K-Hun at Gooski's

Went to see K-Hun play at Gooski's in Polish Hill on Saturday night, they rocked! Seriously a killer band. But I took along my Land Camera 360 with an original electronic flash modified to take AA batteries (I'll get more into that in a future post), along with a couple packs of Fuji FP3000B film and got some great band shots. Here's a sampler:

New photo gallery: Polaroid

I've whittled down my best Polaroids into three galleries: people, places and things. Don't worry, they are still all on Flickr, too!

Polaroids @ Crazy Mocha

I stopped by at the Crazy Mocha in Lawrenceville to visit my girlfriend Jenny Jo Patton at work, and I brought my Speed Graphic and some Fuji FP3000B packfilm to take some photos.

I got some fantastic shots of her and some customers, and made some new friends. We met Estelle of the blog Pixburgh n'at and took a photo of her at the counter. I also snapped some other customers, like Dylan and Meeker, and a regular with his adorable daughter.

We also had some fun with multiple exposures, doing a couple triple exposures at the espresso machine.

I'll definitely be going back to take more Polaroids, hope to see you there!

Estelle and Jenny Lawrenceville neighbors Jenny triple exposure Meeker and Dylan Dylan and Meeker Jenny

Strolling with the Speed Graphic + packfilm

I took my Speed Graphic out for a walk around town yesterday afternoon to practice using it with the Polaroid packfilm back. It's a clunker, and old cameras always have their quirks. The shutter is sluggish at slower speeds, and the rails are a bit chewed up, which can cause difficulty with focusing and closing up the camera. The lens plate had light leaks I had to patch up, and the packfilm back was also leaking due to the disintegration of the felt strip in the darkslide slot. The leaks were not a big deal with slow (~ISO 100) film, but with the Fuji FP3000B they were a major problem.

But at home before I went out I did some experimenting and found the horizontal angle of view for a vertical orientation regular packfilm exposure to be about 34°. I used this knowledge (and the scale on my tripod) to take a four-exposure panorama of the Herron St bridge that connects Lawrenceville to Polish Hill:

Lawrenceville to Polish Hill

This was taken with Fuji FP3000B film, which is a bit tough to shoot with in the Speed Graphic in daylight – it's so fast that I often have to max out the shutter speed (1/500) and aperture (f32). But I bought a whole case of it for cheap, so it's getting used regardless.

I'm still trying to get a hang of framing shots with the Speed Graphic and the Polaroid back, which is smaller than the 4x5 exposure area of the camera. It's especially tough when playing with tilt and shift. I find myself frequently switching to the ground glass to frame a shot, and even then not being totally successful.

I also took some Impossible Polablue (not a huge fan of this film) and Impossible Chocolate (one of my favorite films):

patrick hoelck: polaroid hotel

Polaroid art book alert! The launch of photographer Patrick Hoelck's new art book Polaroid Hotel happened on April 21 in LA at Lead Apron in conjunction with oh-wow. Looks like this book was supported by a Kickstarter campaign which has some more info in the updates section, however it's still unclear whether it's possible to actually acquire this book yet... I'm not even sure who the publisher is. I'd be real interested in getting my hands on it!