I finally got around to getting my old negatives from my dad’s house with this last trip, and one of the other projects that I have given myself is going through and scanning them in. With the printers that we have at school, I can get some damn good output with scanning these in. Even with the printer that I have at home gives me passable quality, enough to make me have no need to ever go in a wet darkroom again.

The odd thing is working with these negatives now, I remember just battling with some of them the first time around, (some of these I haven’t touched in ten years or so) with small scratches here and there, dodging this corner or that one, getting the right amount of contrast, and the juggling act it was getting all of that right on each print. I would spend days working on a print. And now, going through these, I’m spending 15 minutes, scanning them in and doing all of that. Even more so, I have control over so much more than I ever did before that I have been able to get an almost totally different print than before. But even though it was hard, and a pain in the ass, I wouldn’t trade those years in the darkroom for anything.

As I get older, and the pissed off, angry teenager inside of me quiets down, I am able to look at home and Seattle in a different way. A big part of why I moved away was that I resented it, and wanted to get away from it. But now that I am a bit older, I am able to look at it and my family and see how it informs me about who I am and what I come from. And even though I don’t go back that often, being back acts as a sort of mirror to allow me to see where and who I am now, by showing me where I came from and who I was.

Anyways, I am still working on the site, teaching myself PHP to try and get this to do what I want it to, such as to integrate a formal portfolio into it. (which is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be)

So, one more Christmas down. Well, almost. My Grandma (in the picture above) came down with a stomach flu, which the rest of the family has caught. While it is not fun being sick, it has given me some time to work on this site, and get a bunch of work done. That, and watch lots and lots of Law and Order. Gotta love that Law and Order.

The end of the year seems like an appropriate time to begin something new, so here we are. As I am still working on learning Wordpress, this will be a short post, not quite what I am aiming for in the future, but something more of a placeholder. I hope in the near future to have this blog going, along with my art portfolio. It’s a work in progress so stay tuned!