As the RayKo Gallery in San Francisco closes its exhibition of the Plastic Camera Show, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for coming out and making it a great success. The opening reception had hundreds of people in attendance and was a lot of fun. The following set of images were taken by Tim Rollins. Click here to see the full set of images.
Since I am in the final semester of my graduate degree at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco I decided to take a fun class to escape the pressure of my thesis, at least for a few hours a week. The class I chose is “Plastic and Pinhole Photography”. I mostly find myself gravitating toward the Holga in this class, although I have also run quite a bit of film through the Zero 2000 and Blackbird, Fly as well.
I grew up in Dallas, Texas and as such didn’t have access to the ocean. I have now lived in California for just over ten years and I am still awestruck every time catch a glimpse of the Pacific. At the risk of sounding too much like a San Francisco hippy, there is an inescapable force that the ocean carries with it. When I plant my feet firmly in the sand and allow the tide to slowly wash around me I experience a feeling that is simply too difficult to describe. The mood on the coast is vastly different with each visit. I can go to the same cliff or beach every day at the same time for a week straight and have very different light and character each time.
It is with this background that I decided there is no better place to focus on for my class project than the northern California coast line. I photographed the following nine images within the same week at various spots around the Bay area. The project has since changed slightly and I will post updates throughout the semester, but this is the genesis.
Recently I have been dabbling in the art of pinhole photography. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it is essentially about bringing photography back to the basics. And when I say basics, I mean basics. Pinhole photography entails putting a piece of film inside a light-tight box or can and exposing it through a pin-sized hole for about 30 seconds to a minute. No lens. No viewfinder. That’s it. The images come out fairly soft and dream-like. The fun of this process is never knowing what you are going to get until you run the film through the chemicals. The following are three images that I created using this method this week.
