I am a Children’s Librarian living in the Portland, Oregon area. When I am not Children’s Librianing I like to play with cameras and film. I also like playing the ukulele, knitting, sketching, and hiking.
As I mentioned in my last post, I became interested in doing pinhole film swaps several months ago when I discovered people were doing them. As I thought about pinhole film swaps I came up with an idea. What if a person just sent an entire camera, with film re-rolled and ready to shoot, to another person? My Pinholga is lightweight and cheap, so if it gets lost in the mail it’s no big deal. Also, using the same camera would ensure the frames matched up. So I asked my friend Brendan if he would be interested in trying this and he was! I spent the next few weeks shooting a roll, then I sent it overseas to Ireland. I have to say, it was really fun seeing my little Holga on location in Ireland on Brendan’s IG feed every now and then. And I am now thinking my…
I am so disappointed in myself! I have neglected this blog. I was so good about posting my travelogue when we went to Paris. I wanted to do the same when I went to Amsterdam but I didn’t. And now time is getting away from me. There is getting to be too much distance between my trip and my writing. This has got to stop!
I think I will just start moving my fingers across the keyboard and we’ll see what comes out. Let’s start at the beginning.
The idea started as a joke on Twitter. Inge ran into some trouble when she was pinholng the Rotterdam train station. Alex, in response, thought he needed to visit The Netherlands for WPPD 2014. I chimed in with a tweet about joining them (of course as a joke). Then something happened, and I am not sure what. Somehow this joke turned into reality. A couple of weeks after this conversation Raf and I were buying our plane tickets to Amsterdam with a plan to meet up with Alex, Inge, and Brendan on Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Soon Jeff bought tickets. And then it became an event on the WPPD website. And others signed up. And whoa. It became a THING. An actual thing. I was going to Amsterdam! And I was going to meet up with my internet friends! In real life!
I still can’t believe that we made this happen.
So that’s the back story. Now let’s get on with the trip. I’ll start with Day One.
Our flight was a short 9 hours – a straight shot from PDX to AMS. It was pretty awesome and I am glad we paid extra for that luxury. I watched two movies on the plane, The Book Thief and Frozen (both pretty good). And I even tried to learn a little Dutch (it didn’t stick). As we flew over Greenland and Iceland the sunset blended into the sunrise and my afternoon blended into early morning. We arrived in Amsterdam at 8:30 am already exhausted.
The sunset blended into the sunrise.
We got off the plane and our adventure began. When you are in a foreign country everything is different. Things are unfamiliar and there is a little bit of culture shock. This is what I experienced on our adventure from the plane to the hotel. Finding an ATM, getting Euros out of the ATM, figuring out how to buy train tickets, figuring out what train to catch, realizing you are not sitting the right place on the train, figuring out how to take the tram to the hotel. It was all an adventure. And being exhausted made it that much more interesting.
The rest of the morning was spent wandering (stumbling) around Vondelpark, zombie-like until our hotel room was ready.
A Raf and Moni Amsterdam Selfie.A very relaxing walk at the Park.
When it was ready for us we took a short nap, but were awakened by fire alarm! We thought maybe it was just our room but we went out into the hallway and realized it was the whole hotel! I grabbed my camera bag and my purse and we headed down to the lobby. We found out that they were doing a drill. It was quite the experience having been awake for more than 24 hours.
After this wake-up call we wandered the streets for a bit.
Here I am posing in front of one of the I Am Amsterdam signs.
I am I
And here is one of MANY canals I would see and photograph on the trip.
We stayed up as late as we could but in the end we fell asleep at 8:00. I woke up at one point that first night and it was light outside. My first thought was that we had slept all night and it was morning. I was excited because I had an exciting day planned. Then I looked at the clock and saw that it was only 9:00. I’d only slept for an hour.
My next couple posts are bonus rolls, I suppose. I wanted to share them with you because they are cool :).
I really enjoy doing film swaps. I love the collaboration between my fellow film photographers and I love the serendipity that occurs. At some point I realized that people were doing pinhole film swaps. Of course I needed to do one too. It combines two things that I love! So I let fate decide who I was going to do my first pinhole film swap with. One day in January I mentioned on Twitter that I wanted to do a pinhole film swap. Within moments my buddy Herschel (AKA Square Peg Pinhole) said, “Yes! Let’s do this!” I was thrilled! I’ve admired Herschel’s pinhole work for quite some time and so doing a film swap with him would be quite an honor.
My latest post on Pinhole Obscura! In which I show you pinhole photos from my trip to Amsterdam on WPPD. Someday soon I will use actual words to write a real blog post about my amazing time there. For now, it’s pictures..
So! Amsterdam! The four of us actually met each other in person and had a really fun time shooting pinholes, as well as chatting, eating, drinking, and hanging out. If you visit our “About” page you will see a new pinhole group shot of us in Rotterdam where Inge and her husband showed us around her wonderful city. We got to see the Cube Houses in person!! I am not sure how to begin to write about how amazing my experience was there. So I think I will just show you the pictures. Here is a gallery of shots I took on World Pinhole Day. Click through to see more details.
These were all shot with a Zero 2000 and Ektar 100.
Blatherskite 