tuer le Fantôme III: autour de la maison

I didn’t shoot the whole second roll of le Fantôme in the snow… I also checked the 35mm f/2 D focus range… I took a couple selfies too. Sure, I more or less just burned the roll, but what else is film for?

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tuer le Fantôme II: la rupture de neige

After my first failure with Lomography’s Fantôme Kino film, I was hesitant to try it again. Then, one day in early January 2021, after some success with the Babylon Kino, I shoved a roll into the FM3a, bolted the 35mm f/2 D on the front, and went to town…

Interestingly, and rare for North Texas, it snowed! And I had just seen several of those photographs where someone popped a flash into the rain or snow and got those bright dots against a dark sky… I figured the SB-28 at full power would provide both enough light and enough reach that I could stop down to f/5.8 or f/8 and maybe get something similar.

Well…

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tuer le Fantôme I: ne reste pas

When Lomography announced its Fantôme and Babylon Kino films, I hesitated at first, then went ahead and ordered 5 rolls of each. I wasn’t too excited about some slow black & white film, but I appreciate what Lomography are doing, and want to support new (and newly available thanks to repackaging) film stocks.

They took awhile to come, and waited a bit before trying one, but then, one Saturday in June 2020, as my darling wife and I prepared for a scenic drive I grabbed a roll, loaded it into the FM3a, attached the Nikon 105mm f/2.5, and threw caution to the wind…

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Jonathan Levitt – ‘Echo Mask’

Editor’s note: what follows is a sort of writing exercise, undertaken in response to Janet Malcolm’s brilliant “Forty-One False Starts.” I didn’t do it justice, though I did have some fun writing it. If you want a proper, if brief, review, jump to the bottom. If you want to see me have some fun, well, read on.

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Nathan Benn – ‘A Peculiar Paradise’

A Peculiar Paradise: Florida Photographs is exactly what it claims to be: photographs, made in Florida, by former National Geographic photographer (and one time head of Magnum) Nathan Benn. Most—if not all—of the photographs were made in two Geographic-funded trips, one in 1973, “to fill out another photographer’s coverage of the flourishing Cuban-born community centered in Little Havana;”* the other in 1981 to photograph the state in general. Most of the photographs included in A Peculiar Paradise are previously unpublished, including, if I read correctly, all of the 1981 pictures due to Benn’s inclusion of a human torso that had washed up on the beach in his selections for the Geographic’s pictures editor…

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