Category: Photography

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.