Fall Birthday Getaway // Super 8 + Polaroids

For the past 3 years, my (now) fiancée and her longtime best friend/roommate have combined their fall birthdays into one great weekend getaway somewhere in the Northeast with some of our closest friends.

We usually find a house to rent out for the weekend and just enjoy fall activities like campfires, corn mazes, and just sitting around enjoying the cool fall air. What more could you ask for?

Last year I shot some pack film Polaroids along with a roll of Super 8 during the trip and figured this would be a lovely place and time to share them given that it's finally turning into fall again albeit it feels like we're skipping to winter! I shot the Polaroids with a Polaroid Land Camera 250 with Fujifilm FP-100C film and for the Super 8, I used my trusty and tiny Canon 514XL loaded with my favorite versatile stock, Kodak Vision3 200T. I also reclaimed the Polaroid negatives and some of them came out truly amazing!

As far as the trip itself, we rented a house in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and just did fun fall things. We hung out and cooked. We checked out a pumpkin patch and drank some hot cider. Petted some random farm animals. And... we went n a truly bizarre corn maze with lots of odd... dog creature things that were haunting it. They were truly some one of a kind creations and gave us a laugh.

Overall it was a wonderful time. Fall is a pretty great time of year to be hanging out and taking photos so I had to seize the moment. Looking forward to soaking up the nice fall weather. Enjoy the Super 8 film from that weekend below!

Experimenting with an 80-year-old Kodak Six-20

Digital cameras these days are a dime a dozen. Yesterday's top DSLR is old news today. But film is the exact same medium as it has been for 100 years and to that point, I've been using a roughly 80 year old camera, manufactured in 1934 and the results were astounding. It's a Kodak Junior Six-20 camera. It officially takes 620 film but fortunately (and annoyingly), 620 film is actually just 120 film on a slightly smaller spool. This means I had to re-roll the 120 film I had onto the 620 spools in the darkness of my bathroom in order to shoot it.

Fulton St Station

Kodak Six20 | Lomo Lady Grey 400

Dirty

Kodak Six20 | Lomo Lady Grey 400

Luckily, Lomography NYC was having a special B&W Film Week and I was able to snag a 3-pack of their Lady Grey 120 film for free. A perfect excuse to use this old gem. I had previously taken fabric paint and painted the outside and inside of nearly every corner and fold of the bellows since the first roll I sent through this camera had an absurd amount of light leaks rendering the rolls basically a total loss.

Katz's Delicatessen

Kodak Six20 | Lomo Lady Grey 400

Bars and Legs

Kodak Six20 | Lomo Lady Grey 400

Anyways, this camera has manual focusing with number in feet around the lens, and manual setting of the aperture from f6.3 to f32. The viewfinder is an intriguing and not entirely accurate prism or you can use the sport viewfinder at the top which is just two pieces of metal you can look through to compose the shot. It's no modern viewfinder but it gets the job done.

Oculus

Kodak Six20 | Lomo Lady Grey 400

Subway Stairs

Kodak Six20 | Lomo Lady Grey 400

Since the focusing is a bit slow and the max shutter speed is just 1/100th of a second and no cable release, shooting with this camera was definitely a slow and delicate process but I grew to love it. It all collapses down to a very small manageable size for a medium format camera so it was fun to casually carry it around, waiting to spot a good shot.

Tired

Kodak Six20 | Lomo Lady Grey 400

LES

Kodak Six20 | Lomo Lady Grey 400

The occasional light leak or soft focus in the images only made me love this 82 year old camera even more. Plus the images overall were still amazingly sharp for the most part. So don't let old cameras scare you! They still have a lot of life in them.

Kodak Six-20

Polaroid SLR 680 | IP Gen3 600 Color

Patrick & Rachel Wedding // Super 8

I finally have the finished version of Patrick and Rachel's Super 8 film from their gorgeous April wedding in Brooklyn! You can view some more of the Polaroids I took at their wedding in my previous blog post but for this post, it will be about their Super 8 film.

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As per their request, I shot their first look as well as some of their prep on a black and white Tri-X roll that looks wonderful projected and then the main ceremony on Kodak Vision3 color negative film. Overall, it came out brilliantly thanks to the gorgeous bride and groom as well as the wonderful setting and decor. I also had some help shooting from my wonderful fiancée throughout the day and could not be more thankful for her. Anyways, you can see their final film below. 

2016 NYC Snowstorm // Super 8 + Polaroids

Currently in NYC, it's sweltering and unbearably hot, but back in January, the mother of all snowstorms hit NYC and left behind around 26" of snow if my memory serves me correctly, which was less than an inch shy of the record set decades and decades ago. Shame. Even so, I had to make the most of the amazing storm and I went out both during and after the storm was happening to shoot a roll of Tri-X black and white film on my newly acquired Agfa MOVEXOOM10 Super 8 camera. It was bitter, bitter cold and I had about 6 layers of clothes on but being able to capture those couple of days on Super 8 was worth it.

The photos I included here are some Polaroids I shot with my Polaroid Land 250 with Fujifilm FP-3000b film from a snowstorm that actually hit in 2015! Figured they would fit well in this post about sledding and black & white film.

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Polaroid Land 250. Fujifilm FP-3000b. January 2015

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Polaroid Land 250. Fujifilm FP-3000b. January 2015

The results were amazing! I actually held off on developing the roll for a little while because I had signed up for a workshop with MONO NO AWARE which is a cinema arts non-profit here in NYC which focuses on motion picture filmmaking on real film and does a wide variety of workshops focusing on everything from technique to developing the film. This time, I took a class on how to develop reversal black and white Kodak Tri-X film so the film would be able to be projected. The class went well and seeing the results of the snowstorm projected was even better. You can see the scanned version below.

And here's a snapshot by a friend of me battling the elements with my Super 8 camera.

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Jazz Age Lawn Party 2015 // Super 8 + Polaroids

Having been to Michael Arenella's Jazz Age Lawn Party hosted by his Dreamland orchestra again this year, I figured I'd write a little bit about my time there last year. It truly is a fun day full of fantastic music, great dancing, good food and the best of all, amazing outfits!

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Given the time period in which this festival reflects, I figured it would be appropriate to shoot some film while I was there (although the two cameras I used were from the 60s/70s to tell the truth). I shot some black and white Polaroids using my Polaroid Land 250 camera and Fujifilm FP-3000b pack film. The contrast and definition of that film is truly breathtaking, especially given that you can see the developed, instant shot in a mere 15-30 seconds after you yank it out. That's about the fastest developing film ever.

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A few funny stories about using that camera, not only did I run into a few other people shooting with the same or similar camera, but there was a man there, whom I now know the name of, Geoffrey Berliner, who works with the Penumbra Foundation in NYC, who was also shooting with the same peel-apart type film but the color type (FP-100C). The fascinating part was he was using a camera truly out of that era, a very old Graflex camera that he adapted to use pack film. Those results were absolutely breathtaking. That film combined with a giant lens produced results like no other. I also stumbled upon a few other people with Polaroid Land cameras which was a treat having other instant enthusiasts around. Of course there were more than a few TLRs or film SLRs but Polaroids are harder to come by.

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The last odd story is about a photo I no longer have. Meandering the party near the end of the day, wondering what to do with my final shot, thinking I may use it for a skyline shot aboard the ferry back to Manhattan, a man stopped me and began to eagerly ask questions about the camera. He finally asked if I minded if I took a shot of him and his friends and then offered me $20, which I happily obliged at that point. Ha. At the time, that was about the cost of an entire pack of that film whereas now with it being discontinued, it's about half the cost! Anyways, so I shot a group shot of him and all of his friends in their finest garbs, the photo came out beautifully, and they set off gleefully with their new print. That to me is the magic of Polaroids. Near instant results.

Aside from all of the fun with the Polaroid camera, I also shot a roll of Tri-X Reversal Super 8 film in my Nizo S56 camera. I shot different snippets of the event from the amazing dancing, choreographed performances, the band, the people, and managed to end it all on a fading skyline. Busting that camera out also managed to get some looks and even caused an NYU film professor to stop me and chat about the format and how he wished he brought his. Vintage cameras are always a great talking point and I love when people stop me and want to chat about them.

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Jazz Age Lawn Party 2016 - Polaroid Spectra (IP 600 Color Gen2)

This final shot is actually from this year's Jazz Age. Only had one shot left in my Polaroid Spectra camera so saving it for a big group shot seemed like the best use! Such a swell day! Hope to be shooting more film there in the future.