The First Two Years of Conquering the Tundra

Experiments in Orientation 
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Christmas Eve Party

Some Diana F+ shots of the Christmas Eve party with my students Grace, Yolanda, and Sarah and their boyfriends who were visiting from various out of town locations.  We cooked hot pot and played some games.  The guys wanted me to drink a lot of beer but I didn't really plan on doing that so I told them I'd drink as much as Sarah, the quietest and shyest of the three girls.  Bad decision.  Turns out she's the drinker of the group, consistently out-drinking the boys whenever they go out or have a party.  When I said I'd stay on par with her, she immediately cracked open a beer and chugged the whole thing.  Always in teacher-mode, I instructed her and the others on how to shotgun a beer.  She beat me at that too.  Twice.

As you can probably tell from the way the developer cut the film, I tried to turn this roll into one continuous shot.  It worked out alright and I was pretty happy with the resulting pictures.  However, last week I got incredibly frustrated with something my computer was doing and I threw my Mighty Mouse across the room and into the wall. Turns out, not so "mighty" after all.  I can't be bothered to stitch all these shots together with my computer's trackpad.  Maybe once I get a Magic Mouse.  Probably not.  Do it in your mind.

                         
Click here to download:
Christmas_Eve_Party.zip (13486 KB)

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Serenade

This one's for the ladies.

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Filed under  //   diana f+   ktv   pictures  

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Yes this KTV had a stripper pole.

A high class establishment.

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Afternoon KTV

Yesterday afternoon I spent four hours doing KTV.  To me, 1:30pm-5:30pm is not the most opportune time of the day to sing my heart out in a dark room.  Usually I feel I need at least three beers before I can kick out the jams without getting all self-conscious about the craptacular sounds emanating from my vocal chords.  I was just there for the pizza.  Well the KTV didn't have pizza, but there's a decent pizza shop close by and I owed one of my students, Grace, a pizza for helping me purchase my cell phone a while back.  It started out as just Grace (the one with short hair), Yolanda (longer hair), and myself, both of them sang a hell of a lot better than I did.  They sang so well that they would turn off the vocal track of each song they performed so their voices would be the loudest sound coming through the speakers.  

I did the opposite.  I didn't want to hear myself so I turned up the track volume and turned the microphone down.  That didn't stop me from performing heart-warming (gut wrenching) covers of classics like Paramore's "Misery Business", R. Kelly's "Hairbraider", and Taylor Swift's "Love Story".  After a while, without the aid of alcohol, I gained some confidence, and maybe some XP because my singing ability seemed to level up.  I spit hot fire over Huey Lewis & the News' "Doin' It All for My Baby", that song from Titanic, Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me" and The Cardigans' "Lovefool".  I even sang "Country Roads" which seems to be just as popular in China as it is in West Virginia.

One of my other students, Robin (the one with glasses), showed up a couple hours into our singing marathon.  She brought her boyfriend (the dude) who she failed to introduce me to.  Both of them could also sing better than I could.  After taking a break from singing for a while, the girls decided to choose some songs for me.  They assumed that I would know all they words to any English song they knew because that song would be so popular that there would be no way that I wouldn't know it.  So I had to sing "Larger than Life" by the Backstreet Boys and that N*Sync song with the video where they're all riding in cars and running on a train to try to get away from some girl (I'm trying to pretend like I don't know which song that is).  They also chose some Lady Gaga track which was the one song I didn't really know.  I realized that I've heard all of Lady Gaga's singles before I just had no idea she sang them.  I always figured her music would be a lot weirder than that.

The pictures turned out a little grainy.  I'm not sure why, maybe just because it was dark.  Maybe because the film was expired and has been for a few years now.  Its the first time I've used the Diana's default lens for a while.  I'm not used to it.  I'll use the wide-angle next time.  I've been assured that there will be a next time.

                         
Click here to download:
Afternoon_KTV.zip (10010 KB)

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Dinner with the students

Some photos from when I went out with one of the classes a few weeks ago.

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Bar Staff

Even though the new bar is pretty small, like most Chinese business establishments it seems incredibly over-staffed.  Most of the staff is comprised of attractive girls, so I'm not complaining, but it does seem like overkill.  Harry posited the theory that they are also prostituted but I have seen no evidence of that.  The dude in the pictures with me is the manager.

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Hawaii Diana // Volcano Park

More odd pictures.  This time from the volcano park.  Thus ends my posts about Hawaii.

           
Click here to download:
Hawaii_Diana_Volcano_Park.zip (1859 KB)

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Hawaii Diana // Manta Boat Sunset

The first photos are from the dock and boat ride on the way to swim with the manta ray.  The last three were from the luau we went to early in the trip.

                 
Click here to download:
Hawaii_Diana_Manta_Boat_Sunset.zip (2705 KB)

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Hawaii Diana // The Beach

These were taken at the first beach we went to.  The guy at the hotel said that this beach was where he ultimately decided to move to Hawaii.  It was probably the nicest beach I've ever seen, but not nice enough to make me want to work in the service industry for the rest of my life.

               
Click here to download:
Hawaii_Diana_The_Beach.zip (2229 KB)

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Diana Overview

In Hawaii, I experimented with Diana more than I ever have before which resulted in some of the coolest pictures that have ever come out of my little plastic friend.  To explain how I created this weirdness, I should probably first explain how Diana works:

Diana is a plastic camera that uses medium format, 120mm film.  It has two settings for taking different sized photos: 16 and 12 (hence the name of China in 12 Frames).  On the 16 frame setting, you need a little mask inside the camera to make the photos rectangle shaped; without that mask the camera is meant to take 12 square photos.  Everything is manual, so you wind the film after taking a picture.  There is a little, translucent red window on the back of the camera that lets you see which frame you're on.  Depending on what type of film you're using, you can see different icons between the numbers as you wind the film.  Fuji brand film has little black dots that get consecutively smaller as you get closer to the next number, Kodak film just says "Kodak" right before the next number.  Unlike most 35mm cameras, you don't have to wind the film perfectly to the next frame, you have full control where you want to expose the film.  You also have to manually control the focus of the lens and the f-stop.

You can find more information about Diana here and here.

Basically, with these pictures I did everything wrong.  First, I put it on the wrong setting.  I set it to take 16 pictures without the 16 frame mask, under normal conditions this would cause a slight overlap from one frame to the next.  To increase the overlap and double exposure, I also didn't fully wind the film to the next frame.  I did something similar a couple weeks ago with the photos of my kids class, but this time I wound the film much more haphazardly.  Sometimes I'd wind it 2/3 of the way, sometimes half, other times just slightly.  I did keep an eye on the exposure and focal length, but most of the time I did that wrong as well (on purpose, mostly).  Since I was intentionally exposing the film multiple times, it wasn't important to have the camera set up correctly for every shot.  If every little thing was perfectly in focus, certain things could end up being distracting.

There are a lot of pictures, so I divided them into three sets.  Here we go...

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