shooting stars

I taped the trigger button down on my Canon AE-1 to get this photo, with a little pebble under the tape to engage the trigger.  That blur around the tripod is me shooting time-lapse footage of stars out at my cousin's place in rural Indiana last month with my Bolex.  I shot frame by frame, 30 second exposures or more, some up to about 5 minutes each, holding the trigger button down for the duration of each exposure.  This was the coldest weather I have ever tried this in, it was well below freezing.  I dressed for it with snowpants and winter boots and thick mittens.  I did this for hours at a time, and had to work out a method where I'd switch hands for exposures because the longer I did it the more feeling I lost in my fingers.  My coffee froze, actually turned to ice.

  

By the end of my first night doing this, I turned on my headlamp and found that all my gear including my lens was covered in frost.  By the end of the second night shooting, my feet were almost completely numb.  I had originally planned on shooting this out in South Dakota, and after experiencing what it's like trying to do this in the cold, I was really glad I was only an hour from home.  The shots turned out, even the one where the lens frosted up.  Really excited about that.  They were the hardest shots to shoot of this entire film project.  This was the final roll of 16mm film exposed for Hangs Upon Nothing.  I was really surprised by how red one of the stars that makes up Orion turned out in the footage.  It's completely red. I plan on opening the movie with shots from this last roll of film. 

this project on fb: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hangs-Upon-Nothing-a-16mm-surf-film/246361802068338

out the window

Up in planes we're often encouraged to keep the window shades shut so that people can watch movies without glare on their screens. There's some cool stuff out the window though.

the lagoon

Decades ago hydrogen bombs detonated high above this atoll. It is now home to about 5,000 people. Surprisingly, a recent large scale clean up crew that checked radiation levels reported finding no abnormal levels of radioactivity anywhere on the island. Aside from a leftover monolith of a runway, a few rusting remnants of US and English buildings, and some slabs of concrete, there are few remaining indications this place was once home to a large military presence. It was hard to imagine the man-made violent fury unleashed many times over the atoll in years past.

There is a two lane road that twists and turns its way around a large part of the atoll, with shrubs growing up high enough to block visibility around many of the curves. Americans drive on the right side of the road. The English drive on the left. I heard stories that this difference led to head on collisions.

I wish it was more visible in this photo...the clouds above an atoll lagoon, especially this one it seemed, glow a bit of a greenish blue, reflecting the lagoon color from below. It's very noticeable when you scan the entire sky and compare the difference between the clouds over the deep blue of the open ocean and those over the atoll. On a cloudy or partly cloudy day this can be seen from far off in the open ocean, long before any fringe of land is visible.

This is the lagoon that took the life out of my Canon AE-1 35mm camera as well, the one I used to shoot this photo.

look out the window

I shot this not long after lift off from Kiribati. Middle of the Pacific Ocean. I love looking out the window during flights, and shooting footage or photos of what's out there. This is a 35mm still, I shot this with an old Canon AE-1...a few months later saltwater took the life out of that camera...it has some electronics in it. This was my mom's camera from the 70's, and she gave it to me as my first camera years ago.

This is the first of a few posts I'll do about imagery in the new collage at the top of the blog.