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 :)