Abandoned houses kind of break my heart...
There are many in the world and I can't help but stop and make photos of them when I come across one.
You see, I have a history with abandoned houses. One of the first home I remember living in, (west of Dayton, Texas on Hwy 90) was flooded during Hurricane Carla. I was almost six years old at the time and I remember Mom and Dad packing up some of our stuff and us leaving to go stay in a motel while the storm blew through, and boy did it blow! It ruined a lot of our things and floated the tiles off the floor. I remember my Mom saying she wouldn't live in a place that flooded, so my Dad bought another house and had it moved to a piece of property on the side of a hill.
Mom and Dad sold the Hurricane Carla house and the people that bought it used it to store hay in...it was never lived in again after we sold it and it eventually fell down due to disrepair and abandonment.
I loved that house. I learned to ride a bike there, shoot a pellet gun and started first grade there, plus my baby sister was born when we had that place. My Mom almost died there, but that's another story for another time. We had ducks, pigs and chickens and a couple of ornery Black angus cows that never stayed in the fenced in pasture.
Oh, and we had 42 acres there with no trees...it was beside the railroad tracks and I used to watch the Amtrack train pass by at night and wonder about the people I could see inside the lit up cars.
The photo of the house above (near Amarillo, Texas) reminds me of that long gone place full of memories.
I'll talk about the house on the side of the hill at another time... it has its own story of abandonment as well.
Taos.
Holga converted to pinhole...not the nine dollar one, but an earlier one that was fairly inexpensive as well.
and a little hint of spring to come....
Kodak Ektar 100, which really does a good job in the Holga
If you mount a Holga to a tracking mount and let it expose and follow the stars for twenty minutes, you get this.
The smear at the bottom are tree tops...The focus is a bit soft, but I'll try again and see if I can tighten this up...
it's true...this place in Marfa, Texas...
Sometime this spring I'm going to impersonate him...
Holga, Acros, Caffenol
Is that a light leak or radiation????
The landscape was photo bombed by a horse.
Well, it was inevitable wasn't it...that I would convert a perfectly happy 120S into a pinhole camera then make it use 35mm film.
I enjoy tinkering and using a dremel tool and drilling teeny holes in brass shimstock. And black tape...where would we be without black tape.
enough chatter...here's a little image I made with such a camera that I like...it has trees and the San Saba river water in it, so it's the jackpot!
Acros film dunked in caffenol...as it should be.
Hot pickles for 89 cents....how can you resist.
Another find in Socorro.
that this was a Holga shot? Sometimes I think this simple camera with no settings renders a scene a bit better than expected.
The falloff here is a good indicator of it's plastic lens...I like it. It's easy to keep in the truck and have at the ready for unexpected treasures such as the house in the woods above.
If you use a Holga in its out of the box
configuration, it will give you a 6 x 4.5 photo as above. Most people,
myself included just toss the masking frame away and shoot 6 x 6.
With 6 x 4.5 you get 16 shots per roll and at 6 x 6 you get 12 shots.
Sometimes
I like to use the camera the way it came...it's kind of a going back to
the beginning feeling for me which I like a lot. And shooting in a
rectangular format makes you think a bit more on composition since it's
either landscape or not landscape.
It's not really from the vault, but it is from two years ago with another Holga I have had for a long time.
This place is no longer there, so I'm really glad I grabbed this photo when I did.
If you could imagine it in color, you would see it was orange and a certain shade of yellow...like Kodak yellow.
Yes! It was a quick photo finishing box, like the ones that used to be more prevalent and popular back in the days of analog glut.
Too bad it's gone! I would have liked to have it for a studio or tiny house.
Oh, it was in Socorro, but like I said, its' gone now except for the slab of cement it used to sit on.
The open road...this one is HWY 60 and it's my favorite. Route 66 gets all the "kicks" and publicity, but HWY 60 is a class act. Long, open range and if you are driving near Socorro and go west about 35 miles, you'll find the Very Large Array of radio telescopes.
Holga 120S and Tri-x...a good combo from the passenger seat....my preferred way to ride across the desert southwest.
There are so many weird and interesting places around here... This is ICE Station OTTO and it's about 25 miles from my house...
BTW-this photo was made with a Holga that was given to me at a recent film users group meeting. It's going on more adventures soon!
