movement, movement

Annie Costner for El Origin Wool

Posted in 35mm, people, photography, portland by amoslanka on October 15, 2010

This Summer Laura and I did some photographical work for a friend Laura had met the previous Summer in Seattle at a street market. The project this friend was undertaking is a boutique-ish line of natural and fair-trade wool clothing made in Uruguay. The project, called El Origin Wool, has features many beautiful ideas as well as fashion, even though I myself don’t care that much for fashion itself. Friend of the project, Annie Costner, was all kinds of fun to work with and I was very happy to do some film photography for the shoot. Most of the highlights of which were posted by Laura at our collaborative website, Drt & Ink, and the digitals along with a great writeup about El Origin have been posted on Laura’s blog. (Recognize the scooter in those shots? Thats my Kermit..)

Annie Costner for El Origin Wool
Canon AE-1
Kodak Portra 400nc

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The Tone and Color of Autumn

Posted in 35mm, friends, music, photography by amoslanka on October 14, 2010

Michael Blake

Canon AE-1 35mm
Kodak Portra 400nc

Michael Blake and I have and will be working on some musical creations this Fall and Winter, I’m excited for where they may take us. We’ll do our best not so sound like singer/songwriters.

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Laura Dart + Mt. Hood

Posted in 35mm, friends, outdoors, photography by amoslanka on October 13, 2010

Laura Dart / Mt. Hood

Canon AE-1 35mm
Kodak Portra 400nc

Laura and I hooked up with Tom Lehman & Co. for some outdoor enjoyment in early August when she was visiting from Nashville for a few weeks. We’d wanted to do some camping while she was here and I was finally able to simply take a day off work to accomplish the necessary freedom of time to spend some of it in the wilderness.

The afore-mentioned Tom happened to be camping that same weekend and invited us to enjoy with his crew what is quite possibly the most amazing camping spot I’ve ever seen. The view of the Hood River valley and Mt. Hood itself was amazing, and enjoying the weekend with friends and especially with Laura was perfect.

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Too Many Options

Posted in 35mm, photography by amoslanka on October 13, 2010

I found an old gentleman here in Portland via Craigslist who has been collecting old film cameras, particularly 60’s and 70’s and 80’s era Canon and Nikon 35mms, for what seems to be a half a century. In his own words, he’s thinning out his inventory, which in effect is a ridiculous number of cameras, because my midday visit to his “warehouse” left me speechless at the hundreds of cameras he has on tables, couches, in boxes, and in hidden places in order to keep himself from being tempted to sell everything.

My void of words was well filled by Harold’s over abundance of words, and I enjoyed an extended lunch break packed as full as it could get with every bit of information that exists on the topic of the era and style of cameras I was there to inquire about. Harold seems to know more about the brands and technology and intricacies of these cameras than the whole Internet.

I’m in the market lately for the father of professional Canon SLRs, so I’m looking for the right Canon F-1 to join my family, though I’m also open to the idea of the iconic Nikon F or the less-vintage Canon F-1n or EF. Too many options, and in reality, Harold didn’t make my search any easier because my visit to his home today put them all at my fingertips. I’ll figure it out soon enough, however. Enjoy this eyecandy:


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Berlin to Brugge

Posted in medium format, music, photography, travel by amoslanka on October 12, 2010

In late September Laura and I were able to travel together back to Europe, this time to Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. The circumstance we found was an invitation to follow and shoot behind the scenes on the last leg of the European tour consisting of Mumford & Sons, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Nathaniel Rateliff, and we would have been able to travel longer had it not been for the wedding shoot in Wisconsin that had already been booked for a year or two.

Jumping back into European traveling mode only six months after our last trip was rather easy and automatic, though I hadn’t planned on making it back overseas so soon. We were rushed, of course, in getting to Amsterdam as soon as possible in order to catch up with the sequence of the final three shows of the tour, Cologne, Germany, Berlin, and Brussels Belgium. This time we wouldn’t be spending the majority of the time with only each other as we did last year. Instead, Odessa Jorgensen and Gill Landry, close friends of Laura’s would be doing much of the traveling along side us.

This time around we weren’t able to write the daily blog posts as we did last May, but we were able to do as much shooting. I’ve yet to finish getting my photos from the first trip processed and scanned due to a busy summer, but this time a round its actually been much quicker. Here are a few I shot of Laura and Odessa in Brugge and Berlin, respectively:

Laura Elizabeth Dart

Odessa Rose Jorgenson

Hasselblad 500c/m
Kodak Portra 400nc

I’ll have more to share soon, including some of the concert and behind the scenes photos, though the best of those will be held until November for publication in print. If such things interests you, please keep track of Drt & Ink, my collaboration with Laura at our new site, drtandink.com and the blog at drtandink.com/blog.

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With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!

Posted in 35mm, photography, poetry by amoslanka on September 24, 2010

Lauren Stonestreet

With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
Thy ample, smiling face, dash’d with the sparkling dimples of the sun,
Thy brooding scowl and murk–thy unloos’d hurricanes,
Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness;
Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears–a lack from all
eternity in thy content,
(Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, could make thee
greatest–no less could make thee,)
Thy lonely state–something thou ever seek’st and seek’st, yet
never gain’st,
Surely some right withheld–some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of
freedom-lover pent,
Some vast heart, like a planet’s, chain’d and chafing in those breakers,
By lengthen’d swell, and spasm, and panting breath,
And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves,
And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter,
And undertones of distant lion roar,
(Sounding, appealing to the sky’s deaf ear–but now, rapport for once,
A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,)
The first and last confession of the globe,
Outsurging, muttering from thy soul’s abysms,
The tale of cosmic elemental passion,
Thou tellest to a kindred soul.
– Walt Whitman

Lauren Stonestreet
Canon AE-1
Kodak Portra 400nc

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This Is Home

Posted in 35mm, photography by amoslanka on September 22, 2010

this is home

Literally.

Canon AE-1 35mm
Kodak Portra 400nc
Stapleton, Nebraska

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Site Launch: StruckAxiom.com

Posted in life, work by amoslanka on September 21, 2010

Every so often I write a post here about what I’ve been working on in my 9-5 life. Sometimes a project comes along that particularly stands out in my mind. Some of you may know that I left my old job at Summit shortly after finishing the largest project I’ve ever been a part of, which led to some time off in between jobs before starting with StruckAxiom in June.

Officially today at StruckAxiom we’ve launched a site for quite possibly the hardest client to satisfy, ourselves. StruckAxiom.com has gone live and I’m extremely excited about the new branding (developed after Struck merged with Axiom) and the new site. Working at Struck so far has been challenging and exciting in terms of the ability to push into new areas and curiosities, and I’m very happy to be a part of it.

As for the future, besides working for a top-notch agency, I’ve got more ventures than ever, including a lot of rethinking of my own blog and website (new designs coming soon) and the collaborative site, blog, and life that Laura and I are beginning. Trying to find a way to fit it all in, including another trip to Europe on Sunday.

StruckAxiom.com

The I Chromosome

Posted in photography, poetry by amoslanka on September 17, 2010

Seth Braverman

Seth Braverman, a Poet
Rocky Mountain National Park

the father’s voice: did you see it? at the beach, did you see what I took you to see?

the son’s eyes fill with water.

as surely as we get the Y chromosome from our fathers, so we also get the I chromosome from our fathers, or, rather, the eye chromosome. it is through our fathers we are given the gift of sight, and in so seeing, our own identity, our I, is formed. they are given then the task  of teaching us how to see, to show us many great and baffling things with which to learn to look. they take us to discover the ocean or a sunrise, so beautiful that we go dumb and nearly blind. and when we do regain our speech, we simply say, “help me to see,” realizing all we’ve yet to learn, that endless sea. and sight still baffles our fathers, or they are no longer fit to teach. or they are dead or dying. if that time comes, as for some it surely will, it is we who must then take our fathers by their age-ed, hardened hands to discover, once again, the mysteries of light in the hush before dawn.

(expanse)

Posted in quotes by amoslanka on August 12, 2010

The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it.
– Mark Twain’s Notebook

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