Holga Portra 400VC

Well i got some more film back from the great Folks down at Image finishers (http://imagefinishers.com/) and got a few really cool shots to post from a ski trip at the end of January and a Haiti support show i saw early Feb.

I also am in the works of getting a website together to post a greater collection of design, art and fotos that my wife and i have put together over the last few years. I am setting a personal goal to have it up and running by the end of June so we'll see how that goes. As soon as it is up i will post a link here.

On to the art...

Here is Justin Munn, you may know him from a few other shots taken while shredding the guitar on stage with fellow band members of Crimson Refuge. A van full of tired kiddos from our youth group. Good ole Aaron is poking his head out. This was taken with a cheap fisheye and a color gel ringflash. However i am going to have to look into doubling up on the gels cause there really isn't a noticeable difference like those dramatic shots that you see over at the Lomo website. I'll try it out and post back here with some results.



Ok this fellow is Brent Holloman. You may know of him from Beta Radio. This is a shot that was taken at the Satellite Lounge Back earlier this month. Great Tunes! If you get a chance head over to there myspace page http://www.myspace.com/betaradio. If they start playing regularly differently check em out. This was again a colored gell ring flash with little effect from the gels. The background lights were the stars here. I love not knowing what your gonna get when you drop film off at the shop. Little mini Christmas' all year long.




Till next time

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Digital Painting

Ok so it's been a while. Sorry about that. I have some cool things coming up. Scanning in two rolls of 120 film right now and should be able to post them here in the next week or so.
In the meantime i have been really trying to get into this thing called speed painting. From what i can tell it is an exercise that illustrators and animators use to warm up and get going before they jump into there work. Its like working out a gesture painting with out having to let it dry.

Now i have been back and forth on To get Painter 11 or stay with Photoshop. The rotate canvas is the feature that has been the most coveted feature of Painter. Now PS CS4 has that!
Still dont have the funds to break out painter yet, but if some one out there wants to get rid of their copy holler at me and i'll gladly take it off your hands.

Here are a few names of those that i admire in the digital painting field.
Bobby Chui
Bjorn Hurri
BK Studio
Christian Alzmann
Lois van Baarie
David Colman
Chris Sasaki
Willie Real
Carlos Felipe Leon
I could go on for a while but i'll stop there.

Although Cory Godbey, Chris Koelle and Justin Gerard over at Portland Studios don't do very many straight digital pieces they surely spark my interest in the aspects of digital first.

All that to say i did my first digital painting. It's still is floating on the page a bit. That said it's my favorite mug. I look forward to doing more of these in the life ahead of me.


TTFN
Doc

Handmade Holiday

Today I finished printing the holiday art prints for the company. It was a lot of fun, lot of work but i think the end product is really cool.
Here are some process pics and one of my little helpers.


Dried print from yesterdays efforts.


Had to change out the second color for visibility reasons for the darker paper.




Mathis is the man. Don't have one of those supper sweet drying racks (If any body out there has one and wants to give it to me, yes i will take it.) So string and clips will have to do.



Looking forward to screen printing some more posters.
Doc

Splitzer time

Basically i grabbed a yogurt container, the one i found that worked best was the Lowes Food brand yogurt. Also grab an aerosol lid. the fit that worked for me was an old 3m Spray mount lid.



I first mashed the 3m lid down into the yogurt cut as far as i could. and made sure that the lid was straight using the ingredient lines to guide me. marked off where the gap in the two containers started. Using a Dremel, i removed half of the aerosol lid and cut down the length as well to the length marked on the outside of the yogurt container.
At this point i mashed the 3m lid down into the yogurt container. This is a tight fit, which practically held itself in place. But i threw a little tape on there for good measure.


It fits both the diana and the holga. Removing just the right amount of the yogurt bottom was the hardest part. I again used the packaging lines as a guide. After playing with this i went back and hot glued the 3m lid to the yogurt container to keep it there and sprayed the whole thing with some flat black spray paint. i have read about people doing this to the insides of there holga to reduce the light bouncing around on the shiny plastic parts onto your film. Was trying to cut down on the lense flare issues on the splitzer. Here is a shot of 35mm that i hacked through the holga. I'll explain that more later. It was fun checking out all the old school Corvettes and seeing them over the years. I must say i like the old ones better.


Cheers
Doc

A couple of new things

Ok, so i got a Holga GN with the bulb feature...Its very important that you know, before you load film, the orientation for the switch to be in B or N mode.
As you can tell by this "crisp and not blurry at all" image, i did not do that. Well i did take the back off to see if the B and N worked and it did. In my excitement i forgot to make a note of it before loading film into it! This redheaded future gunslinger was awesome. He had a six shooter on one hip and a lightsaber on the other. Sounds like the perfect mix. Firefly/Joss Whedon, we love you, pour one out.
Alas most of the roll came out blurry do to this mix up.


Here are a couple that turned out in spite of myself.

A happy accident! Justin Munn is preparing to shred it. Crimson Refuge check em out on myspace. Really cool guys. This was the Stryper Concert in Cary 10.17.09. Probably the best show to date for these guys! Oh and Stryper, yeah they were pretty good too.



Dosha our new pseudo cat. Colby Jack, our orange pseudo pet cat has moved away and now Dosha "lives" with us. Chilling in the "backyard" doing some grooming. I tapped on the window to get her attention, i was surprised to see her look up. Every time i tapped she looked up. I started to laugh while laying on the floor to take this. Pleasantly surprised with this one.



Highway 86, beautiful day! Black crud from who know what. I guess its on the old sample film i bought off ebay. Hopefully all the rolls wont turn out with it on there, but it's sorta cool too.


I am getting some use out of the measuring string guide. It has helped me better gauge depth over the last two rolls of film. I also have created a splitzer out of a yogurt can and an aerosol spray can lid. Photos to come of the process and of how well it works.

TTFN

Doc

Home Made Focus Depth

How many rolls of film have you shot and waited with bated breath for the film to be developed only to find that most all the shots are out of focus?! I myself after only getting into Lomo cameras this last year have had my fair share.

So i figured that i would simply make a string that i could mark off the distances at which the images should be sharp. I grabbed some nylon string (or whatever you have laying around the house), a tape measure, and some sharpie markers.

Mark off at 1 meter, 2-4 meters, 4-6 meters for the settings on the Diana (or your favorite lomo camera) or put a mark on the string at every meter for setting the focus between the presets on the camera.


See how easy that is. Stunning, i know. All you need now is a way to keep the string together. If only you had a small light weight container to put it in. Oh, hey i can use the film container from any 35mm roll as simple storage for this mod. Wonderfully simple and wonderfully useful.


I am going to try and post some home made splitzers here soon and some shots taken with it.

TTFN

September is upon us

What a way to start a month. Slightly overcast outside. The bike ride to work this morning was wonderful. It was still nice a few hours later for lunch. I sat out side and listened to the birds chirping and the traffic driving down Oleander. Wishing to take just another hour for lunch to enjoy the outdoors.

The ride to the grocery store yeilded some laughter as we dubbed Spikes ride as "Chigger" or "Chigger Rigged".