So, ever since the holiday break I have been shooting a lot in the neighborhood. So much so, that I’m quite tired of developing film. I purchased a second tank so I can develop twice as much film at once, I’m spending 4-6 hours at a time in the darkroom to process film once a week. Frankly, I have never shot so much, scanned so much, and had so many related images at one time. It makes me feel like I need to take on an intern to work on all the repeatable process part of this.

But this bulk capture/process is turning into an actual body of work, another first for me. I am doing a first pass this month, at least trying to get all the film developed (I still have 60+ sheets in boxes). What I have developed so far is in binders and scanned. I weeded a few out, and so far I have 48 images in my preview so far. I am already starting to see images I want to eliminate from the set, and have ideas for types of subjects I want to add.

It’s turning into what I call Morning in the Mission. It’s a collection of little scenes from the Mission between 8am and 10am, when the light is nice at soft and the neighborhood is still waking up. Maybe in another month or two I will have something put together that I can present. Until then, I am walking the line between passion and chore.

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Brad checks in on his iPhone in front of the Old Navy store.

It took a little longer than expected to take this shot, as people were stopping when I raised my camera up to focus. It’s hard to “act natural” when a guy is holding a camera as big as his head up to take a shot :)

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This girl was recording the dancers down at Powell/Market with her cell phone. It reminds me this from the song 3×5 by John Mayer:

didn’t have a camera by my side this time
hoping I would see the world through both my eyes

It reminds me that some things are best left unphotographed. While some people say that the art of photography is knowing what not to shoot, perhaps the art of experiencing life for a photographer may be knowing what not to record. Watching the world through a viewfinder certainly distances you from what’s going on in front of you.

If you experience something in person and have no record, it makes the memory that much more sweet.

This couple approached me on Powell asking about my camera. The focus in this portrait is a little soft.. sometimes I forget just how thin the depth of field is when the Xenar is wide open. Maybe I should target f/8 when doing these for a little added security.

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Last week I attended Pivotal Labs’ annual Holiday Party at the City Club. I brought along the Crown Graphic in “party” mode, that is with a Bogen flash bracket and Sunpak 444D flash. This lovely girl (shown above) is the event photographer of the evening. She asked about my camera, as she has some experience with Large Format from classes. She agreed to let me do a portrait of her. Shooting large format is particularly difficult at a party, with the added speed and the decreased light. As luck would have it, my portrait of the photographer came out just the way I wanted, focus and otherwise.

This guy and his Pug named Leica were waiting on Powell Street for a while when I approached him to do a street portrait. Turns out his wife is a photographer. We chatted about my camera a bit and I took two pics, the better of which I’ve posted above. Julius is a designer and is also on Flickr. Meeting random people on the street in San Francisco is pretty fun, so far everybody has been pretty interesting.

I have more street portraits scanned and others to develop. I also developed half the shots from the Pivotal Labs holiday party. Slowly I am getting caught up. I think it’s going to take several more darkroom sessions to get everything developed. I need an intern :)

This is a friend of mine, Tim. I bumped into him as I was waiting for interesting folks at Powell and Ellis downtown. Tim was in front of the Urban Outfitters store and I stopped by to chat with him. He was waiting for friends who were in the store. So, of course, I did a street portrait of him.

Nick is perhaps the Flickr contact I see most often – he works on the same floor I do. On his lunch breaks he explores the areas around our building with a camera. Definitely check out his collection of birds from the area.

This shot was the result of bringing my Crown Graphic to work in an attempt to shoot the last two sheets before developing the set that night. I exposed this HP5+ at iso 400, forgetting that the rest of the Grafmatic was at 1600. I’ve been shooting almost exclusively 1600, so I would label 400 as an exception. Luckily, over-exposing by two stops didn’t stop me from getting a decent image.

I’ve also been working on scanning my Morning/Mission images, I’m up to 25 images done. I discovered that running my scanner for too long heats up the negatives, causing film curl and in turn the Newton Rings. I’m so glad to discover that, now all I need to do is take breaks to prevent them.