I maaaaay have taken a picture or two of this sign.
It stood at Washington and El Camino in Santa Clara, not far from the SCU campus, on a corner lot filled with old, dilapidated bungalows.
I drove past this sign on my way to, and from, work, every weekday for 8 years.
Some shots were taken with film cameras, some with digital.
I recall riding my bike the nearly 2.5 mile trip from our home down El Camino one Saturday morning – with a bag of cameras – to shoot this awesome sign.
A relic of a bygone era.
Sadly, the sign is no longer standing.
I checked Google Maps Street View and all that remains is an empty lot with a tan colored slat/chainlink fence surrounding it.
I’d bet it’s likely condos or high-density housing fill the lot today.
To start the experiment, I printed a few black and white shots on regular Instax Square film, taken using the LX100 just to see if the idea was feasible.
It was. The three shots above were proof enough.
Over the last month and a half I’ve printed a handful of decent shots, scanned a few, and still have a coupla’ packs of Instax Black to use before ‘Roid Week gets here.
Every shot had differently lighting, so a consistent process was never really an option, but I still managed to get some satisfying results.
I made four instant shots in-between setting up and shooting with the pinholes.
I was quite happy with one particular instant and posted it on my film IG, @dogbonesoup
The other three didn’t seem to capture the story, how I feel, or what I liked about this location and vantage point.
This was back in July 2019. Over a year ago.
This past week I’ve looked back again at the instants from that morning – they’re in a stack of various sized instant shots on my desk I need to organize and store – and what caught my eye this time around was a different shot that was a little overexposed and somewhat blown out.
My position in relation to the sun had changed, and when I moved I lost the shade from the structure.
My position in relation to the sun had changed, and when I moved I lost the shade from the structure. That also means that a couple of these instants were overexposed because I didn’t change the settings on the camera accordingly.
Anyway, today I scanned the two that illustrated the point I’m trying make, here…
Looking at the two scans side-by-side, I am drawn to the dream-like feel of the overexposed shot.
The good exposure, while nicely composed, looks a little tame. Staid. A well documented structure. Very little emotion.
In contrast, the overexposed instant has so much more going for it. I holds a story. Feeling. Nostalgia. Mystery. A sense of wanderlust.
Emotion.
I love that this shot has a toy-camera vibe to it. I guess stepping out of that shadow proved to be a good thing.
This is my first attempt at using Hamish Gill’s @pixllatr.
I used my iPhone 8, hand held, to make the image. The light source was my 9×12 Artograph lightbox.
I used a mask that I made from chipboard to block out any extraneous light (I’m already thinking of ways to make that gizmo and process a little smoother).
I transfered the shot to my Mac Mini via AirDrop, opened the image in Photoshop, converted to black and white, used the Transform/Skew tool to square it up, then adjusted levels.
The results look pretty darned good. An absolute success.
Side note… I made this image back in 2006 with my Holga 120N using Ilford HP5+ 400. The shot was made in downtown San Jose, CA in front of the convention center on West San Carlos Street, directly across from the main office of The Tech Museum of Innovation, where I worked at the time.
The film was developed by Calypso Imaging, a Santa Clara company that went under not long after these negs were developed. Like many companies at the time, the advent of digital cameras was disastrous for the film industry.
I started developing my own black and white film soon thereafter.
In my travels with cameras, I discover a lot of round or circular objects, and since my fave and probably most frequently used aspect ratio in photography is the square, I’ll center these objects and make a photo.
Here’s a montage I put together of 16 faves.
I also assembled an album with 88 examples of circle/square on Flickr, check it out…
We’ve had triple-digit temperatures for nearly half the month of August, with the last six days being somewhere between 92-98º. It’s back to low one hundreds, reaching 104º yesterday.
Texas in August. Whew.
Here area few shots from shady spots around the garden yesterday afternoon using my newish and incredible Fujifilm X100V.
