Hi friends!
As you may have noticed my usual Fortnightly Newsletter didn’t go out on Friday, and I’m taking a little bit of time away from not just Substack but the internet in general as some personal stuff has popped up and I’m intentionally spending my free time with family as I process and move through it all.
But as a little intermission of sorts (heh as the title suggests) I wanted to quickly catch you up on what I’ll be doing during this short break, as well as recommend a few cool youtube channels, link you to some music I’ve been vibing with, and a little sneak peek at the next Newsletter.
And if you didn’t already know I’m a Poet, and was recently gifted a Scholarship! So at the moment I have workshops and performances twice a week which have been really healing and helpful during this difficult time. I want to give a huge thank you to the online poetry community who have held space as I grieve and was a hot mess in class a few times in the last week or so… oh boy it was not pretty!
A little look into the current chaos…
A while ago I purchased a secondhand Pentax ME Super from Cash Converters for I think it was around $40. Not the same one that took the above photo, that particular Pentax ME Super was a refurbished and serviced one I got from NicksPicksAustralia - highly recommended reseller!
Anyway, at the time the cheapy peepy broken Pentax’s light meter was working but the shutter itself was jammed and all gummed up. I thought it would be an easy fix, tried to fix it but failed, and put it away for future repairs - probably about 6 months ago now?
Well, those future repairs are here and as I write this I’m taking a small break from re-soldering tiny camera wires and praying to the film gods this baby comes back to life. I have repaired cameras in the past but never one with an electronic shutter so I did what I always do, search youtube for a tutorial, search for service manuals, and see if anyone else has decided to go all in on a restoration project like myself.
I managed to completely pull apart the camera, de-solder wires to pull the mirror box out, and fix all the mechanical bits. The shutter now fires perfectly, and the mirror box primes and releases as well. Everything seems to be synching up correctly - so if all else fails, I will have a very slow mechanical SLR to play with. The shutter will mechanically fire at 1/125th, which if you follow the Sunny 16 method and plan to shoot 100 ISO film is very do-able as a fixed speed basic setup.
I’m not entirely hopeful about the flexi board itself. There’s a sticker to indicate it was serviced all the way in Canada in 2009 and from the looks of things there’s a few issues with one of the main chips on the board. It could very well be that no matter what I do it’s dead in the water. Which I’m okay with! I went into this project 100% with the mindset of “This camera is trashed, there’s no way I could make it worse” and it’s a good practice camera regardless.
I’ll of course keep you all updated on how it goes, and who knows, if it works and I snap some decent photos with it you’ll all be the first to know ;)
What am I watching when I’m not staring off into the void having an existential crisis about how short life really is? AKA - My current Youtube Recommendations:
I really love loooooong youtube videos. The longer the better. I’m the kind of person who always has something on in the background while I do other things - such as machine knitting, or crocheting, or lately playing Elite Dangerous - so long form videos that have a storytelling element are my kind of go-to at the moment.
Car Restorations:
I’m not really big on ‘building car’ videos but Derek from Vice Grip Garage is just so dang likable and I find him both hilarious and helpful. He explains things in a way that make sense and don’t make me feel like an idiot which is a nice change from a lot of mechanically minded youtubers.
He too has a kind of ‘lets fuck around and find out’ attitude about things and approaches cars the way I’ve been approaching this camera - with curiosity and a bit of just recklessness for the fun of it and to see if it’ll work!
Landscape Photography:
One of my fellow photographer friends Clyde is getting back into Youtube and has released a new video just a few days ago. I really appreciated how it’s more of a storytelling video that takes you on the journey of it all rather than a shorter video with only the best parts of a shoot. He explains his thought process around why and how he is capturing photos, and goes one step further to really viscerally describe the landscape in a way that feels like you’re right there in the middle of the field with him. I’m looking forward to seeing more of his videos in the near future.
Film Reviews:
Of course the lovely Lucy Lumen has dropped a video about Kodak Gold vs the new Fuji C200. There have been whispers about this being the case for the last year that Fuji’s new formula would just be rebranded Gold and I believe it launched in the US first before finally coming to Australia recently. I know for a lot of people this is devastating to lose the dreamy blues and greens the original C200 stock produced - but for me my all time favourite stock and go-to is Kodak Gold so I’m not entirely mad about it. I use Gold for every style of photography I do - even studio portrait shoots - and I adore the warmer tones and vibrant reds it throws.
If the new C200 is rebranded gold (and I mean c’mon all evidence just like Lucy shows points towards that being true) then it actually eases some of my anxiety about not finding Gold! Kodak Gold has been sold out for months now as it is.
Kodak Alaris told me via email way back in November of 2021 (I was contacting them at the time about direct supply for Film Workshops I wanted to hold) that they had 336,000 units of Kodak Film on back order, with an additional 120,000 units of direct customer back orders on top of that. “Our current stock levels are extremely low. We are all out of Gold for example” I was then linked me to a bunch of press releases that explained the logistics behind the film shortages. Again in 2022 Kodak mentioned that consumer stock such as Ultramax, Colorplus and Gold were put on the backburner while they try to fulfill the high demands for Pro stocks such as the Portra lines. Most film stores will tell you the same, that Kodak just isn’t pumping out the consumer stocks like they used to, and in our year of 2023 Gold is near impossible to find. If you happen to find a store that gets a small amount of leftover stock, as soon as it’s posted online, it’s gone again.
I’ve got only a few precious rolls left from my last bulk order in late 2021 and I haven’t been lucky enough to snag more recently. So y’know what if the new C200 is the Gold 2.0 and other Photographers aren’t keen on it because they prefer the old formula, then I’ll just grab that when I can instead! (Some fun little spicy Kodak facts for you there lol.)
Other than that there’s a bunch of Photography based Youtubers I’ve been watching like Graincheck, One Month Two Cameras, and Pierre, but it’s really been mainly the Vice Grip Garage videos that have been on autoplay, they’re just so fun and soothing to watch!
What am I listening to right now?
My daily playlist as always!
This playlist has become my kind of all-my-emotions-in-one-place space.
I sit and write poetry and flick on some Morning Bird by Sade. Then maybe if I’m driving down the highway feeling some kind of way I slap on some Jolene by Dolly Parton. Or if it’s after a rough therapy sesh then Nowadays by Valleyheart is blasting while I sing along. If I’m feeling nostalgic for someone I’ve lost, Cigarettes & Saints by The Wonder Years is my usual vibe and is always a real tear jerker. If I’m just kind of in a weird space, it’s a late night drive, I want to be left alone with my thoughts, then How Does It Feel? by Citizen is what springs to mind. So on and so forth…
This playlist is chaotic and kind of all over the place and I think that’s why I just keep adding songs to it over the years and let it take a shape of its own. It’s kind of a time machine of my life, the ups and downs, the amazing moments and achievements, and the not so great ones too. It’s cool to look back on and shuffle it, see where I end up and what memories it conjures up for me.
I’d love to know what songs you’d recommend to me, so click/tap the buttom below to leave a comment with one for me to listen to and who knows, it might end up on my playlist!
What I will be doing as I take a break:
Spend some time with family first and foremost.
I want to go on road trips with my Dad up the Mountains, and squeeze in a camping trip with my Brother too while the weather isn’t too bad over the next few weeks. Hoping that it’s not too terribly hot (or randomly raining again ugh!) when we finally organize a day to do so. I want to go to that cute restaurant my Mum and Sister keep raving about and then drive to the beach to giggle and sink our toes in the sand. All the little things that actually mean a lot in the end.
I keep making promises that I will do all these fun adventures with my loved ones and then I put it off assuming there’s endless time to do it - but I’ve learned that tomorrow isn’t promised, so you might as well make every second of the present day count. I’m trying to really be there and be ‘in the moment’ as each day comes, and I think my family is feeling the same way too right now.
As always we’ve been doing our usual weekly ritual of getting coffee together as a family at least twice a week at the local spot. I recently got a Pentax MX to round out my camera collection so I intend to take it for a spin and snap some new family photos like the one above - assuming I can get anyone to stay still long enough. If it’s not an Auto Focus camera, you can forget about it!
More poetry classes/performances.
As I mentioned I was given a scholarship to attend the Button Poetry workshop with Desiree Dallagiacomo- focusing on writing who we are and where we come from, and how our experiences shape us as people.
Some really powerful and healing poetry has been born from that workshop, and I’m determined to make my way through the supplemental poetry resources and additional prompts. Each week we come together (online) and analyze the prescribed poetry, talk about how it made us feel, and then we dive into writing time, followed by an on the spot performance of our freshly written poems to the class. The readback is my favourite. I love performing because as Desiree said today - poems are meant to be heard, they are designed to be consumed, so speaking your own writing is so powerful in itself - and I love having a space to sink into that feeling.
I’ve previously taken her and KC’s ‘Kin Keeping’ classes and oh… I didn’t realize how much I needed to learn how to combine poetry with memoir style prose. It’s been so incredible to watch my writing and style evolve over time and sink deeper into a practice that feels more authentic and like I can really identify with my own voice.
And if you follow my Personal Instagram each class on Thursday’s and Saturdays by around 3pm I post the draft to my stories for everyone to read.
Eventually I hope to record all my spoken word pieces and share them as either a podcast or some sort of IG video - I haven’t really figured that out yet. Perhaps a separate substack?
Either way I’ve finally decided I want people to hear and read my work, so I’m excited for my future plans for that!
That’s all for now!
My regular Newsletters will be back sometime within the next month, or so I hope. I’m not really putting pressure on myself right now as grief takes time and I’m just so run down and exhausted lately that editing film photos and talking about how I shoot Editorials, and teaching people how-to-do-the-thing-they-keep-asking-me-about is not really at the forefront of my mind right now, y’know?
But because I love y’all… here’s a little sneak peek into what will be coming in the next Newsletter: Film Outtakes!
I asked people on Instagram what they’d love me to talk about and a lot of people want to see the stuff ups lol. Of course they want to! Heck even I want to see people’s ‘gross’ film photos that they hate and don’t want anyone to see!
We’re all so used to seeing the perfect end result and only the Photographer themselves knows of the outtakes, the photos that were slightly off, or something didn’t work and it got scraped altogether, or perhaps like what happened with me you had some equipment failure and the entire roll of film was ruined. These are the photos that never see the light of day, but I think those photos are kind of neat in themselves and still serve a purpose.
I’ll be sharing some of my worst photos taken, and compare them with the lovely end results that I delivered and shared online. And for the roll of film from the New Face New Place event that has never seen the light of day that I’ve decided to share for it (meaning you are the first to ever see the rest like the above BW photo!) I’ve decided to go through and re-edit some key Digital images in black and white as close to Delta 3200 as I could get.
This re-editing will be done so there’s a visual representation in the next Newsletter of how the photos *should* have turned out and how I expected them to, but just… equipment failure happened instead. I learned that day to never buy a certain series of cameras as they all have known massive electronic faults. The rest of the Outtakes luckily I have successful rolls of film that I can use and no other Digital re-imaginings need to be included for those.
I’m actually quite excited to show you the importance of good photo curation and why Photographers don’t show you everything!
Thanks again for checking in, I hope this Intermission newsletter tides you over for now. I look forward to coming back when I’m feeling a bit better and am keen to share some really cool photos with you very soon.
Until the next roll, take care!
Xoxo, Josie