Week 12 - Sarah

Sometimes it feels like everything is going right. The light is perfect, your framing is inspired, and you're getting great shot after great shot. And other times nothing works; everything you touch turns to crap.

And sometimes you shoot an entire roll of film and only get one good photo.

I think it's this situation--one gem out of a bunch of dirt clods--that is sometimes the most perplexing. It makes you wonder if that one great photo wasn't just pure luck. Clearly you weren't doing anything right the rest of the roll; why should you suddenly remember how not to suck? No, you think, must have been luck.

I don't think it's ever that absolute though. Matters of creativity are complicated. Maybe it was just a matter of the right factors coming in to play at the right time. Maybe all your other pictures were terrible because your rhythm wasn't right, or because you were working as if the conditions were different. Or maybe it is just luck sometimes, and maybe luck is what makes--forgive me--art. At least sometimes.

That's not the lesson I think I should take from this, though. I think the important thing for me to take away is that even on your bad days you're capable of doing something good. You just gotta keep going. Because you never know--maybe that next photo will be the one good one.

My sister came in to visit this weekend and I took an entire roll of film at lunch. This is the only one that was any good. But I like it so much that I'm perfectly fine with it.

Week 11 - Cube Bot

Of Robots and Equipment Failure

I had fun with the photos this week, but they're nothing special. There's a reason for that. I didn't take these pictures for art, I took them for science. Good thing I had a sweet wooden robot that my friend Dana gave me.

You see, the magazine on my Hasselblad appears to have issues. That's the part into which you load the film; it also controls the spacing between frames. Sometimes (and only sometimes, because if it was predictable it would be easy and heavens we can't have that) it overlaps two frames or, alternately, places all the frames ridiculously far apart from each other.

Before I took yet another piece of my camera to be serviced, I wanted to put a roll through and see if the problem would manifest again. That's where cube-bot comes in.

So this week I don't have any really interesting shots to share, just some black and white pictures of a robot toy made out of wood and elastic bands that was given to me by my friend Dana.

It's pretty cool, though. Dana was the first friend I made in Austin and during the 13 years I've known her, she's never given the wrong answer to the question "how does Tate feel about toys that look like robots?"

(The answer is "he likes them very much thank you.")

What did Cube Bot teach me? Not much, sadly. No major issues with the frames, but they were still spaced apart from each other pretty crazily. So I took it in earlier today and probably won't be able to use my camera for weeks. Also, he taught me that I still hate the walls in my apartment.

But I can't actually say I'm all that upset about not being able to use the camera for a while. The thing has been a lot of fun but also a lot of stress. It's going to take me years to get fully comfortable with it, and until then I'm going to continue to frustrate myself.

It's going to be nice to get back to the gear with which I am already comfortable, and the freedom in 35mm to shoot more frames won't hurt either. It's almost like I've been given an excuse to stop thinking about the gear and get back to thinking about the images. I can dig it.

Anyway, Cube Bot thanks you for stopping by. He can't calculate much, being made of wood, but he generally does what he's told. Also, as wood is an organic material, he's technically more closely related to humans than he is to robots of the metal flavor; this is good news for us if (when) the robots revolt.