Kevin - Senior

Kevin is a pilot! He is also a senior this year. We arranged for a special session with him flying air-to-air, he flying in his own plane, myself and another gentleman in another taking photos from the sky. It was such a blast! This has got to be one of the most exhilarating shoots I've ever been on. 

The property was also a lot of fun to enjoy. There were two different flight hangers, fabric covered planes from the 50s, a workshop belonging to a former NASA employee, and much more! Here is just a little taste of what the day was like:

TACHE Graduation Program Design - Preview

Having some fun working on the program design for the 2013 TACHE graduates. My first time on a project like this, it's been lots of fun, here's a little preview of what we have so far:

Cotillion - 19th Century Dance

I had a blast shooting for TACHE's 19th century cotillion dance last week. One of the things I offered in addition to family, group, and documentary style photos was an old fashioned looking portrait I shot through the back of my Ibsor DRP with my digital camera. It was first done successfully with Sophia's portraits last year, so it nice to see that I could mass produce them and didn't take nearly as long being practiced with the system as it did with Sophia's when I was just experimenting. 

My Ibsor DRP is the oldest camera I own at present (1910s era) and since the dance is Civil War era (1860-1890 is the time period of dress) the camera was only about 20-30 years further into the future than people would have been shooting with at the time of these cotillions. Maybe I could obtain an even older camera before the next event... One can only hope.

Kevin - Senior Shoot Preview

I can't wait to work on some of the images from today's awesome photo shoot with Kevin and his family. Kevin is a pilot who is graduating this year, so we set up a special session with him this morning flying air to air. It was so much fun. Stay tuned, I'll post the rest of this project soon.

Loading Film from a Disposable to a SLR - Waiting at the Airport

While on my way back to Indy from Tennessee this weekend I really wanted to get some more of those cool cloud landscape pictures with my 35mm from out the airplane window on the flight back. There's just one problem... I have no access to anyplace that sells 35mm film! When I finally got to downtown Nashville the night before my flight it was already past 8 pm, which is when all the pharmacies were already closed downtown.

Of course, my chances of finding any 35mm film in an airport shop was about a million to one... nonetheless, I looked at all the airport shops in between my connecting flights on my way back the next morning. I finally found a tiny shop that sold disposable cameras. Two in fact.

Now, I wasn't interested in taking any photos with the disposable, but it did register in my mind that there is, of course, 35mm film inside that disposable. The question was, is it in a canister? If so, I should be able to simply break open the back and load it into my SLR, but if not, I would expose all the film when I would open it to check. I decided it was worth a try and documented the process with my cell phone camera.

Here you have your every day 800 film speed disposable camera:

Trying to pry the back open to get a look inside:

Drat. I just exposed the whole role:

It turns out that in a disposable camera, the film begins on a spool and every exposure you advance rolls it back into the roll. I should have realized before I broke the back open that because disposables have no mechanism to roll exposed film back into the roll, the film would have to start out of the roll, each advance drawing the next exposure into the roll:

Here I'm making sure I have it straight, when I spin the scroll to the right it does indeed feed back into the roll:

Last chance. There was only one disposable camera left after my first mishap. So, first things first, I advanced all 27 exposures with my finger covering the lens to keep the film inside unexposed:

Then opened the back again and tada! The roll is ready to load into any SLR:

 Which is exactly what I did when I loaded it into my Pentax K1000:

I was very pleased at the success of the project:

I'm excited to develop this roll and see how it turns out. If all is well, it shouldn't look any different from the others.