New Zine Alert! Happy to announce that my next zine, titled “Analog Transmissions”, will be completed and ready to ship sometime in the next month.
Planning a whole post about this but I wanted to announce it a little early for those of you who check my website in addition to social media.
I’ve always had a weird relationship with Walt Disney World, having grown up here in Orlando and being surrounded by theme park business in so many facets of life. Nearly everyone in my family has, at some point, worked for Disney and I couldn’t tell you how many times we went to the parks. Yeah, I’ve been in the tunnel. The rides were cool and it was fun stuff for a kid, but as I entered my teens my attitude shifted and suddenly the Mouse was lame. Corporations suck, right?!
Sooner or later every resident of Central Florida has to admit that tourism is the lifeblood of the area, and we would still be some backwater orange grove without Walt Disney. For me, I moved past the teenaged angst and have come to accept, but not love, That Part of town. There are parts of the parks and resorts that are intensely nostalgic to me, and even though the area is in a constant state of updates, changes, demolitions and upgrades, many of those locations are still intact.
This week I’ve been afforded the gift of FREE TIME, and have chose to spend it by driving around the WDW resort property. It’s amazing how much there really is to take in behind the scenes. This all began when I randomly saw a post about the STOLPort on Disney property. Short story is that there used to be an airplane landing strip so that private planes could land at Disney instead of the Orlando Airport. The rumors have been around forever but I never actually knew where it was supposed to be. Thanks to the post online, I saw a photo of the runway in all it’s former glory and realized that I knew exactly where it was! Thus I decided to head over there and check it out.
What I found in the present day is an old strip of road that is being used as a dumping group for all kinds of mechanical equipment and supplies. Tractor trailers, piles of metal, construction equipment, trash bins and dumpsters, broken down trucks, you name it. A little underwhelming to be honest, but it’s a fun piece of Disney history.
All this brings me to the fact that I’ve got one roll of film in my camera that I’ve been using as an experiment – a roll of Kodak Ultramax 400, being redscaled. This is new to me and I’ve never tried it before, but thanks to a post from a friend online I learned that redscaling is the process of taking your roll of color film and flipping it so that you’re exposing the back of the film first. Essentially hitting the different layers of film in reverse order so that the color shifts to various shades of red, orange and pink.
I brought this roll with me to see what interesting stuff I could find in the back roads and employee-only areas of Disney that are actually accessible to any ol’ tourist in their car. Spent a bunch of time looking at Google Maps to refresh my memory on what’s out there. Found some old stuff that rekindled fond memories, plus discovered new things that will be fun to go explore at a later date.
The good news is that I just finished up the roll earlier today, I can’t wait to get it developed and see what comes out! There’s plenty more out there to snap some photos of.
Been enjoying my break from the photography side of social media. I’ll pop onto my photo account every few days just to check my messages but other than that it’s been out of my daily routine.
Despite checking out of social media and not really shooting much film, I’ve still been connected to the photography world, by way of ordering photobooks and zines! Just a few of the many publications I’ve received lately:
– Death Metal Summer, Ed and Deanna Templeton
– Night Timin’, Domino Film Press
– Learning to See Square, James Holland
– America and Other Myths, Robert Frank and Todd Webb
– William Eggleston’s Guide
– 1949 Days, Leo Robledo
– Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph
– The Unseen Saul Leiter
As you can see, a big mix of different styles and eras. Hard to pick a favorite, but I’m always partial to Ed Templeton’s work. The Unseen Saul Leiter was one I purchased without being familiar with his work and it truly impressed me with how simple yet wonderful his photographs were. On the other hand, I was severely underwhelmed by William Eggleston’s book.
Since I’m not actually out photographing anything nor am I posting anything on Instagram, I’ve turned some attention to creating a new zine of my own. The title came to me first and I’ve been building a narrative around the concept. Those 3 rolls of film I mentioned earlier? A lot of those images were gonna be in this zine… *sigh*
One thing I am learning by looking through the publications above is that oftentimes that old adage is true – “less is more”. My previous two zines clocked in at 32 and 36 pages each, but I started thinking of really expanding the page count and switching to “perfect” binding. Well, one day I was able to hold a physical copy of a zine that fit the description of what I envisioned and what I realized is that it didn’t actually quite work for me. Sometimes what you think is best turns out to be something different in reality.
So back to the drawing board (in this case, culling lots of pics I would have otherwise used). Still having fun with the creative process though!
Welp. It’s been over two months since my film was lost in the mail and USPS has still not recovered it. While I’ve come to terms with losing those photos, I’ve still not loaded up a new roll of film since then.
Experimented with taking my digital camera around instead and, perhaps not surprisingly, the results are mixed. While yes it’s nice to have all the modern features of a digital camera, I’m still not entirely happy with the resulting images. I suppose I could take them into Lightroom or Photoshop and play around with everything to try emulating film as best I could, but it seems more trouble than it’s worth.
So this is me – still working on finding a path in photography that I’m happy with. I’ve also declared that I’m taking a break from Instagram and in the meantime have actually turned my attention to my own archive.
Calling it an archive makes it seem cooler than it is – really just a huge assortment of JPGs scattered over multiple hard drives, USB sticks, burned CD’s, memory cards, you name it… Completely unorganized and, unfortunately, not well tended-to. There are large gaps where months or years worth of photos should be and I’ve run out of places to look for them. Lost to the sands of time, a bit like the 3 rolls of film I lost this year (except, y’know, I did get to see them at the time).
To my great surprise I was able to find pictures going back over 20 years ago, from my very first digital camera – the Sony DSC-P30!
This 1.3 megapixel wonder was really a solid camera for the time and I absolutely loved using it. In fact, I’ve bought one off of eBay for like $20. It actually works pretty well! Taking it around the past few days has been fun and I’ll add some sample photos (both current and past) behind the jump:
Recently I sent off three rolls of color film to be developed, but they’ve been lost in the mail. This whole situation has prompted me to rethink my relationship with shooting film. This is not to suggest I abandon film altogether, but to be honest my enthusiasm for the hobby is at an all-time low.
The loss of those 3 rolls hits hard – I’d been in a slump for the past 4 – 5 months but the “12 Months on Film” challenge sparked me to get off my butt and take some freaking pictures. The creative juice was back and there were some shots on those rolls I was really looking forward to, especially ones of my kids. But they’re gone.
Meanwhile I have a Fuji XT1 sitting on the shelf collecting dust. It’s digital, yeah, but also a great camera. I loved using it. The pictures are great. It’s got all the features I need.
But best of all, whatever photos I take with it won’t get lost in the mail.
“You should develop your own photos at home!“, I hear you say. Well, I do for black and white (most of my output). I don’t shoot color often enough to make it worthwhile to do myself, hence sending these out to a lab. Regardless, let’s be honest, it’s still tedious. Also, despite being cheaper, there is still a cost to home development in both time and materials.
“That’s a lot of complaining“, you’re getting ready to tell me. Why shoot film then? Good question.
Listen. As a film community, we give digital a lot of grief. You can’t deny that. There’s a certain level of smugness when a film shooter compares themselves to a digital shooter.
Honestly, why?
We love the craft. The magic of physical media and the hands-on process to get our images. We love how it’s more difficult overall to shoot on film for any number of reasons – the limitations, the process, the expense, the dedication needed. For those who shoot 100% manual, without a light meter, on a rangefinder, 1/30 with no tripod, in the freezing cold, uphill both ways, yeah it’s harder. We can compare our STRUGGLE to get the right shots with the relative EASE of using digital all day long.
How many times have you seen someone post on IG, anxious about whether it’s OK that they shot something digitally? As if they’ll lose followers for doing so (and they very well might). How many accounts do you see that say “FILM ONLY”, as if digital photogs should be relegated to the lower decks of the ship with the other undesirables?
For those who weren’t around during film’s heyday, it might be easy to forget just how awesome digital cameras made photography when they arrived. My first digital was a 1.3 megapixel Sony and it was INCREDIBLE to snap a picture and see it instantly. My photography skills soared when I got that immediate feedback. I took way more chances, I experimented more, I took more pictures and captured more things than I ever would have if I were still worried about running out of film.
But at the end of the day, a good photo is a good photo. I can’t tell you how many shitty photos I’ve seen on digital. I also can’t tell you how many god awful photos I’ve seen on film. Though for some reason there’s a segment of the community that will praise any analog photo simply due to the medium. Let’s not even mention digital photos that are altered to look like film (you know people are doing this – Lightroom presets, film simulations, fake borders).
What am I getting at here?
I’m not loaded with cash, and I prefer to be able to keep (and eventually display) my photos without worrying if they will become lost either due to my own error or some external force (thanks USPS). How many of us have gotten a blank roll because something went wrong during the loading process? How about camera malfunctions? Light leaks? Opening the camera back too early? Issues during development? Did I tell you all about the time I ruined a whole roll of film because I accidentally put the fixer in before the developer? It’s heart breaking!
I love shooting film. It’s how I started back in the 90’s and it feels like something I’m supposed to be doing. The process brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment, but honestly people… I can’t afford to buy film, and chemicals, and developing for the rest of my life. I can’t afford to lose my photos for stupid reasons. So I’m thinking of taking the XT1 out more often and leaving the 35mm home for a bit. We’ll see how it goes.
New zine just dropped – “Fragments of Another Life”. This zine chronicles the years 2000 – 2004, a period of time in my life that was full of both fun and failure.
All photos shot on film during the 35mm heyday. Most of the photos were probably developed by me when I ran the One Hour photolab!
Head on over to the zines page for more info, or shoot me an email at christian[at]forcedreaction.org
Hey everyone, do you remember photo labs? Believe it or not, I used to work in one:
Were you, or someone you know, a lab tech back then? Are you a lab tech now? If so, please reach out to me!
Send me an email at christian[at]forcedreaction.org
I’m old enough to have lived through the rise and fall of a few different eras in online communication. Chat programs, message boards, blogs, social media — no platform lives forever and whether it’s due to advances in technology, waning interest or various other reasons, there’s always an inevitable downward slide into irrelevance or obsolescence. We’ve seen it before and it definitely feels like we’re seeing again with some of the big players.
My first foray into connecting with others on the ol’ INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY was in the mid/late 90’s — the infamous America Online and its vast array of chat rooms. Organized by topic, they were often crazy, chaotic, lewd, stupid, hilarious, not to mention tons of fun at the time. Eventually the novelty wore off, but I’d met a few people there that would come along for the journey over to AOL’s Instant Messenger program where we could now chat 1-on-1 via the AIM client. Though I never used IRC / ICQ very much, those chat programs were popular. At the same time, there were a number of e-mailing lists you could join with lengthy discussion based around certain topics or organized by website owner, in the format of back-to-back email replies.
Then of course there were web-logs and webrings – wherein you’d write about your day/life/whatever on your own website, maybe post a photo in your gallery, and link to others with their own pages. Taught myself how to build websites from scratch in order to do so (“This site made with Notepad!”) and met a lot of cool people. Naturally, my first site was on Geocities but eventually my friends and I graduated to hosting our own sites with their own domain names. In fact, this very site was one I’d used in the past and was resurrected on a whim earlier this year. Online forums / message boards were booming as well, covering any topic you could think of.
The weblog community at the time felt new and exciting. Everyone was exploring what it meant to be “online” and while we were finding new ways to be connected, we were still very much independent. Your website was your own little corner of the web to cultivate and maintain and you’d go off to visit other people’s sites via bookmarks, links or just manually typing in the URL, but it was always a mission. Oftentimes this also led to having a separation between your “real life” and your “online” persona. Not that we were faking personalities – in fact, weblogs could be intensely personal – but having to physically sit at a keyboard and mouse to dial-in to the internet meant you were devoting a portion of your day to, essentially, being kindof a weirdo. Being online 24/7 was definitely not socially accepted for a few more years to come. Personally I liked the separation, it allowed me freedom to explore aspects of my personality (for good or bad), but even now I still have trouble reconciling the online vs IRL versions of myself.
. . .
My first experience with the early “social media” model was a little site called, hilariously, makeoutclub.com. As opposed to having your own space, all the site’s users were grouped together but could be filtered by location. The only digital real estate you received was a tiny rectangle where you’d upload a profile photo and post your “Interests” (usually what bands you liked or some vaguely “cool” song lyrics), along with your AIM name & website, so others in your area could find you to chat. Well, I never actually made out with anyone from Makeout Club (the name seemed tongue-in-cheek, no pun intended), but then again I did meet lots of cool people – some of whom I’m still in touch with.
Around the time MOC died (or at least I stopped using it), personal weblogs became too much work and another new site sprung up called LiveJournal. LJ let you sign in, post some crap and leave comments on your friend’s posts. I appreciated that you could type however much you wanted and post images, links and surveys as well. Lots of long comment chains where things could get as deep or as ridiculous as you wanted. Granted, LiveJournal got made fun of because of the name, but once again it was a place that I met lots of great people. Notably, I think, was that this was the first platform I’d used where your friends list was public and the concept of following & unfollowing other users became suddenly important (and to some, this was a Big Deal).
So yeah, I was around for Friendster and for MySpace – this is where Web 1.0 dies and the “nerdy” aspect of posting stuff online was really fading – and eventually got an invite for TheFacebook.com (signed up with my school email, which was then required). Facebook pretty much killed LiveJournal for me and everyone else I knew. It replaced weblogs, forums & message boards, AIM/MSN/Yahoo chats, personal emailing, etc… It killed MySpace and its Top 8, which by then had become a bit of a joke. We all know the story of Facebook’s fall from grace and it does not bear repeating here.
Metafilter, Digg and Reddit occupied some weird quasi-social media space, Google unsuccessfully tried their hand a few times at creating their own thing (Wave, Buzz, Google Plus), Twitter is a raging dumpster fire, Vine came and went, I’m too old for Snapchat, TikTok is cancer, and let’s not get started on crap like Parler or Truth Social.
All of this brings us to Instagram – a platform that I’ve enjoyed using despite the strange algorithm, the influencers, suggested posts, rampant ads, the recent push towards replicating the functionality and addictiveness of TikTok… Certainly I can feel the familiar ecosystem decline happening again. Like many of the communities I’ve been a part of before, it has that same sort of drop in connection from “real” users and feels stale compared to just a year ago. Frustratingly, IG and YouTube seem to be in competition to see who can make the worst ad-viewing experience to inflict upon their userbase.
. . .
Where do we go from here, when IG becomes another has-been app? Grainery was a nice experiment for film photographers but to get the most value out of it you needed to pay $3 a month – not a big deal to me, but could be a barrier to entry for many. Having the mobile app released would have been a great step, but unfortunately the developer disappeared from the face of the earth and from what I can tell everyone gave up on it. A new app is coming up called Foto and I’m cautiously watching its progress. Flickr is, sadly, never going to be an option despite how much I liked it back in the day. Do we find another platform? Do we go back to hosting our own websites? I’ve seen a few photographers who do this and it’s not a bad idea, the biggest issue is just getting people to click…
Personally, I’d love a return to the days of posting more long-form content at a slower pace, with feedback coming in the form of comments instead of likes. Not looking for academic-level discussion but I believe that being able to pour some energy into transferring thoughts from one’s brain to their screen can be healthy (most of the time). I’m not a talkative guy, nor do I have a great deal of talent in writing, but sometimes you need to get the words out without worrying about which hashtag to use so people will even see it. It’s something that doesn’t seem to happen often anymore, at least on the platforms I know and use. The focus on miniscule character limits, doomscrolling, 15-second videos and quick dopamine hits has completely rotted our attention spans – scroll and like, scroll and like, scroll and like…
It could totally be nostalgic thinking or rose-tinted glasses, but I think we got the balance right when online interaction happened away from our phones. Maybe it’s back to weblogs for me? Will you sign my guestbook?
this was a labor of both love & frustration for me to finally stop talking about wanting to do a zine and actually turn this thing from concept to reality.
head on over to the zines page to get more details and info on grabbing yourself a copy.
