Evergreen Grad, 2017

I went and graduated college, didn’t I.

Studying Abroad In Italy {2

Like Where’s Waldo, but with my friends.

The Summer List Series

Everyone Loves Lists! Well, I love lists.

Surprisingly Famous

A Weekend in San Francisco

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     Please allow me to once more be your annoying jetsetter friend with my story of how I spent the weekend in San Francisco the other day. Well, not so much a story but a collection of loosely collected images with very little information attached. Just like my real memories!

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    This is Hazel and our cat Markl standing in Hazel’s kitchen. Did I mention she’s from San Francisco and that’s why I’m even here in the first place? Right now I have so that’s out of the way.

Magritte flavored Mirrors

Studio work winter 2015.

First Shots Off The Reflecta

This Reflecta, for reference. This was such an old, weird camera. I couldn’t tell if the film was ready and loaded right, or how many shots I had left, the TLR viewfinder was washed out most of the time and apparently made before split focusing, I’m amazed any of these even exist.

Acey and Ashley

So this one time I was a wedding photographer.

Colour Film: Selections from rolls 3-9

Or: Why didn’t we hear from you over the summer and nine prints.

BW Film Rolls 1&2

    Way back in spring quarter I took my first film photos on a black and white roll. When I went to replace the film {in the original Starbucks in Seattle Wa.}, It wasn’t rewound properly and when I opened it the film got over exposed and I thought I lost all my pictures. Then I got home and realised I didn’t know how to process B&W film, so that roll and another one sat in my drawer until today when I learned how to process B&W film. It’s really not very hard. Here are some highlights and interestingly ruined pictures.

Hatcher Pass

     Yesterday Dad, Hanna, several friends of ours who will remain nameless and secret, and myself, visited the magnificent and majestic natural wonder just minutes from where I live; Hatcher Pass.
Now, despite it being named after a person, it is not Hatcher’s Pass, even though that is what everyone everywhere calls it.

     Anyway.

     We parked the car and walked up a mountain to a lake that a friend of mine who will remain secret and nameless knew about, and had been to. As we walked I was struck by how crazy nature is, just the sheer amount of detail in nature blew my mind, the tiny, tiny swirls of plants that grow in hard to access locations.
   
      I have always sort of suspected that nature and the earth is a sort of trick, a simulation provided for the amusement of people, that the only reason anything exists is so that people can go and look at it but you go to a place like hatchers pass and that’s so obviously not the case. You walk up to any rock and you stare it and no matter how long you stare you just keep. Noticing. Details. If I were to recreate this somehow it would take me so much time, and so much energy and would be so. Boring. Our nameless and secret friends are religious and I felt so, sad for them. I mean, I understand. It is so, so easy when presented with something so strange and complex that your mind can’t handle it to just push it aside and say, well of course, God made all this so that I may see it and it is great. But whatever. Isn’t this supernatural being great! God is the amazing thing here.

      That is the wrong thing. You’re still stuck in that mind set of ‘Of course everything exists so that I may see it’ and you are not seeing the thing that is in front of you. Because the world is not a simulation for your benefit it just is there. Lichen will continue to grow on rocks and create the most insane patterns whether you walk past it or not and that is awe inspiring. Rocks can be perfect cubes in nature and that is so weird. There are tiny black flowers and it is all basically pointless and that is amazing. Those flowers and massive forests aren’t growing so that they may be good plants and then go to heaven or something, trees don’t have a concept of anything because they are trees and that is okay.

      The concept that the world is massive and insanely detailed and doesn’t exist just for me is a thought I try to have regularly but it is hard to do that. And when this concept is presented in a way that you cannot ignore and you cannot deny and when this all happens in a very low-oxygen environment it is the craziest thing. Awesome in the true sense of the word.


     So here are some pictures.

As you drive up you notice how intense everything is. How green the ground, how blue the sky. 

Hey, our town’s down there. 

On Tardigrades

     SO back in may I enrolled in a biology class at the college near here, I needed the biology credit and man if biology isn’t half hard. It nearly killed me learning about chemistry and cell organelles, {Fun Fact: All of your energy is created by teeny tiny turbines in all your cells. Literally turbines. Anyway.}
     For the final part of the class I had to write a paper {4–6 Pages, double spaced} cited to APA standards with at least six references. The topic was up to me but it had to be biology related. I’d never written a paper before, and I’d never even heard of APA.

Florence: Gross

Seriously, this one is gross. 

If you’re a veganitarian please go read one of the other absurdly long photo posts we have available.

Rome: The Ruins Behind the Colosseum

Out behind the Colosseum are some ruins, there weren’t a lot of signs so Dad and I didn’t really have any idea what we were looking at most of the time, we decided eventually that it was where they kept the animals and where the support staff lived, because there were houses and shops.

Turns out we were looking at the roman forum.
 It’s all a little confusing, because it’s all old, all broken and mostly built on top of older ruins.

There was a big line to get in, but we decided we were italians and just bought and walked past the line. 

I’m not sure what this is, but it’s right next to the Colosseum, looks like it used to have steps going up to it, and drops down pretty seriously just inside the door. 

So, obviously they kept something in there that they didn’t want to get out.

Rome: Colosseum

 The Colosseum: Death Dome of the Ancients. 

  The Colosseum is weird, most of the monuments in italy, the really famous ones, are way bigger than you’d think but the Colosseum seems to fluctuate.

 When I first walked up  I thought “Wow, this is way smaller than I thought it was.” But it isn’t. Not at all. In the subsequent pictures, look for the people who are standing on the ground directly next to it. That’s the real scale.

Panorama: When we walked over to the Colosseum we ended up on a hill with some parked cars, look in the botom right hand corner of the picture.

Those teeny–tiny dots are people who are actually CLOSE to the Colosseum.

Detail: Included, people for scale.

Rome: General

I have never been to New York. 

 But I imagine it has the same feeling as Rome, big and loud and kind of fast paced and stressful. 

I grew up in the country, in the forest in Alaska, One time I visited Chicago, but that’s about as big city as I got. Rome was kind of a shock to the system, especially considering the system had just realised he had a cold. 

 On the train to Lucca Dad and I sat across from this nice young australian couple who were doing eight weeks in Europe, they had just come from Rome, and they suggested a hotel; The Viminale.

It was cheap, and nice, and right in the center of everything.  Definitely suggested.

Portrait: Dad. ALMOST smiling.

Scene: The train station. I Spy: a hobo. 

The Original Grotesque

Before the middle ages, {or “Dark Ages”} the Greeks and subsequently the Romans had a pretty thriving culture, with art and temples and carved marble and things covered in gold, {Like the Catholics! More on that later} but then Christianity went mainstream {Thanks a lot, Constantine} and all this cool old stuff was “Lost” and destroyed because it was “Pagan”.

Fast forward to the Renaissance and Europe is rediscovering all this old stuff, like “Math” and the old stories, which were a lot more popular with artists because Nymphs and Goddesses of Beauty presented a lot more opportunities to carve naked women than the Madonna ever did.

One of the things they eventually rediscovered was Nero’s tomb.

I Am Not a Spammer.

Fedora Flowchart

Fedora Flowchart

Fixed this.

Writing

This is what I go through every week.

It's about procrastination and how the CWA gets written: stcroiss.blogspot.com/​search/​label/​Zachary%27s%20Story

MUSIC: 3 Gymnopédies–Pascal Rogé  Bumble Boogie–Hal Kemp his Orchestra and Chorus.

EDITED WITH: FCPX

SHOT ON: Canon T3i

STARRING: Me.