leaving LAX

Taking off from Los Angeles. From a series of photographs taken in the early 1980s.

making it happen

If you're familiar with this photoblog you are familiar with my love of film photography as well as collecting and preserving old photographs and slides. I'm excited to share my experience and skill with those who may need their own histories digitally archived. 

I started a Go Fund Me page to help get my business started off on the right foot. If you can, please contribute, or please share. Thanks.

Purple Negatives Photography - Go Fund Me

my hometown.

All photographs © Monika Seitz Vega, May 2014.

AUG '67

A few months ago I picked up a bag of loose 35mm movie film, 8mm home movie film, and some stray slides at my favorite thrift shop for $4. The 35mm film wasn't anything special. The 8mm film ended up being a family's 1939 New Year's Eve celebration and miscellaneous home movies as well as a few soft-core pornographic shorts. 

I scanned the slides today, the only information provided was the "AUG 67" stamped on the Kodachrome mounts. 

The church looked familiar, it turns out it is Chartres Cathedral in Paris.

magenta positives

Earlier this month I spent an afternoon as a docent for the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation's "All About the Wiltern Theatre" tour. It was a fantastic event that I am proud to have been a part of. Both before and after the tour I had time to photograph some old haunts as well as some new discoveries. 

It turns out that the slide film I was shooting that day hadn't aged gracefully. Here are some of my favorite photographs from the day's roll, in all of their magenta glory.

All photographs © Monika Seitz Vega, August 2014. Long live film.

Chinatown in twenty minutes

What could one possibly do in Chinatown on a grey July morning when there's nowhere to park and the only metered space to be found was $3/hour and there were only 20 minutes worth of quarters in the camera bag?

Quite a bit actually. I purchased two new parasols, grabbed some postcards to send to friends out of town (3 for $1!), and took the photographs below. Guānshǎng!

the start of the roll (black + white edition)

Remember how strange it was picking up a roll of film from the pharmacy or camera shop and seeing that first print, mostly fine but a little fried on one side? Sometimes when loading a new film cartridge into the camera the frame that would be counted as "1" was exposed to light, guaranteeing uneven and unintentional exposure and, to most, ruining the picture. Labs would usually consider it a waste and wouldn't make a print of this first frame, but when they did... 

A couple years ago my friend Steve and I thought there should be a group on Flickr to celebrate these often beautiful oddities. We started uploading more and more of them, and the group The Start (or End) of the Roll was born. I got into the habit of loading my 35mm cameras sans lens cap to essentially insure the start of the roll would be something unique. Rarely focused and poorly exposed, there's a place in my heart for these accidental creations, lovely in their own way.

From my backyard to the lobby of a historic movie palace to not one but two Los Angeles cemeteries, you never know where the roll will start.