Bikini Wahine Wading Waikiki
Bikini Wahine Wading Waikiki. O'ahu, HI 2009.
After several months of disuse, I finally dusted of the scanner and processed some 35mm negatives I had developed in the beginning of June. Taken last December on O’ahu with a GoPro Hero waterproof 35mm camera on expired Kodak UltraMax 400.
BHF – Aging Gracefully
"Aging Gracefully - Waikiki, HI." fBHF on Kodak Ektar 100.
Ah… this has to be one of my favorite shots from our last Hawaiian adventure.
My wife and I waxed poetic about this older couple walking Waikiki beach hand-in-hand in front of us. We playfully envisioned them as though we were staring thirty-or-so years into our future: still in Hawaii, still madly in love, flaunting what we still had left, as we stroll along the sandy shore, the azure Pacific lapping at our feet and the sunshine warming our wrinkling skin as it gently flaps in the breeze.
I teased my wife that I’d be lucky if she still wore bikinis that far into the future; she said she’d be lucky if I ever wore a Speedo. I replied that it would probably take the full thirty years just for me to squeeze my fat-ass into a Speedo and humanity would probably be for the better if I never tried.
She heartily disagreed, so I gave her thirty years to change my mind.
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Gallery: fBHF – O’ahu 2009
Sometimes the magic gives you toads
'Wading into the Light.' Waikiki beach, Hawaii. Vintage Diana F, Kodak Ektar 100, PS.
Somewhere along the way, my vintage Diana F developed a dastardly light leak in the upper left-hand side of the frame (lower-right image).
As opposed to a beneficial or relatively benign light leak, I’d say this one ruined several rolls of film from Hawaii, except ‘ruined’ is such an ugly word.
How about I just say it ‘challenged’ the composition of several of my shots?
When dealing with crappy cameras, you learn to expect the unexpected. Sometimes the magic gives you unicorns riding motorcycles; other times it gives you toads.
Mind you, they’re still magical toads, so with some effort you still might be able to finagle it into a Princess; but then again, sometimes all you end up with are warts.
The above image is my attempt at saving a princess from an eternity of toad-dom. It’s definitely not the image I had conceived when I shot it, but I think it works. The mirrored symmetry of the new composition balances out the unevenness of the original.
So the good news is that it only took me the better part of fifteen minutes today to diagnose the leak in the Diana F (around where the viewfinder & the flash contacts meet) & plug it with ‘fun-tack’ (you know, that ubiquitous sticky putty adhering beer posters to walls in dorm rooms all across our nation’s colleges & universities).
The bad news is I still have a whole bunch of amphibians waiting for their turn to be kissed.
Smashing Magazine
Newport, RI 2007. Holga with x-pro'd Fuji Velvia 100f.
Smashing Magazine has an article on ‘Toy Cameras’ featuring a piece of my Holga work.
The article is a general survey of toy cameras for the uninitiated (generally sticking to the Lomography retail line-up) and includes several digital means to reproduce the toy camera and Polaroid aesthetics.
While the semanticist in me disagrees with the inclusion of the Lomo LC-A, which to me would be better classified as a low fidelity (lo-fi) camera, as it has more bells & whistles than a typical “toy” camera and what’s left of the analog purist in me partially disagrees with digital imitation on a core level, I do have to say I am flattered that the author saw fit to include my image as representative of what can be achieved with a Holga.
This specific image, in particular, I have always felt unsure about. According to Flickr, it’s one of my most popular images, except I could never ascertain if that was because it was a good photograph or if it had something to do with a prurient phenomena of bikinis on the internet.
Maybe it’s a little of both and maybe “prurient” is too strong of a word. The image has more going on than just the foreground subjects and an easy rule in photography:
Pretty girls often make for a pretty picture.