~carvinganish

flew back to india for a while.

missed my connection in paris, and had to spend a day there. not too bad.

not enough time to get in touch with *Gonzale etc. expected to find them chilling under the eiffel tower...didn't see them.

got a used mp and 35 cron.

paris was the perfect place to break it in, so i walked around pretending i was hcb. nothing much worth sharing, but i will upload something i guess..

so im back home.

shot at a wedding over the past few days...digital. will share some from there as well...

everything's different.

pretty cool video with joel meyerowitz, if you're into street. [link]

processing film!!
so i finally managed to get my hands on all the equipment needed to process my own film. souped 2 rolls of trix in d76. one at 400 and one at 1600. it feels awesome to finally know how to do this myself. it would take weeks to get my film back from the lab coz i just didn't have time to drop it off or pick it up. and the negs from most labs would be full of dust and other crap - resulting in many hours of cleaning shit up in photoshop. i hated that. i was pleasantly surprised to find my negs super clean in comparison. and im loving the grain of d76. now i can finally shoot and look at my shots in the same day! thanks *zort for the inspiration - and everyone who told me how straightforward processing film was...next step is printing!

point and shoot?!
never thought i would buy a point and shoot. but i wanted a cheap cam that i can take with me while going out, and just generally have with me all the time. happened to notice this guy [link] on flickr, who sometimes uses an oly stylus epic. it has a 35 f/2.8 fixed lens and can take film upto 3200. and it is cheap and super small. so i picked me up one. fully auto - but once you figure out the exposure program it's relatively straightforward to predict what the result is going to be like. well, most of the time

i want to do lots of things.
i want to learn to process and print my own b/w.
i want to shoot slow ass velvia with my nokton wide open.
i want to take a picture.

i'll spare you the "i don't want to" list. it's long.

just picked up a couple of rolls that i am relatively happy with. so what has film taught me so far?

patience. i was extremely impatient and loved the immediacy of digital. from shooting to dA in a matter of hours. now by the time i get to see the final shot it's often a couple of weeks. but it's rewarding. when i get to the level where i know i nailed the shot the moment i click the shutter, ill know im in a good place. with digital i was basically "chimping" after every shot. i know when i shoot digital again i wont live by the lcd.

also im really enjoying the nokton 40. part of this may just be rationalization, but 50 seemed a little long...the images take on that almost tele look. not quite but its there. 35 is a good length but just a little wide at times to get a tight composition. 40 is wide enough for that subtle wide aesthetic. anyway, im still figuring out what perspectives and compositions work for my taste. a good tele shot just doesn't appeal much to me these days. 35 or 40 wide open is delicious. and it has to be on film coz bokeh and dof just don't work with reduced-frame digi.

update: scanner is back! my uncle took a look at it and diagnosed the problem in a second. there were a couple of problems. this thing is so cheaply built. anyway, its back to life for now...sweet