Arimoto Shinya updated his site with a batch of new photos, "ariphoto 2008 vol 4." They are black and white medium format, definitely worth a look. I would post one or two here but they are behind Flash, which is worth respecting even in this screenshot-saturated world.
Arimoto Shinya is part of the Totem Pole group.
I'm surprised none of you serious p-bloggers have blogged this yet. Anyway it looks like Polaroid might come back, a group of Dutch folks have signed a 10-year lease for the factory in the Netherlands and intend to start making film for old Polaroid cameras again.
http://www.the-impossible-project.com/
Got this from Peter
Basically something like this: at night, black and white, mad grainy, processed and printed myself.
tensions
serious — light
high — low
theoretical — practical
work — life
closed — open
fragile — strong
"old" — "new"
resolve = work
es asi no?
side note, digital and analog have no place on these axes. nerds
I have made the mistake of sometimes forgetting that close friends and family, some of whom have little interest in photography, read this blog. To that end I wish to publicize a new blog I have started, whose sole intention is to shed light on my personal life in Tokyo:
MCV MCV will remain focused on photography. I don't want to bore anyone reading this blog, saturated with information as you may already be.
On a photographic note, I am pretty sure that I won't have any new pictures to post for a while. I don't have a digital camera any longer (more on that later, I think) and I will almost certainly not have a negative scanner here. Instead of these contemporary methods of producing images, I am hoping to use a darkroom.
A contact sheet is quite simple to make. Cut a roll of processed black and white film into strips, mount them in a plastic sheet, and shine a concentrated beam of light through this sheet onto a piece of photographic paper. When this paper is developed, the result is a positive image of each frame from the roll, all in one place. When looking at a contact sheet, it has always been clear to me which images are worth printing larger.
I am sure that getting back to this process will help me actually see what I've shot, and identify what is worth shooting again. When the results do make their way to the great expanse of the internet, as they invariably must, let's hope you can feel the difference.
I found a whole bunch of books printed up by a service called Photoback last night while walking around some shops. If I am not mistaken, it costs about $25 to print a small book like you see below:
I didn't snap any pictures of the books that were there, but the quality seemed very high. The book is a very pleasant size, you can't tell from the picture but it's just about 5x7 inches and feels great in the hand. I will keep my eyes out for other automated photobook printing services here, and maybe report more on Photoback if I can find/learn to read more information about it.
No public end-of-year reflections for me, but a link to an end-of-year list, TIME's Top 10 photos of 2008. This one was deemed "fourth best" (numerical rankings of non-numerical things hardly ever make sense to me). It's been stuck in my head the longest, and I realize it reminds me of this photograph by Shoji Ueda, from 1950:
TIME image tumbled by lapuravidagallery