Advertisements Are Sacred

The better part of my day was spent figuring out how to put that Flickr banner in the sidebar on the right. I would say I have a firm command of HTML, but don’t even ask me how PHP scripts work.

I have had a couple of weeks of busy, and now that I’ve had a mid-week weekend, I’ve gotten back to going through some stuff I’ve shot over the last 5 or 6 months. Of course, not only do I have all the stuff that I’ve shot since June to go through, I also have a large stack of family photographs going back into the 1860’s to go through and scan as well. The fruits of my aunts’ labor going through my grandparents’ house in Fresno. There’s a lot of great stuff, even printable negatives from the 20’s, but I’ll talk about that in the entry when I actually post some shots. Anyway, what I’m posting today is the first couple of shots from my trip to visit my friend Niki up in Gardnerville, NV, last June. I went up there to help her mother with a project, and ended up hanging out with Niki and her friends for a while. Got to see Carson Valley Days. Niki and her friends took me up to this abandoned gold refinery in an area called American Flats, just outside of Virginia City. I took about 25 shots that day. Decided to scan about 15 of them. Of those, I’ll probably show at least 12. I’ll keep it to 2 to an entry, probably. So, these were the first 2, and they both happened to be of junked cars. There were a few more, and the graffiti definitely got more interesting the more we explored. All shots were taken with the favored Minolta SR T-101 / Vivitar 20mm f/1.7 combo on Ilford HP5 Plus film. (And I did make these embiggenable if you click on them.)

On a different subject, I’m kind of in the process of moving from Lancaster to Los Angeles. I’ve been getting more work down there than up here, and I hate hate hate the commute. Anyway, that’s just kinda the news. I’ll still be spending some time in Lancaster, just not as much as I have been.

Today I’m sharing a picture I took about 18 months ago. The lovely Rachel Gomez and I took a trip up to San Francisco just to get out of Santa Barbara for a little while back in October of 2005. Something that struck me at the time was that she–as a Portraiture major–shot most of her assignments on film, and she brought her digital camera on the trip, whereas I–as a Commercial/Advertising major (I had not yet switched to the Industrial/Scientific program)–shot most of my assignments digitally, and I brought one of my many film cameras. I suppose that’s not really important. I just thought it was interesting at the time. Anyway, I shot about 2 rolls of Kodak Tri-X 400 on the trip, and this is probably my favorite of them all. I was shooting with a slightly damaged Vivitar 20mm f/3.8 lens attached to a Minolta SR-T 101 small format camera, and this was somewhere in the Haight-Ashbury district. Rachel’s interpretation is the 9th image in the Travel gallery on her website.