people watching by the pier

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attended a fun photo walk / meetup with other woman & non-binary identifying photographers in santa monica this past weekend hosted by not your grandma’s camera club. I used it as an opportunity to play with my new (to me) fuji 35mm f1.4 lens. this lens has a kind of mythic cult following amongst fuji lovers & is well known for it’s “character”. I certainly have not figured out how to get the absolute best out of it, but when I managed to hit the focus (& exposure, I’m also still learning the xpro3) the shots are really nice.

digicams at night

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a couple shots from a night out in downtown la with my 2009 casio.

walk around the block

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a walk around the neighbourhood to clear my head with the fuji x30.

dreamy disneyland digicam

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spent a day at disneyland & disney’s california adventure reliving childhood memories & eating dole whip with my sony bloggie mhs-pm5. I like the dreamy quality of the sony bloggie when the the light gets low, it becomes almost like a memory.

friendship (1963)

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agnes martin, friendship (1963). museum of modern art, new york.

gold leaf.

it glows. wherever the light hits. your form leaves a darkened center when you stand in front of it. a shadow.

as you move around it, it changes. changes everything about itself. colour, texture, hue, dimension.

from the left it takes on the shape of paper time cards stacked beside a clock. from the right it smooths out like an expanding field of wheat. a sea of gold. far enough back it’s smooth & faint.

up close it becomes rugged, pocked with texture & moments of almost red scratched through. the lines, etched down to the canvas, become gashes across a face or the raised scars on a wrist. the moments of red… blood?

it undulates & the gold rolls as you tilt your head. between water & oil…

something else, mercury like & waiting to either poison you or wrap you in warmth.

I close my eyes. I can feel the gold on my face like the sun.

the road to utah

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two mondays spent driving through the west to/from utah with a 35mm point & shoot.

b&w on the street

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I’ve always loved street photography but never made serious attempts to try it. on my trip to nyc this past winter I was inspired by ming smith (I saw her show at moma while I was in the city) to try some black & white street shots using a new technique for me. I set my fujifilm x30 to all auto settings using a monochrome film simulation & shot from the hip without looking through the viewfinder. this was really exhilarating & something I’d never tried before. excited to try this way of shooting more.

digicams in the forest

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a walk through the mt. hood national forest with my digicam.

inca trail journal

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sacred valley, peru
18-21 may, 2023

I keep thinking of hiking over the uneven stones half eaten by the jungle & thousands of individual feet. A path laid into the sides of mountains & etched through caves & over leaning bridges. What a place to have been.

Starting in a lush valley then continuing up up up above the treeline to the bright beating sun of the alpine with its sharp air & soothing breezes.

Then down again to alpine valleys, freezing overnight but you can still hear the distant music of the jungle as the sun sets behind the mountains. An explosion of stars.

Finally down into the Amazon with the thick foliage stacked on top of each other, all different shapes growing out of the rock & between the uneven stairs carved around them. The bird calls. The chorus of insects & frogs singing all night long.

The final push up slick jungle stairs rising vertically into the clouds. The locals call them "Gringo Killers" & I climb them using all of my limbs for balance.

Then, finally, the Sun Gate. High in the mountains perched hanging over the jungle. Sometimes this is your first glimpse of Machu Picchu, but on our Sunday morning the mist & clouds hung to the mountains like a white sheet in humid weather.

For the briefest of moments the mist rolls up, revealing the city & Huayna Picchu crowned in clouds. The hikers gathered around the Gate clap & cheer & then just as quickly the fog descends again.

The Sun Gate is the end of the Inca Trail but you're not there yet. You continue over the alternating smooth & jagged stones & through the mist & ruins until Machu Picchu finally reveals itself.

Huayna Picchu is always crowned in clouds it seems. Machu Picchu mountain is behind, & the city lays between these two sacred peaks. Machu Picchu the masculine protector & Huayna Picchu the feminine. The Inca viewed mountains as gods & holy places. As living things. They built into their natural form because they did not see themselves as the dominators of the land, in stark contrast to the colonizers who would shortly come to destroy them.

Machu Picchu city was abandoned in a rush to hide their most sacred places from the Spaniards who came to demolish them & slap a Catholic church on top – as happened in Cusco, once the capital of the Incan Empire. The plan to conceal worked, the city was hidden from outsiders for centuries.

 
 

photo dump: la jolla digicam

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moments from a night out on a 2009 casio exilim.

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

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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.