Oh, hey. Look at that. IT’S NOT INFRARED. : )

I haven’t given up the IR experimentation (sorry, haters), but over the last several weeks, I’ve been slowly making my way through a couple of rolls of color film in the Olympus XA. I had them developed recently, and I’ve got the scans post-processed and uploaded now.

One of the rolls is Ektar, a film of which I’m not normally a superfan — but which seems to really be at home on XA. I think it has to do with the comparatively low contrast of the XA’s lens — it takes the edge off of Ektar’s contrast and saturation.

One of the more successful subjects on the roll is this construction site at Laney College. Construction sites are one of those categories of subject which is inexplicably tricky to photograph well, and yet at the same time is hard to turn away from. The appeal is easy to understand, I think — sites and situations which are undergoing transformation sort of cry out for documentation, and unlike many natural landscapes, you can’t tell yourself, “well, I can come back another week or another season.”

The difficulties are a bit harder to figure out, and I don’t think I have them all straight in my head yet. Part of it is that the great machinery and the huge quantities of raw material tend to lend a lot of drama to the situation — and yet, unless one is shooting an annual report for the construction company or the site owner, documenting that drama is probably not what the photographer wants out of the situation. One has to try to find a place to stand from which one can enforce a human-scale perspective…