Category: Photo Journal

I spent half of this past month on the road, traveling to Pittsburgh, Ohio, Southern California, New Mexico and Arizona. It was an attempt to make up for going years without any serious photography trips.
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In this installment, we’ll take a quick look at the results of shooting with Kodak Vision 3 500T film.
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Lomo 800 shot at the ‘bando train.

So…

I clearly missed my regularly scheduled May & June posts to this series. Both months were filled with work, travel, events planned on short AF notice, and writing writing writing… More on all of that later. Let’s get to the film.

So I recently tried out some Film Photography Project color IR film. It’s expensive AF at nearly 40 bucks per roll, but I was enjoying shooting it. I got two rolls, and seeing the potential in it, I was going to order more. The powers that be have discontinued it though, so these might be some of the only color IR photos I get to make anytime soon.

It was tricky stuff to use. The description of ‘don’t overthink it, just shoot it’ was really stupid I think. To get decent resulted, you need a completely manual old school camera. Fortunately two years back I had my circa 1980s Canon AE-1 fixed up (it sat a bit beat up after years of use – late 80s to 2001). You absolutely need a Yellow 14 filter for it, and you have to play around with it in photoshop.

Here are two of the photos I’m kinda content with:

“Pretty Hate Machine” Abandoned NJT ALP44 locomotives awaiting a date with death

Prince of Concrete: Ferrera Bros. Concrete ‘bando.

As you can see, there’s quite a bit of variation in results. I honestly thought the concrete towers would be less interesting than the trains in nature, but I prefer the results. Not that I hate the trains, and the disturbing graffiti on the one on the left. I suspect if I scan and play with the other images more in photoshop I’ll get some fun results. I’m hoping to salvage some interesting stuff from my first roll, which I shot in Kansas City and St. Louis in May. Unfortunately I didn’t have the Yellow 14 filter, and everything came out a bit pink.

The second roll of film I want to offer a review of is Lomography color 800 film. This film is way more affordable, and the results are neat AF. I shot these on my slightly more modern Canon A2E (which I’ve had since the summer of 2001).

Again – good variation yet I didn’t do a damned thing to these in photoshop. The train photos being brighter yellow I’m assuming is just from a strong sunset, while the bluish concrete plant photos were shot in mid-day sun. I’ll be shooting two more rolls of this stuff soon so we’ll see how varied they are.

If anything, the lesson in all this is that you don’t need some crazy ass $40 a roll film to come up with compelling photos.

And yes, the LIRR train and concrete plant photos might look familiar, if you caught the two recent (ill)legal party articles linked at the top of this sentence.

This last month I finally got around to using an old roll of Tmax 3200 iso film that I before it expired, sometime before 2003.
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As I mentioned last time, I took an unexpected trip over to Chicago at the end of January. It took awhile but I’ve finally gotten the 35mm film processed from this adventure. The results are really unexpected.

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Welcome back to another (maybe) fun filled monthly film journal.

As you all might expect from last month’s post, I ended up doing a tiny bit of research and swallowing the (maybe) bitter pill of purchasing a lifetime subscription to VueScan. With it, hopefully I’ll never need to worry about out-of-date scanner software ever again. The decision was made easier by the fact that we’re moving (a few streets away) soon and purge-the-extra-stuff mode is enabled. That means getting rid of the vintage 2011 macbook I used last month to get my film negative scanned.

VueScan of course, came with a bit of a learning curve. The biggest difference is Canon’s MP Explorer software would recognize film negatives and break the preview scan into frames, whereas with VueScan you have to zoom in and crop. There’s also a bit more work to do in Photoshop, playing with levels and popping on ‘Auto-Color’, but hey, this basic method is going to (hopefully) force me to tinker more in Photoshop than I normally might.

Enough blather. Let’s get to some photos.

Unfortunately I goofed by dropping my latest rolls of film off late on a Saturday afternoon, only to learn they won’t be ready for a week. I didn’t ask why (what I thought was) the normal 1-2 hour turn around was going be much longer. Who can complain at 2 bucks a roll though? Still, I’m super eager to see how some of the rolls came out, particularly a film project ‘low’ roll that I bracketed the shit out of, and some general shots from a trip to Chicago that you can read the broad strokes of by backing my ass on Patreon.

This left me with a need – a need to scan (something) for this journal entry. With no new film to test the scanning software, I was left to dig into some old negatives and get re-acquainted with how I shot 15 years ago. Flipping through one of my binders of negatives, some photos from ‘The Monastery’ jumped out at me. I have never scanned these or even written about the Monestary. It was a building on Staten Island whose exact history escapes me. What I do clearly recall though is how much we all joked about the place back in the day (late 90s-2003ish). It was one of those buildings that was severely beat up and very well known, popularized by Weird New Jersey. Sidebar: Weird NJ was an even bigger joke to us. Our mean people cool kids club always looked down on their suburban ghost stories.

After much consternation we finally decided to go to this dump one day. The whole place was littered with red plastic cups from whatever ‘spooky’ college rager took place here a few days before.

It wasn’t long before we ran into some natives. There was a guy with a radio playing security for his buddies who were in the sub-basement trying to smash down a wall. Did I mention the urban legends of this place having like 10 floors below it, complete with dungeons and coffins filled with zombie nuns and ________ (insert Weird NJ style pabulum here).

After chatting up their lookout, we all went down to the sub basement to see what the rage was. Sure enough there was some wall that (maybe) looked suspect that they were taking turns bashing at. It was apparent they had bashed a few other holes in walls down here, searching for that elusive portal to Satan that apparently every Staten Island youth desperately craves.

It wasn’t long before the whole thing just turned into some weird ass photoshoot.

And there you have it.

Your two key takeaways from this post are as follows:

1) VueScan is good, but there’s a learning curve that I’ve rushed through and will have to revisit more. The quality is fine though, and makes the most out of my old scanner. It lets me kick the can down the road awhile longer to research or wait on a scanner worth buying. For the mostly online work I do, Vuescan is enough to pull in good images. It will also work fine for any of the print work I’m hoping to get into this year.

2) The Monestary, for all it’s worthless stupidity, was definitely one of those NYC places that could only have existed when it did. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss how much I hated that place.

Next Month: Some actual talk about various types of film, noodling with F stops, etc.