Analog Love Letter: A Vigilante and Protestors

I shoot a lot of street photography. I also shoot a lot of protests. It's rare when I get to capture both styles in one photo.  

Me and my friend Calvin were looking for something to photograph one Saturday and I told him that there was a protest going on somewhere in downtown Los Angeles over the shooting death of Mike Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The freeway was jammed in Hollywood so I told him to take the surface streets. While driving, I heard some yelling out of the car window and I noticed that people were protesting something and it hit me, we ran into the protest we were looking for.  

We got out of the car and started shadowing the protestors. At one point, the protestors hit Hollywood Blvd. where there are people dressed as characters of all sorts trying to shake down tourists for a dollar or two to have a chance at having a photo with said fictional character.  

On the corner of Hollywood and Highland, I noticed one of the Batmans (yes, there is more than one Batman there) about to cross the street while the protestors were marching towards him and the thought of having these two forces cross paths would make for an interesting photo opportunity.  

I waited until they both met and shot this photo. In hindsight, I probably should've developed this roll instead of cross processing it which is why it looks so grainy and contrasty. Oh well. It kind of works.  

"The caped crusader meets actual crusaders" / 35mm AGFA Precisa 100CT / November 2014

Analog Love Letter: A Man And His Camera

Around 2009, I bought a Polaroid SX-70 film on Etsy because I wanted to get into instant film photography. I loved the washed out look of the emulsions that you couldn't replicate with 35mm film (unless you really over expose an image which didn't look great 90% of the time). I was so excited to add a new camera to my collection. I wanted to dive in and create as many Polaroids as I could. 

Some time in that same year, I remembered leaving the camera in the trunk of my then girlfriend's car and asked her if I could get it back. She told me that it was probably gone when someone broke into her car and took everything in the trunk. I was saddened by the loss of the camera.  

A year ago, her brother told me if the SX-70 he found belonged to me and I told him I thought it was stolen but apparently he found it. Lucky for me, he's also a photographer and owns an broken model so he knew exactly what it was. The camera, when not used, looks like some tiny storage box but when you open it up, that's when you realize it's a camera. She didn't know that it was a camera she had all these years and I was finally reunited with my camera! As soon as I got it, I bought film for it so I can start shooting some instant magic. Polaroid no longer produces film but the Impossible Project bought the emulsion recipe from Polaroid and are now the sole provider of Polaroid instant type films.  

This is a photo of Jasson Bautista in front of the Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles. He had newly acquired a Leica III and I had newly acquired a Contax G2 so we decided to do a little street shooting session with our rangefinders. A little shoot out of you will. 

"Jasson and his Leica" / Impossible Film SX-70 / April 2015

Analog Love Letter: Bon Voyage

I never really got along with my mother in my later years. We butted heads on many things. We're both pretty stubborn people. I get my methodical reasoning from my dad. I get my stubbornness from my mom. My good looks come from both of them.  

I took this photo of my mom, dad and sister at LAX before they went on vacation one last time to Indonesia. While there, my mother had some health issues which later turned out to be cancer. She's still there. I miss her.  

"Departure" / Fuji Pro 400H 35mm /  August 2014

Analog Love Letter: Missing Piece

I had a cat a couple of years ago and I loved her dearly. My mother told once told me that as a child growing up, I was always attracted to cats and they were attracted to me. I'm a lover of animals and I'm fond of both cats and dogs when it comes to the great debate between the two but I'll always be drawn to cats. 

She passed away in 2011 and I miss her dearly. She was more dog like in that she would greet me whenever I walked in. Cats care despite the popular belief. They just show it in different ways. She never had a name.

"Cat" / 35mm Foma Fomapan 200 / February 2010

Analog Love Letter

A few things are established and known.  

1. I love analog film. 35mm, medium & large format and Polaroids.  

2. My film process is slow. Friends and others will always ask me what ever happened to the photo I took of them on film are. My reply is always "When it's ready.  

With that being said, I will no longer post blog entries regarding my love for film since everyone knows it and since I'm slow with updating content on my site with new photos, I'm going to start something new with my blog called Analog Love Letter (hence the title of this entry). This series should solve my haphazard content updates.  

Simply put, Analog Love Letter are brief stories and some thoughts of certain photos I took on film. This is the first.

I was in San Francisco for an annual music festival called Outside Lands at Golden Gate Park. Me and my friend took a breather on the side of a hill in the afternoon because we were tired as all hell and  I saw this one couple in front of us laying on the grass. It became cold rather suddenly so they cozy'd up trying to stay warm, all the while enjoying the sound of Death Cab For Cutie playing on the main stage. 

"Music Brings Lovers Together" / August 2014 / 35mm Ilford Delta 100

Back to print making

Swimming in Blue

The above image is a cyanotype print of a film negative that was taken months ago. The print was developed in March for the Getty Master class on alternative processes which is set to debut on the walls of the Gett Museum on April 27th during College Night.  

I'm no stranger to photographic print making. I've cut my teeth with analog film and have a great deal of experience inside the darkroom working on traditional print making. It's been a long time since I've set foot inside a darkroom but when I was offered to join the class, I jumped at the chance.  

Print making for me is one of the things a photographer can consider him/herself an artist. Photography can take years to fine tune and master. I'm still learning something new everytime so I'm far from master but fine tuning I am, but to be able to go inside a darkroom, spend time and watch your photographs go from negatives to a tangible work of art in the form of a print is a very rewarding experience.  

For this class, we (the photographers) are supposed to develop prints of our photographs in the form of an alternative photographic process and there are many of them. As a class, we all did cyanotypes as a tester. The cyanotype process is probably the easiest of the alternative processes. You can buy a kit for dirt cheap at a photography store and you don't need a darkroom to develop your prints which is great because not many have access to a darkroom nor would have the financial means to pay for a darkroom rental per hour. 

Although fairly easy to produce, I find that cyanotypes are limited in what can work with the process because the resulting print is so one tone heavy which is blue (in most instances) . Because of its limits, I needed to decide on a process that better fits my style and what I want to convey to the viewers of my work.

I've always envied painters. I can't paint, nor can I draw for shit. The best I can do are stick figures. There is one process that will allow me to reproduce a soft and painterly work while still retaining elements of photography and the process that allows for that is gum printing. 

I have only worked on gum printing once in my life and that was before I had any experience in print making so suffice to say, my first gum print was horrible to put it nicely. Coming into this class with, now with print making experience, I feel comfortable and confident enough that my prints will be much better than my first gum print. Hopefully.  

As you read this, I have started on my first gum print as a test. See what mistakes I will make and correct them for my future and final prints. I have treated my papers and will lay down my first emulsion layer.  

My time to work on these prints before the final submission date is quickly nearing but I have a couple of photographs ready to work on and am fairly sure I can complete the prints in time. I will provide an update to my test print once I'm finished.

To artistry and being a keeper of the light.

Ketchup

It's always the case that when a new semester starts, I start falling back on entries and updates to my website and blog. It's something that I'm used to but I'm not fond of. That scares me a little bit. 

A couple of entries ago I posted about my work with the Getty Master class inspired by the work of Japanese photographer Mikiko Hara. Well the opening reception was weeks ago and the exhibition is still up and running. There are a few days left (I believe a week) to catch it before the photos go down so if you want to catch it, you have until March 6 to see my work, as well as my colleagues, at The Japan Foundation LA. 

It was rather nice seeing my work being hung on a wall other than mine or a friend's. There's that feeling of validation and pride, however big or small, in seeing your work in more established walls and them being seen by people you don't know. I was the only one there that specifically shot a 1x1 ratio using a 6x6 medium format film camera (like Mikiko does) and the only one who submitted a black and white photo to which I received a number of compliments for. That was a lovely experience. I think our contingent have the best photos in that exhibit. 

I'm thankful and honored to be a part of this class and exhibit. I put in some hard work shooting on film. I had many misses but for the ones that did work, they worked out spectacularly. With that said, I'm really excited to tell you that I will be a part of the next Getty Master Class and this one is going to be much bigger and exciting. For starters, it's going to focus on alternative processes which is great because it's pretty much my territory. Having worked in an actual darkroom wet lab, having that experience, and printing in a number of processes, I'm well equipped to take on this project. Secondly, the venue the photos will be displayed in is HUGE. As in the Getty museum! How awesome is that? The Getty rarely, if ever, showcase student work and to be able to have this chance and say that my work has hung on the walls of The Getty?! Once in a lifetime. However I am working hard to get more chances to have my works on major walls in the future. Only time will tell. 

Ideas are being conjured. Proverbial chess pieces are being placed. I can't wait to start work on this project. Updates will surely be made and will come when they come. 

As far as new content being added to my site, I have a few unpublished projects on the back burner (read: uploaded) but I haven't made them public yet as they're not ready. I also have some new multimedia to upload and they will be added in the next couple of days when I have downtime from the chaos that is the newsroom. 

-Q

Film Is Forever (Like Memories)

I'm pretty bad at developing my exposed film rolls. There was a time, many moons ago, where I was fairly frequent in developing film. I no longer have the resources to develop my B&W film at home and I rarely did color. Too much of a hassle maintaining a constant temperature for color film. 

So at some point I decided to just outsource my film to a professional lab (not Costco, CVS, Walgreens etc.) and have them process and scan my stuff. The level of quality as far as scans are concerned is so much better than any of the commercial stuff your average Joe can buy and the people who work at the lab I depend on (Richard Photo Lab) have decades more experience than I do with the same amount of passion and love I have for the medium.  

The less frequent I sent in my rolls, I kept shooting and I've amassed quite a queue. I'm due in for another visit to RPL and I went into my shoebox where I store my exposed film rolls and was greeted by this... 

I did a count and it came out to 48 rolls of exposed 35mm and medium format film. If I were to develop one roll a week (which I do), it would take nearly a year to develop whatever is in the box at this very moment. Sad right? Depends on how you look at it...

The world is now saturated with digital photos ranging from DSLRs, small point and shoots and camera phones. Immediacy is everything and its culture has changed the way we look at and practice photography. 

When I was growing up, we didn't have the luxury of being able to (near) instantaneously view a photo after we had just taken one. We had Polaroids which took a couple of seconds to develop but that was the closest thing to immediate we had back then. I sound old right now but I'm not. If you had owned a Polaroid camera and didn't like the photo, it was rare for someone to throw it away (unless by some chance the exposure came out well over or underexposed)  because there was a magic to watching your photo "come to life" before your eyes. Now, if you don't like a photo you took, a simple press of a button on your camera and its gone as if it never happened. But it did. 

For those of us who shot roll film, we had to wait to see our photos. Head over to a lab and drop it off for development and the quickest a lab could do it was 30 minutes. Some may think that's inefficient and in today's world you would have a point, but there's the element of anticipation in waiting for the result of your exposures that makes shooting on film, to coin an Apple term, "magical".

Even though I have so many rolls waiting to be developed, each week I turn in a roll to my lab, its my birthday because I get to see the results from the last roll I turned in the week before and I'm always surprised with the results. I get to relive moments long forgotten. Memories become re-connected. Others who do continue to shoot on analog may be better than I am at processing their rolls but it's all the same feeling. I think if more people shoot film, picking it back up or trying something new to their normalcy of digital photography, it would benefit them and their art because they would be able to experience being surprised (pleasantly or otherwise) by their results. It would make them, in my opinion, much better photographers because it would allow them to approach their craft with a different view and/or mindset. You can pretty much shoot forever depending on how many memory cards you have on hand and delete photos on the spot of the ones you don't like. You have that freedom but it's a cheap way to go about your craft or hobby. With film, you're limited to thirty-six frames, at most, per roll. The exposures you don't like are stuck with you because they'll be on your negatives but that's all right. You'll be able to look back on those blemishes and correct it in your future shoots. How are you going to get better if you delete your lesser photos from history? It happened. That's the purist in me. 

By the time this gets published, I'll have already developed a handful of rolls. On the other side of that coin, I'd have shot double and throw the new rolls into the box and they'll wait there until I'm ready to reconnect with those memories. 

-Q

Dispatches from the Newsroom

With the Fall 2014 semester coming to a close, I've decided to release a collection of photos that I took while being a staff member of either The Roundup News and The Bull Magazine while at Pierce College. There are still many photos to go through but I wanted to release these now as I'm not sure where I really stand on coming back to the publication or not next semester.

The collection can bee seen under the +Projects section on the main page and it's titled "Dispatches From the Newsroom"

-Q

Downtown protest for Mike Brown

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Emotions ran high between police and protesters during a rally in support of Mike Brown. LAPD officers created a bottleneck by blocking protesters with nowhere to exit. Soon after being blocked, the LAPD gave the protesters a four minute warning to disperse or risk being arrested for unlawful assembly. Wednesday Nov. 26, 2014. Los Angeles, Calif.

Hi everyone, I've updated my Journalism gallery with some new photos from the recent protest/rally for Mike Brown in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday Nov. 26. It was a really gnarly experience and I've documented a lot of protests in the past but I have never been close to being arrested as I was on this night.

I've learned many things from this protest with regards to covering it as a journalist. One of the things I've learned is that if you're persistent, courteous and professional to the police, they will open up doors for you as far as access even though your college press pass doesn't hold as much weight in their eyes as say, an AP press pass. Also, talking to the many photographers and reporters that night from a number of media outlets like the LA Times, AP, AFP, Daily News etc. was awesome. They were open to our questions regarding getting your foot through that journalism door. Another thing I've learned is that covering (spot) news thrills me and it's what I want to do.

There'll be a better detailed document of my experience along with the other Roundup News reporters/photographers that were with me on this night as I plan to do a Behind The Print edition of our coverage so I will post that once it's completed.

-Q