Just found out that my photo of my bottle of Remy Martin XO is being used over at Blog on the Rocks for a review of that very same drink. Most excellent. :)
Archive for October, 2005
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Downtown Park in Bellevue is quickly becoming a favorite walking area of mine. It’s close to my apartment and has plenty of parking. It’s a pretty popular area, good for people-watching and candid photos. And the trail around the park is exactly 1/2 mile long, making it easy to keep track of how far I walk.
I went there today for my getting-to-be-regular photo walk and was surprised to see a large field of white cardboard crosses and headstones. I figured it was a memorial of some sort, and that was exactly it. Arlington Northwest was holding a memorial for all of the American soldiers who have died in Iraq. Each cross and headstone had the name, age, home town, and date of death for a soldier. Some of them had short notes on how the soldiers died. Most of them also had paper bags with candles in them, ready for a candlelight vigil.
As I walking around the memorial, I noticed that the average age of those who died were in the early-to-mid 20’s. Many of them were 18 and 19 years old. It was kind of an odd feeling seeing a memorial for so many people who were younger than me. It’s not quite a graveyard, but it had the same eerie quietness and somber feeling. Interestingly enough, I was one of the younger people who walked through the memorial. Most of the people who paid their respects were much older than me.
I’m not exactly a supporter of all the war-mongering the US has done in recent years, but I have nothing against showing respect to the men and women who gave their lives doing their jobs. I ended up spending a couple of hours hanging out at Downtown Park taking pictures of the memorial and of the people passing through. Interestingly enough a few of the organizers of the memorial asked me if I was part of the media and if I knew if more were going to show up. I elected not to lie about myself and just went about shooting photos like I normally do.
Many of the park regulars glanced at the memorial on their way through the park. Quite a few stopped their daily run/walk/stroll to detour through the aisles and read the names. Some simply looked and left, while some were visibly choked up and in shock at how young most of the fallen were. I wanted to get in closer for some more intimate shots but decided against being too disruptive. This didn’t seem like a good time to stick my lens in someone’s face.
Despite not being as aggressive with my shooting, I still managed to get some nice photos of the memorial. The full set can be viewed in my Flickr photostream.
I finally got some film cross-processed. It took me a couple of weeks to get through a couple of rolls of Fujifilm Provia 100F and Kodak Elite Chrome 100, but I did it. Both rolls went through my Olympus XA2, and both were developed at Redmond Camera (developing and 6 MP scans for only $10 + tax). The Provia shots all came out way underexposed, because I forgot to push the film an extra two stops. However, I did not make the same mistake with the Elite Chrome 100.
In general, I’m satisfied with the shots I got. I need to pick better colors and lighting to shoot for punchier contrast and colors, but this first round is pretty good considering I’ve never cross-processed for real before. I’m also learning what I can and cannot do with my XA2 in terms of framing and focusing distance. Just need to develop a better feel for the camera.
Now that we’re well into fall here in the Pacific Northwest, the rain is starting to become more of a daily thing again. My D70 probably won’t be seeing as much action as it did this summer, because, well, I don’t feel like drenching a $1000 camera and a $400 lens. I’m considering getting a small compact digital camera to carry around with me (I sent my tiny Canon SD10 to Mei, since her old camera died), but I haven’t been too thrilled with the current crop of compact digicams, and I don’t feel like dropping another $400 on electronics just yet. I think I’ll stick with my XA2 and a few rolls of film for now. It’s not as cost-effective as a digital camera, but at least the cost of development is spread out over time.
Anyway, you can see the results of my first foray into real-life honest-to-goodness film cross-processing in my Flickr photostream (You can ignore the 3 square photos of Sheena on the page; I shot and posted those the same day I got my film back).
This week’s Photo Friday theme is “Delicate“. My initial perusals through the early submissions showed a lot of flowers and leaves and soft fuzzy things. I had a feeling that there are going to many entries like those, so I decided to go with something a little different. This artsy fartsy tree thingamabob can be found in Bellevue’s Downtown Park. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at first, but at least it’s tree-like in form, unlike many of the more “creative” sculptures I’ve seen in other parks.
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