East of the Cascades

Pike Place in Ektar 100

Seattle Center in Kodak Portra 400

Beautiful spring day in the city.

Color pigments and silver

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.

Tulips

Every year I tell myself to not go back to the tulips farm and every year I go back.

The wetlands

Permanently flooded areas of land are found across the globe from the arctic to the tropical regions. While I have explored to great extent the swamps and bogs in the sun-tropical region, these wetlands at the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana reminded me of the similar terrain in Assam, in north east India where I spent the first twenty something years of my life.

Shot on Hasselblad X2D, during a conducted tour of a wetland near New Orleans earlier today.

New Orleans: Day One

Beautiful Wednesday afternoon and evening in French Quarter

Plants

I love photographing columns of sunlight percolating through thick vegetation and illuminate plants and their characteristics near ground. It reminds me of the very different tropical and sub-tropical forests in the place where I lived twenty years ago.

The first species in kingdom Plantae appeared about 1200 million years ago in water and complex plants appeared just 200 million years afterwards. First members of animal kingdom appeared after another 400 million years down the timeline.

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

Weekday in Marymoor

Kodak Gold 200 film

Shot on Fujica GM670

Early spring in Amsterdam

Marseille

Possibly one of my best and worst at the same time city that I have visited in my adult life, Marseille will always have a very special place in my memories.

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.