A New Beginning

A 9 foot roll of paper on two stands serves as my photo studio. Everything in the living room serves a purpose for either work or photography, with the newest addition being Miah’s bed where the vacuum is in this photo. The closet is absolutely filled to the brim with photography gear, and I can’t really see it serving any other purpose anytime soon.

I’m currently sitting here in my new apartment in Mankato, finally going down the path I set my eyes on years ago. I’ll be graduating in two years with two degrees, Multimedia Technology, and Interdisciplinary Studies. I tacked on the Bachelor’s of Science in Interdisciplinary Studies because, financially, it made the most sense since it would make me a “full time” student, and that helps a ton with grants and scholarship money.

I’ve got to say, while I’m glad I waited to go back to school full time, it’s incredibly strange being back in Mankato. The last time I was living here, I was in the midst of one of the deepest depressions I’ve ever been in, and my biggest fear of living here is falling back into that state.

Everyone I knew and was friends with when I lived here originally is long gone, so the only one I really have around is Miah. She has certainly kept me occupied, going on 4+ hikes or walks a day around the neighborhood or at one of the local parks. So far she has kept me very well grounded, and I am so glad I brought her with me, as I don’t think I would be able to do this without her.

Since she’s the one I’m constantly around, of course she was the first subject I had using my new photo studio I built out in this small, one bedroom apartment.

The yoga mats originally served as Miah’s resting place before I brought her bed over, and when we did our little test shoot they made the paper crunch under her weight, which she did not like at all. I’ve since moved them, and can move around everything else as needed. The biggest issue I have with the photo studio is having to turn the A/C off when I’m using it, which makes the apartment hot very quickly. Thankfully it will be fall soon and that won’t be as much as an issue shortly.

All in all, I’m really happy to be finally started on this journey, and the end of the new beginning is already in sight.

COVID-19 and Some Goals

The last two weeks have been absolutely insane, and I have no doubt in my mind that this will be our new normal for at least a few months. As of writing this sentence, the total number of documented cases of COVID-19 in the United States is just under 45 thousand.

Last Tuesday (3/17) I got the news that Mayo Clinic would be cancelling all elective surgeries and appointments that weren’t absolutely necessary, so I wasn’t sure I would have a job this week. As of writing, my position at Mayo has completely changed from rooming patients and scheduling appointments, to screening patients and employees as they walk in the building. Temperature checks have begun on every person coming in, with multiple screening questions asked before we determine if they can go to their appointment, or need to go be tested for the coronavirus.

Throughout the last week, I volunteered for multiple different positions dealing with the outbreak, and Thursday (3/19) around 3:45pm, I was told I would be working 12pm-7pm screening patients every day for the foreseeable future. This started the next day. Every day, and damn near every hour, protocols for screening have changed. I currently have been working since Monday the 16th, and will continue to work my 12-7 shift until the 29th. Thankfully they added in a rotation, so I will luckily have 7 days off after the 29th, and have a weekly rotation start after that. That 7 days on, 7 days off rotation is where these goals come into play.

I’m going to try and be as productive as possible with those days off, but after working 14 days straight, I imagine I’ll be sleeping a lot on that first day just trying to recover from the total exhaustion I’m experiencing now.

My biggest goal during the time off will be learning how to shoot and edit video. There are tons of free programs available for video editing. I’m excited to dive in, but also a little overwhelmed with everything that’s going on in the world, as I’m sure everyone else is. Besides my goal of learning how to shoot and edit video, my other goals are to catch up on sleep, learn some different lighting techniques (pictured above), tire Miah out, and get out to shoot some possible content for these videos.

If anyone has any requests for content, please comment below and I’ll see what I can do! One idea I have at the moment is developing film, and showing the process I go through, but that might be towards the end of my 7 days as I learn to cut together video. Otherwise, l’ll probably take some video of me and Miah doing some training, or random hiking around Minnesota.

Hopefully everyone is getting through this as best as they can, and starting to adapt to our new normal. I’ll update as often as possible, and until then, everyone stay safe and wash your damn hands.

Drive and Direction

Every second or third Thursday, I go and see my therapist. I’ve been seeing him on and off for the past year and a half. He’s been absolutely instrumental in helping me with my direction, my personal issues, and life in general. He inspired this blog post, so, thank you Jeff.

Almost every person you meet along your way in life, has a passion of some sort. Some people have a passion for sewing, maybe painting. No matter the craft, bringing an idea into fruition is one of the most validating and rewarding things you can do. Holding something tangible, something real, that you made, it’s pure bliss.

At this very moment, I’m surrounded by different cameras, film I have developed myself, and photos I made are hanging on the wall. It’s clear to me that this is my passion. I love learning about the world around me, but this is the one thing that I have always come back to. It’s one of the few consistent things in my life (Miah of course is one), and sometimes that consistency provides solace in this hectic world of ours.

For the past two years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn this passion that I have into a career, something I can do day after day, and still be happy.

Jeff explained the situation as this (not exactly):

Passion is the engine, the fuel that makes the car go. People have the fuel, the energy, but they don’t always have the ability to direct themselves where they want to go. The steering wheel is that direction, it’s how you channel that passion.

The artist’s dilemma, how do I make this my reality? When you’re starting at the bottom, you won’t just fall into success. You have to sit down, figure out a plan, and execute it. I’ve been slowly piecing together this steering wheel, so I can finally drive the car with the roaring engine, where I want. It’s slow, there’s lots of friction, it’s frustrating, but I’m figuring it out.

I applied for a part time job, making more money hourly, but will be working much fewer hours in total. In this particular situation, getting a new job and no longer working at my full-time gig is the catalyst that will kick my ass into the next step. It’s motivation to keep pressing forward; motivation to make my dreams a reality.

I’m on the right road, at least I think I am. Wherever it takes me, I’m excited to see where it goes.

Enjoying *Most* of the Process

There are multiple reasons I started shooting film again, but the biggest reason is that it slows me down and makes me more present in the moment. Shooting film is inherently a slow process, and since I started developing and scanning at home, it has become even slower. I’m learning to set aside an hour or two a week to develop film that has been sitting idly by for sometimes two months before I get to it.

Shooting is obviously my favorite part of the whole experience. Developing only takes about 20 minutes from start to finish, hanging to dry takes about two hours. I find the process of developing very therapeutic; I am fully engulfed in the moment, and it feels like my own form of meditation.

After the film has dried, I get to cutting it up into scannable sections to hopefully make it a little more efficient.

BUT, scanning is awful. It’s painfully slow, the software is buggy and reminiscent of early 2000’s Internet Explorer. It’s like someone designed the software back in ‘01 and failed to ever update the interface. Trying to edit within the scanning software feels like walking through the woods on an unknown trail, blindfolded. You take one step off the trail, kick a rock, trip and fall into a ditch. I’m only being slightly dramatic. Pull up the histogram to edit the blacks, mid-tones, and highlights, and what you see happening to your photo doesn’t make any sense compared to what you’re doing to the histogram. It’s incredibly inaccurate and doesn’t loan much confidence in the scanning program.

Epson V750 - Nothing PRO about it.

Another issue I had with scanning was the inability to leave the computer and software to run and go do something else. If you didn't keep clicking on the screen between every photo, it would stop. How incredibly efficient. After digging through a couple pages of Google results, I actually found out there is a solution to this stop-go issue I was having. I had to download another file which was separate from the main program, restart the whole software, and then it would scan continuously like it’s supposed to. I have no clue as to why they chose to keep those things separate instead of just including it in an update. But again, early 2000’s design.

Scanning does go quite a bit faster now, but it’s still the worst part of shooting film. If I have a professional lab do the scanning, I have to pay at least $20 a roll, and that adds up quickly with how much I shoot. Scanning at home is the more economic option, but my $300 scanner doesn’t quite give the quality that the professional lab’s $15,000 scanner is capable of.

If I try to push the scans too much while editing afterwards, they get some gnarly lines going up and down the frame. Everyone loves seeing lines going across the frame and spending 30+ minutes trying to edit them out right?

Unedited scan from an unnamed lab in Arizona. Notice the vertical lines across the entire image.

Any attempt to make the scanner do what it’s designed to do, and it’ll wreak havoc on the scans. I tried to apply the “Digital ICE” function to this picture to have the dust, scratches and other blobs removed from the photo. It didn’t work in the least bit, and honestly I think it made the entire scan worse than if I had kept it off like usual. These scans were a cluster from the beginning, as the lab I went to in Arizona mailed back the negatives on top of one another, which in the film world is a huge no-no. They stuck together, ready to rip off the emulsion from the negatives.

Thing is, just because there’s one awful part to shooting film, doesn’t mean I’ll stop anytime soon. The majority of the process is a blast, scanning just sucks. I leave the negatives under books for a couple days to help flatten them out anyways, and I’ve found myself doing that more often now that I’m scanning at home. Maybe one day I’ll be able to invest in a $15,000 scanner, but that ain’t happening for a long, long time. Until then, I’ll keep dealing with this crap shoot of a system.

I'm a failure

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

Photography, like life, is full of failures. And like life, our growth depends on our reaction to those failures. Failed shots often get thrown to the wayside to make way for the successful shots that were taken. The thing is, if you don’t try and understand why those shots failed, you’ll never figure out how to prevent those failures from happening in the first place.

People tend to dwell on the failures in life, no matter how small. The thing that surprises me with photography, is how easy it is to ignore the failed shots and go straight for the keepers. Files are deleted, negatives thrown away, never to be looked at, or learned from.

This issue seems more common place in 35mm film where there are an abundance of exposures to pick from. When shooting medium format, you only get 15 shots max, and the failures tend to hit a lot harder. About a month and a half ago, I spent two weekends going on lots of trips. In the span of those weekends, I shot 4 rolls of slide film, which are $10-12 each. Of those four rolls, I got 4 or 5 usable shots. It hurt, a lot.

Overexposed Velvia 50, Lanesboro

I spent the weekends in Lanesboro, the cities, and on the North Shore, and had nothing to show for it. After I was done feeling disappointed of myself, I sat back and asked what went wrong. Once I had my head on straight, I did some research, and found out just how little wiggle room you have with slide film. Half a stop overexposed and you get a shot like the one above. One whole stop and you lose any and all remnants of detail in the snow like the one below.

Overexposed Provia 100, at least I got the focus right… Whitetail Woods Regional Park

Since I had shot so much negative film (Color and B&W) I was going off of the same rules, but to a lesser degree. Come to find out, I should have been doing the exact opposite with the slide film. Negative films have a greater latitude, meaning they have objectively more room for error, and deal very well with overexposure. Slide film on the other hand, typically requires a slight underexposure to prevent any brighter areas from losing detail.

I was doing what I was taught, and in the same vein, I taught myself even more about film. One $45 photography lesson later and, underexpose slide film, meter for the highlights, don’t do that again.

Overexposed Provia 100, Whitetail Woods Regional Park

I’ve spent a lot of the past two years, learning to take my failures in stride, look at them as objectively as possible, and take away what lessons I can. This mentality has helped me grow as a person, and as a photographer.

So, here’s to screwing up everything, and hopefully learning from it. Just make sure you keep pushing on.