The first full day I was out, we went to the National Gallery to use up a little time between meet-ups. We knew we only had a couple of hours and couldn’t see everything, but I’m glad we went because there was no way I was going to be able to see everything there in one visit. I found myself drawn to the sculptures a lot and how the light reflected off of them.

The piece that hit me emotionally the most was this one. Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci.

I wasn’t even aware that there was a da Vinci at the National Gallery until we were talking to one of the security staff and they mentioned that was their favorite place to just go sit. The four of us only had a short amount of time before we had to leave so we headed up to see it. The room was fairly crowded (the above photo was taken another day when very few people were there), but you could get fairly close to the painting – well, as close as the guards, pedestal, and glass would let you.

It’s small – the frame makes it look larger – but I just had this moment as I was looking at it.

“This is a real-life da Vinci painting. And you’re in front of it. You only thought you’d ever see a da Vinci painting in books or on TV when you were little. You thought you’d never get to leave Louisiana. You never thought you’d be able to come to DC, or London, or Los Angeles, or anywhere else you’ve gone. And now, at 45 years old, you’re in front of an honest-to-God da Vinci painting, with friends, in a huge art museum.”

As we were leaving the room, I asked my friends if we could sit for a second, because I was having a pretty emotional moment. They asked if I was okay, and I explained what was going through my mind. They sat there and felt it right along with me, no judgement, no snark. That right there is why I love my friends.

And then we left and went to a Tiki bar and had nachos and fruity drinks.

I went back a few days later when I was toodling around DC by myself, and got to see some of the other exhibits and rooms that I missed the first time around. I was kind of sad that the entire modern art section was closed off due to renovations, but OH DARN I guess I’ll have to go back after it reopens.

I took a trip to Washington DC to visit some very good online friends back at the end of April/beginning of May. As much as I wanted to bring tons of assorted cameras and such, I also didn’t want to deal with carrying a checked bag AND two or three carry-on bags. (I already have to deal with two carry-ons when I fly thanks to my CPAP machine.) I figured that bringing my Canon DSLR and my trusty 24mm pancake lens was the best option, and it did not let me down. (Well, except for the day I went to the Library of Congress and I forgot to put my battery in the dang camera, but that’s not the camera’s fault.)

My first full day in, I went to the Hirshhorn to see the Yayoi Kusama exhibit with a group of friends. It ended up being a beautiful day so my friend Jen and I walked around the sculpture garden first before heading in to meet up with others to go through the Kusama exhibit. It was amazing being in the infinity rooms, but my favorite had to be the first one, Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field (Floor Show) (1965/2017). You only get 30 seconds in there, and I went in by myself. When the door closes, it’s eerily quiet, and you’re just surrounded by yourself and this never-ending field of polka dotted fabric sculptures. Standing there for the short time I had, I could briefly understand how someone may begin having odd experiences if they were shut in here for longer than 10 minutes. But I’d go in again, and beg for another minute if I could. The second infinity room, Infinity Mirrored Room—My Heart Is Dancing into the Universe (2018), is beautiful, and gave me a much more joyful feeling, but the doors are also open the whole time, so you can see the outside, which for me, broke up the infinity room aspect of it.

I have a lot more pictures, especially from the National Gallery of Art, along with another story from there, but that’s for another post. 🙂

Hello hello! It’s been a while. Things have been…well, I don’t really need to explain. Everyone in the world has been dealing with the past two years of dumpster fires in their own way. A lot has gone down in our lives – things both good and bad – and I’m not where I used to be, both mentally and physically. Maybe I’ll dig into that in a future post that will be more than just a gallery of photos.

Anyway, after essentially abandoning this blog and site since October of 2020, I decided it’s time to return. Like I said above, things have changed, and I’ve felt myself becoming more creatively charged over the past couple of months. So I pulled my cameras out of storage – both the digital and film ones – and began using them more. I took a composition class with an excellent local photographer, Christy Lorio, and I’ve even signed up for her technical photography class. (I still struggle with a lot of the numbers concerning manual photography – most of the stuff I’ve been doing is all point-and-shoot.) I even took my DLSR with me to Washington DC! I only brought my pancake lens, but it was the first time I traveled with my DSLR and I feel a lot more comfortable about taking it with me places now.

So while I was digging through photos, I came across a folder of this entire roll of Lomography Lomochrome Purple I shot with my Minolta Maxxum 5, back when we lived in Mandeville. As y’all know, I love the color skewing of cross-processed slide film, so when I saw that this film offered a similar color shift without the need to pay for cross-processing, I snagged a roll of this and of the Lomochrome Metropolis film. (The Metropolis is currently sitting in my fridge.)

I really like how this shifted everything green to this pinky-purple shade, and also shifted the color of the sky. It’s been a while since I shot this, but I’m pretty sure I did it on an overcast day before fall shifted into summer, so things were still extra green in our yard. Looking at these, it’s just a strong reminder that I need to get back out there and shoot. Film, digital, doesn’t matter, just do it. It brings me joy, it feeds my need to stay creative in some form, and I need more of that in my life.

I really like the effects of this and want to grab a couple more rolls to try, maybe in Couterie Forest at City Park or an early morning at the Fly in Audubon Park.

These were taken on the same day that I went to explore Greenwood Cemetery back in 2004. These were taken in both Greenwood and Holt Cemetery.

I had never heard of Holt Cemetery until I came across it that day. From the Save Our Cemeteries website:

Originally a cemetery for the city’s indigent population, Holt Cemetery passed through several rounds of ownership before being established by Dr. Joseph Holt, a city board of health official, in 1879.

Holt is a potters field cemetery in New Orleans, and nearly all of the gravesites are below ground. The sites are taken care of by the families of the deceased, and there are a lot of homemade gravestones or memorials. Even though the city has done a lot of repairs and upgrades over the years, the cemetery still shows significant neglect, with some graves showing human remains.

It’s such a drastic change from the well-manicured above-ground tombs of Greenwood.

Back in early September, I decided to get up super-early one Saturday morning and head to the Madisonville boat launch to catch pictures of the sunrise. I brought my Konstruktor loaded with Lomo 400 and managed to get some really beautiful shots of the sky.

I am always surprised how nice the shots I get from the Konstruktor are. Yes, they’re slightly soft and fuzzy, but I like the dreamy feel it gives. Not bad for a plastic camera I built myself.

These are probably some of the oldest film scans on my laptop, back from when I was working at Lakeside Camera. During the majority of my time in the lab, I either spot checked the photos or worked the photo printers – one was an Agfa and another a Fuji printer that I had used at Eckerd Express Photo. I was working the Fuji one day when I got a roll from another employee and was surprised to see the colors on the screen – I’d originally thought we messed up the development, or the monitor had gone funky, or something like that. I asked them about it and that’s when I learned about cross-processing. I instantly fell in love. Those color shifts were just so cool, like something off of a 1990s band album cover photo shoot.

See, as much as I loved processing photos and seeing other pictures, I was always hesitant to do anything more than the souvenir snaps of friends and such. Seeing that sparked my creativity and curiosity about what I could do. That afternoon before I left, I bought some rolls in the store and decided to do something with them on my next day off.

On that day, I loaded up my camera bags with the Minolta and some B&W and slide film, and headed over to Greenwood Cemetery. It was a summer weekday morning, so there weren’t many people out and about. I stopped in the main office to see if it was okay for me to walk around and take pictures in the graveyard. They told me sure, as long as I stayed away from any services that were scheduled (of course!), and I parked my car somewhere in the middle of the graveyard and went walking.

I scanned them the next time I went to work and was totally shocked at how awesome these came out. Even today, I don’t want to edit them. These scans are exactly how that film came out, no retouching or anything. They’re still some of my favorite photos I’ve done to this day.

I ended up finishing up the rolls in City Park – that’s another post though.

Last Friday night I decided to get up early Saturday morning and head out to the Madisonville Boat Launch to get some shots of the sunrise in my Konstruktor camera. When I woke up Saturday morning, I decided to also bring my DSLR with another experiment.

Probably a little over a year ago, I had purchased an adapter for my Canon so I could use the M42 mount lenses I had for the Pentax Spotmatic. I’ve been reading a lot about how the Super Takumar lenses were amazingly good, and I was lucky enough to have one in really nice condition, so I figured for a few bucks the capability to use it with my DLSR was worth it. And after seeing these pics, I have to agree.

I tried to focus most of my shots on the Konstruktor since that was my original plan, and the majority of my pictures at the Madisonville Boat Launch were taken on that camera. (Was planning on dropping off the roll at Bennett’s Camera in Metairie this week – but Hurricane Sally changed those plans.)

But I headed over to Sunset Point in Mandeville to finish the roll off and came across some really good spots, and as soon as the roll was finished, I started snapping away with the Canon. It took a little time to get used to adjusting the lens for a clear shot…but once I did, I found that I got some really good pictures.

I did take the pictures into Lightroom when I got home to use the Dehaze feature and punch up the clouds a bit. I’m kind of proud of this experiment and am also excited to see how the shots on the Konstruktor came out.

When I really started getting into Lomography, one of the first things I put on my wishlist was the Konstruktor camera. A chance to spend a weekend afternoon building a completely working camera from a kit? UH YES PLEASE.

The kit was actually fun – it’s almost 90% plastic parts, but the mirror assembly is already put together, so you’re pretty much just building the body.

For some reason, I elected to order the non-flash version of the kit. I can’t remember if that’s because the Konstruktor F hadn’t come out yet, or if the non-flash version was on sale, but the version I have does not allow for a flash to be connected to the camera. So I shot the test roll on a really sunny day.

The thing I found the most fun – and the most challenging – was using the waist-level finder. It’s similar to the viewfinder in a medium-format camera, which I was TOTALLY not accustomed to! But after getting the hang of it, I really like it, and I would love to use it on other cameras. I wonder if these types of viewfinders are available on other 35 mm cameras? It kind of forces me to focus on the shot.

I did a little editing in Lightroom, mostly to adjust the exposure – everything was just a little too washed out. I would really like to try and get some shots with this camera either right as the sun is going down, or during a slightly overcast day. (Reminder to self: use 100-speed film if it’s a really sunny day, durr.) The camera also allows for multiple exposures, which is something I really want to play with more.

All these photos were taken at my former workplace, and Cate Square Park in Hammond, LA.