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I’m down in Washington, NC this weekend. They weren’t going to have fireworks here, because of the dryness and all the wildfires already happening in the area, but they figured it was safe and went ahead. Good thing they did! There were a lot of folks out on the downtown waterfront.

This was my first time photographing fireworks. It didn’t go too bad, except that my battery died on the camera right as the finale started. I scrambled and put the film camera on the tripod, I’ll see how those turned out later.

More photos here.

Sometimes film does funny things that you cannot explain or duplicate. Most of the time those things are awesome.

Citizens for Sound are really sounding good, they’ve got enough original material now that they are playing on Thursday nights at Ocean View Fishing Pier. If you are there, don’t get in the way of the guy with the big camera!

More photos from the other night available here.

via Scrivener

Last weekend my good friends Drew Odom and Michele Mills were in town - they both stayed at my place. We just generally hung out and misbehaved and just had a blast. It was good to have them here.

For most of the weekend, I carted my Canon AE-1 (30 year old manual 35mm film camera) and snapped off shot after shot in the 36 exposure roll of film that I swore was in it. I even was responsible with it and brought along two spare rolls of film. I took what I think were great shots at dinner Friday night, on the Virginia Beach oceanfront on Saturday, at a cookout Sunday afternoon and at the craziest Karaoke this world has seen at a place in mcdowntown Virginia Beach (lately I don’t take a ton of pictures when I’m out with a camera, but the ones I take usually count).

Tuesday on my lunchbreak I went to go get the film developed. I went out of my way to Walgreens and after parking I wound the film up. As I did this, it didn’t feel like anything was happening. I opened the camera - there was no film! Talk about stupid. Talk about ruining your day. Now I know that with that camera watch the film rewinder for movement when you advance the film. I could have sworn that I loaded the camera after using it last!

Life goes on. No cool 35mm pics from me. We did manage a (possibly NSFW) photoshoot at around 2am Friday night. That was a fun learning experience for me that is furthering my interest in taking untraditional portraits of people - something more interesting than typical Olan Mills portraits. I reckon it does help to have a pretty lady that is willing to sit in front of my lens. Thanks to Drew for the setup and pointers on framing and to Michele on, well, being Michele. Hopefully we can get some good prints made to send to her.