photography

people of the orange county fair

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I spent a saturday at the orange county fair recently – walking around & people watching. I think fairs are the most quintessentially american experience: a place full of fried foods, sensory overload, sticky sweets, alcohol, over-consumption, price gouging, questionable fashion choices, screaming children, & farm animals.

 
 

all shot on my fujifilm x30.

summer in the desert

in ,

journal:

the heat hung in the air like a weight. when you step out into it a hush surrounds you. the creaking of ancient hills barely registering above the hot breeze brushing through desert shrub & cactus. the roads glisten with warmth & all the creatures slow down to linger in the shade.

the desert is teeming with life, but it is a slow life. a quiet one.

 
 

desert day digicam

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a saturday spent wandering around joshua tree national park & morongo valley california with a 2010 sony bloggie mhs-pm5.

the impossibility of perfection

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journal:

this is the core of the digicam/lofi/camcorder appeal. everything in our world got so polished & perfect & flat; the pressure to look like a glossy magazine life got to be so much that these frankly shitty early devices became irresistible. you literally cannot produce perfect glossed over documentation with a 2004 point & shoot digital camera. it is actually impossible. so the pressure to attempt to do so is lifted entirely. it’s a liberation from the confines of perfection.

february in death valley

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a few half frame film shots from my day in death valley on a paleontology hike with the national park service (they do these once a year and I highly recommend it).

shot on kodak gold 200 with the kodak ektar h35 camera.

streets of cusco

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walking the bustling & narrow streets of cusco with my fujifilm x30. once the capital of the incan empire, now the main hub for peru’s tourism industry.

florals on film

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a few shots from descanso gardens on kodak gold.

alien planet

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took a roll of lomochrome turquoise film to death valley a couple months ago. the results look like photographs from mars! the turquoise film is super fun even if I do have a hard time deciding when using it will create cool results or just weird ones.

shot on lomochrome turquoise 110 film with the pentax auto 110 camera.

florals for spring

in

spent a saturday at descanso gardens admiring the blooms.

death valley winter

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three iphone shots from my time in death valley on a full moon.

the winter light in death valley is like a caress. rose-hued & hugging the mountains – curling between scrub grass & salt flat. driving the long curving roads like a wave craving sand.

looking up

in ,

while playing with my new (to me) fujifilm x30 in nyc I fell in love with this monochrome film simulation & the winter light on the city’s buildings.

I loved being back in the city, even if only for a handful of days. I was surprised to realize that as much as I love new york I am very grateful to have made my home in california.

time machine: prospect park

in

while working on my 2023 project of redoing my apartment I found an old polaroid t1234 compact point & shoot digital camera that I think I would have gotten sometime shortly after highschool (2010ish?). I’m currently trying to repair it, but with it I found a 4gb memory card that still had some photos on it! I believe I took these photos in prospect park brooklyn, potentially for a college class project.

much better quality pictures than I remember. hoping I can get it working again!

desert dreams

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a morning in joshua tree national park.

shot on portra 800 with a vintage lubitel 2 camera.

meet the hollywoods

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film half frame photos from ciclavia’s meet the hollywoods event in august.

kodak gold 200 / kodak ektar h35 half frame camera

mojave morning

in ,

a morning spent exploring mojave california & the surrounding area with my kodak ektar h35 half frame camera & a roll of ilford hp5.

back at the rocks

in , ,

journal:

woke up at 3am & went to the desert. highway 14 served as a kind of line between the slowly spreading dawn & the thick close smoke of fires burning to the north.

the morning sun doesn’t so much rise here as it does spread out. the light fills the darkness like water saturating a cloth. it blooms. osmosis.

spent a morning a few weeks ago at my favourite state park – red rock canyon in cantil. I’ve taken a lot of photographs of this park over the years so I decided to bring my film cameras out to play.

standing stones

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journal:

“I don’t think I understoond the word verdant until now. not fully. whereas dublin is grey & a bit blunt the countryside is lush & rugged & rolling hues of green interspersed with slate rock & peat bogs.

the roadsides are dotted with serene collections of mountain sheep grazing away as the cars move around them like a planet in orbit. they can sense the rain & lay down when it’s on its way. sometimes they lay together in little groups of 2 or 3 resting their pitch black faces on each other like woolen pillows.”

poulnabrone dolmen is the largest & best preserved of irelands some 172 dolmens or pass through tombs. the partial remains of at least 33 people have been found here, indicating the site was used for ritual rather than an long term burial location. the structure dates to the neolithic era, but was in use up through the bronze age.

edge of the world

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located on the southwestern edge of ireland’s burren region in county clare, the cliffs of moher run roughly 9 miles along the coast. at their highest they rise more than 700 feet from the atlantic ocean below.

camcorder video diary

the cliffs were formed between 313-326 million years ago as a result of a river dumping silt, sand, and clay along an ancient delta. this sediment was collected over millions of years & compacted & lithified into sedimentary strata now exposed as the cliff face. the punishing atlantic ocean waves are now eroding the cliffs, causing them to collapse under their own weight.

you may recognize the cliffs of moher from their supporting role as the “cliffs of insanity” in the 1987 epic the princess bride.

I arrived in the early afternoon to an otherworldly view of the atlantic & the infamous cliffs shrouded in sea mist & swept by gusts of cold salt air. the cattle and sheep of the surrounding countryside didn’t seem to notice the bluster, & continued their lunchtime grazing without incident.

the cliffs now see over 1.5 million visitors per year.

 
 

emerald isle in black & white

in ,

recently returned from my trip exploring ireland. despite bringing a wide range of cameras with me, sometimes the iphone is all you need.