islands

Its been almost 5 months since I actually went to phillip island (as depicted below)
clearly a massive fail thats it taken me this long to post these pictures... suppose I have a tendency to live in the past anyway

this was taken by my beautiful friend libby, I love lending people my camera, it's like seeing the world through their eyes for a day; I already spend alot of time daydreaming what it would be like to someone else... though it's probably beyond my imagination
the rest I took. As you can tell I love the 'people walking along a lonely path shrowded with trees' concept, there's another picture like this in the post fresh air...

and when we sunbathing on the beach two minutes walk from our house

and when I wanted a typical, dorky, 'LOVE' sign. (oh so hard to position the camera in this photo though! guess whose holding it)

and dario when we went dune surfing on this huge sandy hill with body boards. if there wasn't a clear path, halfway down the hill one would probably fall off and roll down sideways haHA

I'm at the top of that pyramid; fell off and rolled my ankle in a weird way when I think it was aaron (on the bottom left) gave way. never being the top of a pyramid ever again.!

aaron climbing up the dune/hill of sand (yeah, those little dots in the distance are people)
kira sleeping (which she did for most of the holiday) and kitty




to whom it does concern,

kira walking to the dunes, don't know what I inadvertently double exposed this with

the view from the top of the dune

hayley. the water looks beautiful, but even with the sun, it was so so cold

and the entire group of us. darius' dad took this photo. here goes -
james, bronwyn, aaron, alison, jono, darius, kitty, libby, emma, kristyn, kira, hayley and I.

the trip was amazingly free. the first time I've been away from all authoritative forces (parents, teachers, etc.) for an entire week. that^ was just before we were to go home

a cemetary where i marry the sea

so maybe i love pictures of the beach far too much; and people dressed in ridiculous outfits for strange athletic events. which makes me feel a bit copyright Rennie Ellis; oh dear.
but where else can you find such inspiration as on the beach? urban landscapes are waaay overdone. i suppose people are always a good thing to shoot. sometimes i think Australia bores me, i really should try and find the beauty in it... but that can be surprisingly difficult in a place you've spent the last 10 years in. i mean obviously not Australia as a whole (wow that would be a gross misrepresentation!) just maybe Mount Waverley. i keep trying to revisit the awe i felt on first arriving in Mount, so i can appreciate my home more. cold winter air, concrete jungle, Safeway. that's always fun.

so we went to chelsea beach with the family. Darren took the picture above of me in front of the playground. it was accidently double exposed with this picture i took of the laneway leading up to the beach so the playground ground now looks like a really shiny swimming pool.

the playground at dusk, with its little faux lighthouse and the shining brick outline.

there were a lot more birds on this line when i initially took the picture. probably would've made it much more effective too; did you know that if you feed a seagull panadol it'll blow up? or something like that...

darren in his little straw fedora in front of the re-occuring playground scene. i thought this was a picture from the sri lanka lot that had shown up heaps later cos its so reminiscent of a little old man with this straw hat walking along the side of a road begging, hitchhiking or trying to sell freshly cooked fish. all it needed was a bullock cart.

oh the abandoned pink bicycle. there would've been a certain air of childhood innocence about the bike if not for my ridiculous shadow peering over it. i didn't notice it until after the picture was developed and now that i think about it, all the shadow adds is a creepy pedophilic vibe to the picture. or maybe a sad atmosphere, like the little girl walking away from her childhood. i hope the bike was indeed abandoned, otherwise a little girl would probably have been a bit concerned by the fact that someone else was taking a photo of her bike.

which brings me to a rant: why is it that in the present day everyone is so concerned about creeps? i always fear when taking pictures in the street, of people on the beach, of little abandoned (hopefully) bicycles like above^ that people will misunderstand my motives as creepy. you always have to ask people now to take photos of them, privacy issues and all. if you look adoringly at a really gorgeous baby their parents are bound to be a bit concerned. of course its easier for me as im a girl and we're allowed to gurgle over children, but it'd really suck to be a guy trying to capture the beauty of his surrounds when the people inhabiting it are so hostile and anxious. all the time.

i change shapes just to hide in this place

I never actually knew who were behind the Jabbawockeez masks...
Nor did i learn til a fair bit later that they were some hyped hiphop dance crew. In fairness, they're incredible dancers. But the formation in my opinion spells the resurrection of BOYBANDS. dun dun dun!

I like the masks though; always wanted one of them.



Felicia. Looking shifty with Millie and Cassy's ribbons from house athletics. That's our senior school principal in the background Mr Kosach (gangster). Atleast i think he's our principal..

The girl inside the unicorn (that's her legs up the front) won the best dressed prize at Valedictory this year. Due too, considering she's dressed up as a duck and santa claus in the past for events like this. It never occurred to me how strange it is that our school uses athletics carnivals as an excuse to dress crazily.

So the holga loves it's sunlight. And i blame the lack thereof for the darkness of this picture.

Adele and Tim, and a light leak i forgot to crop out on the side. I took a photo like this at the swimming carnival, it failed (so did the rest of the film cos it was 35mm and got exposed to LIGHT). light, what a bitch. So i retook it, perhaps more epic this time round.

The Average Joe's.

the Trauma Team

Superheroes, and when Holga got attacked by silly string. haha 'silly string'.

Ohhh so out of focus, inadvertently this could portray our struggle to focus on the bright little things in life.

Dodgeball?

Superman, with fluffy shoes ... for a soft landing

The Super Freaks had the most amazing retro crazy girly outfits with feather boas, fur jackets and bright florals. But i accidentally double exposed this picture with the runner's about to takeoff. shit luck eh? The sign above all else remains, symbolic

The freakiest juxtaposition thus far; happy little pixies/fairies with a zombie bleeding down his front.

Though not here, this was the clearest picture i've achieved with the lomo. Sadly though, a) i didn't take the picture and b) the point of the holga isn't to achieve clarity but make the world look more beautiful through its surreal, blurry lense.
I'm the dork in blue, god how out of place i look.

go write your message on the pavement

For a photography project for lauren we went on a journey to the city. which isn't really a long journey like going to the countryside but whatev.
i want to do a series of black and white photos of friends of mine's faces so i can stick them on my wall and bask in their beauty :) but i never get round to doing it... lauren's my first and only subject so far...
but i'll get there... it'll be the next amazing post (after the one im about to post after this). heh.

strangely enough there was an old school car show going on in fed square as well, so this was one of the cars there... not so subliminal advert for RACV eh?
but the cars were all so beautiful and shiny, and for once were on display to be taken photos of :)

and then we went through these alleyways that smell liked hobbo pee. it was incredible, one of the first shots lauren took she got this crate illuminated by a ray of light in the darkness, midair. ... it was one of those moments that made you question a divine presence.
thats the alleyway>>>
i got all these funny light leak-like things on left top corner of these photos for some reason...

and this super wall of gold painted pipes... whose colour you can't appreciate in the photo.. but you can in your imagination! yay.
it was quite cool.

its crazy how creative street art can be... alot of its not just graffiti scribbles. like al was telling me the other day bout this - remember those numbered colour-in-this-part-this-colour books when you were small? - not a very good explanation but if you get it, it was like that on a wall and the different parts were meant to be coloured with bits of chewed gum.
tots gross but it would look mad awesome no?

a sad day for aspiring artists

i have terrible luck with old chinese ladies in photography shops. first one i went to i was all excited cos its a new photo developing place opened down the road, and the guy id talked to before said they processed 120 film for $20 so i was all like WOOH don't have to travel all the way to the city to get these developed... anywho, went back there to get the photos developed and the lady there ( i think she was the wife of the guy who served me before) was basically like no. no we don't do it. and then proceeded to give me a lecture about how crap my plastic holga is and how i should buy a new digital one... in short, i'm living in the stone age.

which my parents tell me everyday.

so i laughed and went to the city. to the place where i normally get my photos printed. and the chinese lady there was like no. no we don't do black and white (which i needed at the time) nor do we do slide film (which was the only other thing i needed) but they did cross processing so i put my film in for that. and then all the photos came out shit, completely burnt out, like the photo of darren (in the middle) but like 50x more saturated... the only good photo that came out of that lot was the car one down the bottom and that still looks like a cartoon... but thats not the ladies fault, it was mine for putting the film in for cheaper crossprocessing :( the problem was that she also took it upon herself to tell me off for having such a crap camera/taking such crap photos.

why? the world is so perfect and shiny through a digital lens. why take a photo of something you see with your own two eyes anyway?
you don't often see life through vignette edges with light leaks and oversaturation. ...unless you were on drugs... but that doesn't count!

so i walked down the road from that place and the mean lady and found solace at michael's where the cheerful Gus (i think thats what his name was) attempted to help me fix my skewed lens and i had a nice chat to the pro camera fixer guys who admitted to owning a holga themselves and absolutely adoring the effects it gives. YAY! its so nice to meet people who share the holga love!

these were the only ones that worked from the phillip island bunch...

the ever-running carnival we went to. with the creepy ducks...

darren fishing on the pier (though you can't really see the rod - its there!) we met these two lovely middle-aged men who gave us some bait and advice on where to fish. we caught some weird looking toadfish... which turned out to be poisonous so we chucked it back in. fail fishing trip.

and the car from a superb car show going on at the time on the island. its red in real life. there were all these other beautiful cars around like this which i was dying to take a photo of but was too embarrassed ... do you reckon people feel complimented or annoyed if you take photos of their car?

BTW tots don't mean anything against old chinese ladies in general... they just shouldn't work at photoshops! most are quite pleasant and have admirable fashion sense :)

you'd see it with your own two eyes

We had this sleepover a few weekends ago. And went crazy with the glowsticks. Thought I'd whip out the holga and take some pro blurry bulb night shots with a long exposure. But, like an idiot, I went crazy with the flash instead and forgot to turn on bulb.Gah.
Here bist the results -

This super ball of glowsticks we made, watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall (in LOVE with Russell Brand - just like every other girl on the planet). Just above Mil's knee is a tiny picture of the ball from afar - I wander what photo that was exposed with?

And Mil again with glowstick glasses. But her eyes were closed because the flash was super strong, and every photo I took I had to warn the girls and they'd all closed their eyes before I took it so they wouldn't see blue dots everywhere. We learnt from painful experience.

That's me being a power ranger. Tots advertising Coca Cola inadvertently. I sooooo wish I'd turned on bulb, all these photos would be so much better with it on...

Yes, I do realise that there's a hand coming out of Sarah's face. And this is my fail photo where i accidently quadruple exposed several major ones and had to redo each of them.
Oh the pains of having a traditional camera. But it's generally worth it.
Look for the word 'LoL' in the photo.

Felicia's sexy butt. It looks like it has colourful eyes and ...even eyebrows!!
LOL felicia. Hope you don't mind me putting this photo up :)

The uber ball again. So I realise I have two photos of it, and I tried in vain to delete this one, but for some reason blogger completely failed me.

Megan, looking so angelic in this red light. Even though red light isn't really angelic... oh well!
She's so gangsta.

the freak show

So the last few photos tots have a border as opposed to the old ones. Got it processed at a new place down from Michael's (the old one) MUCH cheaper, but probs didn't do it as well as Michael's does considering the short amount of time it was done in, etc.
Took a whole HEAP of photos of swimming sports (below) that couldn't get developed because I attempted to use stupid 35mm film and I didn't know how to manually rewind it in my cam. sigh. But these are the 120mm ones that worked. Why do you care?

WOW. I write everything in a horribly boring monotone.

Why? And how on earth do the famous bloggers do it? I suppose its about the originality of your blog... take garance doré for example (not that she's unorginal - completely unique in fact)- but how does she do it? Is it about writing personal life moments - then considering my life is less exciting than a goldfish in a tank it wouldn't quite work. hum.

So swimming sports has never really been about swimming... come to think of it I can't imagine why anyone would go there to swim. It's more like a massive fancy dress pool party where 1800 people are invited, and only the crazy of those actually show up. It's pretty good too... can't wait til next year (as a year 12) you actually get to get in! woot. Sad, no?

That's Grace and Darren (bro), and his girlfriend Des at the freak show that is swimming sports. Which btw was yonks ago - near the start of term 1, I'm just disorganised with my film processing.

Followed by Alex (a.k.a Smithy) dressed up as a crazy renegade punk fairy that had the hair of Gene Simmons in his KISS days and Cyndi Lauper punk era stockings (fluoro yellow and black if I remember right) and this mass tutu with (WAY WAY) oversized sunnies on.
Quite a sight.

The people who actually bothered to go swimming (this was supposed to be mid air but.. woops) sad lack of camera skills by me. tehe.
Probs mostly made up of junior/middle school kiddos. Miss those days.

Peter - totally unfocused - somehow I managed to get Kat's head instead of his - in my super blue heart-shaped sunnies. How cool? :) Random gangstas in the background.

My muchacha Lauren - dressed up as a bee - who actually had a whole hive with her, but ... I dunno what happened to them... So I looked up 'muchacho' on urban dictionary and apparently it means young mexican male, but then muchacha means female. I'm using muchacha then for Lauren, but she's not mexican... or Spanish... or Eucadorian she's just Lauren. But I like the word and I'm gonna use it regardless of the meaning :)

We dressed up as the warriors from Braveheart - as you may have figured by the face paint - but we kinda didn't have the whole kilt business going. Most of us hadn't actually seen Braveheart... so it was kinda 'let's be gladiator looking things with blue and white face paint' .. pretty cool eh? :D Good times.
Here's Cass and Sarah and Lachie in battle... I couldn't think of a name for the battle though...
Suggestions?
BTW: 'Freak show' is meant in the best possible way. I don't mean it as an insult to anyone who took part (I did too) and this additional note is NOT sarcastic, so is that not sarcastic, etc. (God, that chain could go on forever).