So for whatever reason, when I lived with the apartment with Denis, Jenny, (and I guess Michelle), I decided that I wanted to buy some ‘real’ black and white film and get back to my ‘roots’. This isn’t the fake kind that you can get processed at any 1 hour photo place. This is the real deal that you either do yourself or you take to a pro shop to get done for a pretty penny. Oh, we also lived with a cat and a puppy. And a stuffed cat.

I didn’t have any pretty pennies and only a few ugly ones, so Jenny ended up throwing my roll of negatives into the cannister with a roll she had to develop. This was very nice of her. You see, we had always planned to set up a dark room in our apartment, and we had most of the necessary equipment…but when we got down to brass tacks, it was tough to get our heads around finding the actual space in the apartment to do it in. It’s not that we had a small apartment….and usually we did everything we said we were gonna do. For weeks, if not months, we all went biking every night, followed by an insane number of crunches. That was a good time. That was before girls came into my life again, and the band, and blah blah. Anyhow, I’m just saying all this because, wow, I may have been in shape during that time, but apparently time did a number on me and I got chunky. I was looking at some of these pictures Michelle took of me…I looked like some kinda weird duck creature! So I’m not going to post those. But here’s another one (edit: of someone else).

It was so bad that, upon viewing the pics, I ran into the bathroom to look in the mirror and make sure my face wasn’t that fat anymore. Whew. Unshaven, crazy looking, but not chunky. Close call.

Fast forward to the now: I’ve had these negatives, developed but not printed, in my possession for quite a few months. Nothing was compelling me to go get them printed. Then William brought up the fact that he had a sick-ass negative scanner. So…here we are. Nothing particularly good, but I just like looking at high contrast b+w grainy pics!

They are acrobatic fucking. Is that how they do it?

So anyhow. Big post today.

I got three rolls developed; 2 taken by me and 1 taken by William. The photo lab told me that I should let them know that I don’t want color correction in advance, next time. Once they saw these shots, I think they realized that it was intentional. They were very friendly.

The older fellow asked me what camera I used
“a minolta…SLR. It’s older than me, heh!”
“son, my shoes are older than you! A lot of stuff’s older than you!”

So you might say, “Ryan, don’t you know you can do that in photoshop?” and I’d say “Look, Lucy (because your name is Lucy) … I, of all people, know you can do that in photoshop. But what you do in photoshop, never existed in real life. And the purpose of my camera is to capture what really was. For a split second, the chuckle patch was surrounded by each of these colors. Doused in them.

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So anyhow. William and I took some boring nature shots. This was before I had thought of the abandoned building thing! Might as well get them out of the way:

It’s a cactus!

We walked around in the florida sun. I didn’t want to take pictures of people so we wandered about the ‘nature trail’. I remembered how dry and crispy florida woods are. I miss the dank musky shady cool windy sanctuaries of elsewhere.

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So as part of my new oath to take my camera wherever I go….I went to Flaunt with it. Flaunt is at delux (which is a club) in Delray Beach. My friends DJ there and always make sure that I am drunk.

I got there very early.


Yes, I know the vertical ones are super big. Whatever.

I took these next few when the club closed. My drunk eyes were out. So let’s just not worry about focus.

I wish all of my drunken colorsplash shots were like this. Maybe not so pink, though.

I forget how many drinks I had. I forget why we went to IHOP. I know we didn’t eat anything! I remember not totally being in a dancey mood, though I tried. Earlier that day I had attempted to safeguard my night by telling her not to come. It ended up being a big fight and perhaps that emotion lingered as I drank, and looked around at everyone. She didn’t show up, but I think the damage was done. Everyone who goes out has a purpose, except for the people who are emotional eunuchs. No purpose, no place…you may as well be drinking alone. No! That’s wrong.

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On saturday, we went to ft lauderdale to see Richard. He was doing sound check for Revenge at Roxanne’s. We talked synths, we talked about the club. A fellow rode up on his bicycle and asked us about Roxanne’s. A fellow who could only be described as being a close relative or disciple of Prince himself. I locked my keys in my car for the third time in the past month, so we walked around and snapped a few shots while awaiting AAA.

Before leaving, Richard pointed me to a building across the street.

“you can’t tell from here, but they ripped the whole side off of the building.”

So we crossed the street.

The ripped the whole side off of the building, exposing the rest to the outdoors. We ventured farther in but were basically out of film.


Bye!

Some links posted in irc today reminded me of one of my favorite old pastimes:

exploring abandoned areas or infiltrating areas that I am not supposed to be in. This would go well with my new pledge to bring my camera on every adventure. I have some old photographs from the berkshires I’d like to scan in to start it off, and now I am looking for places nearby that fit the bill. I spent all of yesterday taking pics of boring florida flora and fauna and decided that it just wasn’t for me.

oh well, for now I will post for you the links that got me thinking along this line.
some abandoned stuff in the new england area; mostly asylums
abandoned japanese island (translated because it’s funny and i love you)

I definitely think it’ll be a fun reason to go on adventures and keep me from being alone with my thoughts. Also, it’ll hopefully give me some inspiration so that when my music situation is all fixed up, I can write some good stuff.

Here’s some pics I took with my new colorsplash flash. Most of the pictures that I took of things at a distance (like the ones of Carolina below) came out terribly because F16 and that small flash are just no match for the darkness!

of turning this into a photo blog as well.

The reason I say this is because I have been taking tons of pics lately, and it’s very fun. Also, I have been reading a lot of photoblogs lately and they are really fun to read!

What do you think? And yeah, that’s kind of a rhetorical question since no one reads this thing right now.