Our artist friends were either completely destroyed by covid or the metamorphized like butterflies and created beautiful things. Both of these things happened to Helen Rosemier who lost her husband, Matt, during COVID and also created an astounding book about the swirling emotions. ZONES OF POSSIBILITY is a book of photography, memory, loss and celebration. It’s also a book filled with design elements that would send a publisher into spasms. “What do you mean you want to glue photo corners onto page 11 of every copy?” “What do you mean pages 24 and 25 need to be ripped in half? We already agreed to an embossed cover and a foldout flyleaf.” “Wait, you want loose photos stuffed in there too?”

In London again. With <lj user="trillian_Stars"> and a Hasselblad 4116 trying to remember LJ embed codes. 

I feel like we're at that delicate nexus of possibility and creativity and my inclination is to run as far as I can before we fall off.

But, true love, seek me in the throng

Of spirits floating past;

And I will take thee by the hands,

And know thee mine at last.

— Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal

People, let me tell you about our best friend, Kevin Hollenbeck and how we want you to have his cameras.

Kevin was ubiquitous in the Dresden Dolls band scene and so many other music scenes. He was the person that a lot of rock stars relied on to Get Things Done when they came through town. I remember Kevin telling a story of how he ended up in a Volkswagon Jetta, driving it like a get-away car, hunched over the wheel, swerving around ducks and trash cans with Weird Al Yankovic in the back seat, careening dangerously towards an amusement park where there may or may not have been a roller coaster they wanted to ride at 2:00 in the morning. And while this sounds like the fevered dream of many a person, it wasn't Kevin's fevered dream, it was a true story, though I may have gotten some of the details wrong.

Kevin Hollenbeck, aka Shadowcaptain, was a photographer from the Washington D.C. area who passed away of colon cancer in 2022 leaving an incredibly large group of friends devastated. Kevin was a theater person who loved music and spent his career helping indie bands with his photography. His kindness and enthusiasm put him at the center of a lot of amazing experiences with musicians. He left behind a lot of photo equipment and to honor his legacy, we want to give that equipment to people who will continue to support bands and theater.

Here's how you can win one of Kevin's cameras.

Ever since it came out in 2018 I have coveted Micah Bloom's book Codex, published by the University of North Dakota's Digital Press. Codex is a response to the 2017 flood in Minot, North Dakota and asks the question, what if you love a thing far more than anybody thought humanly possible? After the flood, Bloom and a meticulous team of researchers went to Minot and combed through the flood debris documenting and collecting books. Ordinary books. Collected and treated with the care the NTSB would give to airplane wreckage. Indeed, the whole thing has the overtones of an infinitely funded quest to discover ... what? The resulting expenditure of resources on something that we'd all walk past gives us a fascinating and beautiful look at the intersection between humanity and nature. Floods are, intrinsically, i think, about the ownership of the liminal spaces that people expand into.

Bloom took many of the collected books and exhibited them in a gallery show that I'm sorely depressed that I missed. But I'm incredibly happy to have one of the 20 art books created from the gallery show, thanks to me whining about not having one loudly on the Internet and the press realizing that there was one unsold copy lying in a drawer.

This is literally one of the two or three most beautiful books I've ever seen.

But don't be sad!!! You can get a digital version of this astounding book, for free, from the University of North Dakota Digital Press here.

The Haddelblad X1d is simultaneously one of the most beautiful and yet one of the most tragically terrible cameras I've ever used. 

It produces excellent images when it produces images but it's as slow as a 4x5 without the reliability.

Being a mirrorless, you can put a whole lot of other lenses on it but with the Hasselblad having the shutters in the lenses, there are some tradeoffs — with a non Hasseblad X lens you're limited to using the electronic shutter, which takes 1/3 of a second to write the frame, so any movement in the camera during that time will show up in the final image. But the advantage of a built in leaf-shutter is that H native lenses will flash sync at any speed. So that's nice. 

The camera itself is ponderously slow to respond to requests from the user to actually do something, pressing the shutter is basically sending a third class parcel package to the camera asking for it to take a photo when it has a chance. Another powerful annoyance is how slowly the camera turns on either the ELF or the rear-screen. I'm used to the Panasonic X series — the GX7 and the GX9 respond instantly to a touch of the shutter button and display the live view. Not so with the Hasselblad, where four or five frantic half-pushes of the shutter and several long seconds are required to switch the camera from menu to live view. But, if you can live with that, the images are nice. There are two newer versions (X1Dii and the X2D) both of which use the same exact sensor. 

Last week over on Twitter, vegan comfort food emulator Thee Burger Dude  (@TheeBurgerDude) wondered how much vegan chili he could make for $36. I didn't follow enough of the conversation to figure out what made him ask that, but it got me instantly obsessed with how much vegan chili I could make for $36. [EDIT FROM THE FUTURE: Thee Burger Dude responded to me on Twitter saying that there was a viral tweet a couple of years ago from someone lamenting that they couldn't be vegan because it cost $36 to make vegan chili, causing the entire Internet wonder, loudly, just what the heck this person was making chili out of.] A few years back my colleague at the Philadelphia Weekly, Randy LaBosso wondered, in a series of articles, how well he could live on some small amount of money — it might have been $40 a week. And, you know, whenever someone on the Internet does something like that, you're always smacking your head at how you could do it better and I'm going "Randy! Let me tell you about lentils!" 

I'm fortunate to live in a part of Philadelphia which has an enormous amount of food options and that's not the case everywhere. Many American's live in food deserts where their options for shopping are very limited. For this, I shopped at two different places, Sprouts Farmers Market for bulk spices and Aldi, for almost everything else. There are a few places that I didn't try that might have been able to save me more money, such as our vegetable trucks and the dollar store (critically, I think the zucchini and squash might have been about 25% or so less expensive at a vegetable truck). Also, if I'd been able to go in on this with other people, I think I could have gotten the beans cheaper in larger amounts by shopping at some of our international stores that supply restaurants in the area.

So, all this is predicated on a) having places to shop and b) having the time to go to those places. 

TL;DR

Since 1999 I've been taking a self portrait that spans the end of one year and the beginning of the next. They're all two seconds long and start in the last second of one year and end in the first second of the next. 

Here's 2022 turning into 2023. As I've gotten older, I've realized that I have pretty much everything I want right where I am. 

I hope 2023 is good for you. See you there.

I'm now also @kylecassidy@photog.social on Mastodon and <lj user="trillian_stars"> is @Trillianstars@mastodon.social. 

It's been three years in the making and quite a long strange trip, but my latest book, Lopapeysa: A Knitter's Guide to Iceland with Patterns, Techniques and Travel Tips is on sale in the UK and EU. It's got LOTS of photos and it's about a really exciting and photogenic location.