This is the new project I’m very proud to be collaborating on, check it out at
https://happyfamiliesareallalike.wordpress.com/project
Category: Photography
Past & Furious
Today’s my birthday.
So I loaded my Polaroid 600SE with an expired 03/2009 Polaroid 125i film
and went out wandering to get a birthday’s picture, hopefully.
And I got it.
Looking at it I had already a title in mind:
Past and Furious!
Camera: Polaroid 600SE
1/125 – f 8
An Instant Film Story
[pictures at the bottom]
This is just a little tiny story, it only takes few lines, it only lasted few minutes.
It happened that I could make someone happy, and a picture was the reason for happiness.
I chatted one hour (or two?) with Jesús, great person, photographer, pinholer and chemist.
We left that was almost sunset, with a nice light and atmosphere.
I walk toward the Olympic Harbour, to the Moll de la Marina. There you always meet tourists, and therefore people trying to survive selling something.
– “No thanks. I can’t eat a “cocco bello” (fresh piece of coconut) now, I just had a coffee. ” –
I answer to this Pakistani, middle age, man.
Then asks me – “I take you a picture?” – as he did before to other tourists.
– “Very kind of you, but no, I’m not a tourist indeed.”
And then I start taking a picture (quite bad) with the Polaroid SE600 I have with me, with instant film Fuji 100pc (thanks Fuji!).
There’s almost no people now, and fascinated by the process (shot, pull, wait, peel) he simply says:
-“take a picture of me.” –
I think (who knows) I felt his thrilling, he thinking “I wish he does”. But yet we seemed so socially distant and different.
It was not likely, it was a long shot…
-“Give me one minute, I’ll do it!” – is my answer.
Now I’m worried because the light is quite low, I had no tripod, I started feeling responsible, I have to make him a nice picture!
You should know that both tourists and emigrants share the need to be portrayed with something symbolic: the Golden Gate, the Colosseum… …the 2 towers of the Olympic Harbour, in this case.
He poses. I shoot!
I pull out, he knows from before the picture will take 1 minute or more. But the temperature is dropping, and I decide I’ll wait more time.
I peel and… it’s nice!
I am so happy, and being the 10th and last picture, I can even use the empty box as frame.
I show him the picture. He seems satisfied and smiles, seeing himself there, under the towers, in Barcelona, while his wife and children are in Pakistan (he told me).
-“Take, you can even hang it if you wish” – I tell him showing the framed picture.
His smile widens, he understood my gesture, and willing to correspond my gift he instinctively offers me “cocco bello” – “Take, take!”
I smile – “No, really, as if accepted. But take the picture, it’s for you” – I reconfirm.
I worked with children, and in that moment I recognized the same “focused” happiness.
While walking away, he keep watching and studying that object he was holding, where he could see himself standing under the “2 towers”.
He walks further, still face down and looking at that peculiar gift: a picture, an object, a picture.
Sometimes I need a situation that reminds me what #Analog photography is and what an #instant #film can do for #happiness.
Agfa Box 50
I had the luck of winning a camera from Revela-T, a beautiful AGFA Box 50.
It works at 1/60 or B time, with f/11 aperture, 120mm film for 8 shots of 6×9.
Once I got it from Pep, I had to immediately start walking around and take my first 8 B&W shots, finding the correct light exposition.
166
Lomo(graphy) cameras are already “mainstream”, but keeping that allure of Soviet Union that charms many of us photographers, hipsters, nostalgic and makers.
I find that among the (growing) amount of these cameras, one of the most significant is the Lubitel 166.
For its aesthetic, viewfinder, focusing… its personality!
Your are not taking your Lubitel with you to take pictures, you are going out together at most or, usually, your Lubitel is taking you out.
Here few pics of our walking, with some views of the former Encants Vell Market in Barcelona:
I Can
To take a can and convert it into a pinhole camera is something that many photographers have done and will keep doing for the next millennium.
A positive black&white paper is the sensitive support recording the light and image, following the ancient camera obscura principles. The negative resulting is the either scanned and inverted into a positive image, or simply reprinted with another black and white paper.
Distortions and a plethora of defects enrich the resulting pictures, as only such an analogue technique can obtain.
Pinholing: my sight through a hole
It’s time for me to start showing another side of my photographic activity,
one of my oldest passions, but kept for myself until now.
Pinhole photography entails endless considerations, totally ignored here.
Images and suggestions, views of the world through a tiny little hole, in a infinite variety of cameras’ shapes.
Here we go… silently and slowly
Pixels
To underline:
I love all kind of films, slides, plates or phisical support, and keep riding the sweet old style analog photography.
But more I love graphic and photography “tout-court”.
Thus, the digital era offers tools and more options, that not to explore would be unwise.
I am wise, and here I present some small projects, realized through a mobile phone’s camera (iPhone4).
Blending pixels: here’s what I got.
RED NYC
I discovered that New York is not what I thought it was, a Contemporary Cosmopolis with a post-contemporary aesthetics: grey but shiny, with sparkling and dazzling streets.
I saw a Modern city instead, with more 19th than 21th century in it, quite decaying and musty and somehow rotten.
Grey? NYC is grey, indeed.
This made me decide to shoot some Red Scale films, to obtain images returning this mood .
Easy to understand why Coney Island is a big part of this reportage.
– images gallery –
Specs: Canon AE1 – 50mm 1.8 FD – Red Scale
AMMAN
Amman:
It’s an old cotton mill, a huge structure in the Northeast of Italy, active from the second half of ‘800, and since around 1980’s inactive and left abandoned.
The project presented is a slow reportage, the result of several months of exploration around its different areas together with long exposures.
This work is influenced by the Japanese aesthetic concept of “Wabi-Sabi” applied to a typical Industrial Archaeology reality.
From its original structure typical of early XX century industries, now the landscape shown through these pictures (large and medium format with Mamiya and Linhof) becomes a newly created post-industrial stage with its peculiar scenery.
A similar process of sedimentation to that that these walls and elements went through, has been applied to the images’ capture process, using closed diaphragms (/16 to /32) and long exposures time to transfer these layers to slide films.
Michele Paier 