Vintage is the New Hip

If you read yesterdays post this is going to be the exact opposite, a departure from the fantastical technology headed our way.  There's a deep duality with me, I fully embrace the coolness of modern technology, and where it's heading and yet at the same time my deepest fantasy is to build a rustic mountain(or desert) cabin, furnish it with hand built furniture, stock it with produce grown form my garden and meat hunted.  To watch the quiet sunrise, far removed from the city where I now live.  To live as close to nature as possible, to observe first hand the changing of the seasons and the running of the deer (past piece).  If you know me you know I love to build things.  I have much more fun building something than using it, most recently I carved and built a model sailboat, which has been sailed exactly once. 
I'm definitely a journey/process versus destination guy.  So my next project is going to be a camera, a large 20x20 wooden camera, complete with a handmade lens and film holders.  Why so large, well I plan on shooting wax paper and collodion negatives contact printed on a variety of prepared surfaces, but I'm most excited about salt prints. 

Contact printing is sandwiching the negative and paper together in a glass frame and exposing it to UV light.  The size of the final print is equal to the size of the negative.  I'd like to exhibit the final work along side the materials used to produce it.  I've always had this feeling when visiting art galleries, when there is a plethora of information 'defending' the process by which the particular photographer achieved the images, that if what's being sold is the process than the process should also be on display.  Plus it would be really fun to describe the whole project, from building the camera to producing the final images.  Handmade throughout, no computers, pixels or inks.  Sometimes disconnecting is the best thing you can do.  Yes I know I'm writing a post about handmade on a computer, but hey what'd you expect, a handwritten blog post.  Ooh, now there's an idea, a snail mail blog, but then it wouldn't be called a blog but a snog (snail + log), of course I already use the word snog at Christmas time, Soy Eggnog; snog...

Cheers All!