International Kodak Film Photography Day 2014 and Philly Street

It's 2014 International Kodak Film Photography Day and as an avid Kodak shooter, I am going to celebrate with some initial favorites taken on a recent trip to Philadelphia with fellow DC street photographers Matt Dunn, Chris Chen, Bill Bramble and Mahan Talebian.

I packed two cameras for the trip; my BessaR rangefinder with the Voigtlander 35mm f/2.5 Color Skopar lens and Olympus EP1 digital camera. The BessaR served as my primary camera and the EP1 took care of random additional stuff. I shot 8 rolls of Tri-X over the two days checking out the city and upon initial review, it looks like I can group the few keepers into three general categories; Street, Portraits, and Places/Things.

DC to Philly, aka #DCpassyunk is in the Books

The first road trip of the summer, aka #DCpassyunk, my is in the books and on my scorecard it was a resounding success. A group of us rented a house in the Passyunk neighborhood of South Philly (near Gino's Steaks, kind of) and set out on our photographic and food related explorations throughout the city. Let me say right here that Philadelphia's food and people are both absolutely amazing. And we barely scratched the surface. Chris Chen acted as our resident food connoisseur and guided us to some epic meals.

Photographically speaking, we could all work as a group or explore a theme or area on our own. The early reports come Sunday afternoon indicated that everyone managed to work on something for themselves while still enjoying the camaraderie of the greater group. 

Planning the day's itinerary

A group mentality can backfire though, like when three of us telepathically understood that "this old woman in Chinatown with a gigantic umbrella is definitely going to lead to a photo" and we all descended upon her at once. It wasn't planned, but we all saw it and went for it. Thank God umbrellas can also double as a shield. 

I didn't arrive with any specific areas of focus in mind so I decided to check out Philadelphia for what it was and photograph whatever presented itself. Love Park was sought out though and I managed to hang with a few guys filming a skate scene. In total, I went through about 9 rolls of Tri-X and I'm in the process of developing and scanning those negatives, but I did shoot some random b-roll stuff throughout the weekend on my Olympus EP1. These are just interesting buildings, bits of nice light and compositions that I noticed along the way but didn't want to spend a frame of film on. The additives, if you will. 

I should have a couple more follow up posts with the film stuff in the coming weeks. 

Next up; Atlantic City! 

DC Street Photography Roudtrip Part Uno: Philly!

This weekend is a big one. Philly; the first stop in my set of summer road trips around/up/down/near the East Coast of the United States for DC Street Photographers.

The concept materialized a number of months ago when I was recollecting the old days of skate team tours, where a team of skateboarders would load themselves into a van and conduct a number of demos, skate sessions, meet with fans and generally cause a high quantity of impromptu mayhem along the way.

I thought that this could be an interesting activity for street photographers and immediately started looking into the details associated with loading a bunch of street shooters into a minivan and tear-assing through a few cities sometime this summer; shooting street, eating foods and checking out live music/art happenings along the way. The idea is to show the strength of the DC area Street Photography community by bringing them to other cities. That way, people from outside of the Beltway get a chance to check out what we capture throughout a number of cities and eventually dig into our work from the Nation's Capital.

A quick survey of known conspirators led to some very positive reactions to such plans, but I soon realized the logistics of lining up a van, the schedules of 4-5 people, and  adequate places to stay throughout multiple cities into the same week would be almost impossible. Especially with the amount of time I could allocate to formulating said plans (almost none) and available budgets (next to nothing). So, the concept morphed into a new plan:

Three cities on three separate weekends throughout three (or four) months of the summer. This way, different photographers can pick and choose what weekend works for them. First up is Philadelphia with Matt Dunn (@MattDunnDC), Chris Chen (@furcafe) and Mahan Talebian. My main objective of this particular weekend is to finally check out the venerable LOVE park, home to one of the most influential skate scenes in the US. I know it's but a shadow of its former self, but still...

Love Park via Blabac Photo (check that dude out; he's on point)

Anyway, Part 2 will be Atlantic City Boardwalk in late July and hopefully NOrleans in mid-September (30% chance of me surviving that trip).

Get at me in the comments section or on twitter @DGDCphotos or via email andy@dgdcphotography.com if you are interested in any of the trips or want to provide some tips about each location.