A California Yankee in King Cake's Court

I buy a lot of film from Adorama.com, and it's where I get my large prints (for exhibit and sale) made. Yesterday I got a coupon from them for a free 8x10 aluminum print; of course I had to pay shipping, but it was only $7--without the coupon it would have cost $32--and I've been curious about what those prints look like, so I used it.

This is the photo I used. It's one of my rare forays into digital manipulation: I turned up the contrast and played with the color levels until I got a cool purple-and-green look I really liked. This is the original, unaltered photo:



Aluminum prints come with different finishes, I chose silver satin because the description said it reduces glare and the colors "take on an almost luminous, iridescent sheen bouncing back the light like colored foil". Eh, maybe it's bullshit, but it's a free print so what the hell.

In other news, I'm getting really excited for my aunt's wedding in Laguna Beach next month. I'll get to see the Pacific Ocean again! But choosing what cameras and film to bring is torture!

I learned a valuable lesson about this camera the 2nd time I used it: the rewind knob sometimes doesn't work--maybe because the original take-up spool has been replaced with the guts of a 35mm film canister--and trying to force it will just rip the end out of your film roll. Sigh. So now I remove the film inside a changing bag and rewind it by hand.



Framing is tricky with this camera, what you see through the viewfinder is always tighter than what actually gets photographed--when I looked through the viewfinder at this scene, I pretty much only saw the building.





Still, this lens has awesome color saturation.



You can get pretty close-up, too.



The photos were a little overexposed, I used 200 speed film and stopped it all the way down to F16, but it was a really bright day. I think I'll stick to Ektar in this camera unless it's an overcast day.

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This is going to be the last outdoor meetup for a while, although I might go a few places by myself outdoors for a while yet. When it's just me, it's easier to take a/c breaks, or just decide "eff this, it's too hot, I'm going home". I got some mild heatstroke: a splitting headache and nausea--I had a cup of turtle soup with lunch that was very good, but it started repeating on me in the form of burps, and that wasn't so good. About 24 oz. of ice cold Diet Coke (sweet nectar of the gods) and some prescription-strength Aleve fixed me up; plus some rain clouds started rolling in and it cooled just enough, but even in the car I couldn't stop sweating until I got home and took a cool shower. I didn't grow up here and I doubt I'll ever acclimate to the summer weather (which generally starts in May). Still, March and April and even the beginning of May were unusually cool, so I'm not complaining.

I think I'm going to have the next meetup at the WWII museum in NOLA, which I've never been to.

Anyway, Donaldsonville is the seat of Ascension Parish and almost exactly midway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. My GPS took me there via I-10 (which is how I drive to Baton Rouge) and home via LA-90 (which is how I get to NOLA), and both routes took just over 2 hours. It's a small (about 7,500) town but a historic one. It was the state capital for a single year, 1831-1832. Apparently the politicians thought they'd get more work done without the cultural and social distractions of NOLA (Baton Rouge didn't become the capital until 1849), but they must have gotten too bored, because they moved back after a single session!



There's a 19th century Jewish cemetery in the town, Jews from all over south Louisiana requested to be buried there. There used to be a synagogue, but it disbanded in the 1940s (the building is now an Ace Hardware) due to there not being enough members. I guess religion wasn't as important to the younger generation as fitting in, and they all eventually converted. There are still some Jewish names in the town, but none of them practice anymore.



The original Church of Ascension dates to 1772, although the present building was constructed about 100 years later. The stained glass is beautiful, but they keep plexiglass over the outside, which kind of dims it. But I guess you can't pound boards into 150-year-old brick when there's a hurricane coming (and some of the windows are really high up).



There are some cool old buildings downtown, but a lot of them are closed and starting to fall apart. This is the old Bank of Ascension building. It's for sale!



This was the local Elk's Lodge. Of course, I couldn't resist a giant stag head that seemed to be floating in space; I got a pretty good Silver Shade instant, too. The Masonic Lodge was directly across the street, do you think they rumble with each other?



This guy was a trip, he saw Hope and I gawking at all the stuff in his yard and was like "Hey, take my picture!". Then I printed out a copy for him from the Zink printer and you should have seen the amazement on his face. He kept trying to give me money for it, I was dude no, it only costs me like 50 cents.



They had this old building in their backyard, his wife says it was originally the first Mormon church in Louisiana. It used to be right on the river, but when they built the levee it was moved and became part of the property.

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I shot this roll a while ago but didn't sent it to Dwayne's right away; I find it more cost-effective to send at least 2 rolls at a time. So I waited until I had another roll to go with it (which I will probably post tomorrow).

The film camera I took on my most recent NOLA outing was the Blackbird Fly, a plastic 35mm TLR rangefinder made by Superheadz (they also made my Golden Half). I haven't used it in a while and I was considering selling it, but thought I should use it one more time before I made up my mind. I remembered it as difficult to use, but I think that's because when I last used it I didn't yet have much experience with rangefinders. Since then I've used several (and I collect Arguses, which are all rangefinders); my Yashica MG1 is my go-to camera for B&W, and even my Smena 8M is a rangefinder.

The only drawbacks to the Blackbird Fly is that a) it's difficult to take horizontal photos, instead of using the viewfinder you have to compose your photo through a cut-out in the viewfinder hood, and that's never a 100% accurate way to frame; and b) you have to really concentrate on getting your subjects level. I remember the first roll I shot looked like I had done it in a rowboat. And unless it's really overcast or you're shooting indoors, you need to stick to low-speed film (this is Kodak Ektar 100), because there are only 2 aperture settings to the camera--sunny and cloudy/flash--and both of them are fairly wide, I think F11 and F8. With higher speed film, 400 or even 200, in a camera with a normal range of aperture settings, I usually stop it all the way down to F16 when it's a sunny day.

Anyway, I think I'll keep it for now. It's a little unusual to find a TLR that's also a rangefinder, and the camera itself is fun to use and even rather cute. And like most rangefinders (except my Yashica, which has an in-viewfinder focus aid that allows you to be really accurate), the fact that you're never 100% right about the distance from your subjects results in an appealingly soft focus.

Our Lady of Lavang is a Catholic church in Gentilly (the most racially diverse neighborhood in NOLA) with a 100% Vietnamese congregation. The mass is conducted in Vietnamese, and the shrine is an interesting mix of traditional Vietnamese architecture and Catholic iconography. Our Lady of Lavang was a Marian apparition that occurred in Vietnam in the 19th century, at a time when Catholics in that country were being persecuted. The Vatican has never authenticated it, but JP2 allowed as it was "important". To keeping the coffers full among the Vietnamese diaspora, no doubt. HEY-O.

This is something I've been meaning to do for a while, get all of my vintage cameras together and take some photos. (I took 3 photos from 3 positions: standing, sitting, kneeling.) I don't keep them all in one place--I group all the rangefinders together in one place, my Kodaks in another, my Polaroids in another, some that are for sale I keep in the closet, and miscellaneous ones are on the top shelf of my desk--so it's hard to get a sense of how many I actually have. This isn't even all the vintage cameras I've EVER owned, since I started my Etsy shop last year, I've sold a few. A lot of these are for sale, too--in fact, most of them would be for sale at the right price. Although there are a few I wouldn't sell at ANY price: my Arguses, my Land Camera, the WWI-era Zeiss-Ikon that Phil bought in Germany when he was in the Army. He gave it to me a few years ago.

A lot of people do film stash photos, but I don't have tons of film on hand at any given time. Frankly I think it's dumb to hoard more film than you can shoot in, say, a year. Refrigerated or no, unexposed film is a slowly degrading medium. I'm currently stockpiling about 20 rolls of Fuji Neopan 400, which I recently learned is being discontinued, but I won't try to amass more than that. I'll just have to switch to Ilford when it runs out. Sigh.

Saturday was my Lomographers meetup, in Jackson. It was kind of blah, the town looked more interesting on paper. Like, every other building was on the National Historic Register, even if it was built yesterday. And we couldn't even find the abandoned building that (allegedly) used to be part of the Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System. I think it's on the grounds and whoever took the photo that I saw just didn't want to admit they were visiting someone there.

But it's still fun to get out of the house and see other people and take photos. Lunch was good, too--we went to a BBQ place and I had a bacon blue cheese hamburger. And afterward we stopped off at the Port Hudson National Cemetery, which is on the way back to Baton Rouge. It's kind of humbling, all those thousands of identical tiny white headstones. But next month (or rather, later this month) I'm going to have it at Fort Jackson, a decommissioned early 19th century masonry fort in Plaquemines Parish. That can't help but be interesting!

However, the main objective of the day, for me, was to test out the Smena 8M, and mission accomplished. It took me like a half hour to figure out how to load it; eventually I realized that the original take-up spool had gone missing and the seller had included the guts of a 35mm film canister to make up for it. Which means the film lead has to be trimmed on both sides, instead of the one side, as it comes. The ends of 35mm rolls--the end that fits into the canister, not the end that sticks out--are very narrow. I'm also pretty sure that the lens cap is not original to the camera, it has threads on it, like the seller pulled it off a bottle. It was very thoughtful of them to include it, and to stick a little hammer and sickle pin through it--that's just fun!

I like the camera a lot, it reminds me of the LC-A+ in that when it's focused on infinity, you get perfectly clear photos; but when focused closer, things can get interestingly fuzzy, because there's no focus aid and you're always just guestimating. (With the LC-A+ it's because there are only 4 focus settings, so you're never really perfectly focused.) I didn't notice any camera shake blur, either that trait has been exaggerated or I just have uncommonly steady hands. Maybe all those years of needlework!

See what I mean about "interesting fuzziness"?

Nice saturation of color, too. It really is a good lens for a cheap camera. I believe the Soviets always had good optics factories, so even their "proletariat" cameras had quality lenses.

I finished up the roll around the house when I got home in the evening. This shot really captures that lovely, golden late afternoon light. (It's slightly double-exposed because it was the last frame. I could crop it out, but I don't really mind it.)

I spent weeks researching plantations in Louisiana, trying to find one that hadn't been restored but that was still standing. That turned out to be pretty rare; if a plantation wasn't kept up by a family who didn't lose all their money in the Civil War, or get turned into a paying attraction (B&B, tours, etc.), it tended to have disappeared years ago. I kept finding photos that looked promising, only to find out it was an old photo of a house that had burned down in the 1950s or been demolished in the 1970s.

Finally, paydirt: LeBeau, in St. Bernard parish just south of New Orleans--and I mean JUST south, you could probably walk there from the city limits. The most recent photos I was able to find were taken in January of this year, so I was certain enough it was still there to make the drive (and to convince Trish to meet me there). After the war it was a hotel, a brick factory, and an illegal casino. A fire destroyed much of the inside in 1986 and it's been uninhabited since then. There were some plans to restore it, but then Katrina happened, and it dropped pretty far down the priority list.

I was pretty sure, from some of the photos I'd seen, that there was a hole in that chain link fence somewhere. And I don't think local kids sprayed that graffiti on from a distance. Trish spotted it, round the back, just big enough for my butt to squeeze through.

We didn't try to get inside. For one thing, the inside is probably dangerous, because of the fire. That house is several feet off the ground, and falling through the floor could mean breaking a leg or worse. For another, the steps that lead from the ground to the porch either washed away in the storm, or were removed to keep people away from the house (doesn't appear to have worked for the local graffiti artists), we would have needed a stepladder. Also, see that thing in the doorway that looks like a brain? That's a GIANT BEEHIVE. Like icebergs, what you can actually see of a beehive usually represents just a small fraction of the structure. The inside of that house probably looks like Candyman's home.

All that aside, I still wouldn't have tried to get inside. It's boarded up, and to get in you would literally have to break and enter. I'll trespass for a photo, but I draw the line at destruction of property.

So mission accomplished! I photographed an unrestored but standing plantation home. (I also shot some 35mm in my Pink Slim Dress, some 120 in my Diana F+, and several Silver Shade instants.) And Trish sold me a bundle of slightly expired 35mm Fuji--2 dozen each 400 and 200--for just $10. So I won't need to buy any color 35mm for a while!

Clinton is the parish seat of East Feliciana Parish; parish seats aren't necessarily the largest towns in their parish (although Abbeville is), and the population is only about 1,600--far less than nearby Jackson, where I'm having the next meetup. That was supposed to be tomorrow, but it looked like rain so I moved it. Plus it's a holiday weekend, people might have plans.

It's a pretty town, with gently rolling hills; lots of trees; and narrow, meandering streets.

St. Andrew Episcopal Church is a classic Carpenter Gothic structure built in 1871. Unfortunately it was locked so I couldn't photograph the inside. Even though I'm an atheist, I'm still of the opinion that churches shouldn't be locked during the daytime!

There's something about Episcopal churches that really appeal to me. In rural Louisiana at least, they don't go for "grand" and "soaring", like Catholic churches. They seem to aim more for "cute". Most of the churches I have photographed in south Louisiana have been Episcopal churches, even though it's such a heavily Catholic area.

They have a pretty impressive courthouse. One day I'd like to photograph ALL the parish courthouses in Louisiana and make a postcard book.

The Confederate cemetery. The veneration of the idea of the Confederacy really chaps my hide, because THERE ARE STILL QUITE A FEW BLACK PEOPLE LIVING IN THE SOUTH, HELLO. (Also because if they'd actually won the Civil War, I'd now be living in a 3rd world country.) But Confederate soldiers as individuals were still people who deserved a decent burial, so the cemeteries don't bother me.

Obviously not everyone buried there was a soldier, there were quite a few children's graves.

This was something I found without looking for it. According to the sign out front, it's The Marston House, which made me laugh because isn't the name of the spooky house in 'Salem's Lot? Anyway, it was so big that I would have had to be standing in their across-the-street neighbor's front door to have gotten the whole thing in the shot. I've got to start using my wide angle camera again.