Here’s to new adventures, sand between my toes, and probably an obnoxious amount of beach photos!

In the meantime, I better get started learning how to dance like this if I want to blend in with the locals.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity in the workplace or I guess more specifically, being a creative in a nine to five kind of job. It sort of feels strange to force a natural process to occur between a certain set of hours. Design is a relatively new career field and while most office environments are more lenient than other, more corporate ones I think asking a creative person to be indoors at a desk for eight hours a day is problematic.

Creativity requires inspiration. You can obviously get that inspiration from books or websites but that can be really limiting to me. I feel most inspired when I’m out doing other things. I’ll see a pattern in a store and be inspired, I’ll listen to an album on the beach while my mind wanders and be inspired.

One of the things I loved most about college was how open my day was. I went to school in a small mountain town, there wasn’t much to do but I was always surrounded by nature. It was beautiful and abundant. Like most students I had large gaps of time in between my classes to do other things, usually nap, or work on projects but I saw the sunlight, I took walks, I took pictures. I went outside and I got inspired. I miss that a lot.

Creative people need to wander. We enjoy the unknown, we are curious and inquisitive. We require time and freedom to become inspired. A computer is not really a place for creative thinking, it’s a place for execution—it’s a tool for bringing your vision to life. I wish more employers understood that. I realize that there’s a need to have warm bodies in seats but when time allows it, let your creative people to wander and they will flourish.

1. “Back of Your Neck” – Howler
2. “Weekend” – Smith Westerns
3. “Devious” – Gross Ghost
4. “King of the Beach” – Wavves
5. “The Wave” – Miike Snow
6. “Diplomat’s Son” – Vampire Weekend
7. “Get Going” – Headlights
8. “Is This Sound Okay?” – Coconut Records
9. “Take Care” – Beach House
10. “Surfer Girl” – The Beach Boys

Listen Now!

For the inaugural scan, I busted out some old negatives from my college photography classes. Talk about uninspired, there weren’t very many that I deemed worthy of being scanned in for the world to see. We’ll blame it on being forced to take up to ten rolls of film at a time. Even if I bracketed that’s a lot of pictures to take, and there wasn’t a whole lot going on in the small mountain town that I went to school in. You can only take so many pictures of snow and trees before you run out of ideas and I never was (Read: still am not) huge on studio/portrait photography.

This was probably the best picture I took in college. What I like about it is how normal it seems at first, you think “Oh, a door with some interesting light patterns on it, how nice.” It’s only after a few seconds of staring that you notice the creepy hand reaching out. It completely changes the mood of the photo. I have a non-dust covered print of it matted that I will eventually get framed.

I actually took these photos for my mom and not for a class project. She had recently inherited this old tractor from my great-grandfather who used it for years upon years farming on the North Carolina coast.

These were for a project, I don’t even remember what the assignment was, but Chris and I found these old masks at a Big Lots and thought they were just cheesy enough to photograph. Please ignore the dust on these, gah.

I’m also a sucker for bright colors and anything nautical or covered in squid, so when I saw this new camera from Lomography I had to have it. My review is a little late, it took me a while to finish off the roll since winter hit (my camera hibernation period, ha) but I preordered a camera sans flash from their first series. I have the navy blue Sea Pride one below, it has a squid on the back… of course it does.

You see, the gimmick with these is that they’re actually made from old sardine cans. I love it, so precious. Since the initial release they’ve put out all kinds of awesome designs: a pattern edition, a metal edition (do this with holga, please!), a Seoul edition, and a Virginia is for Lovers edition. You can check them out on the Lomography website here.

Settings and Controls
So on to the details! The La Sardina is a wide angle lens toy camera that uses 35mm film. Following suit with other toy cameras in my collection it has very few settings. Two focus options: close up or far away, indicated on the lens by a bug (so cute) and a group of three people, respectively. It has a bulb setting for long exposures, a normal setting, and a multiple exposure setting for uhh taking multiple exposures. It also features a rewind dial and a lens cap. I cannot tell you how happy I am about having a lens cap that actually stays on. A lot of toy cameras don’t come with caps or they have caps that fall off all the time and of course, there are no replacements available for purchase. Of course you could argue that scratches on your lens just add to the character of the camera but having a cap is important to me. It has two tripod mounts and a tunnel viewfinder, which means the viewfinder is not connected to the lens, so what you see is an approximation of what you’re photographing. When photographing subjects up close you may experience extreme parallax error, which basically means what you’re seeing is not what you’re photographing. Over time the more you use the camera the more you’ll be able to adjust to correct.

Final Verdict
I have always heard wonderful things about color slide film so I went to my local camera shop and asked for a suggestion. I walked out with a roll of Kodak Elitechrome 100 color slide film, which has now sadly been discontinued. You should still be able to purchase it for a few months, so if you haven’t tried it out I would highly suggest picking up a roll or two.

The film was pretty easy to load, though the door on the back of the camera can be tricky to close. There’s a little lip that the door has to latch on to and it doesn’t do this naturally, you have to force it. It took a few tries but eventually I had the film loaded and the door tightly secured. The first thing you’ll notice when you look through the tunnel viewfinder is that woo boy, this is a super wide angle. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t shoot with wide angle lenses very often but it felt like the whole world opened up and I could suddenly fit everything in frame. It was awesome. I really had no issues shooting with the camera, the rewind dial worked perfectly, the shutter was responsive, overall no hiccups.

When I tried to remove the film however… I thought I was ripping it up. The dial was so hard to turn I thought surely I was doing something wrong so I quickly googled instructions on how to rewind the film to remove it. Sure enough, I was doing it right so kept at it. By the time I was done my fingerprints were sanded away from the notches on the rewind dial. Seems like every camera I get from Lomography has rewind or advance issues. This is a pretty standard feature for a camera. I dunno why they can’t seem to make it more smooth. My Holga is plastic and it rewinds/advances smoothly so I don’t think it’s because of the materials being used. It’s always very concerning for me when I have to forcibly rewind film like that, it feels like I’m ripping up my film. No bueno.

The pictures themselves were kind of a disappointment. The film was awesome, colors were lovely—skies were super awesome blue, grass was super awesome green. I think the failure in the pictures is a combination of my inexperience with extreme wide angle lenses and the quality of the camera in general. Out of 36 pictures there’s not one that I’m really excited about. I almost never center the subject or focal point of my images, but it’s definitely a must with an extreme wide angle, there’s a very small window in the middle of the frame that will be in focus and every thing outside of that will distort and blur. So subjects have to be in the middle. That just doesn’t provide the variety I desire.

I would still recommend this camera, but only for landscape photography: mountains, skyscrapers, parks, nature etc. Avoid people, or smaller objects. Below are a few of the shots that weren’t super offensive. The last one is an example of how not to photograph people with this camera. Keep ‘em in the center!

On our way out I spotted a basket full of old maps and brochures. They were all in pristine condition, as if someone had hidden them away in an archival box somewhere for most of their lives. This 1950s South Carolina Road Map had to be mine. It was so beautiful, a prime example of the clean and concise design that I so aspire to do. I love it all. The color palette: mustard yellow, bright red, ocean turquoise. I can only imagine how they must have popped on the bright white paper before it yellowed over the years. The brush type, (what looks like) Futura, the beautiful illustrations, and don’t even get me started on the copywriting. It’s adorable.

It unfolds into a fullsize roadmap but I had a hard time scanning it and getting photoshop to merge the scans correctly. I plan on framing it to show the mini-maps. It’s a real nice piece.