Author: Nicolai Grossman

Reminder: Polaroid Week 2008 starts this Monday!

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Polaroid Week 2008 is a month away! Shoot 5 Polaroids and upload them to the Polaroid Week 2008 group on Flickr—you can participate with a free account!

Get your cameras out, stock up on film, and get ready to shoot, Polaroid Week 2008 starts this Monday, 21 April, 2008!

About ‘Roid Week 2008

It’s that time again…..POLAROID WEEK! This one is a little bittersweet — as you all know, Polaroid has . It very well could be the last Polaroid Week we have…

But until that happens, it’s time to play! Post a Polaroid a day.

APRIL 21 – APRIL 25, 2008

Five days. Five polaroids. (or more if you’re so inspired, just not more than 3 a day)

Starting on Monday, April 21 2008. Stock up on film (!), dust off your SX70, Spectra, 600 or Polaroid weapon of choice this week and start shooting!

Or dig out old squares you’ve found, stolen, or have had laying around since high school and scan scan scan.

Here are our requests: please post photos you haven’t posted on Flickr before. Meaning, give us something new — don’t contribute a Polaroid to this group that you already posted last September. That’s just plain lazy. Also, please don’t post more than three photos to the pool a day.

C’mon. Play with us. You know you want to.

Love,

Cate n’ Lori

PS: Check out last year’s Polaroid Week 2007 for inspiration!

Pinhole Day show and workshops at RayKo Photo Center, CA, US

Nicolai Grossman 2 Comments

All kinds of good things are happening for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco, CA, US:

Work by Katharine Kreisher and Rebecca Rome in the main gallery; meet the artists from 3–5pm.

A group show of pinhole photography (including work by Katie Cooke and myself).

Free rides around San Francisco in Simon Lee‘s “bus obscura”, a van that’s been converted into a pinhole camera!

Sweet!

Art Rental

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Pablo Mayrgundter had an interesting idea about renting art:

…someone said they’d pay to have it on their wall for like 2 weeks, but probably wouldn’t want it much longer than that. So we started to figure out a business of rental art just like people put their art up in galleries or bars, it would be nice to be able to join a group of art fans (but people who aren’t otherwise comfortable with buying art) who basically pooled money to have a sampling of paintings go through them…

Continue reading at freality.org

Thoughts?

More cowbell: extreme photography equipment roundup

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Check out this roundup of crazy sh*t, including the Sigma APO 200-500mm f/2.8 and Zeiss Apo Sonnar T* 1700mm f/4 lenses and a 6×17 inch camera:

There are several categories of camera gear available: there’s the sensible, the desirable and then there’s the stuff that you’d never even imagined. Here’s a selection of equipment that most definitely belongs in the latter category…

Continue reading at Crestock

How to use 120 film in a 616 camera

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Check out this how-to on using 120 film in a 616 camera from Gayla

Six-16 film is pretty near impossible to find and when you do the developing cost is high and probably not worth the expense. Here’s how I modified 120 film spools to fit inside a 616 camera. Keep in mind that 616 film is much taller than 120 film. As a result you will end up with images that are shorter, but long, not unlike panoramic shots…

Continue reading at Making Happy

Peter Wehkamp "Barely Moved" show, Berlin, DE

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Barely Moved show flyer

The approach to a place by photographing is the focus of Peter Wehkamp’s work. Besides, the term “Place” signifies not a localising definition, but the real perception of surroundings and an environment in which people exist. In the process Wehkamp faces necessarily a man-made landscape with his camera. The relation between people and nature leaves perceptible characteristics in the photographic works of Wehkamp. He describes the creation of spatial order which adapt themself in the nature, but also separate. With his analytic view Wehkamp looks for human tracks in the nature, which refers to an ambivalent interaction.

Details at Galerie MFK

How to get really grainy pictures

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Here are some tips for getting more/larger grain in your pictures:

  • Push ISO3200 film as far as it’ll go in your developer. As a rule, pushing increases grain.
  • Use a high-actuance developer like Rodinal and…
  • Agitate the hell out of it.
  • Shoot as small a frame size as possible (the smaller the negative, the greater the enlargement factor, and the bigger the appearance of grain). There are several options for sub-"full frame" 35mm: the Olympus Pen series are half frame, and Canon/Bell & Howell made some as well. You can get anything from point & shoots to really sweet SLRs (check out the Olympus Pen F and FT for that, I have an FT and love it).

    If you want more cowbell, check out the quarter-frame QuadCam (only $13.95 from American Science & Surplus), or bite the bullet and give those monopolistic rip-off artists at the Lomographic Society way too much money for an Oktomat (1/8 frame) or a Pop 9 (1/9 frame).

    There’s lots of info on subminiature cameras at subclub.org.

  • Cross process color negative (C-41) film in black and white chemistry. Underexposure helps, the only digital manipulation on this was the sepia toning:

    The Depravity of Voyeurism
    The Depravity of Voyeurism, underexposed [I think it was] Kodak Portra 400VC, developed in Diafine. It’s this grainy on a 4×4cm negative, so a submini would probably be really unbelievably grainy.

  • Ilford Delta 3200 film processed in Diafine is a particularly grainy combo for me. Here’s maybe 1/5 of a 35mm frame with no manipulation at all:

    Untitled
    (Bigger version here)

Get ready for Polaroid Week 2008!

Nicolai Grossman Leave a comment

Polaroid Week 2008 is a month away! Shoot 5 Polaroids and upload them to the Polaroid Week 2008 group on Flickr—you can participate with a free account!

The quality of the work produced for this event has been extremely high in the past—a mid-week roundup from the last one is here. Don’t miss out on the awesomeness!

About ‘Roid Week 2008

It’s that time again…..POLAROID WEEK! This one is a little bittersweet — as you all know, Polaroid has . It very well could be the last Polaroid Week we have…

But until that happens, it’s time to play! Post a Polaroid a day.

APRIL 21 – APRIL 25, 2008

Five days. Five polaroids. (or more if you’re so inspired, just not more than 3 a day)

Starting on Monday, April 21 2008. Stock up on film (!), dust off your SX70, Spectra, 600 or Polaroid weapon of choice this week and start shooting!

Or dig out old squares you’ve found, stolen, or have had laying around since high school and scan scan scan.

Here are our requests: please post photos you haven’t posted on Flickr before. Meaning, give us something new — don’t contribute a Polaroid to this group that you already posted last September. That’s just plain lazy. Also, please don’t post more than three photos to the pool a day.

C’mon. Play with us. You know you want to.

Love,

Cate n’ Lori

PS: Check out last year’s Polaroid Week 2007 for inspiration!