After many sessions that have left me frustrated and angry and failed, I’ve finally started to have some success shooting tintypes. I’ll hopefully be blogging about my equipment and setup in the near future once I get it a bit better nailed down, but I’m happy with what I’ve got thus far.

The amazing thing about shooting tintypes is that they were the polaroid photos of their day. Photographers (who were considered craftsmen and not artists) would set up on the streets and shoot people’s portraits, creating the film, exposing it, and developing it all in one sitting. I go from a blank piece of metal to an image in about 10 minutes.

Scanning doesn’t do these photos credit. I’ll have to start shooting photos of them instead. The varnish I use gets dust in it that you don’t see with your eye but that the scanner picks up.

Anyhow, I moved to an interior light setup and I love what I’ve been getting.

But I’ve gotten a few decent ones from direct sunlight:

the whole set is on my Flickr

I stopped by my friend Rayna Polsky’s house in PA a few weeks so we could explore the woods and little towns in the area. And what did I end up spending my time doing? Scanning her old photo and tintype collection.

The whole set

Martha Swetzoff is currently shooting a documentary on steampunk, and about a month ago she interviewed me and Jake von Slatt for the project. Which meant I got to go on a tour of Jake’s steampunk workshop, which is pretty sweet. The whole place is filled with junk from floor to ceiling and he’s got a stroh violin! This is also the first time I’m trying this new flickr plugin. I’m not convinced I like it, but my old one is broken.

Continue reading Jake von Slatt’s Steampunk Workshop →

Acadia National Park sits off the coast of Maine in all its frozen glory. Lakes, carriage trails, weird-ass yuppie-looking towns that are probably actually really nice to live in, and a coast that finally makes the American Atlantic have something worth saying to the Pacific. Also my friend brought a horn the likes of which you don’t really get to blow when you’re in civilization. But frozen lakes, on the other hand…

Continue reading Acadia! →

The other Portland is actually really beautiful! (Yes, yes, I know it’s older than the one in Oregon, but having spent many years of my life living in the West Coast one, Maine has “the other Portland.”)

Any how, we walked around and I patiently listened to my friends extolling the virtues of eating the flesh of slaughtered sea creatures. And I liked this sticker so much because I was in the middle of reading REAMDE and kinda not-so-secretly just wanted to be reading. But okay seriously Portland was pretty and the weather was cold but lovely.

We also went by Occupy Maine and I met a silly counter-protester all by his lonesome who was sad that someone had burned the flag. What I really love about this guy is that he totally groks the aesthetic of bad-grammar signs on cardboard. This fellow is missing an article.

Continue reading That other Portland →

Witches! A whole town with a tourist industry based around some people who got brutally murdered there by the State! Woo! Also I got to see a pilgrim graveyard. And learn that before it was a genre, witch house was a house. A really really pretty one.

Continue reading Salem, MA →

We left Boston to head up to Maine and decided to stop in Salem, MA. Most of the museums seemed pretty kitschy, but the Peadbody-Essex Museum is the oldest longest-running museum in the US, or so they claim. It was half a proper art museum and half an old sailors drinking hall, with rooms full of old “hey look at this weird shit we found in our colonialist explorations!” knick knacks. Pretty interesting. Particularly, from my point of view, the displays of really old books.

Continue reading Peabody-Essex Museum →

I hadn’t been to Boston since 2004. Last time I was here, someone called the terrorist tipline on me and I was bumrushed on the street by plainclothes cops from DC. Because I was wearing a skirt. Awesome.

Anyhow, this last trip has gone much better, all told. I’ve been hanging out with cool anarcho folks and gotten to explore abandoned bear cages for what would have been a zoo but is now a park. Also, my friend makes awesome handicrafts and I took photos of them. The needleworks are about mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Continue reading Boston! →