we left home saturday last week for going to the market and stumbled on the local carnival event! we were a bit unprepared, but managed to take some photos with the holga. there were people partying in boats on the river, lots of shops selling krofi (like bolas de berlim but filled with chocolate!) and even a parade, with tons of kids dressed up in themes and my favourite part, the kurenti:

Kurenti or Koranti (singular: Kurent or Korant) are figures dressed in sheep skin who go about the town wearing masks, a long red tongue, cow bells, and on the head multi-colored ribbons. The Kurenti from Ptuj and the adjoining villages also wear feathers, while those from the Haloze and Lancova vas wear horns. Organized in groups, Kurents go through town, from house to house, making noise with their bells and wooden sticks, to symbolically scare off evil spirits and the winter. (more on wikipedia)

they’re very loud, jumping around and ringing their heavy cow bells, yet friendly, stopping by to talk to curious kids. it was a real treat to watch, our timing was quite perfect :)

it’s mostly melting now, and the ground is muddy and gross… so let’s look up, shall we? :)

i’m becoming a tree top collector, but i can’t help it. everywhere i go, there are trees waiting to be discovered :)



more proof:

i think it’s only going to get worse when spring comes. can’t wait! :)

my most precious christmas present this year was a scanner, the mighty canon 8800f. since leaving china, i have been searching for a way to get negatives scanned, quickly, cheaply and with quality, but the results (and the options) were often demotivating. so i ended up dragging film along, shooting less and less of it in the past few months.

i know a lot of people that are able to work magic with a digital camera, but i’m not one of them. to me, digital is efficient and cheap - but it doesn’t quite translate the feeling i get from analogue… and so, i’m quite happy to now be able to shoot and scan again, to my heart’s content.



the only problem i’ve found so far has been dust. it’s everywhere and i can’t seem to keep it out of my negatives, no matter how much i clean them… tips?

prado, santarém. junho 2009

not that different from the black and white version. i like the fact that, despite it being a color film, the colors turned out so subdued… spring can be like that too. and i haven’t got tired of looking up to the tree tops yet… :)

while i was in beijing, i kept thinking something was wrong with my holga. the sound of the shutter didn’t sound right, it was… different.

yesterday when i got the film back from the shop, i glanced the negative and was relieved to see there was something there, so maybe not all was lost. i got home, ran to the computer and put the cd inside, and what do i discover? a film of shaken, overexposed pictures. hum… could it be? i flip the holga around, and there is the culprit: the switch on the bulb position. oh well… i don’t know how that happened, but at least it isn’t broken!

in the end, i don’t completely dislike the string of caffeinated photographs that came out of this roll. here are a few: