As I take more and more digital photographs every roll of film I finish is that bit more special. This particular roll is extra special as it's the last one of a batch of film called Konica Centuria I picked up a couple of years ago I-can't-remember-where. It's one of my favourite-looking colour films, and one of the best-named; futuristic and timeless.It's also not being made anymore, so any stock still around is out of date and going cheap, so I think I'll stock up while I still can. The image above, taken at the Camden Palace, was a semi-accident (as were the last two images in this post) caused not entirely by my slightly ill-functioning camera but more by my own paranoia that said camera was misfiring. When I wound the film on after I took the first photo I took the same photograph again, just in case. So it turns out the film is just not being transported properly. Still, this has given me an idea - take every photograph on a roll of film twice using the camera's multiple exposure lever. This roll is semi-defined by fortunate mistakes.
Black Sun at the Camden Palace Hotel with Daniel Higgs, Raising Holy Sparks, Rory Francis O'Brien and Sacred Harp Shape Note Singers of Cork, 23-4-11:
Broken bits of Galway
Around January or so, whenever the really bad snow and frost coincided with storminess, seemingly all the palm trees around the city died. This one (which looked like this in better days) I spotted one night in Salthill after I had just run out of film. A few days later I spied it again, this time on Aaron's wall in several gorgeous medium format photos he'd taken a few weeks previous...
I love how the particular film, coupled with exposures of 30+ seconds, warp the colours and give an unreal sheen to everthing. I hope these trees grow back...
These are the first two photographs on the roll, accidentally double exposed and displayed here with each layer's correct orientation:
The non-palm tree photos are of a guy waiting for a bus in Dun Laoghaire, while I was studying in Sallynoggin between September 2009 and May 2010. I have no clue when exactly I took these photographs. I obviously put the film in the camera, took two photographs and rewound it and replaced it, for whatever reason, with a different roll. This happens quite a lot because, though I do try to be diligent and record on the film canister itself what lies within, I regularly forget and just put the film back in the drawer with the others. Then, weeks or months later, I'll use the film and this will happen. They're like strange, incoherent messages from a mysterious past self and one of the reasons I love film - what comes out of the photographs is sometimes entirely at the mercy of the owner's whims and flaws. I love these last two photographs, but also they are a slightly depressing reminder (in a sea of slightly depressing reminders) of how poor my skills of concentration and recollection are. But still, it's funny that the main method I employ to counter-act this absentmindedness - photography - is a long way from being itself immune from it.
All of which leads nicely to this set of double exposures I did with Dave and had developed the same day as the above roll... Which segueing/linking is altogether too slick of me.
