TexasGirl Photography

January – a new year, a new beginning, which began with an ending: I closed my business. I had intended to keep it open “just in case,” just to leave the door open for possibilities, and then I realized I was going to be expected to pay a huge amount of property taxes even if I wasn’t earning a dime. Considering that I only earned $400 in the second half of last year, I knew it was time to throw in the towel. So as of January 1st, the biz is no more. Onward to other, hopefully more lucrative things.

As much as I have felt recently that I am moving away from photography, I did a lot of it this month. My father gave me a Deardorff view camera for Christmas, and I put a lot of effort into testing it out – with frustrating, less than satisfactory results that I’m pretty sure are largely due to my resistance to the restrictiveness of the lenses I have for it. None of them are very wide and it drives me crazy.

My first outing with the camera was to a pecan grove in a local park. I had pined for a photo trip among those trees for over a year, and could have easily spent the entire day there. I used a couple of different lenses (160 mm with only the lens cap for a shutter, and a 190 mm more modern lens), and both 4×5 and 5×7 film.

Of course the image I was most excited about has a light leak due to a faulty film holder. C’est la vie with large format, for me anyhow.

My next outing was to a greenbelt area in Austin, and I’ll admit I was mostly disappointed with the results. Lens focal length kept me from being able to deliver the vision I had for the place, plus I had some trouble focusing because of the way I contorted the camera. I only used the 190 mm lens because I was concerned about over exposing everything, and at the end of the session the lens became jammed & refused to function properly at all.

There’s a lot more to that location, and I am looking forward to going back with more forgiving gear.

In other news, I spent an entire day figuring out how to do C41 processing, which means I will finally be able to finish the work I made last summer in Colorado and New Mexico. For now, I will just share this photograph, self-developed to my great satisfaction. A tree of memories.