Took a chance on an old box of photo paper I found while visiting a friend in Richmond VA. The original seals on the box looked to be unopened which was assuring me that it hadn’t been exposed to light, but as far as it being in a temperature controlled environment I was rolling the dice.

50 sheets of expired 11”x14” double weighted fiber paper for eight dollars was a steal though. Normally buying this kind of paper new is about 250 bucks a box, but at least 99% guaranteed to be usable.

Here’s the thing, the quality of these older papers are incredible. We’ve all probably dug through a box of old black and white photos at a yard sale or brought down grandma’s dusty old photo albums from the attic and admired the way those photos looked. The look and feel of that paper from the 50s and 60s is superior to what I’ve bought to make prints with today. Some would argue that there was more silver in that older paper too.

Not to say that there’s not some options for good photo paper today, there is, but you are going to pay an arm and a leg for it.

But heres the deal, this paper if you find it, is expired and for the most part can’t be used with your regular paper developer. The most common thing you will run into using expired paper is “Fogging”. This means the whole sheet of paper goes to a murky grey once you put it in the developer.

I started a job as an assistant to the Art Department at the local community college a little over a year ago. The instructor who teaches photography there makes beautiful prints that are out of this world. One day while in her office I noticed her cabinets were filled with boxes of old expired paper. I asked her why she bothered with expired paper and she told me the secret to using this old paper is to develop it in a Lith developer.

I’m trying not to go super in depth here, but basically a Lith developer slows down the developing process. If you overexpose the print at the enlarger and pull it from this lith developer right before the image is fully developed you might just be able to get a decent print without any fogging.

Aside from the fogging that you might want to be avoiding, the Lith developer after about an hour starts to produce a very interesting look (and heres where the secret lies). As the developer is getting exhausted and more bromide is introduced into it with each sheet of paper you get to a sweet spot where the magic starts happening.

The three prints below are by far my best prints made in a darkroom thus far. They are also truly one of a kind due to this Lith magic. Look closely (even though you aren’t able to hold them) you can hopefully see how they differ from a regular print I would of made. Or hopefully you can. Maybe this is over your head and you’re like Sean I don’t have a clue what your talking about. I’m doing my best though to explain :)

First off you’ll notice I was able to avoid the fogging because I still have clean white borders, win! Next and this is the Lith beauty, the very faint brownish hue across the print giving it a soft feel, almost a nostalgic vibe, is that sweet spot I was talking about. The print to me feels like it was printed 50 years ago. Plus the way the blacks hit when using glossy fiber paper is to die for. Something I’ve been chasing when looking at the instructor’s prints and not getting when using RC paper (which, not to bore you is a completely different and cheaper paper for us beginners).

Anyhow this was very exciting and I wanted to share it even though I’m not sure it translates very well taking iphone photos of the prints and posting it via social media. But thats where were at these days.

These two rolls of film where shot on my Nikon FE2 with a Nikon Series E 75mm / 150mm zoom lens that I acquired last winter.

Been on this kick as of late where I develop 2 rolls of film and print every image onto newsprint paper via the printer/copier machine at work. Now, the copier doesn’t like this particular paper so, I usually have to feed it into the machine one sheet at a time. Which means I have to walk up and down the hallway seventeen times just to make one copy. Not the most ideal if I were to make twenty copies, but oh well. I do really like the way laser jet looks on this newsprint, it’s just too bad the paper is a bit delicate for the copiers ways. Now I’m on the hunt for the right paper or other papers that give a vibe and feel like this.

A number of years ago I was traveling across the country and planned a stop in Kansas City to stay with Shawn for a few days. We had met online and in previous years struck up a friendship. I just so happened to be traveling with my Buchla Easel and it only made sense for us to do some recordings. Shawn at the time was mainly using another banana jack based synthesizer, the Ciat Lonbarde system, heavily influenced by Buchla.

These three tracks mark the final moments of the three days recording session and have a specific energy to them. The title comes from Jorge Luis Borges' story of the same name.

We were also able to make this video documenting the session. I do highly recommend the video it’s a bit of a time capsule now, but I was able to document the unique home that both he and his wife Sienna lived in.

Sean Julian - Buchla Music Easel
Shawn E Hansen - Ciat Lonbarde Plumbutter, Cocoquantus, Sidrax, and Soprano Saxophone

recorded, mixed and mastered by Shawn Hansen
cover photos by Sean Julian

Here are some DL codes enter them in at the link below. Have fun!

https://shawnedwardhansen.bandcamp.com/yum

wkyj-hr9t

g2zt-bd8v

aezy-jedz

x4n9-jyzk

eyk6-5s67

2xtt-xl39

882y-kbwg

&

paste them on 3x5” card stock and mail it out

My friend Jim took notice of me having fun with the 120N holga, so he lent me his panoramic holga.

now I’m not really a panoramic lover but I was intrigued by the 90mm plastic lens that was designed to cover the camera's massive 6x12 cm negative. It was tricky wrapping my head around composing a shot across two frames and reminding myself to skip a frame when advancing because of that (so you only shoot 6 shots on a 12 exposure roll), but to my surprise I was way into it!

theres still the classic holga vignetting going on but it’s not as noticeable. actually the focus is pretty sharp, not tack sharp but decent. the exposure is really great for a fixed shutter speed and aperture. a sticker on the camera said to shoot 400 iso, so I did.

Kodak T-Max if you are wondering ;)

anyways hope my geeking out isn’t disrupting all your other important emails.

I remember when I first got that app it reminded me of my polaroid camera. I think it was the 600 color film that I would buy double packs of at Target. It was the first camera I really shot with in the beginning.

One day in class we were all talking about aspect ratios and which one did we like. I always liked what TV used to be which was 4:3 but then Amanda the instructor said square was her favorite. I had completely forgot about the square as an option. She was the one who lent me this Holga. Now I’m leaning to liking these squares too.

i find the balance of the bigger negative with a crappy plastic lens to be quite interesting, maybe like playing a low quality vhs on a high definition tv. And even though there are settings on this camera alluding to zone focusing and possibly aperture with the daytime / cloudy time switch, i don’t believe any of that really works. but maybe it does?

what i’ve noticed so far is that it operates more like a pinhole with a fixed shutter, unless you set it to bulb mode. and with a lot of reading about this camera online I’ve come to find out that the shutter speed is 1/125 of a second and that the aperture is fixed at about f8 and maybe f11.

So it made sense to use the sunny 16 rule, and shoot with ASA 100 film on a sunny day. Now I’m sure you can get great results many other ways with this camera but for now with the price of film being so high i don’t feel like experimenting any further. But if any of you out there have some advice i’m all ears.

anyways this post is about the pics not my silly words.

This week I edited down a bunch of tracks from an old hard drive. It seems that most of these download folders I’ve been making end up being around the 20 minute mark so here’s another. Not sure how much I can keep this up because Samply only gives me five gigs of free space. So I’m either going to have to delete or fill up the five gigs and call it quits. We’ll see, I did want to give you wave files so maybe switching to HQ mp3s might make more room to post some more. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

It was fun editing these older tracks down to just one minute. Condensing them some how brought them back to life for me. Most of the tracks span a fifteen year period from when I was living in San Francisco, New York, a cabin in the woods and even more recently here in my apartment in Mount Shasta. Usual suspects as far as gear goes, roland SP 404, a makenoise phonogene, MPC 3000, vintage Juno 6, casiotone MT68 and the Buchla easel.

It’s funny how in the past I would get real hung up on wanting my work to look or sound finished, but now I really don’t care so much for that. I’m grateful to the few of you key listeners out there who get what I’m doing and dig it for what it is. So thanks :)

I kind of remember this day, although it could have been numerous days where I was sampling records into my SP 404, playing with the presets on an old rhythm machine, recording a flute through the Roland Space Echo and rappin’ into a crappy microphone over a re-edit. On one of the tracks I’m literally needle dropping the sample while the beat is looping on the 404.

These were the days where I would pretty much sit down, get stoned, make a beat, record it to tape and delete it. I did this for the last two years of my beat making era, which I believe was around 2010 to 2012.

It’s all very sloppy, but I kind of love it just the way it is. Once again the cheap cassette is adding to it’s quality. Hope you enjoy and maybe I’ll dig up some more of these unlabeled cassettes.

P.S. for some reason the Samply player put a one second gap between each of the tracks. Hopefully that won’t be the case if you download it and play it on your own player. It’s better in my opinion when it plays seamlessly, but whatever.

I shot this whole roll on a walk. Unfortunately this camera is starting to act up and the alinement got a little out of wack, but I guess that’s part of it’s charm.

As of late I’ve really been interested in shapes, values and form. So it was fun to see how four separate pictures come together on one frame.

In response to René Margraff’s post I decided to try out a new platform where I can share music and sounds for no one to listen to. Except for those of you who like to click on links and carve out a little time to press play.

René aka Doomglue used a term “No Audience Underground” which made me laugh.

Here are 7 recordings from a cassette left unlabeled.

These are field recordings that were captured on tape a few years ago. Not ideal, recording to a cheap blank cassette but I wanted to test out my Sony WM-D6C cassette recorder. The tape was left unlabeled and shoved in a drawer until a few months ago. Listening back what I ended up liking most is the tape’s quality, the in house editing (pausing and unpausing between locations) and the infamous tape hiss.

Track number six is a bit of an out liar though. It’s a recording of me in a room playing back misc field recordings on at least two different players. I believe the buchla is woven in there as well.

These are slightly enhances only by turning up the volume in Reaper.

I have nothing in common with this guy up on the screen, but I was surprised how some of the events that took place in the movie paralleled with moments in my life. It stirred up some deep rooted emotions about my father that I haven’t quite dealt with.

I’ve mentioned before in a pervious post that I’ve never had much of a relationship with my father. Now that I’m near the age that he was when he past, I feel that not knowing him is a big part of me not knowing who I am. Both my sister and I have done a lot of work to reverse the vicious cycles in our families past, but I not sure that this is something that will ever be completely healed or dealt with.

Part of dealing with or rather being with my emotions when they arise is seeing how they show up in my work, whether I’m conscience of it or not. I’m now starting to notice how my photography as of late is tapping into this void.

The title of this post also strikes a cord with me as I sit and look ay my work. It’s a quote from a lady who I saw sitting in her car crying when I was out walking the streets. I was very confused when she said it to me at the time, but the more I reflect on it the more I see some truth in it.

Listening to the sounds of joy as a young boy can be heard caving in sand walls from a stream washing out to sea. In the distance you hear a man with a table saw and up close are the sounds of Max’s collar jiggling has he comes up next to me. My feet start to sink into the sand has I cave in a few walls myself. I join Noa collecting rocks near the shore. Our voices murmuring in the crashing waves like a memory fading away.

The sharing today was of this little happening at around noon on the corner of Ski Bowl and Rockfellow Dr. I’m standing right across the street from the photo below on Ski Bowl. So maybe like 30 feet away.

Surprisingly the audio plays alright on computer speakers, but if you want to get the details it’s best to put on some cans :)

mixpre 6 soundman - wind chimes / cars / birds