Day 3

I've been driving by Reese Volunteer Fire Company most of my life, located as it is along the highway between my mother's house and the closest town. One week each year the fire co. throws a marvelous hometown carnival -- ferris wheel, funnel cakes, bounce a pingpong ball into the fishbowl and take home your very own goldfish in a plastic bag. The Reese Carnival was always the highlight of my childhood summers. The remainder of the year the carnival grounds stand empty, bereft. For not quite so many years as I've been attending the carnival I've been driving past admiring the strings of light bulbs that hang there, waiting for the time to pass before they once more light up the midway. I always noticed them,always thinking what a striking photo it could make. So today I stopped.

That black speck in the center of the frame isn't noise or schmutz -- it's a bird. I like it a lot, the accident of it appearing in all that sky at just that moment.

A lot of trial and error with the iPhone Hipstamatic app. I feel guilty about how much I like this app, images from which come surprisingly close in appearance (on the computer screen, anyway) to replicating the actual plastic camera film photographs I used to print right down to the rough filed-out neg carrier borders. I'm always going on about how digital images ultimately lack the soul of analog film pictures, and how if Kodak finally stops manufacturing 120 film I'll devise some way of making my own (until that day, though, I'm simply stockpiling Tri-X).

I always enjoyed the lack of control when shooting with toy cams, how when you opened the processing can to get that first look at your film the images rarely looked how you'd imagined they would. And I am discovering that what you see in the Hipstamatic viewfinder tends to be only a small sliver of the photo you'll actually get. So I do feel like it replicates a little bit the crapshoot of using fifty year old toy cameras, my weapon of choice for the past two decades.


(iPhone, Hipstamatic app, set to Kaimal Mark II lens and BlacKeys B+W film settings).