Battle Creek Falls

Today I may or may not have slept until noon. It was bliss. 

Also, we went and hiked Battle Creek Falls! It was an awesome time to hike around with my family. I took my new camera and exposed a roll of film. I hope they turn out! Because I was taking pictures on that camera I didn't take anything digital, so I stole some pictures my sister took. Thanks sis!

Tomorrow my family and I and a couple friends are going to go shooting. I'll try to remember to take some pictures this time around!

Film Adventures (Part 2)

The film camera that I mentioned a couple of posts ago arrived yesterday! So did an old Minolta for my sister! We went to our local photo shop and bought some film and had some adventures. Two nights ago we did some steel wool photography.

(I took a couple of pictures with a digital camera too)

My sister and I went to Provo today to walk center street and take pictures on our new cameras. It was pretty cool to try out our new toys and listen to some Led Zeppelin (even if she's not a fan). I'm super excited to spend some time in the darkroom developing and printing!

Adventure Day

Yesterday was quite an uneventful day, apart from playing some games with Taylor and Kelli. I pretty much slept the day away and accomplished nothing, which was actually kind of nice.

Today, my sister and I stole the parents' car and went to buy a couple of rolls of film, one for the each of us. She's super excited to shoot it, and I'm pretty excited to see how her first roll turns out!

My cousin came over a bit later so we went to the mall to dream at vinyls, watches, shoes, clothes, pretty much everything cool looking. 

We played some Texas Hold'em with our fancy poker chips. I won a whopping $2.43, probably the most I've won gambling. It was pretty exciting, almost as exciting as my cousin's and sister's "poker faces". Not impressive, but definitely hilarious.

Hey look, it's me!

We took a drive to Rock Canyon to do some climbing because my cousin's never been and we were bored. It was a pretty good time, but the wind was relentless and we pretty much froze our butts off (notice how we're NOT dressed for relentless wind in April). When we were done we practically jogged to the warmth of the car. Brrrr.

Also, I decided to have a vanity moment.

These are all the records I've purchased myself.

These are all the records I have, minus Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits, which is currently at my other cousin's place.

Sometimes I love vanity moments.

Kintsugi

If you know me, you know that I love Death Cab for Cutie. When they announced a new album earlier this year, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. So, when they sent me an email saying "buy our vinyl!", I bought their vinyl. It arrived a couple of days ago, and looks/sounds incredible. I'm a big design guy, so the design of the cover and the vinyls is a big deal to me. They definitely hit a home run on this one.

It's definitely a stylistic departure from most of their earlier work, and the last half of the album kind of disappointed me when I first heard it. As I listen to the album over again (and over, and over, and over again), those last few songs are growing on me!

Taking Pictures of "Junk"

A couple of days ago I read a blog post by Daniel Em, which you can read here. In the post he discusses why he takes pictures of "junk", or random stuff that holds no personal significance to him. The points that he makes center around practice and getting more comfortable with a camera, both points that I agree with. 

I, too, take a lot of pictures of "junk". But I don't do it for the practice or for becoming more comfortable with a camera. I do it to point out little pieces of life that we so often gloss over and take for granted.

If I'm honest with myself, I take photos for fun, not to tell a story or to accomplish a creative goal. However, as I go back through old photos that I've taken I'm inspired to take more inspiring and thoughtful images. In my work as a hobby photographer I will start trying to capture more emotion and to develop stories in my images. Hopefully my work will become more emotional and have a greater impact as a result!

Film Adventures

I mentioned my film obsession yesterday, so I thought that I'd share some of the fruits of my film adventures.

It's pretty hard to see, but that is a contact sheet of my favorite images from my first two rolls of film I've ever shot! I feel a little bit like Walter Mitty, which is exciting seeing as I love that movie so much. 

And these are my first 4 prints I made in the darkroom at Mountain View (excluding some throwaways that I, well, threw away). The bottom two were exposed wrong in camera and something weird happened with the developer on the selfie, but the top left picture turned out great!

I have a roll of film sitting on my desk waiting to be developed, but next week is spring break which means we'll have to wait awhile before I get access to the darkroom. Maybe I should go buy some film...

Neglect, Work, School, and Play

Oh boy. It's never a good thing when on a whim you decide to open up Blogger and remember about that blog you used to keep a long time ago. Even a worse thing when you open up the stats and see that a whopping 2 people viewed your blog the entire month of March. Poor, neglected little blog.

That job interview I mentioned last post? It went fantastic, and I felt completely confident that the position was mine. I felt confident right up until the moment they called to inform me that they were impressed, but couldn't hire people under 18. What a bummer, I was sure the job was mine. So now I need to find somewhere to apply. I'm a stubborn sonuva gun and I refuse to work in fast food, which limits the field quite a bit as a 17 year old punk. 

I just got the results back from the ACT I took earlier this year, and I almost cried when I opened it.

The last time I took the ACT I studied a ton and took a prep class and scored a 32. This time around, I literally didn't study anything, and this is the result. Hmm, my lazy teenage brain is drawing conclusions that probably aren't indicative of reality...

And finally, I've become obsessed with film photography lately. I stole an old Pentax ME Super from my comrade to fuel my obsession. I use my high school's darkroom quite frequently with a friend of mine, which is funny because I'm not even taking film photo until next year. Good news though, a film SLR all my own is on it's merry way to my doorstep!

Please realize that this is an image of a brand new one that I found on Google, definitely taken care of better than the one I'll be receiving. But I'm so excited for it to arrive!