Come to momma

The new camera is slick and fast and fancy and makes us both feel like we are shooting a cover for Vogue. We’ve been barking orders to our cats, like “find your light!” and “hold it. hold it!” We went to a (lovely) birthday party the evening of the day we’d bought the camera – we hadn’t even read the manual but still snapped ten million photos of our poor friends. They were good sports.

Buying this camera has brought back a flood of photography memories and thrilling, prickling creative urges. I love cameras. I love taking photos. I remember getting a Kodak Disc© camera for my birthday when I was probably about 8 or 9 years old. I could not stop taking pictures of things, and that film was expensive. I remember learning to dole out exposures to things that were really important – it took so much willpower!

My first love

I had a 3rd or 4th hand Minolta that I used constantly and my parents were rad and bought me film for my birthdays. By the time I made it to high school I felt like a pro. I took photos for yearbook and spent most of my Junior and Senior years in the yearbook’s darkroom. I remember experiencing dumbass sexism for the first time when I asked about joining yearbook when I first moved to a new town: the (female) yearbook director said only boys could be photography staff because girls would “use the darkroom innappropriately,” couldn’t understand photography, and would break the cameras. I ended up getting on yearbook anyway when she realized I could actually print photos better than all those dudes. And for the record, I only used the darkroom for making out 2 or 3 times, tops.

I got a little burnt out on photography when I did a lot if it for yearbooks my Senior year – the other photographers seemed to flake all at once and I spent many evenings of my last year taking photos of JV basketball games and dull banquets. I took a photography break, but in 1999 got a Canon Elph and fell crazy in love all over again.

I’ve always loved the creation of photos but hated paring and editing them. This became a big issue once I started using digital cameras – there were just so many photos! I also got bored with point and shoot and the fact that digital cameras made everything look OK. Not stunning, not awful, but OK. The camera we bought a few years back, to replace the Elph, was a point and shoot that was fine for taking quick snapshots.

BUT NOW! We have a camera that is 100% manual and some fancy lenses and I wish I could just stay home all day taking photos. It’s wonderful to feel inspiration and creativity returning to my fingertips. I enjoyed making our wedding zines and felt inspired during that process, but it didn’t feel native to me. This feels native, and I’m remembering all kinds of tricks I’d forgotten. Once again I’m capturing time and faces and emotions and it feels fanfuckingtastic.

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* Two songs come to mind whenever I think of cameras:
“Photographic” by Depeche Mode and Peter Murphy’s “I’ve Got A Miniature Camera” — I honestly don’t know which is cheesier, but they both make me happy

Desk Set : watched last Friday w/ Katie & Sky
This movie wasn’t half as fun as I thought it would be. I love me some Katherine Hepburn, or at least I thought I did, but I spent much of this movie confused because she was laughing her crazy head-thrown-back New England laugh and I didn’t understand what what so godamned funny about the plot. Maybe you had to be there. The clothes were great and I took some small pride in the fact that the librarians were better than a machine (even if they were rattling off complex, memorized answers just like robots most of the time). Anyway, this is one of those LIBRARIAN movies that you’re supposed to watch and so I watched it and I think Party Girl should be our group movie if we get to vote on it.

Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana if you’re being fancy): watched last night w/ Sky
This movie was hilarious and I really enjoyed that they made a totally hot lady (Fefe’s wife) look “ugly” by giving her a unibrow and a mustache. Those hips were out of this world. Also the weird dubbing was pretty great and I loved all of the clothes and I’d like to live in a castle now.

Visual Acoustics: watched tonight w/ Sky
This film has been selling out @ Northwest Film Forum – so much so that they were showing it in both theaters tonight. It’s a documentary about Julius Shulman, a world famous photographer who is best known for capturing modern architecture in Southern California: Case Study Houses, Palm Springs, etc. He was a swell guy and the documentary had a lot of great footage of him visiting with all sorts of people: previous owners of houses, new owners, and architects. Shulman was a pleasure to watch, and his photographs were amazing. That’s about all that was good about this documentary, though. There were all sorts of woozy special effects, random Jib Jab style animations, a not very cohesive story line and weird edits throughout. It seemed more like a really long Power Point presentation (with some video thrown in) than a film. A few times they didn’t give names of people who were talking until they’d been on screen for a minute or so – super frustrating.

It wasn’t an awful documentary, but it wasn’t a good one, either. I’m a connoisseur of the documentary film, and it makes me cranky when I see half of Seattle lining up to see a mediocre one when there are so many AMAZING ones slipping under the radar every day. I also take issue with people who assume documentary making is easy, or easier than making a fiction film.

* Brain is stuffed due to entirely new job in entirely new place which I don’t really want to talk about because I’m still trying to reconcile myself with the fact that I have an entirely new job in an entirely new place