once upon an old daydream
that’s what you gave me
out on the corner of Broadway and 48th street
i don’t know my way through a maze of gray skyscrapers
but i’m willing to learn

well i could start discovering your world
and i would make a damn good city girl
things would start to bloom
i’m sure

you are my Manhattan from the sky
you look so neat and tidy when i’m way up high

—

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Get on the LA subway {yes, LA has a subway!} and take it all over, getting off on entirely random stops and emerging to eat & have coffee, to saunter around, to make photos. We went from Union Station to Wilshire in K-town, to Hollywood Blvd, and then back again. One of the rolls I shot came back with these weirdo blue lines which bummed me out, but I enjoyed this adventure & these shots too much to just shuffle them away without sharing :)

The first of many film adventures I’ve been going on recently! Shooting personal work always provides great new inspiration, & shooting film just makes my heart happy. It feels calm, deliberate, thoughtful – such a refreshing perspective for a trigger-happy photographer like me.

{ all shot with a Canon EOS 3 and a haphazard mix of Fuji 400H & Kodak 400 film }

“No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does.
Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.”

—

3 photographer girls. 24 hours in SF. 12 rolls of Walgreens Kodak film {developed at Costco}. Ready go.

Now there are two things I fell a bit more in love with on this trip.

The first would be film.

I’ve known that film = magic for quite some time, but I feel like this trip really reinforced how drawn I am to it. Film feels real to me. When I look at a film photo, it’s almost as if I can reach out and touch the moment, like the moment is still there, 100% as real as yesterday. As if somehow, the smells and the sounds and what I felt at that.very.second are all conveniently built in as well. It is immensely tangible in a way that I can’t even explain. And of course, the color. Blows my mind every time.

And the second is the city.

There was a period of time as a kid, where my family used to visit SF every year. Ghirardelli might have been the first chocolate brand I knew. We had cable car ornaments on our Christmas tree. At 3 years old, I would refer to any overcast day as “San Francisco weather.” And then, maybe 15 years passed without me visiting the city even once. But this job brought me back. First for an engagement session here, a wedding there. Somehow I found myself in this city a total of 6 times this year. The little apartments with their bay windows & hardwood floors, the cozy cafes, the hills, bridges, the nightlife, the FOOD… San Francisco continuously inspires me in an incredible way.

And if for some bizarro reason you do not already love this city as much as I do, perhaps these photos can change your mind…

(all shot on Kodak 400 film, with a Canon AE-1)

I believe I literally squealed when I opened the scans Alice sent to me of my photos and saw this first image below. I was so banking on receiving a set of photos that were totally white/totally black/completely blurry & ridiculous, and then I saw this, my first shot – somehow exposed, in focus, and full of insane light. EVEN PIGEONS (rats with wings!) look good on film.

Even if I conjured up in my mind the most perfect cafe in the world, it would not be as perfect as Cafe de la Presse.

A big thank you to Kevin Chin for taking us to shoot around the Embarcadero. The light against the bay bridge was incredible – I think I looked a bit like a crazy person juggling my film camera, iPhone, and digital point-and-shoot (JUSTINCASE the film didn’t come out) as I tried to capture it in every way possible.

The Ferry Building, the place where I just walk around repeatedly saying “WHY DON’T WE HAVE THIS IN LA??”:

Savory bread pudding. The world is a better place now that some genius thought this up.

And some shots from Alice & Connie’s collection…

Lomo Fisheye FTW!