Mélange d’arbres.

Published May 5, 2009

It's been about a month since I dusted off and loaded up my plastic-lensed, Chinese-made Holga, stuck in some new AAs, and plastered the thing with gaffer's tape. It's been even longer since I bought a few novelty rolls of expired film.

This natural collage of shots is from a roll of half price 125PX. I had been worried that I didn't account for the slowness of the stock, but I still got a fair amount of information in some of the exposures which was assisted by the fact that a lot of them were overlapping.

It had been my intention to have an uninterrupted negative strip without any distinct frames or breaks, but, as has become standard for me, I botched the processing. The negatives slid out into daylight when I was dumping the developer (before having been fixed and made insensitive to light.) I wasn't expecting anything come out, though, and so am pleasantly surprised!

Some of the first mashed up images on the roll were test shots that I didn't expect to come out, but wound up being goofy self-portraits from near the end of Moustache March.

For anyone struggling with a creative rut I highly suggest inserting some element of randomness into your process. Uncontrollable variables often produce happy accidents, and for someone with my (low) level of technical skill, those accidents are often more interesting than anything I could ever intend to produce.

I really love the spooky, looming branches and the way they impose so strongly. They bear down and jut out at all angles, and if you look at it long enough they stop resembling anything organic. It reminds me of blown ink as I first encountered it on Stefan Bucher's Daily Monster, which is ancient news by internet standards. It's still worth a look if you haven't poured over all hundred creatures, and definitely ranks high up in worthwhile internet inspiration alongside things like Exploding Dog.

Up next on the queue of semi-risky expired film stocks are P3200 Tmax, 100 Tmax, and some ISO400 slide film! The local CVS has a couple cartridges of Polaroid 600 film, too, but I haven't let myself buy them up because I feel like I need to have a grand project in mind to justify the $2 per photo.

Let me know if you have suggestions!