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The Landmark Series - Part One

I'd been planning this shoot for about two weeks before I did it and my sister and I invited several people before it happened. I wanted to create a fashion photoshoot displaying endangered buildings around Buffalo. Instead of selling clothing, we would be selling the buildings ("Please don't demolish us!").

Russell had told me repeatedly that he wouldn't be able to make it down to Buffalo again until April. He didn't have enough money or something like that and he had just left the previous Tuesday and he couldn't come back so soon. Being Russell, he showed up Saturday night at my house along with his friend Nancy from college.

Russell, Nancy, my sister, and the other people who could make it to the shoot on the short notice that we gave them showed up at our house at around 11:30 in the morning. The day started hectic with the models arguing over what clothing to wear and what would look good and what wouldn't and it didn't really get any better. We managed to shoot at three locations. We returned home after only about three shots from the first one because it was so cold. It was probably the coldest day of the year so far (the weather in Buffalo has been kind of schizophrenic lately, sixty degrees one day, sixteen degrees the next).

The bad luck that seemed to plague me the entire weekend (more on that in a later post) continued to follow me to the next location. After shooting a few shots at the H-O Oats grain elevator, I ran to the car to warm up since my fingers were about to fall off. As I was opening the car door, my camera slipped from my hands and landed upside down on the pavement with a loud crack. My heart pounded as a lifted it up to find a giant crack across the top of the camera above the view-finder. I continued to take photos, but my day was kind of ruined after I called the camera store and found out that my warranty doesn't cover camera-dropping.

I took the film to the camera store and got the negatives along with one hours prints. I asked the people how much it might take to repair my camera and they said it would probably be over $100. That's nearly as much as my camera cost (minus $90) and I'm kind of broke so I'm going to have to put some electric tape or something over the cracks so light doesn't come in. The pictures turned out very well despite the bad-luckiness of the day. There are some light spots on the right hand side of some of the photos from where light seeped in from the crack in the camera, but they don't really ruin the pictures. I kind of liked some of the one-hour prints equally or better than the ones I developed in the dark room so I scanned both.

To view the photos in a slideshow, click here. To view the photos in an album, click here.

January 20, 2006 at 10:33 PM

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