Snow and Los Angeles

Since it's been a little gross out here in New York, and I've been trying to catch up on some old printing and documenting (scanning mostly), I've been a little lazy about printing and shooting.

Of the most recent batch of prints, here are the ones that are ok. I realized that while initially my concept was that I'd just post every single contact print I make, scanning is proving more time consuming than I'd planned, so it's going to be slightly edited. Basically, I tried scanning some of the prints I was a little less enthusiastic about, but I got sick of staring at them in the digital lab. There is, I think, one more picture of LA that I just ran out of time, a picture of a street that might be ok, so I'll try to get that up sometime this week.

So, the LA picture is from before Christmas when I went to California. I've always thought it'd be easy to make pictures in LA, but I found this picture really challenging. I think I just need to get a little more comfortable with the city and maybe start exploring different suburbs. Another problem was that there seems to be much more vehicle traffic at night, which is something that's already difficult in small Long Island towns.

I tried an experiment in LA that I think I'm going to continue. Basically, since I'm working with such long exposures, cars coming by pose a major problem, since they basically appear as streaks of lights, which don't work for the kind of pictures I'm taking. They end up looking both amateur and create this imression of speed or fast moving time, which pretty much kills the moods I try to make. So this time, I thought I'd try to take the dark slide (the black piece of plastic that covers the film in the film holder) from the exposure I'm making and cover the lens while a car walks by. This is tough for a few reasons. One, while the dark slide is black plastic, it's still reflective, and I was worried that I'd be reflecting light straight into the lens. Two, in trying to minimize the amount of light reflecting into the lens, I tried to keep the dark slide as close to the lens as possible, which raised the possibility that I'd bump my camera during the exposure. And third, this whole procedure means I need to be vigilant and pay close attention to my surroundings during the whole exposure, when I'm sort of used to zoning out.

So far, from the negatives I tried this system on, it appears that things basically work, although somewhat imperfectly so. There doesn't seem to be any camera shake or weird, unexplained light, but it looks like I did miss a few spots, although they're way less noticable than the usual bright red lines which completely ruin a picture.

The Long Island pictures are from more recently, during what seemed like what was going to be one of the warm nights we've been having around here. But no, it was cold as hell.