Today, the day I am posting these scans, is Friday, July 7th, 2023. It was a pleasant day. It wasn't too hot, although it did get very warm by 3 p.m. when I had to go out to do errands. But it is still bearable. It seems much more so than the experience of those living in much of the rest of the United States, especially in Texas, where it is said that they have been having to endure a miserable "heat dome".
These are photos I took with my Minolta Autocord back in May, before my operation. It involved a trip out to one of my mainstays, the Southern California Railway Museum in Perris, CA. It was a "blooming" day, and it was just around the time of May 5th, that bloated fiesta that has taken hold here in the United States. It is definitely bloated, and it really overwhelms you, but with the Mexican identification with this holiday, it seems as if almost every city, town, village and hamlet holds a celebration. It is as prof. David Hayes Bautista says, it is now an "American" holiday, celebrated much more widely and fervently by the Mexican (and Latino) populations in the United States than by Mexicans in Mexico.
It was a saturated day. What do I mean? The colors were just way too saturated, I remember thinking this as I walked around. It was as if the universal controller or setting had been raised too high. If you believe that our universe is just a simulation being run by a higher intelligence or agency, not god, something that arose and evolved in the universe, a scenario recalled in the novel "Darwinia" by Robert Charles Wilson, then that is what I felt. The programmer who was using their other-worldly version of Lightroom or Photoshop had set the saturation levels way to high. It seemed unreal to me.
I walked around and was astounded by the intense colors I saw in the vegetation, in the buildings and in the overall location. It just didn't look real, and the film I used, Kodak 200, caught that over-saturated look. Now, I know, I know, oversaturation is a feature of, say, Velvia 50 slide film, but I WAS NOT USING SLIDE FILM, I was using Kodak 200 color film! Still, I walked around in wonderment, framing my shots with the camera that has really been my mainstay these last few years, my Minolta Autocord TLR.
These photos were taken not that long ago, but it feels as if it has been forever. I had my hernia operation on May 19th, and after that, I was incapacitated for many weeks. I could move around, slowly and gingerly, but I had to be careful. The main nature of my incapacitation was mental. I just wasn't inspired to go anywhere. I didn't want to go to any public gardens, not to any urban locations, etc. I was just fed up with it all, and was desperate for a new beginning. So I didn't send out the film to get it developed, I just held it in the cabinet until last week, when I finally sent it in on June 26th.
I received the package and I was not particularly impressed. Well, to be truthful, I did not really like anything that I saw. This roll was probably the best of the lot of three rolls I sent in, and yes, it cost me a pretty penny to send them in to the Darkroom and get them developed. It was about $8 per roll for developing ($24 total), plus $3 more per roll of slide (two slide rolls = $6), plus tax (about $6) plus postage (about $6). So, it ran me about $45 to get them developed, more than it cost to buy the *damn* film itself. This is a very expensive habit, and I need to put an end to it.
As I was saying before, I have no idea of what I want to photograph now. I don't know where to go, it seems as if it all seems futile, I can't see anything new. It is all for naught, and I want novelty, I want to reach the wellstone of creation. (Is there a "wellstone"? What does that mean?) No more public gardens, though. I was just reflecting on this as I was walking at the Hidden Valley Nature Reserve today. I do not want to go to all the public gardens in my local area that I was frequenting during the Covid years. No more California Botanic Garden, no more Los Angeles Arboretum, no more Descanso Gardens, no more South Coast Botanic Garden, no more UCR Botanic Garden, no more Sherman Library Garden, no more San Diego Public Garden (they had yet another "corpse" flower blooming currently!), just no more of these gardens. I am exhausted and can't see anything new.
I don't know what to explore, though. I have thousands of dollars worth of film, just boxes and boxes and boxes of film, and I see it and despair, because I still feel the urge to buy more film, but I have nothing to use it on. I even have boxes and boxes of steadily aging Fuji FP100C pack film that I need to use fast, but I can't figure out what to photograph! I am reverting as well to old habits, that is, going to my digital SLRs and photographing cultural dance performances, but of course, I can't photograph them with my film, using medium format involves such finicky detail and setting of exposure parameters that I can't imagine getting anything worthwhile. Plus, I don't even want to look at all the negative I exposed over the past 20+ years. I am certainly in a rut.
Well, I'll upload a few more scans. I am on a search.
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