Silver Spring in Color II

A graveyard of Benzes.

Georgia Ave.

Some suburban graffiti.

The Hirshhorn

Here's a series of pictures from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. It took me longer than you would think to put them together like this in a single frame/file. I like each picture individually but I like them better as a group. None of the pictures were posed, and the last one is actually at my house and not the museum, although it was in the same roll of film. There does seem to be a theme of loneliness on the roll, or a sort of film noir style, and maybe that's why they look good together to me. I used KodakCN film (I think this is the name - chromogenic black and white by Kodak. I know, I need to move to real black and white but I haven't found a lab close to me that develops real B&W) and took the pictures with my Nikon N75 with Nokon AF Nikkor 28-80mm lense.

Silver Spring in Color I

This is my first attempt at using color film. As it turns out I didnt have any black and white film on the day I went out taking these pictures, only color film, and all the photo stores that would carry black and white film were closed on Sunday for some reason.

The film I used was Kodak Gold 400, which game me some weird results. There appears to be some noticeable 'grain' effect on all th pictures, almost like digital noise on digital pictures or when you use a higher ISO setting. You can see that areas out of focus appear pixelated. I checked out some reviews online for this particular film and several people said that they noticed the same thing, so it wasn't the developing process or the scanning process. But I guess it's possible that these problems are more noticeable when the film is scanned in.

I believe that this is the MARC/Amtrak station in Silver Spring off of Georgia Avenue. I liked the pink and yellow on the left side of the image and how they almost converge towards the middle of the picture, before the yellow line is interrupted. I also like how lines (the fences, train tracks, yellow line) appear from each corner of the image and travel to different depths of the picture.

I do get the feeling that this image looks more like a documentary rather than portraying any sort of artistic intention (or is a documentary photograph an artistic intention in and of itself?). I'm tempted to take it again in black and white and see if it works better, but I won't because, one, I think I like the colors, and two, I'm lazy.

This next image is of Piney Branch Avenue, NW on the Washington, DC side of Takoma Park. It's not Silver Spring but it's only down the road so I'm lumping it into this post.

I really like this one. On a purely personal note I love the image of a series of unused parking meters on an empty street. I thought I should wait until I took more pictures of scenes like this so I could present it as a series but I'll probably just recycle this image when and if I ever do take more meter pictures. I'm particularly fond of the winding road and the winding line of meters and how it contrasts with the sharp lines and angles of the overpass above. I do wish I had a longer lens to shorten the distance between meters and make it look more crowded.