Some Day Things

On our trip back from St. Louis for the 4th, Jon and I were discussing how efficient it would be if he got his pilot's license, and we could fly back and forth to St. Louis, to Huntsville... to anywhere we've got friends or family we'd like to see more regularly. Yes, it'd be expensive for lessons and to get the license, and to keep it in a hangar, and to purchase our own plane.. but it sure would be much nicer to fly 3 hours to St Louis rather than 7! or 8 when the weather is hurricanic like it was on this trip.. in which case we'd be grounded in a plane anyway, heh. But! in guaranteed nice weather, it would be nice.

We'd get a cute little single engine plane with a Saturn V rocket painted (by me) on the side panels. Jon's door would say "Captain" and mine would say "Mrs. Captain" and we can get some flight suits and I would design a "mission patch" for each vacation we take our plane to.


(The rocket blast is an unreal addendum, ha)
It's so easy for me to give myself more reasons to wish for something :) SOME day.

Also, and not related.. some day I'm going to build my own dark room, solely for the purpose of re-experiencing the nostalgic nature of processing film and photos like those times that were so dear to me through late high school and mid college.



Up front, buying all the equipment and chemicals would be a little pricey (although I've seen enlargers being sold for only like $300 or something) but afterward it'd be relatively cheap to maintain the hobby. Photography is so intriguing. It's amazing how a chemical bath will make an image magically (chemically) appear on paper.. an image that exists due to light being exposed on a thin clear piece of plastic, basically. AMAZING. I'm more impressed by the people who figured it out in the first place.

Have you ever made a pinhole camera? Photo paper + darkness + beam of light = printed image. AMAZING. It truly is.. but it's only science, ha.

Here's my pinhole attempt from my junior year in college. A small piece of photo sensitive paper was placed inside a film canister that had a pin hole in it with a piece of tape over the hole. I took it outside, lifted the tape and revealed the paper to light for a few minutes, then closed it back up and ran inside to develop these:

My toes on the sidewalk.
(the curve of the paper on the inside of the film canister creates a fish eye lens effect)


Trees around the studio.


Trees and the front side of the building, Ellis Hall.


This is a "contact sheet." All the negatives from a shoot are laid out on top of the photo paper and exposed to light. Pretty neat.. I haven't seen some of these images for years.. click to enlarge.