When it comes to hard copy scrapbooking, I work in stages. I spread out my images or ephemera, figure out the background color for the pages, then start to poke at the layout, add in decorative elements, make a note for the journaling, then stack the finished pages in a 12x12 holder. At some future point I will sit down and have one long gluing session for all the finished pages, and that part of the project is relatively portable in case I want to emerge from the art room and glue pages while watching a movie in the other room.
One of the challenges I face when walking away from my hard copy scrapbooking for too long is that it is sometimes difficult to remember where I left off, or what my intentions had been with the pages I was making. This is made especially difficult if I've scooted the unfinished pages to the side to use my table space for some other quick project (birthday cards, plant markers, mouse ears... ) It is because of this that I tend to let the scrapbooking sit for long periods of time... because even if I could steal 10 minutes for the art room, my work space is usually so disheveled that it would take me 30 minutes just to figure out what I could spend my 10 minutes doing.
Over the past couple weeks, though, I managed to take enough time out to re-organize my work space and remind myself where I was (by laying out all my "finished - not glued" pages) and where I was headed with this album.
Post-it notes are helpful, as my mind gets scattered in between project times.
So, headway has been made in layouts, and I now have a larger stack of pages-to-be-glued in the 2004 ephemera album.
My other challenge is that I'm still trying to *only* use the paper and supplies that I already have, which is at once limiting and liberating. Limiting because I know that manufacturers are constantly putting out amazing and adorable page accompaniments; liberating because I'm not spending hours meandering craft stores looking for adorable and amazing page chachkies. At any rate, I really want my ephemera collection to speak for itself and to be the decorations surrounding the photos to complete the story.
I had a pinhole outing which, at the time was quite satisfying... I felt very self-congratulatory that I'd simplified my process and enjoyed the experience of slowing down my compositions, calculating the exposures, and being "in the moment". Then I went to drop my film off at the lab and it was finally brought to my attention that I'd exposed two rolls of color negative film, not the two rolls of color slide film that I had calculated for. With all the effort I'd been trying to put into my process, this was a seriously ridiculous bit of oversight. The wrappers for the film are not even the slightest bit similar (Kodak is bright yellow all over, Velvia is silver and blue) I chalk it up to having not regularly used slide film in well over a decade, also that other than the two rolls I shot in May, I had not ever used 120 sized slide film at all. So the wrapper alone didn't trigger any realization of the film type other than "this is not Ilford, so this is color". I just didn't bother to read the film label and ran on the assumption that the only color film I had was slide film, forgetting that I'd tossed the last of my Kodak color negative film in my camera bag along with the B&W.
Thankfully the exposures were not horribly off... I basically exposed for the film speed, but without the proper correction for reciprocity failure, so everything is a little underexposed (outside of my 5 second exposure, which was close enough to correct). And some of the images were experimental anyway... I'm rather happy with how this abstract came out:
I set up the tripod on the deck of the ferry on our ride from Kingston to Edmonds. There are actually small boats on the water in this shot, but the action blurs them. The San Juan Islands are the blur on the horizon.
After still contemplating my 2018 calendar, I ran a quick unscientific poll online to see how people might feel about a calendar with a mix of B&W and color images, and the unanimous answer was "Do it! That would not be weird at all!" I also have more pinhole images than I had realized, because I'd forgotten that I filed my scans from my vacation with my vacation photos on my hard drive, not with the rest of my film scans. I need to make a final decision on how I want to organize my files... either keep all the scans in the film folder and make a note in the vacation folder that there are also photos on film, or vice-versa. I haven't decided which way makes more sense, but consistency might help me to feel less scattered.
My goal is to get a few more good pinhole outings in before the end of the summer. The challenge is finding someone who has enough patience to hang around while I make long exposures. While I have no problem with the idea of going out by myself, it is probably not the safest choice for me to wander down distant hiking trails lugging camera gear all alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment