Laying down track and trying to stay ahead. I’m quite a bit ahead now considering I’m just getting to these photos! And I suppose the thing is that if I didn’t tell you I shot these nearly 5 years ago you wouldn’t have known that they were that old, right?
This collection has a handful of pictures in it that I really like from a composition standpoint. As well, a couple of them feature my coworker Curly who is now retired and living in California.
An abbreviated post, as half of this batch was taken with my Olympus Infinity Stylus that I was using at the time.
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These would have been from after Memorial Day, I believe.
Most of them anyway.
A repository for more memories–this is where Dumbledore gets his pensieve out. Do I miss the place or do I just miss the simplicity of being a kid again? I’m not sure I can say which. A recent photo contest prompt was about home and home life, and I realized that I just don’t have too many photos of my own home but I do have plenty that I took at my grandparents’ before the next generation sold it off. The loss of that house and everything inside still eats at me like a gaping wound, and that had me looking at all the b-sides of this post.
I shot these over Spring Break in 2019 while my aunts and I were there trying to save as many family heirlooms from the auctioneer’s clutches, and I don’t know why I didn’t put these in before. They strike me as very evocative of my time growing up, but also I see all the things that my dad didn’t consider worth saving. They’re not terrible pictures either, but one thing that’s changed about me from then to now is what I’d consider a sufficient amount of film: I really wish I had more to look at than a measly two rolls. It’s all I have left now of a space that was occupied by one family for 101 years.
This is the beginning of Summer 2019, which now seems like the infancy of my cowboys & Jeeps project. Some of these probably deserve individual posts but I shot just so much Tri-X back then, probably 40-45 rolls of film in 2019 and 2020 and it all sat in my mom’s freezer for months before I could get around to developing it. A handful of posts with a lot of images might be the only way I can get through it all.
I don’t know exactly how many parts there will be, I didn’t really keep track of exactly when I shot everything, though it is all in chronological order. I would develop 5-10 rolls at one time just to get through it all. It ended up being a marathon scanning session over several days, and this was before I did my post work on my own laptop so it meant waiting til I drove down to Colorado Springs again. I’ve been trying to keep chronological order on my Instagram but here I’ve jumped around so much that I’m just now getting to these images that are 3 years old.
August 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the cassette tape. I don’t know exactly what date is the official anniversary because there were a lot of articles a decade ago from the beginning of August all the way into September and I’m not sure any of them agreed on a date, but this is definitely the birth month. I thought that I would give you guys an album of my cassette-related photography:
Some of these are my promo shots from my first (though to date only) album Lacrimosa back in 2013, my collection of Type II tapes, for feeding my Tascam portastudio (pictured last). I should probably get some better pictures of my Tascam 244 the next time I pull it out of storage. The one I included is a favorite of mine though, because kitties playing music, of course. And speaking of the Tascam portastudio last year was the 40th anniversary of probably the most notable album to ever be recorded on the format. And of course these days it’s pretty popular to put out your album on tape, thankfully people like NAC are still around for bands to do that!
Everything dies baby, that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
-Bruce Springsteen
The Pentax Spotmatic SPII: still the best deal I ever had in photography.
I think I’ve told the story before but it was back in about 2010, I found this camera with a 1.8/55 SMC Takumar lens at a garage sale for $5. I didn’t really know the Pentax brand that well back then and thought that the lens might have been an off-brand until I noticed that they both had “Asahi” on them. If not for that I might have just left the camera there as I was hoping to find a Minolta similar to my mom’s. I’m glad I took a chance! That camera became my main camera and constant companion for an entire decade, only switching when I was able to get into Nikon’s more professional bodies.
But for the 2010s this was all I had and if I wanted anything it was to use the Takumar lenses forever. Looking at everything that I’ve put on Instagram and as I decided to just go in chronological order, I’m still posting pictures that I took with this camera rather early in my jeep tour photo project. I suppose that Nikon distracted me a bit but I also think that it’s time to rectify that a bit here, so there will be plenty more Spotmatic shots coming.
He loves doing his thing.
It’s not quite Indiana Jones, but then what is?
I don’t need to be famous, I just want to be loved.
These ones have gotten quite a lot of love over on the IG so far–thanks to my supporters for sharing them.
I have a flag picture that I took years ago, this is a bit of an updated one. I’d seen this truck driving around Colorado Springs back in 2019 and every once in a while parked at the old honky tonk by our office. My photo instructor wanted to see better up-close pictures which I got around to taking after the class concluded.
The flag you can’t see is the Revolutionary War yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.
Happy Independence Day.
The Resurrected Camera 