Trains and mid-century facades

A winter day trip to Seattle, captured on film.

Thanksgiving week

Mostly far away from the chaos and traffic

Joshua Tree National Park, FujiColor 100 (Japan)

A tale of 5 days: Shooting BW film in PNW fall weather

I have never documented the behind the scenes narrative of a full roll of film before so thought I’d give it a try…

November although started off dry has been really wet and stormy over the past two weeks. This is a story of five days spread across the weeks of stormy weather and my attempt at finding new things to shoot.

Day One: Six mile walk

Hugging on the north side of the lake, a ~6 miles walk under moving rain clouds. The first half of the walk was in dry weather but to my surprise, I took more keeper shots in the walk back when it had started raining and presented with limited opportunities to think/compose or even slow down.

Day Two: A coffee shop

Dropped my truck at the shop for oil change, had an hour to kill. We walked around the neighborhood and found a bullet-ridden RV parked in the ditch next to the arterial road where the truck shop is. Yes, I took 2-3 photographs of the seemingly abandoned RV but I didn’t like any of them. Then found a new coffee shop where we sat for the next hour in wait, this red British public call booth was placed outside its entrance.

Day Three: The Puget Sound

November sunsets in Western Washington are before 5 pm and add overcast weather to it, gets dark fairly quickly after 3 pm. This means one could take long exposures early on in the evening, therefore I took the opportunity to take a few photographs of the waves, with a tripod to allow longer exposures.

Day Four: Night Photography

Taking the long exposures fun further, ventured into Anacortes, Washington late night when the streets are free of cars and people.

Day Five: Whidbey Island

For the final images in the roll, we drove out to Whidbey Island. Although the day started with bitter cold and sideway blowing rain in the wind, the weather started to clear out near sunset. It was getting dark fast but I was able to shoot handheld for at least 30 minutes before having the need to pull out the tripod.

Fall colors of Denmark & South Sweden (Kodak E100)

The second roll of slide film I’ve ever shot and this time I added a Tiffen 812 warming filter.

Last day of the trip: Copenhagen

Walking around the city with my Leica loaded with a roll of Ilford FP4 Plus, when the jet lag has weaned off but I am ready to fly home weary of the week living out of a hotel room and without a car.

Fifteen years ago I’d have not guessed how American I am.

This time of the year Copenhagen is unobviously warmer than Seattle and pair that with ~10 miles of walk a day, couple of beers at lunch hour and a warm winter jacket could make one uncomfortably warm. Given that this is not the business tourist season in Scandinavia, I was on the hunt for opportunities to photograph daily life.

This was not the first time we were in Copenhagen and hopefully not the last time either. I love this city: if there is a place in the old world or east of the Atlantic that I feel at home, that would this region - the islands and landmass around the strait of Øresund.

The Upper Cascades

A familiar route for a sunny Saturday roadtrip…

Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up some film in your best camera and shoot like a bastard - a slightly modified quote but relevant to the mood in these photographs.

Eastern Washington in early Fall: From wet mountain slopes to arid canyons

Driving east on Interstate 90 past Snoqualmie Pass brings you to the “other side” of Washington I find relatively prettier than the rainforests and the evergreens to the west. Home is where the heart is but home - western Washington, being more accessible round the year presents less interesting and less exotic subjects to me for creating photographs. The Fall season is about to peak in Washington but the foliage was starting to turn yellow and orange around high elevations, so I embarked on a solo road trip last weekend to capture the early season on film as well as digital photographs.

The terrain changes very quickly after driving down the east slopes of the Cascades, from mountain side consisting of densely distributed streams and creeks flanked by perennial trees to gentle hills covered with sagebrush and farm animals. Signs of fall quickly changes to either late summer or early winter, for there is no distinct fall season in these parts.

Many hours fast forward - a sunset and a moonless night sky. The wind stopped briefly for the sunset before changing direction and get colder in absence of the sun.

This was not the first time I have been to these locations and likely not going to be my last trip. With every year adding more photographs of familiar locations the timeline starts to blur and makes it difficult to place a timestamp on a photograph. But there will always be a special place in my heart for these mountains and the wide open land beyond them, not too far from my home.

Pike Place in Ektar 100

Seattle Center in Kodak Portra 400

Beautiful spring day in the city.

Soviet made LOMO Lubitel-166

A Lubitel-166 Universal made in the USSR in the 80’s - I bought this camera from an Amazon seller from Ukraine in 2022, it took months to get it delivered after transit delays (due to the war in Ukraine). Once I received the unit, didn’t shoot with it until now. I had put a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 in it many months ago to get my father-in-law into analog photography but he couldn’t find time to shoot. After kicking off my home film developing workflow I was hungry for exposed film to put in the tank to develop therefore, I finally took the TLR camera out.

There are no light leaks, I am particularly impressed with the sharpness of the images, especially since I was guessing focus over a somewhat broken focussing system.

HP5 home-brew

When I rebooted analog photography in December of 2022, it was inevitable I would get down to developing film at home, at some point. Today. I finally got to that point…

I ordered the Ars Imago lab box and CineStill DF96 monobath that came in earlier today. The first roll to go into the daylight operable lab box was a Fujifilm Neopan ACROS 100-II. But unfortunately, it came out not that great - the developed negatives strip had purple stains. But it added an effect I loved on certain shot, like the one below.

I was unsatisfied with the result, had to shoot some more to test and give it another shot. So in the afternoon I ventured out with my trusty Pentax 6x7 loaded with a roll of HP5. Few hours later I had shot through the roll, and it was ready to go into the lab box. This time I agitated the film in the soup for 9 minutes (instead of 6 in the previous attempt), followed by vigorous rinsing under tap water for a much longer duration. The result was very satisfactory: although there are purple stains on the film edge (that I believe was due to the film edge in contact with the spool), the images came out clean.

There are “some” stains in the following images but not as bad as what I got in the first round. Once I run out of the monobath I’m going to invest in individual developer and blix/fixer to have more control on the process.

The second roll of CineStill 800T (35mm)

Snohomish in Spring Sun

It’s really beautiful here in the Pacific Northwest when it is not raining.

Shot on Kentmere Pan 100 film.

Thin line between love and hate

Graffiti is not always art, it can be the result of vandalism.

Shot on Kodak Portra 160.

Seattle in the Sun

Marseille in film

Kodak Gold 200 film

Shot on Fujica GM670

The Funeral

I cannot articulate in words the feeling that brewed inside me as I was setting up this shot. First, there was no sun until the last few seconds when it peeked through the clouds and lit up the trees in the background. Then it was a difficult composition with the “Wide” lens.

It appeared to me as if the trees were mourning the death of the fallen one.