I'll see you soon

I am saying good bye to yet another important person in my life. We're leaving together on a road trip today from California to Missouri. He'll be working in St. Louis for the next year. I'm really excited for this trip, excited to spend a week with my good friend, and take a TON of pictures. I'm bringing 35mm and 120mm film, ready to capture the adventure and beautiful things that we're bound to see.

Leaving my friend behind to fly back to California on the 31st will be so hard, but I'm feeling pretty great over all knowing that my friend is starting his next adventure to go on an do wonderful things. And what a better way to kick things off then with a week long road trip! 

I'm going to miss you.

As for the rest of you friends - you better stay put, damn it. I don't think I could do this again soon with another one of you.

Jackie and Billy Arlew

These photos are from early on last summer... I think? Even I don't know anymore. We went on an adventure in Santa Cruz during an engagement photo session, shooting from the Arlew backyard and the train bridge by the Boardwalk. I used my TLR medium format camera with kodak portra film (which is the best film for portraits!). Such lovely colors and details.

Sometimes I really don't like images I take. Then 6 months later they grow on me. That is what happened with this set.

Today is a difficult day

I'm a sucker for poetry. I like to pretend that my feelings are tangible when I touch words on paper.

"No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us."

-Excerpt from Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich

I'm already missing you.

Camping in Pescadero 2

See part 1 here.

On our second day of camping we hit the beach. It was overcast, but we brightened things up with a kite, frisbee, snacks and good company. I am very much in love with what this expired film does to our of focus images. Everything is so soft looking, like a water color painting.

boys and kite

Skipping rocks on the ocean

eat eat eat

There were a lot of dead crabs at the beach

My friend took this picture. I forgot to explain how to focus.

Camping in Pescadero 1

I went camping with some wonderful friends in late July. It was very lazy, pull your car up, easy camping. It was great to just kick back, grill, play frisbee, and run around in the forest. I brought a couple cameras with me, a brownie and a Nikon. I'm not sure if the brownie works, so getting the film developed will be a surprise. My staple camera is the 35mm Nikon, and I used film that expired in 2007. I just love the colors and the grain of expired film :)

Driving in the mountains

Bubbles, sass, friends, and beer!

Breakfast

There is always, somewhere, a boy in a tree.

Holga #4

I don't bust out the Holga a lot. The film is expensive and I can never be too sure about what is going to happen when I'm shooting with it. Then again, that's part of the fun of using it. Here are some Holga images from the last 8 months...

Triple exposure using red, blue, and yellow flash to create primary color mushrooms

Sort of cultish looking but hard to tell from a distance. I had my friends stand in the forest on one section of available light so that just their heads were lit. Came out pretty eerie looking.

The stuff of nightmares - my friend Eric

Double exposure, maybe even triple. Not sure. Looks like my room and a forest floor, plus a light leak.

This image was nearly destroyed by a light leak but I do like how it turned out.

I just love the colors in this image. So soft and cool, must be winter. I'm pretty sure we were on a foraging adventure.