• a variety of fine pickles •

reward

i spent more than 5 hours having mammograms and ultrasounds today. i am worn smooth out.

maybe i'll write more about it later, or maybe tomorrow.
right now i can barely keep my arms in an upright position...

ouch.

if you live in NYC!

for my friends, bloggers & readers in the big apple - this is for you!

my friend sara at lightbulb oven & bawk! is having a culinary salon... tres swanky!

if you're in NYC in any of the 5 boroughs, you have plenty of advance notice and NO EXCUSE not to go! but hurry - the clock's a'tickin'!

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It's light-bulb oven!

Please join me on Saturday, February 17 for an historical event: the first-ever light-bulb oven dinner!

It's a culinary salon, a cooperative dinner party, an underground restaurant... what our friends in Cuba call a paladar: one person cooks and everyone else chips in to cover groceries.

It's 35 bucks (a deal!). You'll meet new people and eat four courses of fantastic food.

It's in prospect heights, Brooklyn (3 blocks from the 2 and 3 trains; also near the N/Q/R/4/5 trains; address divulged upon purchase of ticket)

Visit the website for more information, past menus, fun facts about yours truly, and because it's pretty:

http://lightbulboven.com/home.html 

Go here to see the menu and buy your ticket!

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gracie & the sunbeam

i went to my mom & dad's house today and got to see my neice gracie. she had a bad cold, and her sweet little cheeks were flushed bright red, but she hadn't lost her urge to laugh and play and run around, and pose in a sunbeam for her aunt lissa's camera. she even got the hang of putting the lens cap on my camera. maybe she was trying to tell me something.

   

i can't get enough of her. she makes my heart smile. 

       

okay. i kept my promise.

i promised i would shut my fat yapper about my new holga until it arrived.

it's here!!!

i can't stand it. i want it to be daylight so i can go outside and take a whole roll of pictures.

i've got it loaded with a roll of HP5+ 120 film and a modified 6x6 mask. it's got velcro holding the back on (thank you SO much randy - you're a freakin' genius, i swear to god.), randy smith's custom cable release, randy's custom bulb modification, custom tripod mount, interior flocking so it won't reflect light, and the lens cap is IN MY JUNK DRAWER, just as randy prescribes. not throwing it away, just putting it away to avoid shooting a whole roll of film with the lens cap on. this ain't digital.

i am giddy like a school girl and i can't quit grinning.

i said it before, but i'll say it again because it certainly bears repeating, again and again...

if you're going to buy a holga, please do yourself a favor and spend your hard-earned money as wisely as you can, with randy smith at www.holgamods.com

i have never in my nearly 36 years experienced the level of customer service that randy has given me within the last several days. i'll be purchasing more holgas in the future, and i'll be buying them from randy, and no one else. nobody else. ever.

i've spent the time since i got home from work this evening loading film, attaching velcro, running around like a 4 year old, taping up the back of my camera to avoid light leaks, laughing uncontrollably, and taking 2 pictures in the brightest light possible. i took the obligatory "picture of myself holding my new camera reflected in the mirror" in the brightest of my 2 bathrooms, and then i went into my studio and lit it with studio lights and took a photo of those terribly cute, terribly terrible necco valentine's sweethearts (the ones with the messages on them) that nobody ever actually eats because they taste like flavored chalk.

i took a picture of them last valentine's day as well, in color, in digital:

but this one was black & white, and it was with a HOLGA!!! no telling how it's going to turn out, or even if it's going to turn out... but i don't care.

i may not sleep at all tonight!

the love of my life

my neice, mckayla grace. to me, she's gracie. i love her so much it makes my heart ache.

 

one last thing about the holga...

then, i PROMISE i'll shut up about it. until it arrives, that is.

i mentioned before that i purchased a custom modified holga from randy at www.holgamods.com and i just have to take a moment to scream it as loud as i can that i have never, as long as i can remember, had such a wonderful customer service experience than i have had with randy.

to the best of my knowledge, holgamods.com isn't a huge corporate machine. as far as i know, it's randy, modifying holga cameras by himself, and that may be all.

after several years of making online purchases with a machine, recieving a reciept from a robot, and a few days later getting a box or envelope in the mail, that's what i've become used to: no interaction whatsoever. randy changed all that. he's a real person. he's a real nice person.

i not only bought a holga, i made a friend. i have honestly never had customer service like he has provided before. maybe not even in person. he's just a decent, nice guy. there's a very short list of that type of person left, especialy when you're talking about the online marketplace.

here's another little "something" - randy emailed me this morning with the head's up that his interview in JPG magazine was published. you can see it here. it's on page 40, and although you can "flip through" the pages of the magazine from the website, i suggest you download the PDF of the magazine - MUCH easier to read... you can actually make out the words that way. besides that, there are some great photos and articles and they're worth the read. but especially the article on randy.

my friend, randy.

thanks again randy. i wish i knew more words to say how appreciative i am.

about a cheap, plastic girl: part II

i bought it.

it'll be in the mail in a few days thanks to the fantastic randy at www.holgamods.com who is custom-modifying my spankin' new cheap plastic chinese camera.

yay!

there are many different types of shoppers out there. impulse shoppers, cautious underspenders, shopaholics... the list goes on. i'm a little harder to pidgeon hole than that. there's not one specific category that i fit neatly into when shopping is concerned. i'm as guilty as anyone else could be when impulse buys are concerned. sometimes i do a little research before i make a purchase, usually with bigger ticket items - nothing out of the ordinary there. then there are other times that i research something to death before i buy it; also not out of the ordinary. until recently.

if bigger ticket items require a little research on my part, that's understandable. take a camera, for instance. if i'm gonna drop a grand or more on a camera, i want to know something about it. hell, i want to know everything about it. so it would stand to reason that something that i have researched to death would probably cost an arm and a leg, right? nope. how about twenty-two bucks?

i'm talking about a holga.

the glorious holga, right out of the box.

a holga is a cheap, plastic, shoddily made toy "camera". i use the quotations because the word "camera" hardly seems to fit. it's appearance is less that of a camera and more that of something you might find in the 3 + under section of a discount store with "fisher price" stamped on it.

however, turning the phrase "making a silk purse out of a sow's ear" never seemed so appropriate.

the photographs that are possible with a holga aren't just good, they have the potential for turning out surprisingly gorgeous. artistic. edgy. all those buzz words that mean pretty.

it was manufactured in china back in the early 80's when the most popular, plentiful film type was 120 medium format (which TOTALLY excites me) although it can be fitted to house and utilize 35mm film, which i have quite a bit of experience with, albeit experience that i gained years ago and haven't used in... well, years. in fact, it's been... well, years since i shot anything other than digital. which is where the over-doing it with the research comes in.

how bad could it be? it's not like i'm gonna have to brush up on my manual film camera settings; the holga only has 2 apertures; f/8 and f/11, and even those are something of a joke. you don't choose an aperture by it's size - you choose it by what holga-veterans lovingly refer to as the "mystery button" - a sliding mechanism labled "cloudy / sunny". pick your aperture. however, reading all that i have about the holga, as it turns out neither of them really work, so you just sort of get what you get. could be cloudy, could be sunny. YOU NEVER KNOW.

there's one shutter speed: 1/100. that's all. there are modifications available that will allow you to keep the shutter open for the length of time you depress the shutter button, but i don't think i'm going to go that modification route right off of the bat. a longer exposure time would be nice, but i think i want to get to know it before i start modifying it. maybe. i'm still researching that part.

one of the great things about a holga is that by virtue of the plastic lens - that's right, i said plastic lens - you get this incredible, unpredictable vignetting on some of your shots. (visit this link if you didn't click on it a few paragraphs up) sometimes you get it on all of them. sometimes you get it on none of them. that's part of the beauty of the holga; YOU NEVER KNOW.

the camera body has to be held together with black gaffer's tape (not included!) because the housing is made of plastic so cheap that it doesn't fit together like it's supposed to, and when there's a roll of film loaded the back tends to pooch enough so that the back has to be taped to the front.

holga, in all of her gaffer's-taped glory.

BUT - one of the coolest modifications possible with the holga is the "holgaroid" modification; outfitting the holga camera with a polaroid back. not the new generation of polaroid where the film comes shooting out at you, but the old kind of polaroid, with the peel apart film.


my polaroid 250 land camera - currently not in use!

i happen to have one of those - a polaroid land camera that isn't getting a whole lot of use at the moment... possible modification? YOU NEVER KNOW.

as of this writing, i have reached 100% certainty that i'm going back to film, at least part-time. one of the hardest parts of converting, at least part-time, back to film is the loss of instant gratification. that's one of the best parts of digital. instant gratification and 0% waste. with digital if you take a crappy shot, you know it right then and right there, and you can simply click & delete it right off of the camera. you didn't just screw yourself out of an exposure. but something about that makes me want to go back to film again too... it's sort of like a test for my eye. it's a creative stretch to not just shoot anything, but subject matter that, well, for lack of a better term, matters. at least to me. that's an exciting prospect. i think digital makes me lazy and i'm looking forward to shakin' it up a bit.

since i'm done researching the holga ad nauseum, i'm going to start looking into places to develop my negatives and prints. i'd like to do it myself if it's at all possible, but i can't afford the investment of all of the equipment (though nothing in the world would make me happier than to OWN my own darkroom equipment - and i know exactly where i'd put it.) but i would like to develop my own photos. nothing turns me on like the scent of darkroom chemicals... developer, stop bath... mmmmm. so i'm going to research (that's right, more research, but quicker this go 'round) the local college and see if they allow for outside darkroom usage for set fees, or if i have to take a photography course to be able to use it and rub elbows and suck up to the professor in charge... which i would totally do. the sucking up part for sure but also taking a refresher course in film photography. i could use it, that's for certain. they'd be teaching 35mm photography, not medium format, but that's alright - i can MODIFY for that!

so i'm set. i'll be recieving two holga cameras (they're cheap $-wise and, well, CHEAP production wise, so i'll be needing a backup) soon. i'm looking into places to develop my prints or at the very least making sure there's somebody local who can develop 120 medium format. i'm certainly not selling or otherwise giving up my DLSR. i've gotten way too spoiled to go COMPLETELY back to film and abandon my digital... after all, this ain't swiss family robinson. i'm not laura ingalls wilder. a girl has to have some mod-cons. but i'm giving it a go, and i am ecstatic about it.

my question is this: anybody out there own/use a holga? any insight? tips & tricks? any caveats?

holga photos - www.holgamods.com

i feel pretty!

turn up the sound - and click here !

when dogs get cabin fever