So the voices have been heard and the camera you wanted to see featured was the Altissa Altix V. A nice old German camera that takes 135 film. More about it can be seen if you click the “My Cameras” link at the top of the page and scroll a bit. This has been one of my favorite cameras for a while but sadly it is out of action at the moment. During my very long time in the states last year this camera got a but of a work out. But…

One day the film would not advance. I was quite sad needless to say. It turned out that the little gear that turned when the film advanced in order to cock the shutter is stuck. I know nothing about vintage camera repair and I have quite big fingers so there is no way I am going to open this thing up and tinker with it. Poor thing really. Its a great little camera and when it gets it right it really makes you happy.

Now these picture were a huge surprise to me. This roll of film had been floating around in a coat pocket since before last winter and I finally got around to developing it this past monday. I don’t know exactly when this roll was shot but by the looks of it it was a long time ago. These buckets of compost are from when we moved in to our house in February 2009.

Apparently I went around the house and garden, took some shots with the Altix and probably ruined half this roll when the camera broke, as there was only 12 shots on it. (Unless it was a 12 shot roll but who knows really). Its really an exciting thing to have a time capsule like this, especially as everything is changing right now both physically and otherwise. Its nice to be able to look back at little details you have forgotten. These images already have a dreamy quality to them. Having them revealed over a year after they were taken adds to this dreaminess and mystery.

The film was Kodak Gold 100 expired sometime in the past or possibly the future. Have I ever been an organized photographer? Hope you enjoy these shots. Stay tuned for a future post featuring the runner up of the wee little reader poll I did, the LCA+.

As I sit here at my computer scanning some film for the first time in quite a while I feel compelled to make a little update to my increasingly dormant blog.  So here it goes.

What’s new?

Well for starters that little blob up there is what will one day become my child.  Now I don’t suppose that after reading this your jaw will drop all the way to the floor as mine did when I saw this little guy moving around on the screen.  Still, this is pretty awesome news.  Life will be so different come this November.  As a matter of fact it already is pretty strange.  In all respects I am feeling the pregnancy as much as Susi is if you know what I mean.

But this is a photography blog so I might as well share some, well, photography.

This past Christmas me and my wife were so happy to be back together that we may have went a little overboard on the present department.  There was not really much surprise but we both ended up with things we really wanted.  She got a Wii (which she has barely touched) and I got a LCA+ (which has become one of my favorite cameras).

So like a boy with a new toy I have been snapping away with it and have put some four or five rolls through it.  Like most things in life results vary but this camera is indispensable when it comes to ease of use and portability.  Imagine a slightly heavier Ultra Wide & Slim with more features (and not as wide a lens of course).

So I hope you enjoy these shots and I will try to share some more new stuff soon but as you can imagine life is really busy right now and will only get busier.  And if you are really in despair about the long intervals between posts here on my blog I suggest you write a letter of complaint to Apple as I now have an iPhone thus dooming my computer to a lonely life with little human contact.

But rest assured that I will be picking up eight rolls of film this Tuesday and will do my best to scan them up.  In fact lets try a little game.  The eight rolls of film come from different cameras.  Those cameras are a Minolta SRT 201, the Four Corners Dark special edition Holga 120N, the Rainbow V UW&S clone, the aforementioned LCA+, my Altissa Altix (probably its last roll as it is now broken) and my trusty ol’ Holga GFN.  Leave a comment as to what camera you would like to see featured in my next post and whichever wins will be the first scanned. (This is really just a way of getting you readers to keep nagging me to make a new post).

So as promised here is a new post for all those of you that are still with me after my big lull in posts and photography.  Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t stopped taking pictures.  In fact my back log of film to get scanned up gets bigger and bigger.  But there have been many things going on in my life right now that have kept me away from the computer.

For starters, life is back to the way it used to be a year ago for the most part.  I have the same old stuff keeping me busy and eating up all my time.  That all comes with being back home with my wife I suppose.  Life is good and busy as it should be.

If you have followed my blog here the past so many months you will already know why I would be so happy to be back home with my wife.  It was a very long six months of my life when I was over in the states waiting for a visa.  In fact my whole visa troubles, that started over a year ago, are now finally coming to an end.  The final application that will give me a whole five years to live a normal, worry free life with my wife and my dog is sitting at the home office right now waiting for that all important stamp.  In fact it is sitting there in a bundle along with both me and my wife’s passports so the two of us are actually stranded on this green island for however long it takes.  Even if I wanted to leave I can’t.  After so much stress, work and tears it comes down to the final wait.  Lets hope it will be sooner rather then later.

Now dear readers I wouldn’t let you leave this fresh new post without some tasty photography.  I do have a nice new scanner after all and I have been using it.  But this offering of visual goodies doesn’t actually come from me this time.  Remember that special edition Four Corners Dark Holga that was offered up a while ago.  Well I gobbled one of the ten up right away and had it shipped to me when I was still in America.  When I finally got back to Ireland I presented it like a cat does a dead bird to my dear wife and she has been burning a few rolls through it.

The black and white shots were on some Ilford HP5 Plus which gave a great soft grey tone to the shots.  The color ones are on some Fuji slide film, I forget specifically which kind though.  It may have even been expired for all I know.  I am not very organized these days.

To my delight she really likes taking pictures with the Holga and waiting for the unexpected results.  She especially likes taking pictures of me.  The top picture and the next one are of myself.  We framed the top one as well and it sits on the mantel above the fire place.  Its a great shot in that all she wanted to do was capture something close in the foreground with an expansive background and what she ended up getting was the essence of me: wedding ring, cigarette and camera (if you look closely).  Its nice to be on the other side of the camera once in a while.

All these black and white shots were taken at a place called Nendrum at the end of the road near Strangford Lough.  Its a great place to go to take some pictures as the light is always amazing, especially at sunset.  We go there quite often when we have nothing to do and want a little inspiration and it never disappoints.

The slides were taken just on the beach near our house along Belfast Lough.  The same place that I took my first shots with the Holga.

If you want to see more of Susi’s budding talent check out all here shots on my flickr page here.

And as always, I emptily promise to keep the posts coming.

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.

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.

Why the big smile at the top of this post?  Well…After one hundred and fifty two days the moment I have been waiting for has finally arrived.  Today the UPS man came knocking on my door to deliver a slightly battered envelop filled lots of paperwork and one passport containing one family permit allowing me to go to the UK to join my wife.  The wait is over!  Life has just taken a turn towards happily ever after.  I can finally go back home to Ireland and start working and living again.

This whole time in the US is not a loss though.  It turned out so that I got my visa around the same time my sister is going to have a baby.  So now all that has to happen is for her to go and have the baby already.  Granted it does make me a bit impatient since I have to wait for that now.  But if I wasn’t already here for it I wouldn’t have a chance to see my yet to be born nephew for a very long time.  So its a good thing really that I had to wait this long.  I also bought about fifteen cameras since I’ve been here, so thats good too.  (Now I just have to figure out how to get them all to fit in my luggage.)

I thought for this post I would include some photography of mine that represents why I have endured this very long wait.  So please enjoy the lovely sentimental images, I hope they are as beautiful to you as they are to me.