I know what I did last year

Well hello there! It's been awhile, time has passed and it has gotten away from me and all the other suitable sayings.

Well, well, well
Let's not
Dwell, dwell, dwell
On that.

(This is called reminiscence, not dwelling.)

I've been busy and lazy alternately and at the same time. Lazy in that way that I haven't bothered to post here for... almost a year now. I've been thinking about it though and all of you. About writing something. Commenting, connecting. But then things happened, bigger and smaller, significant and insignificant and I just... didn't write stuff.

But that all is going to change now. At least for one post, today, this moment. I am going to give you a short (or not short, nobody knows yet so it'll be what it'll be) summary of all the things that I think are worth writing about (or aren't, you perhaps know me) that has happened or what I'm fixated on currently.

You may or may not know or have known but no longer know or didn't know that you know that I've started studying fine art photography. (Known knowns, unknown knowns, known gnomes and what the heck are unknown ungnomes?!?! Those feisty little ankle nibblers.)

One of our teachers gave us an assignment to start a documentary project. Any project that didn't have to be finished before the teachers classes were over, but started and somewhat progressed so that the teacher could give each feedback on how to go forward with their documentary photography project.

At first I had no idea what to photograph. I just went out and started photographing people on the street. That turned out as project Main Street and is still more or less ongoing. Hämeenkatu, the main street of Tampere, Finland. (I'll go out there some day again.)

But I wasn't that fascinated about the idea. I think some day it perhaps may be cool to see what it has become when there are plenty of photos from different years and seasons but for me it wasn't that brain stimulating at the time when I started it. I guess it's too normal.

Fortunately fate pushed me to a different direction.

One day one of my classmates forgot his sunglasses outside where we were photographing earlier and asked me to go check if the sunglasses were still there. So I got an idea. A brilliant one (in my mind) to be exact. The Case Of The Missing Shades.

I've been searching for the sunglasses since.
🎵"But I still haven't found what I'm looking for" 🎵

A perfect excuse to rehearse people photography and ask strangers out there on the streets to pose for me.

I love and hate people photography. The thing that I hate is start talking with people. And keep talking with them. Being social. I mean, I do like people but I also like to be on my own and not talk with anyone. Answer with one word sentences if asked something and be unnoticeable in some dark corner. And I always fear that the results are awful so that the person I photographed hates them. And what I love in people photography is that I can talk with people and take photographs of them.

One of my goals is to be better at dance photography. After first attempt I bought lights. Proper lights that are portable. If I don't want any movement blurriness, I need more light. Controlled light.

And additional lights make a huge difference in portrait photography too, even though the person is just posing for my camera. Funny thing that. Lights.

There I was finally learning things I said I knew before. My brain repeating: "I told you so! It's all about the light." So I craved for proper lighting equipment.

But hey, after couple not so good ideas of what should my fine art photography final production be, I got an excellent idea that I think I'm not going to change. The theme is movement study. Quite obvious actually and I don't know why I didn't even consider it before November last year.

Here's few examples that I might or might not use. Anyway, this is what I'm going to try. Study different kind of movement through the camera lens. Subtle and larger. Slow and fast.

Too much variation, too much going on, but I still have few months to decide where to go with this so the "kill your darlings" part will surely come. And then I will weep.

On a sidenote, I bought a brand new Polaroid camera. The latest and the greatest, Polaroid I-2. It's quite fun.

What else, what else...

Oh! Last year in the fine art studies we had a cyanotype workshop. That was quite fun.

I think I'm going to continue cyanotyping (hahahaha I'm killing myself) some day. Only first I have to do eeeeeeverything else.

I haven't forgotten old or new weird cameras. Still messing around with them. The type of precious jewels like Smena 2, Canon T50, Robot 3 and Lomography Actionsampler. Those are all good candidates to win in the "which is the crappiest of them all" -competition. Then again, sometimes the results are quite fascinating.

This film was inside a flea market camera. In hope for interesting double exposures, I rewound it, took photos and developed it in caffenol. Yes. Caffenol is one of the things I do nowadays. I'm a caffenolic. When you develop a color film in caffenol and scan it or take photos with a bright light on the background and then invert the colors, it's all cyan like this.

Who knows, perhaps I do my movement study with these cameras. That could be fun.

Never say never, right?

Because I also did something I at some point said I would never do. Open a digital camera and try to do something to it. I made my old Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 see infrared light. That sure was a hassle but I didn't break it permanently!

Oh yeah and then I bought a Hasselblad 503cx with couple of film backs. (There it finally was, my 30€ limit for old cameras exceeded. Or actually that was long ago, but after this I can't even pretend that my max. is somewhere there, around 30 euros.)

Aaaaaand then I bought a digital back for my Hasselblad. An older version. CFV-50c. This means that I really need to start sorting which photos are good enough to save and which ones are just waste of space.