Emotions, feelings…

til now I’m doing great, doing well is pretty vague

April 1, 2015

New Year’s Day 2015; taken on Ilford HP5 Plus 400 B/W film with a Nikon F3.

It’s April Fool’s Day, and I’m writing this post at 4.20 — the irony of this does not escape me.

Where have I been and how did I get here?! For the first time in my life, on paper at least, it would appear that I have all my “ducks in a row”. Since uni wrapped up in November last year, I have completed a summer internship and managed to secure employment for February 2016. During this time, I have also been on 22 flights for a mix of (very little) work and (a shitton of) fun. How did I get here indeeeeed.

Of course, anyone that knows me will know that there’s no rest for the wicked… Let’s just say there are a lot of things in the pipeline.

So it’s taken me a quarter of the year to come back to blogging. I’ve been itching to write about absolutely everything and nothing at all, and ended up writing in many places but here. I think the crux of maintaining this site is that I need to stop thinking about it as “blogging”. Rather, just as writing. Last night, whilst looking for a very particular photo, I accidentally fell into memory lane via an old hard drive. It’s been nine years since I registered staticimage.net, and ten years ago I blogged — much more prolifically — at rockgeek.net. Terrifying how time has not flown, but simply disappeared. Irrelevantly, I wish I was as cool of a 23 year old as I was a 13 year old!

Anyway, it really got me thinking about why I had found it so easy to blog so frequently and enthusiastically back in the day. The blogosphere has changed a lot since I started blogging over a decade ago, and certainly the vibe of the internet as a whole. The façade of internet anonymity really dissipated when facebook came along, and with the increasing popularity of monetising blogs, they just feel like such work these days (even if you’re not involved in the blog $$ world).

On a personal level, I’ve always struggled with privacy. I’m never particularly particular about anything, and that makes for tough writing and a boring read. But “anonymous” blogging was never quite for me, and my photos are damned well getting attached to my name, so that’s not a viable option. I was recently discussing the issue of creative freedom versus our imminent legal careers with friends, and they pointed out some things that stuck with me. One said, “lawyers have feelings too”, and the other bluntly said I should publicise and continue to take whatever the fuck style of photos I feel like.

Also, I’m going to stop thinking about this as strictly “blogging”-blogging and just throw things in here. I think that will work better.

Without wanting to offend anyone (who am I kidding, I’m sure I will), I’ve realised that the new direction that the blogosphere is going in just doesn’t really suit me. Ten years ago, blogs that offered help/tips/advice on blog-related things were largely to do with the practical side of how to build a blog. Literally, how to build a blog, i.e. coding, graphics, database imports, and in the pre-Wordpress days — manual versus cutenews versus whatever-else-I-can’t-remember-it’s-been-over-a-decade! Now it’s all about “find your niche” and “how to monetise” and “affiliate programmes”… the list goes on. At the heart of this discomfort and tension, really, lies the fact that I simply do and see and think too many things about too many things. So whatever website/blog I own, will ultimately reflect that.

I’ve also finally conceded to myself that I am never going to sit here and blog about my trips. Not in the way that other people do. I will, however, get off my arse and start writing stories and try to scan my films with a bit more urgency. Twenty one rolls are on their way back to me and I cannot wait.

Also here is the happiest sound of a song I have heard in a while, from whence this post derived its title:

in uncertain times I wanna go where my thoughts can take a nap, and if the atom bomb should end us both, I’ll be happy to go to the stars with you

May 6, 2014

It’s weird being back in real-life for just under a week now, after traipsing up the West Coast from LA up to San Francisco and Seattle, then back down to Malibu to attend my sister’s graduation. I shot purely on film and didn’t even have a digital camera with me, so it will be a while before I start to slowly get my films processed — but hopefully it will be like wine and age into maturity, best to be shared around.

Below are a few of my photos photos from the last batch of film I got back. I was super flattered when Reatha at Film Soup decided to feature these shots as part of her “Scanning of the Week”, you can check out her post here.

All taken on Kodak UltraMax 400 at Hard to Find Bookstore in Onehunga:

It’s funny how these photos captured a golden afternoon in all its glory and nothing else. We’d gone to one of our favourite places, I’d tripped on a book going up the stairs (that place is brimming with books to the point of dangerousness), which led me to almost falling down the stairs, I couldn’t find the book I’d hoped to find, and then was struck with a strange curiosity and moral dilemma when I found a handful of old photos tucked into a book. That sentence is a rambling mouthful to read, but so was that day. It all screeched to a halt when my car remote ran out of battery and I couldn’t deactivate my immoboliser to start the car and didn’t want to ruin his birthday dinner plans. What a mess. And yet the photos show none of this but merely the fleeting split seconds that I had decided to click the shutter, or left it on a timer to put myself in a photograph. I think that’s what I enjoy most about the photos that I take. I’d like to think that they’re very honest and documentary-styled, since I don’t “set-up photoshoots” and stuff — yet I hope they’re kind of fleeting and in media res, maybe making it a little dreamy, that you feel like they might be lying.

Ironically, since I’ve arrived back from America, my little yellow car has finally had its last legs with me, and I feel like my adolescence has really died along with it. All the music that was blast, the excited, cramped, drunken passengers, the driveways and carparks and drive-thrus that car has seen me taxi people in. It’s yet another thing sentiment I just have to put down and let go.

I’m also really struggling with living in the moment right now — I’m looking backwards, at easier days, at happier times, or looking forwards, looking forward to things in the future. There’s a roast dinner to celebrate a friend’s engagement on Thursday evening, or the potential of a job offer, also that day. There’s a comedy act I agreed to go to on Friday, there’s my two hockey games, and maybe getting some music recorded or something, and hopefully cramming in one last surf before my wetsuit becomes too useless for the winter. There’s the further stuff, the promise of the summer holidays, whether I’m working or not, I won’t have to study for a couple of months. I might actually spend all my summer wages on a trip back to my favourite city. Or do something else. Regardless, I keep looking away from the right now and avoiding being in my head. I know that’s how people cope with stress and pain and difficulty (and apparently how Generation Y just likes to live on their smartphones, period), but I know I need to be more present, especially if I want to get my academic shit together. I honestly feel like I would be a straight straight A student if I was getting paid to study, rather than accruing debt to do so. But I’m sure everyone else feels the same. So it’s back to playing catch up on law readings and trying to compose so I can finish my LAST EVER music paper and get one degree finished. Here I go again with the looking-forward-too-much thing. To be honest I’m actually fucking terrified of finishing my music degree.

when I heard the knock on the door, I couldn’t catch my breath — is it too late to call this off?

March 26, 2014

Last month I handed over seven rolls of film to be couriered, processed and scanned. What happened instead was the courier damaged my films and refuse to be accountable. I hear one of the rolls has been completely flattened, although I really cannot fathom how, since those things are tough m’fuckers that don’t need “fragile” labeling. It’s really been quite the emotional rollercoaster because, dammit, I took some good photos, I know I did!

Here is the roll that’s been the least damaged, but it still suffers from a light leak that I haven’t edited out. I doubt I will ever edit out the scarring that’s happened to my film, but maybe one day I can be convinced otherwise. A few shots have been omitted because there was a two-hour span or so where the camera kept malfunctioning — probably because it hadn’t been used since circa 2006 and probably 1996 before that. I didn’t take my trusty Nikon F3 on the Tongariro Crossing because it was getting repaired but I sure as hell wished I had it with me. Sorry, Contax. Old habits die hard, and I won’t let that camera die until I do.

I’m popping over to the states for my sister’s graduation in a couple of weeks’ time and I may try to shoot LA/Californian National Parks/San Francisco (and maybe Seattle) purely on film. I’ll see how that goes. If anyone wants to meet up, email me.

Tongariro Crossing on Ilford HP5+ 400 B/W film; Contax RTS iii.
P.S. yes, that is an active volcano, gotta love Middle Earth.

And we could feel under our backs that the earth was round

February 10, 2014

It’s only been little more than a month into 2014 and I’ve already had so many photos and thoughts I wanted to post — the accumulation of it all got too much and if I don’t start somewhere, it’ll never happen. Frankly, I can’t believe January is already over, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way.

I’ve been restless lately because of all the changes going on in my home life — being between flats and house sitting, etc. — but I’m finally about to move into a new flat, which will hopefully be a little “permanent”, if I could use that word at all. I’ve complained all summer long that I don’t want to return to university. That I just want to run off somewhere and do “things that I want to do”. That I want see the Great Big World, ASAP. But I realised something, just moments ago, as I was typing: the only permanent, constant, unwavering thing in my life for the past four years has been university. Throughout this time, I’ve changed addresses, instruments, gone through parental separations, had my sister move overseas (who is soon to graduate), succeeded and failed and fell in and out of love and hate with all sorts of things — and through all this, I’ve been at university.

For the longest time I’ve been bitter that my choice of conflicting paths meant an extra year tacked onto my time in what I consider a money-sucking institution. Whilst I will still view the place that way, I need to let that shittiness go, and just see it as more time to grow, rather than time spent being stuck.

Some things that I got up to in the last while (some of which involved photos yet to be produced, chemically, the old fashioned way):

When my sister was back in NZ over Christmas, we decided to do the Tongariro Crossing, with mum and the boy in tow. Or, realistically, the boy had us all in tow and helped hustle mum along towards the end, so we wouldn’t have to wait an extra hour for the second shuttle. It was a beautiful, beautiful day and I’m annoyed my Nikon F3 was broken and I had the wrong Contax lens and it was heavy and awful but I hope whatever photos I took will turn out well, once I save enough to get a huge batch of film developed.
I still suck at surfing but I can stand up alright and now it seems my biggest barrier to improving is the masses of other wave-users at Piha.
Riding bikes downhill in the forest isn’t my biggest forte but I hear I’m really brave because I lost skin but kept going anyway. I hope that really means I am a little brave because at times it got scary as fuck.
Meeting a lot of new people in a short space of time and having to remember their names. It’s so much easier for everyone at work to remember my name because there is only one of me. I have to confess that sometimes, right after someone speaks to me, I go on the company website to make sure I do indeed have the correct name-to-face.
Eating a ridiculous amount of ridiculously good food and trying to burn it all off without getting sunburnt.

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