It's my turn to shoot... with a camera.

So those of you who read my blog know that I do a little writing, but I also enjoy doing a bit of photography from time to time. Since I am now living in the Netherlands and I am constantly surrounded by new things to look at photography has been occupying a lot of my time recently. Even when I returned to the US for a few weeks recently I found that I was seeing familiar things in new ways. So I have decided to set up a flickr account and now have a photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gaypunk/ where I will be posting most of my photos. I also have a Tumblr account (what is it with the obvious discrimination against the letter "e" in these web site names?) which you can see at http://gaypunk.tumblr.com/ Most of the photos on these two sites are duplicates right now, though not all, but I plan on using them in different ways and posting different pictures to each as time goes on.

I tend to mainly shoot with film instead of digital, mainly because I can't afford a good digital camera set-up right now, but also because I just like the way film looks and I enjoy the rather fiddly nature of using a fully manual film camera. Plus there is that feeling of being a kid on Christmas morning when you are handed that envelope of freshly printed photos and you can't be 100% certain of what you are going to see until you open it. Digital takes that level of fun out of photography, but it sure is cheaper than getting film processed these days. If you have an old film camera lying around somewhere you should dig it out. Yes, you can still get film, Kodak, Fuji, Afga, Ilford and several other companies are still making a reasonably wide variety of film, companies have even released old formats of film like 110 and instant film for old Polaroid cameras. Plus you don't give up anything by using film. You can still digitally alter the images, just scan the negatives or prints (or get the developer to do this for you and put them on a disk) and then run them through Photoshop or GIMP. This is what I do and it works out really well.

So click on the links and check them out, I want to know what you think of my photos!