Vacation!

I’m leaving for vacation on August 2nd, and will be returning on the 21st. Starting out in Washington, DC for a few days, visiting friends. After that it’s off to Amsterdam, followed by a few days in the Dutch countryside, visiting friends who live near Apeldoorn.
Then it’s off to Budapest for several days. We’re planning a day trip from Budapest to Vienna as well.

This is a vacation, not a working trip, but I’ll be shooting the entire time, and it’s quite likely I’ll end up with some photos that I can use when I start making alternative process prints. Vacationing, fun, and enjoying the company of friends are my main goals, however.

I’m bringing art as gifts for my friends. They’re all recently made pieces, and all involve some aspect of alternative process photography, so I thought I’d post them here.


This is a Polaroid lift made for my friend Michael. Michael moved from Chicago to the Washington DC area a couple of years ago, and recently bought a condo. This is a housewarming gift for his new place. The original photos were taken in Olympic National Park on the Pacific coast of Washington state two years ago. Michael went to graduate school at the University of Washington, and knows the area well. In fact, I think it was him that convinced us to go out to Olympic National Park when we visited Seattle. I scanned the finished lift, cleaned it up a little, then enlarged it and made a print roughly 12 X 24 inches. I had to mail it, it’s too big to fit in my luggage.


This print is for my friend Els, who lives in Wenum, a small village outside of Apeldoorn in The Netherlands. I met Els while doing an educational exchange a couple of years ago. Els also teaches art and photography, at the Netherlands equivalent of a community college. For the exchange, she came to Chicago for two weeks in the Fall, stayed in my house, went to school with me, saw the sights, etc. The following Spring, I went to The Netherlands and did the same thing. We became friends, and have kept in touch. We’ll be visiting her when we are in Holland, so I made this for her. The photo was taken with my Holga camera using black & white film. I scanned the negative, played with the color quite a bit, then enlarged it and made a print.


This one is for my friend Dal, who lives in Budapest. Dal is a former colleague from school. A few years ago, he met up with an old flame from college. She is Hungarian, and when they realized they were a couple, got married and moved to Hungary.
This print is a bit of an experiment, an attempt at a vertical panorama shot with my Nishika 4-lens camera (you can see other images made with this camera if you go back to the first posts in this blog). I’ve shot a few more of these panoramas. If they work, I may enlarge them and make digital negatives to do alternative process prints with them. This one was shot at Millennium Park here in Chicago.

I’ll try to post at least a couple of times while I’m off seeing the world. and will try to upload some vacation photos as well. I don’t think I’ll be too far from a computer while I’m away. If I don’t manage to post during my trip, I’ll update as soon as I get back.