deeply disappointing.
Move home at age 28 after flunking out of carpetbagging Los Angeles via the film industry, bring some of that gold hour magic light back with you, work through some shit, and get ready for the next thing. Remember that you’re from the cold, and that gold hour is not really who you are.
Repeat.
Self-Effacement Ritual:
Pentax 6x7 MLU with the 105 2.4 - Pro 160 NS in 120mm with really crappy color grading because the lab kinda messed up my order up, and you had to do all the color/luminance corrections yourself on a computer - rather than them more or less being correct out of the box, not in a color print head. Pro 160 is a great film, I wish it hadn’t gotten fucked up. I still think it’s probably too slow for me, especially shot at 80 - I don’t really give a shit about grain, especially in 120 + larger because at most of the display sizes that the work is going to be seen in, it won’t show up.
A bit of an aside - I’m gonna miss pro400h, (the faster sibling of 160NS) not just because it’s “fuji’s answer to portra” but because it’s a cool tone film with great tonal scale, and relatively fast -- funnily enough Ektar has a pretty cool tones despite the loud ass reds, so that’s fine in 100 speed. That’s really kind of a key change in the so-called “film community” over the last four years -- I remember when fuji acros 100 (the original one) was discontinued -- there was a mild price jump on the secondary market, but there wasn’t an insane gouging war like there is for pro400h - and the price remained right around 40-50 bucks per pro-pack post discontinuation (though much to my chagrin, the film used to be 24/pro pack).
I’m pretty burnt out on needing to stock up or replace gear and materials only to find out the prices have doubled for no discernable reason, other than well meaning hobbyists are buying shit up (I had to buy a backup pentax 6x7, and it cost me literally double what I paid for one in 2017). I’m hoping to get off social media soon, at least for a little while - my work has kinda diverged in three directions, and I kinda need to step back and refocus on the material worth a damn, or like digging into.
Color is great, and to date my major photographic “party trick” is printing color/ my fluency in doing so - but I have no clue what I’m doing with color anymore, or like what the significance of color is to me anymore, so I’m calling it quits on using color (negative or positive) until I can find something worth shooting in color again.
Gold Hour is still gold even in silver gelatin.
Shout Out Will Hopkins for ferrying back all the rolls of Pro 160NS from Japan - no small feat, especially while recovering from a hernia. I just wish I could’ve made something more significant with it. Sorry Will.
Then again, to quote Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story - “Life is disappointing, isn’t it?”
-Andrew D. McClees
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(Also I know it’s 120 film you chodes, I just think the the whole it’s 120 not 120mm is the fucking dumbest shit to get on a high horse about - rather than like the obsolescence of most men doing creepgazy art nudes of women, or like the objectification of the homeless, or glamourization of drugs, or like a million other things that are actually worth picking a fight over.)