On Holiday

These are my (artsy fartsy) favorites from a couple rolls of film I shot over the Thanksgiving holiday, in Chicago, and the winter break, in Bodega Bay. That's my little sister Jojo up above, after the first snow after Thanksgiving. Here she is running through a tunnel:


The film was daylight balanced, which is why everything under the florescents appears green, and everything inside (tungsten lighting) appears red:


(That's my kitchen!)

In Bodega Bay, where my mother lives, Jojo and our dad and I all took a walk to the tidepools on Jojo's birthday. Bodega Bay is stunning and it was a perfect day for photography, with overcast skies and lots of soft, cold, diffused light.




I was conciously playing with a couple of things in framing these shots, most notably the horion line - look at the angle of the sky in all three of the above pictures, descending from right to left at the very top of the frame. The sweep of the landscape in all of these is striking. Look at the barely noticeable black trees in the top right corner of the second photograph, and the tiny corner of incoming wave in the top right corner of the third photograph.

The colors of the landscape also struck me as particularly riotus. I was really happy how the development of the photos captured this insane green:


It also helped that I was using my grandfather's old camera, an old heavy Topcon, that vignettes the image a little bit. You can see it more clearly in this photo:


See how the corners are darker? That picture above is actually my favorite of all the photos in the batch. I remember standing there framing the shot (again, playing with the horizon - the sky takes up nine tenths of that photo) waiting for the perfect wave to stretch right across the frame. I was so happy when I saw this come out. Look at that subtlety of color gradation in the sky and the sea! Look at the palpable sense of serenity! Gosh!

The other amazing thing about that day were the rocks. The tide was very, very low so we were able to see all kinds of starfish and anemones and lichen and barnacles and shellfish:




Texturally incredible. You can really see the vignetting of the color and also the focus in that picture of the starfish. I love things that are gross and beautiful the most.

Of course the very most beautiful things there were Jojo and Ross:


I can't help staring at their eyes for at least a minute every time I look at this picture. And for a bonus, the one shot Jojo took for me, with really creepy Tungsten coloring and incredibly eerie execution:


I'm watching you.