Plain Beauty

I just returned from a short visit to a place where I grew up. One of the places. I always felt like a visitor there. Good people all around me, but not my people. If you know what I mean.

What struck me on this visit, as always, is the landscape. A German work ethic is applied to the land with a firm hand, and in early spring the whole place is fields of color. And I don't mean planting fields.

Broad expanses of saturated color. Grass green. Sky blue. Earth brown. With sharp edges and angles between. (In fact, Mennonite women bent over edging tools and weed wackers along roadsides everywhere we traveled). No serendipity or happenstance. Orderliness and plain beauty.

It makes this part of upstate New York, which I love, look like it needs a haircut and a shave. And the quick touch of a hot iron.

(Thank god I finally found my people.)

Baked

I am intrigued by one of Toby Hancock's Polaroid out-takes from the exhibition  "Outside the Lines" at The Impossible Project's NYC Space (through the end of January).

His other-worldly image of a Frank Gehry building in L.A. is rapturous (if you Flickr, you can see it here).

His technique, which he kindly shared, inspired me to crank up the heat on my prints. In the oven. Two hours in a low oven and the little chemistry lab between the layers of this instant film goes a bit bonkers.

Before baking, this was just a failed attempt to capture my friends' old pump house and the garden cart that's been leaning against it as long as I can remember.  After baking, it is something entirely different. Not sure that I love it, but it is entirely different.

Stormy Weather

Yesterday the fast moving clouds of a rumbling August storm rolled over the house.

Just enough time before the big splashy drops started to fall to aim the Polaroid SX-70 skyward (without soaking it's beautiful leather skin).

Silhouette

Roid Week Night Two, a photo by The Gentleman Amateur on Flickr.

 
Untitled, a photo by ludwigwest on Flickr.

The mystery is in the chemistry. 

Polaroid Week 2011. Friday

What I learned from Polaroid Week;

Film is not meant to sit in your refrigerator,

Take pictures where you are (because you don't actually live in Paris),

Even when a single print costs nearly $4, shot. Just shoot (and don't do the math),

No matter how narrow your obsession, there are thousands of people out there with the same obsession,

And you can learn a lot from them.

Thank You! to everyone who dug deep for Polaroid Week 2011.
(can we do this more often?)