Again I must appologise to all of you who keep visiting here hoping for an update. Life is so busy at the moment and I haven’t had time to get around to much of anything. I still have all my film sitting on my desk waiting to be scanned. I did geta few new cameras for Christmas and have already burned some film through them as well. So, again, sit back and be patient for some new stuff from this very busy photog. Maybe I should rename the blog the Lazy Penguin.
So I haven’t had a new post in a while. I am very sorry about that. My readership sometimes surpasses the teens so I know how much the world depends on my ramblings and accompanying photos. Well how about a little update and a long lost photo from a long time ago.
For those of you concerned, I am back in Northern Ireland with my wife at long last. Six months apart was in many ways the worst experience of my life. Right now life is back to normal, whatever that is. This of course means that for the first time in half a year I am busy. This will remain as my excuse for not posting in such a long while.
I finally have the scanner that I planned to get before my lovely little exile and I am slowly realizing how frustrating technology can be. I am trying to find the time to scan all my negatives but life being as it is that time is scarce (and I am also a huge procrastinator and slightly lazy). With the weather being as it is here on the emerald isle there isn’t much chance to get out and shoot so my only photographic plans in the near future are to get all my film scanned. I even have plenty of new photos I would love to share as soon as I get through the other 500+ but for some autistic reason originating from the dark chasm of my head I need to scan all my film as chronologically as I can.
So on that note I hope you were admiring the photo at the top of this post. I know I am. For some reason this photo was never printed when I first got it back from the lab. It is actually from the second (I think) roll I put through my Holga back when this crazy obsession of mine started and I only had the one camera. Naturally as I am just starting to scan my film this little beauty was one of the first surprises I got. Come to think of it, I might have just written this shot off as a blurry piece of crap like I had with so many other shots. Huh, funny how aesthetics evolve.
Anyways, I hope I didn’t bore too many people away from my little blog here with my lack of new posts for so long. I promise to keep the film flowing from now on, I swear. I have a few ideas floating around in this brain of mine so do come and check in every once in a while.
If you follow my photographic adventures you undoubtedly have seen quite a few shots of this street sign from Berlin. I figured since today is my last day in America before I finally go back to Ireland to join my wife it would be a perfect time to give the full story behind this shot and share my most meaningful photo I have ever taken. After all, this one photo represents everything I have been working towards these last six months and makes all the suffering of forced separation worth it.
Around the end of January this year my wife and I were in Berlin, Germany to register for our upcoming wedding. Since my family has always traced it’s heritage back to Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the Diesel engine, we always wondered if there was a Diesel Street somewhere in Germany. Susi’s dad informed us that there was actually one right there in Berlin. We rushed out to a book store and bought a road atlas to send to my family with the street circled in it for when they come for the wedding. We left Berlin and returned home content with the knowledge of Diesel Street.
Months passed and the next time we were in Berlin was for our wedding this last August. The idea of finding Diesel Street had taken a back burner to everything else going on until we were at the reception. During her dad’s tremendous speech, we were presented with an A4 sized picture of a white street sign that read Dieselstraße. Upon closer examination we saw that our names and a heart were on a piece of paper hanging from the bottom of this sign. The family had went out of their way to find this street, clean the sign and hang our names under it, which wasn’t a small task since they sent the shortest person they could. Now we had to go and find it.
Oliver John Bayer was born on Tuesday October 6, 2009 at 3:47 in the morning thus solidifying my status as Uncle DJ. Now there is a long running tradition in my family of giving relatives funny names. It all came about because my sister could never say anyone’s names properly when she was a child we can’t be sure if Uncle DJ will actually stick. Oliver’s mother predicts something along the line of Dunkle. We will have to wait and see.
My sister asked me if I wanted to take some pictures for her since I have become the photographer of the family and I said sure. I didn’t want to disappoint so I opted for the fancy cameras over my beloved plastic ones. It was going to have to be done indoors after all and I am notoriously crappy at these kind of pictures. So I loaded up some Kodak Portra NC 400 in my trusty Minolta SRT 201 and Yashica Minister D and headed over to the hospital. There was great light coming in through the huge picture window in the hospital room that I thought would be great. Unfortunately the wee man had to feed and the tired mom had to sleep so the photo session had to wait.
They took the little guy home a few days ago and the chance came again yesterday to take some good photos so we set him up in his little bed and I started sapping away. A lot of the shots were underexposed but the ones that weren’t are perfect. I had the idea of sticking a plastic magnifying glass on the lens of the SRT for some obligatory close up feet shots as well. Surprisingly the little guy was quite well behaved for most of the time. I am quite pleased with how the shots turned out, although I will gladly pick a crappy camera over ones with so much choice. But the only thing that matters is that my sister is pleased with the results and hopefully I was able to give her some nice memories that maybe have a little more heart than the thousands of digital shots they already have.
I am really liking this plastic magnifying glass. I think it made a really dreamy intimate photograph that I hope will mean a lot to the family as time goes buy and his tiny little feet and hands get bigger. I would hope that maybe they would see that the slight inconvenience of film over digital is worth it in the end when you can capture such warm moments. I hope you enjoy these photographs as much as my very proud family does.
The flood of zero emails I got about why I haven’t been doing my photo-a-day(ish) thing anymore got me thinking. For one, did people actually care? And two, maybe I should officially bury the whole thing. The fact is the project has really run its course. I originally decided to post a photo every day as a way to pass time while I waited for my visa. Kind of a zen like exercise to make the sands of time slightly less harsh. And in all respects it worked. It gave me something to do and gave me an outlet for all my thoughts. More importantly it gave me a way to share my world with my wife who I haven’t seen in a very long time. Most of the stuff that I wrote was for her anyways.
Now that I actually have a ticket booked for home I haven’t felt the need to post something every day and I also haven’t had the time. Now there is actually a date when I will get home, October 16 at 9 o’clock in the morning. The need to pass time has become a little diminished. In fact I actually have another project that I am doing but I can’t reveal anything for a while and it actually involves two different countries and no computers, but more about that in a few weeks time hopefully.
Now, if you look at the photo in this post and you remember from this post about a month ago I said that one of my favorite pictures was yet to come, well thats it at the top of this post. I think the fact that I will be home in 13 days is reason enough to share it. Some of you might have seen it already on Flickr and I am sure most of you have seen the plethora of other shots I have of the same thing. But this one in particular strikes a very emotional chord in me. It feels like it was just yesterday that I married my beautiful wife and I remember vividly the magical time we had in Berlin. I wish I could live in that time of our lives but sadly life had other plans and it has been our destiny to suffer through this separation. This shot captures everything that was special those almost six moths ago. The light coming through, the sense of joy and exhilaration, the care free feeling while we waited to embrace the happily ever after. I truly love this shot and on an emotional and spiritual level it is the best photo I have ever taken. Its quite long so stay tuned for the full story of how this lone street sign came to be so important to me and my wife.
