"When you are standing at a crossroads in your life, realize that the greatest block that you can put in front of your Self is the idea that there is a right choice." ~ Story Waters
The other day my boss looked over my shoulder as I was finishing a blog post that I had been picking away at for three days, scoffed, and said something along the lines of waiting for me to turn the corner and give up on my dreams. I think he was joking, but honestly, all of this hurts my brain. "Turn the page or close the book."
I have often mentioned the state of this shoebox Mamiya, and all the trials and frustrations of making the most of what I have, but now I can finally show you. In my recent rant about the post editing involved in trying to make my 120 negatives mildly consumable, I had a number of people come forward with medium format cameras to sell, but one really got my attention by a certain Saint Wolanski: a dust collecting Bronica GS-1 for cheap. Honestly, if I could afford to spend 2k on a used Hassy, I could afford a new back, lens, prism finder, an additional lens, and a near mint additional body for my Mamiya get up. While there are aspects of the RB that I cherish, if not simply the bellows focusing, I would trade the camera and the romantic story for a consistently sharp and usable negative... and here we go:
quite possibly the last frame of my baby, and the first frame of this new machine. The first is the RB with a 90mm/3.8 NB, on a tripod that has basically been dedicated to this camera, antiquishly blurry and inconsistent exposure. The second is the Bronica with the Zenzanon 100mm/3.5, hand held. Both were shot on HP5 at 125/f11. If you can't see the night and day difference here then we have bigger problems, and this isn't some abandoned house we found out in the desert... this is actually the state of our back deck, which I needed to shoot anyway, and this comparison fit in pretty perfectly. This is the year of the game changing, and I am terrified. Thank you, Saint Wolanski, for this ante up! Be expecting a more personal thank you.
I think I finally found the perfect analogy for this final attempt at a relationship, which may very well end in my going completely Euripides on this world: I have a coffee cup. It is the near perfect size, color, and weight, in that I have grown accustomed to it over time.
I don't use any other coffee cups. I finish the coffee or tea in the cup, rinse it out, and set it in the same place next to the coffee maker every day, and it is always in the same place every morning, waiting for the same routine. I don't like it when anyone cleans my coffee cup. I can clean it when it needs to be cleaned. It doesn't need to be cleaned, or moved, or polished.
It doesn't need anything but to be in the same place every morning, and serve the same purpose. My wife has a dozen different coffee cups, all different sizes, colors, and weights. She uses a different one every day, and I don't think I've ever seen her finish what's in the cup. They get collected from various spots where they have been abandoned around the house, generally half full, and they are washed, then placed back in the cupboard, to be half used or not used the next day.
In writing that down, it dawns on me that this analogy might simply apply to the differences between men and women, because my daughter does the same thing with water cups, which I initially found annoying, always wanting new cups of water when there are dozens of perfectly good half full cups of water around the house, but at least I know we will be safe when the aliens finally show up. Quirks. We laugh about them; we fight about them; it doesn't change them. We exist as we are, and that is enough, to loosely quote Whitman.
Life primarily consists of things that we can not change, especially when it comes to individual human souls who are free to do whatever they want. The only thing we will ever have control over is how we choose to respond. I often look at myself in the mirror and imagine that I am better, but I don't think I will ever be anything than who I am. I continue to change in ways that align with my journey, but my process is mine, and your process is yours, and all any of us can do is love each other in the process. To this day, one of the most profound realizations I ever came to was that I am an idiot, and I have been repeating that mantra for a decade.
Truly understanding that very basic concept is the only way to open yourself up to a world of possibilities. Take the box of definitions off the shelf labelled 'facts', and relabel it 'assumptions based on perception and opinion'. Which beautifully circles back to another ancient E, Epictetus:
"It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows."
The only way to truly benefit from this life, and all it has to show us and teach us, is to go into everything open and loving to who people are, not who we want them to be. This applies to self more than anything. We spend too much time wanting to be something, or trying to be something, when we are already beautiful. True beauty is in the being, not the doing. The things we do become beautiful when they align with who we are, in this specific moment in infinite time and space, not who we are trying to be to live up to temporal expectation, which is why expectation always ends in disappointment, and openness and love, in ourselves and the uncontrollable spinning ball of gas and rock hurling relentlessly around the Sun, generally brings pleasant, positive surprises.
I obviously love my wife, and genuinely appreciate her willingness to shoot, but I love her less for the model she is trying to be, and more for who she is. This is a bit of a personal rant, and mildly unrelated to the photos attached, but it is all related. Relationships are relationships, whether intimate or in passing, and the only way to survive the chaos is to appreciate ourselves and everyone in our lives for who we are, because we will never get to choose who loves us, why they love us, or how they love us. Just like we will never get to choose how people perceive us or judge us.
We can only be the best us that we can be, smile, and allow everything to happen exactly how it's supposed to happen. You can't change gravity, but you can change how gracefully you navigate it.
My first shoot of the year that wasn't with my incomparable wife: the amazing @steph_in_space and @bodyofsarz; a beautifully exhausting day in Joshua Tree.
There is something strangely forgiving about slightly blurry work when it's on film, almost ideally romantic. When I was learning photography, I felt my work sucked because I couldn't get sharp focus most the time, which I later realized was just cut rate equipment, id est plastic, cheap lenses, and primarily shooting in available and often low light. I learned to over compensate by using really fast, grainy film, and to treat everything really contrasty or abstract, keeping the depth of field shallow, instead of bowing to the "everything in focus" philosophy.
Most go with the safe work, and I didn't want to do that for the same reason I don't want to take "boring" photographs now: anyone can do it, and it doesn't take much skill to do it well enough to be praised by people who don't know better. Obviously those photographs and photographers and consumers serve a greater financial purpose than the path I've chosen to take, but I would rather love my work and do what I love, than work for the approval of people who are really looking for what they think other people might love, based on what they've been fed by societal ideals.
I don't mean to go on one of those rants again, but maybe if I point it out enough, one day you'll wake up and realize that all the things you've been conditioned to think are important are really just silly and temporal things that eat away at the precious moments of a life that is rapidly passing. Or, maybe you'll just keep following the herd of consumption zombies, and I will forever be sitting in the corner with my arms crossed, shaking my head gently with disappointment.
Those are my post-apocalyptic options at this point, but I've learned to not lose any sleep over it. lol. I tense the term "post", but I genuinely feel like we are knee deep in it now, societally, and am really waiting for things to start exploding, but maybe that's just my own idealistic romanticism? Maybe that's my version of everything being forgivingly blurry? /rant (sorry, but the whole point of this website was supposed to be a philosophical statement) -- When I did finally go digital, I swiftly became obsessed with everything being in sharp focus, to the point where I zoom way in and not use anything unless it is in sharp focus, so I most likely have an entire collection of "good enough" photos that never made it past my self-inflicted strict guidelines.
These weren't taken that long ago, on the only 35mm camera I use now, a Pentax MX that my father purchased from a guy in a Mexican parking lot for $20, and couldn't get it to work (it didn't have a lens, but only a 2x converter). Luckily, I had liberated a (Pentax mount)50mm manual, macro lens (with a minimum focus distance of one inch!) from my old job selling cameras, so I threw it on there and it worked fine. I figured the light meter was broken, but a new battery even fixed that. Only problem is 35mm is like a thumbnail. I am shocked how well this scanner does with such small negatives. That is certainly a wonderful game changer. More news on the 120 front coming soon, and my first shoot of the year is happening in Joshua Tree tomorrow. I am excited and terrified. ...and don't even get me started on the format anomalies on the Wix blog.
My entire life I have held on desperately to a basic crutch: I have no means or money to scan my negatives. I secretly relied on that to not pursue working with film. This year my wife demanded that I bought a good film scanner with our tax return, so I am forced to deal with my shortcomings and make the most of them. There is certainly an art to film, as is evident in this one frame. The original scan:
dust, roller damage from the film back, light leak, what appears to be a hair or piece of fabric on the film plane (as it appears on every frame of the roll), scratches, and some more dust. After a couple days of figuring out that an 800mp scan was impossible to edit, and another couple days of dust removal and reconstruction, I've got one frame... that still needs more work. This was the last frame on the roll, mind you, which is always a bit more tattered, but this is a big spoonful of reality to swallow. I suppose now I can fall back on my original excuse: I can't afford good, clean equipment. lol. This is a 50 year old Mamiya found in a dead guy's garage and given to me 20 years ago, complete with a light leaky back and a rare, but foggy lens. I fixed the light leak with electrical tape, but now the back is glitchy about registering film. The shutter used to randomly lock up, but I fixed that by bending a little piece of metal on the back. I've even tried taking the lens apart to clean it.
