Tomorrow afternoon I’m hopping on a train and riding down to California to shoot a wedding, attend a baby shower, and visit with friends and family during the downtime. I’m beyond excited.

Unfortunately, this will be a 12-hour train ride, by myself, so I can’t imagine I’ll have anywhere near as much fun as I did when this photo of my friend, Ryan, was taken in Thailand last year.

I will be bringing my laptop with me, and keep the posts comin’ when I have the time to write ‘em. All orders for actions will still be sent out promptly, as well– I just wanted to give a head’s up in case I decided to totally bail out on the blogosphere for the next week!

Last week I finally bit the bullet and ordered a negative scanner. I didn’t get anything too fancy– just an Epson V500– but it’s a purchase I’d been putting off for years. It arrived earlier this afternoon and I’ve been trapped inside my binder of negatives from college ever since!

So far I’ve been skipping around but I intend on getting everything scanned in while I patiently wait for my first rolls from the Rolleiflex and Holga to come back.

We’ve also got a stack of negs from Chris’s trip to Africa some 10 years ago, long before we knew each other, that I can’t wait to share.

This photo is a double exposure from AP&D, a staple in every HSU student’s life.

More to come!

One semester in college my entire photography class had to prepare individual slideshows with backing music, to be presented to the open public.

The process was actually pretty grueling, too. We had to first create a storyboard of our idea, shoot it, develop the negs and then print them onto litho film to create the positive, then cut out each slide and glue it into a slide case. It was a great learning experience but man, I never want to do that again!

My slideshow was called The Tourist and revolved around a darker Alice in Wonderland sort of tale. Basically, girl reads a book, falls asleep, finds herself awake in a weird new world and has to find her book to get transported home, only to be left wondering if it really happened or not.

The soundtrack to this is “Kefka’s Theme” from the Final Fantasy VI Piano Collections, one of my favorite albums ever. The music playing at the credits is “Kids Run Through The City Corner,” also from the VI Collection.

Anyway, I started making a digital version of my slideshow in Windows Movie Maker last summer and never quite finished it. Mostly I’m missing a couple frames (hence the repeat shots), and I went a little overboard with the camera shake effects, but overall I’m pleased with where I left off.

Despite all that, I thought I’d post it for s&g’s. Hope you enjoy it, too! And Happy Sunday. :)

I know it’s not Caturday, but since the rain started getting dumped all over Portland there hasn’t been a lot of time for feline sightings. This lack of cats on my blog just won’t do, so I’m digging into the archives here.

This is Momma. She’s a stray cat that loyally hung round the backyard of Chris and I’s Arcata apartment. We lived there for 2 years and there was rarely a day we didn’t see her. We nicknamed her Momma because she had a big swingin’ belly that looked like she’d given birth to one too many litters before someone in the neighborhood got her fixed (her clipped ear is a sign that she’d been TNR’ed).

For a short while we also called her Ice Queen because her normal routine was to sit and stare at us through the sliding glass door. Once, Chris kept a daily log of her activity and she had literally been on our back porch for almost an entire day– disappearing once or twice for up to an hour. She was probably catching some lunch.

For over a year she had a bestie whom I named Nermal; Nerms was way friendlier than Momma, and they were always together. On those rare sunny Humboldt days, they would lay on the rocks next to the fence and roll around together. It was the cutest.

And on the usual rainy Humboldt days, they would spoon each other on our back porch, guarding our recyclables and using pizza boxes for mattresses when we had them.

Unfortunately, Nermal went missing and was eventually reported by a neighbor as being found dead. I cried for a week, I loved her so much. Momma never stopped hanging out in our backyard, though.

It took almost the entire 2 years we lived in that apartment for Momma to warm up to us– it wasn’t until after Nermal died that she let me touch her. She’s extremely feral; I can’t count how many times I’ve witnessed her drag a dead field mouse onto our back porch and devour everything but the snout and tail (total ew!, but also pretty awesome).

We had to say goodbye to Momma when we moved into the Tree House on the other side of town. These are the last photos I ever got to take of her, back in the summer of ‘08. I’d like to think whoever moved into that apartment after us is still taking care of her, but who knows?

I wanted so badly to take her with me, but even after 2 years and a few scratches under the chin she was still so feral; to remove her from her territory would’ve just seemed cruel.

Even though we weren’t the closest, I still miss and think of Momma and Nermal whenever I see a grey cat… I am thankful for the time we got to spend together.

And now, my friends, I am officially misty eyed!

The last couple of days I’ve allowed myself to really sit down and play in Photoshop. I don’t normally do this and, after looking back through the fruits of my leisure, I have no idea why. I had fun, figured things out and ended up with some shots I really love.

It all started with Lensbaby-envy, which grew into “I wish I knew how to use my Holga”-envy.* I decided that anything you could do by accident, I could do on purpose, and these photos are what I ended up with.

My only grievance about the process of faking lomography with Photoshop is that everything you do is deliberate. The very nature of setting out to fake it takes away the element of surprise that is so exciting when shooting film.

I told a friend earlier today that I wish Photoshop would come with a button that said “Surprise me.” That would make my day.

I did resort to closing my eyes a few times when using the lasso tool to produce the “light leak.” I guess that’s the closest we Photoshop addicts will ever come!

* I’ve had this thing for at least 5 years and have never successfully taken out the originally loaded roll of film. Pathetic, huh? If you want to come over and teach me how to use my Holga, I’ll make you chocolate covered peanut butter balls. **

** Yeah, Renee– I’m talking to you!