I USED CHEMISTRY TO MAKE IMAGES--COMPUTERS BE DAMNED
i love bad pictures
pictures that are framed weird, rule of thirds go to hell. overexposed, underexposed, exposed twice but not on purpose, exposed twice on purpose but it didnt turn out great. OUT OF FOCUS PHOTOGRAPHS! those are my favorite. or like, when there's a little shaky hand action going on? chefkiss.gif. i love the feeling a Bad picture gives me. sometimes it feels like the moment trying to be captured was fighting back against the medium
i'm talking about all of this because i recently got loaned a little point & shoot and some expired film and boy howdy am i rusty at film photography. the camera works great; an olympus stylus whatever the hell. the roll of fujifilm superia 400 was possibly 20 years out of date but most shots i made with enough light turned out pretty solid. fuji > kodak every damn day. but when the pics didn't turn out so great? when a photo screamed "i haven't done this since high school"? that's the good shit. here are a couple of my favorite Bad superia snaps (click the thumbnails for the full res ~experience~):
it was so fun taking these that i spent 8 bucks on a roll of ilford fp4. black & white babyyy. color is easy. walk outside at sunset, find a good spot, bam, everyone loves a photo of a sunset. can't do that with ur ilfords, ur kentmeres, ur arista edus. but i enjoy changing the way i have to think about what i'm looking at. i guess the kind of pictures i take are street photography but with no people and not in a cool big city. i like taking shots of sculptures that have some other Thing going on with them (see the cover photo for my self-titled album), human items interacting with nature. i like weird little bits of trash on the ground (not in the sense of... i don't like that someone littered but sometimes it's, visually interesting idk i clean it up after). lately i've been taking a lot of pictures of people's yards, especially if they have some funny decorations or some odd suburban fuckery. you know that when you see it. sometimes, these pictures turn out great! but other times... they're Bad [devil emoji]
the ultimate bad picture
this is, somehow, my favorite picture i've ever taken. the olympus whatever the hell is stellar, but i was still getting used to the range of the autofocus and what the green blinking light meant (it meant i was too close to the subject lol). but! i can't argue with the results--trying to catch bigfoot style photography of funny little guys or something. this picture would be enough to fool arthur conan doyle into thinking there were funny little guys runnin around. he'd be like "houdini!! look, you cannot deny photographic proof. there ARE funny little guys AND it is extremely likely they can tell us about the faeries!! my good friend harry houdini, even you must admit pictures cannot lie. they are made of science!" and harry houdini would be like "listen carefully. i want you to punch me in the stomach as hard as you can"
basically, this is all to say--picking up an old hobby because it makes you feel good is great. i think that's the point. i want to put together a photo zine and make it all nice for others, but i also have some pictures i'm taking for myself. stuff that isn't super shareable but is pleasant for me to shoot. boring pictures inside my house with my gf and/or roommate. i like capturing little moments that are just for me. i hope that if you got anything out of this post, it's the desire to make some things for yourself. thanks for reading my "blog" and have fun out there.
Nicky Flowers - 05/07/23
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