siik.org

+ oh my goodness. i’m trying to shoot more 120 with my yashica but yo, the money that goes into this is getting out of hand. 120 film goes for like five to sixish dollars a roll – for twelve shots, and then developing runs around seven to nine dollars depending on where you get it done. like my man chris says, every shot has to be perfect. come correct or you wastin film! i’m now fairly convinced that all the people that shoot medium format on flickr are ballertronix. either that or just very very very enthusiastic about this expensive hobby. (i’ll prefer the latter)

+ i kinda finished putting up all my new york pics – i just need to scan the 120 that i shot while i was there.

+ heatish little juke mix by kaptain cadillac that goes hard in the trunk.

+ also had this mix by dj riccachet as the soundtrack to my room-cleaning endeavors. it’s fucking long! (that means i got lots of cleaning done)

+ OMG i knewww itt!!11

if you’ve been following me for some time, you might gather that i enjoy photography a great deal (read: hella much). i’ve been shooting stuff since around 2003. first with some simple canon point and shoots, and then i moved into the dslr arena in late 07. however currently, as of december 08, i’ve been completely in love with shooting film. a lot of people on flickr still shoot film, and i used to tell myself ‘why shoot film when you can just treat the image to look film-esque in photoshop?’ – well, now from experience, i can say it’s just a totally different method and mindset when shooting film.

when i shot/shoot digital i ultimately fell/fall prey to a number of habits that are telltale of digital photography:

a) checking shots immediately after shooting them (urbandictionary will have some arguments about this term);
b) obsession over shot quality-blurry or OOF or bad white balance etc;
c) caving in to the instant gratification of immediate deletion;
d) fixation on new technology and upgrading along with the yearly ebb and flow

i’m not necessarily saying they’re bad or good, it’s just that these type of things lend themselves to shooting digitally. i was getting interested more and more with film over the past six months, even bought the film cameras that i’m using now, but never really had the time to start shooting – blame that one on school. i started shooting film right around christmas, and i probably haven’t touched my 10d since. i love getting the off comments about it all the time(“what the hell, is that a film camera?”, “old school!”, “i thought those all broke when y2k happened”), i love the twang of the shutter, i love not having to post process any of the photos, and i absolutely love grain. i love not knowing how my shot turned out, i love being surprised by it once i get the pictures developed. also since i can’t see how my shot turned out, i will care less if the shot is in focus or not – sometimes even accidents will look great in film. it’s just a change of pace in comparison to digital.

however, it can get expensive. i tend to go through rolls per week so i’m always buying more film, and while developing is still pretty cheap at target, they don’t do special film like b&w or slide film – where i’ll have to get those done somewhere else. it’s not as hassle free as having a cf card with all your shit immediately. i also just bought a scanner for the sole purpose of scanning negs so i dont have to have them on photo cd, which is more bills. but currently, i’m still feelin film hard (NH/NG/TWSS) and will continue to keep using film until i turn enough tricks to get a 5dmk2.

me and my friend pauline have started a photo blog where we’ll be posting purely black and white images for a 400+ page book we’ll print later on. we’ll use lulu so it’s gonna be mad cheap, and they’ll be for sale.

my lulu book arrived. lulu.com is an online publishing service, where you can make actual books and print them and get them delivered. right into your hands. there are a few other services like them but lulu seemed easiest and cheapest.

i made a photobook of the pictures i took in the philippines. full color full bleed, 121 pages, perfect bound, 9×7 paperback cover. it cost me around 22 dollars, plus another 8ish for shipping. it’s a real unbelievable price – i needed to try it so that if it came out good, i would probably use lulu more in the future for other projects. and it did indeed come out good. not GREAT, but good. the paper stock is nothing special, it’s kinkosesque(kinkosian?) in quality, print is probably the same too – laser color or something like that. not hating, it gets the job done, and for the price, it’s what i would expect. color reproduction is vibrant – most times a little too vibrant, the colors get pumped up hard with my style of saturated images. i didn’t get to make a custom cover(i laid the book out in indesign; there’s a publishing tool online you can use but of course full control is much better)but it’s a little bit thicker and has a gloss on it to make it all fancy. lulu lets you take off their logo watermark on the spine, so it can look as legit as you want it.

all in all, a great service for the price. i plan on making a few more photobooks. samples of my print here, here, here, here, and here.