Welcome to Old Photos Week! Every day I will post a photo or two from the batch of film I had scanned recently. Since I sent it in blind, some of the images that came back were surprising. Some I had forgotten. Some I never even knew existed.
When I was a kid, Christmas was my favorite holiday by a long shot. My family went all out, and the mountain of presents under the Christmas tree was always one of the highlights of my year.
As an adult, my favorite holiday is Halloween.
Not so much for the dressing up, but because I love the whole atmosphere that goes with it. It's good, wholesome, spooky fun! And sometimes it's fun to dress up too.
In looking through the last batch of photos, I ran across some images of me wearing one of those cheap-ass Collegeville costumes that came in a window box you could pick up for $1.50 back in the day. You'd get a jumper with some kind of print on it that was sewn so poorly it would barely last the night, plus a matching mask made out of plastic so thin that it would crack and split just by breathing in it...
Photo found on Etsy
Saf-T-C eye holes and flame retarded! Doesn't get much better than that!
Still, a lot of those old cheap costumes are a heck of a lot scarier than the ones you can buy today! Take, for example, the skeleton costume I am wearing in these creepy-ass photos...
Though what's truly scary is the bruise I've got on my face underneath the mask!
I'm guessing I got it fighting a bear or something.
Hope you Halloween is extra-ghoulish this year!
Welcome to Old Photos Week! Every day I will post a photo or two from the batch of film I had scanned recently. Since I sent it in blind, some of the images that came back were surprising. Some I had forgotten. Some I never even knew existed.
It's weird what our brains choose to latch onto.
I don't have a lot of vivid memories of my childhood, but there are some memories that have left an impression. For example... I remember being in our garage when I was very young and we had just moved somewhere in California. The neighbor kids were over and we were looking for the boxes that had my toys in them. I couldn't yet read, but one of the girls that lived nearby could, and kept reading off the boxes... "Summer"... "Summer"... "Summer"... "These all say Summer!" It wasn't until years later (high school maybe?) that I was able to revisit that memory and figure out that the boxes didn't all say "Summer"... they said "Simmer." No idea why such a mundane memory is stuck in my head, but I can "see" all of it. There were four kids total in the garage. The boxes were stacked up against a wall. I can picture it in pretty good detail.
Another memory that's stuck in my brain is a trip to Lake Chelan when I was a kid. There were many, many trips to "The Lake" when I was young, all of which have faded from memory... except this one particular trip hasn't. What I remember vividly is a tiny dead fish that washed up on shore. I can see it as clearly as if I saw it yesterday. My brother and I had been building "boats" out of inner-tubes and water mattresses when BLAM! dead fish.
So you can imagine my surprise when I ran across these two photos in the last batch of negatives I had scanned. Everything is exactly as I remember it...
That "boat" obviously wasn't a very good one if my brother had to bail water out of it, but oh well.
I can't be positive that these images are from the dead fish trip... perhaps we built mattress boats on other trips... but something in my gut tells me this is the one. In that second photo, just out of frame, there is a dead fish lapping on the shore.
How it died we can only speculate...
Welcome to Old Photos Week! Every day I will post a photo or two from the batch of film I had scanned recently. Since I sent it in blind, some of the images that came back were surprising. Some I had forgotten. Some I never even knew existed.
My mom's mother (my grandmother) did not like cats. Not even a little bit. I heard her mention it several times over the years. I don't know why, really... I always thought that maybe she didn't like all pets, but apparently she was okay with dogs. So no clue. Unless she was tired of running into their covered poop when weeding the vegetable garden perhaps? One of the many, many things I wished I had asked her about while she was alive.
And yet...
There are quite a few photos of cats hanging around in old photos of my mom when she was little. My first guess was that they were wild cats that lived in the area, but then I see photos of my mom holding them. That doesn't seem likely if they were truly wild, so I'm not quite sure what the story is there. Maybe they were pets, but they had to live outside. I'm guessing my grandparents had a barn, so maybe they were barn cats who kept the mice in check?
One of my favorite pictures is this one of toddler mom with a furry friend. I am assuming that this was taken at her home, because the series has no other people except mom, grandma, grandpa, and mom's brother...
This photo brings up another mystery... what's with the playing card in the dirt there?
Because my grandmother didn't like cats and would undoubtedly have shooed them away if she was trying to take a photo, I'm guessing this one was taken by my grandfather. Looks like a cat walked in-frame and plopped down to lick its butt while grandpa was taking a picture of mom and her brother...
My mom seems to like cats (she was a huge fan of Spanky), so I guess hating cats is not genetic.
When my final scans arrive, I'll probably print my favorite photos of toddler mom with cats to add to the collage in my stairway. It's nice to have two of my favorite things in a single photo.
On Saturday I went in to work and was amazed at how beautiful the leaves were as I made my way down the street. I was so enchanted that I pulled over to take a photo... only to find out that my phone was dead. The next day I forgot my phone. Then yesterday I didn't go into the office.
Today I finally remembered... even though it's not nearly as pretty now that half the leaves have fallen off...
Now I am bummed that I didn't charge my phone a bit then immediately go back for a photo on Saturday. A beautiful moment that now only exists in my memories.
Speaking of memories... soon enough, THIS is what the same street will look like...
=shudder=
Thanks to some unexpected cash that came into my life last couple months, I was able to pay off a bill, buy new socks, up my monthly donation to Doctors Without Borders, make some donations for animal rescue efforts in hurricane-ravaged Houston... and pay for another batch of old photos to be scanned. The last time I could afford to do this was five years ago, so it was a nice to be able to treat myself to something senselessly expensive and cool like this.
All of the photos I have left for scanning are photo negatives, so I don't really review anything. I just send them in and hope for the best.
This batch ended up being pretty special.
There were photos of my parent's wedding I hadn't seen before. Amazing photos of my mom when she was very young. Fascinating photos of my grandparent's life from a bygone era. And, of course, lots of photos of me and my brother growing up.
Also interesting? A trip to San Francisco by my mom's parents to visit my parents, assumably just before I was born in 1965(?)...
One trend I noticed was oodles and oodles of plaid. My brother and I were drenched in it for half a decade...
Another photo trend was me on vehicles.
How many people can say that their first car WAS A FIRE TRUCK?!? ME! I CAN TOTALLY SAY THAT! Just look at me! All chill as fuck while cruising down the sidewalk in my sweet ride! Acting like I don't care and all the world is my bitch. SO BAD-ASS!
Holy shit! My second car was a Corvette... WITH WORKING HORN!
Here's where things started going downhill. Apparently my third car was a wagon...
There are hundreds more photos waiting for me to look through them, so I'm sure "Throwback Thursday" will be a trend for a while here. Or not. Guess it depends how boring my life is next week.
This will all make sense tomorrow.
Maybe.
Okay... probably not. But still... it's a random cow. That's pretty cool, right?
Photography is a hobby I absolutely love... but rarely have time to pursue.
Indeed, it seems the only time I get to delve into serious photography is when I'm on vacation. The rest of the time I'm shooting stuff with my iPhone because it's always on me and oh so handy. The iPhone also produces fairly good images, which makes it infinitely more appealing for snapshots than having to drag the Sony a7S Mark II out of my camera bag.
I mean, seriously... this was shot years ago with my iPhone 4...
Yes, you read that right... an iPhone 4. Which can't even touch what images you can get out of the iPhone 7s that's out right now.
And, yet... I'm not going to get shots like this from an iPhone...
Which is why I continue to invest in camera gear. Sure it sits in my closet most of the year, but those times I actually get to shoot with it? Magic.
Because I mostly only shoot on vacation, it's my travels that drive my photography purchases. I know I'm going to be shooting scenery in Vietnam, so I buy a new lens for that. I know I'm going to be going on safari night-drives in Zimbabwe, so I buy a new camera body for that. And so on. And so on.
Photography is an expensive hobby to have.
And today Sony announced the next evolution in their professional mirrorless camera line... the a9...
Needless to say, I'm in love.
Not only does the a9 have some astounding new features that I'll actually use... it also addresses some of the shortcomings of the a7 models that were so frustrating. Like dual media slots. And touch-screen operation. And a LAN port with FTP. And a battery that's worth a shit.
And while I rarely shoot video, the 4K footage (down sampled from 6K!) is pretty amazing...
It's pretty much a dream camera... though I'm sure they'll be coming out with an a9S sometime down the line that will add even more honey to the pot.
There are two problems, however.
First of all, Sony's lack of longer lenses makes the sport and wildlife features kind of moot. Yes, they're going to release a G-series 100-400mm for $2,500 in July... and that will definitely help... but that's all there is. That's the most reach you'll get out of Sony. Sure you can add a $550 extender to double that, but it's a less than ideal scenario for serious sport and wildlife shooters. Not a deal-breaker from my shooting perspective, but until the big glass arrives, the market for the true potential of the a9's capabilities is waiting.
A far bigger problem for me, however is the price.
All $4,500 of it.
Now, don't get me wrong, the specs on this beast of a camera are better than what you can get out of cameras from Canon and Nikon that are far more expensive. I absolutely acknowledge that. But $4,500 for something I'm not going to use very often is a tough thing to justify.
And yet...
I think back to many of the trips I've taken, and I would have killed for this camera. I think forward to the Antarctica trip I'm going to be taking in December, and I know the a9 coupled with the 100-400mm lens would be put to very good use. Heck, in many ways, it's the best possible camera I could take. And given all the money I've had to scrimp and save to even get to Antarctica, isn't that worth the investment?
I dunno.
Maybe I rent one. Or buy the camera and rent the lens. And then sell the camera when I get back if I find I'm not using it as much as I'd like. There are options. All of them expensive.
But maybe.
I guess we'll see how broke I am by the time I've finished paying for my upcoming vacation.
...or something. The reason I know this is that there was nobody at work when I showed up.
Oh well. Seems as good as time as any to say don't forget to wipe.
It's expensive keeping up with the Joneseses.
My neighbors have been stepping up their gardening game lately and the neighborhood is awash with flowers.
Except for me. My irises have all died off, the spice tub has gone to seed, the pots of roses are done, the dogwood is back to leaves-only, and the planters are pretty much finished. I got nuthin'.
Which necessitated my pulling out the spice garden (which I would never use anyway) and a pot of dead stems so I could plant petunias... on sale at Home Depot 6/$6...
The spices got their revenge, however, as my hands smelled like rosemary(?) for the rest of the day.
That helped a bit, but my yard still looked a bit bare, so I decided to go for a hanging basket. It's nice, I guess, but I didn't notice the plastic pot was cracked when I got it (FOR TWENTY-SIX FRICKIN' DOLLARS!) so I'm sure it will be falling through the bottom any day now...
My back yard, on the other hand, is just now starting to bloom. The previous owner has all kinds of roses and stuff in the back flower bed, which is pretty sweet...
I wish I could have swapped the front and back of my home... it would have been a lot cheaper than having to buy a bunch of new pretty junk.
The minute I heard that Sony was releasing a professional-grade 24-70mm lens, I was intrigued.
For oh so many reasons, this is the perfect lens for general photography, but the biggest reason is that it fills a gaping hole in my lens line-up.
Which is currently like this...
See? It's a perfect fit! And the lens sounds too good to be true...
Of course, it actually is too good to be true when you consider the following...
And yet...
This is the lens I need. Once it's on my camera, I can use it for 90% of my photography. For quick trips, it could very well be the only lens I take with me.
Of course, needing something and being about to afford it are two very different things. So I ended up selling some gear (including my amazing Sony A7s camera) to get it.
Totally worth it.
Yes, the size and weight are a bit of a bummer. But you can't have a feature-set like this without trade-offs. A few quick test-shots have confirmed that it is definitely fast and exceedingly sharp (bordering on what you get from a prime lens)...
I'm sure I'll have more to say when I've had a chance to really put it through its paces. But, for now? Amazing, amazing glass.
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