Super 8 + Polaroids

April 21, 2023

With a little bit of a wedding backlog, this one is from before the world went crazy. It’s Tori and Eric’s Hudson Valley wedding on Super 8 and Polaroids! They had a lovely little ceremony upstate in the Hudson Valley literally overlooking the Hudson River. It was stunning! Take a look below!

I also was shooting a bit of instant film that day and got some truly wonderful moments on the custom Instax camera I was using. The black and white instant film really just fits so well with weddings. So classic and chic!

I’ve got a bunch of weddings to post and really want the world to see them so promise to start posting in the blog more often!

Congrats to Tori and Eric and hope they’re doing well!

Jazz Age Lawn Party - West Side Story - Instax

Jazz Age Lawn Party 2019 // Super 8 + 16mm + Polaroids

September 3, 2019

Back at it again with this year’s trip to the marvelous Jazz Age Lawn Party on Governor’s Island in New York City. For those unaware, the Jazz Age Lawn Party is a yearly event taking place on a weekend in both in June and August where you travel out to the really beautiful island off the southern tip of Manhattan and have a day filled with jazz, champagne and dancing. Everyone dresses up in their finest 1920’s threads (some of it is genuine vintage clothing from the time period!) and enjoy a day relaxing.

I always go with the amazing Penumbra Foundation’s tintype booth they run every year. They shoot actual tintypes on large format 4x5 and 5x7 cameras. I document their booth as well as the event on Super 8 and this year I added some 16mm into the mix as well. The Super 8 was B&W Tri-X self-processed at MONO NO AWARE, a cinema arts non-profit I work with in Brooklyn, and the 16mm was color negative shot on a Bolex H16 and processed/scanned at the new Kodak NYC lab! You can see some of the footage from the day below!

A fun little snippet in there is when part of the cast of the upcoming Broadway show and Steven Spielberg directed film adaptation of West Side Story. Probably around 8 of the cast members were at the event just enjoying the day and couldn’t help but get a tintype of the crew to immortalize the day. They were a lot of fun and really loved their tintype. I later caught a portrait of two of them on some instant film which is featured at the top of this post.

Aside from documenting on motion film, I always can’t resist bringing a few still cameras to take some portraits because the outfits are always incredible. I brought along a Polaroid 110B with some Instax Wide film as well as a modified Instax Wide 300. Bringing along cameras that were at least closer to the correct time period (albeit still from the 50s technically) is a treat because they always get a lot of looks and questions as I walk around with them.

Also, while helping out the Penumbra Foundation with their booth, the tintype studio manager, Jolene Lupo, and I devised a very McGyver’d way to shoot a “mug shot” type double exposure on a single plate. Took a lot of ingenuity and several extra hands but the results were exactly as we’d hope for! This is the flipped scan since with a tintype, everything comes out inverted.

In the end, it was a hot but fun weekend to test out lots of different cameras and chat with some really inspiring artists working on their craft. And be sure to check out the previous years I’ve gone: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.

50 feet of Song - Birdtalker // Super 8

November 4, 2017

Another chance to collaborate with the Super 8 project called "50 Feet of Song" came my way and I was thrilled to jump in. The concept of the project is to film folk musicians performing a song in one take on one roll of Super 8 film, which is 50 feet of film in length. My previous session with Kirby Brown came out really well and I was hoping to do more. To be honest, it's a bit of a thrill to shoot an entire roll of Super 8 in one pull of the trigger and the results are a truly unique experience of capturing live music.

The project was featured on Kodak's podcast, The Kodakery, as well as in Kodak's new print quarterly magazine, Kodachrome, named after their much beloved yet dead reversal film. You may also recognize the name from Paul Simon's legendary song.

Anyways, I shot this session in Harlem with the fantastic folk band, Birdtalker, who I've been following for a while. Check out the full session below and be sure to not only listen to more of their music but check out more sessions on 50 Feet of Song.

CAAMP, the band // Super 8 + Polaroids

September 19, 2017

Last year had the chance to hang out with the guys of CAAMP, a killer folk band, and shoot some Super 8 and Polaroids while they were in town.

CAAMP - "See The World" Tour Promo

Had a good time just hanging out around NYC, on fire escapes and exploring the city. Some of the footage was shot during their fantastic show at Rockwood Music Hall in the Lower East Side. The guys have a really fun, high energy performance that was great to capture on film and the results looked awesome.

CAAMP - "Hey Joe" Tour Promo

We ended up using the footage to create two promo videos for their current fall tour. Looking forward to when they pass through NYC again this week.

Jazz Age Lawn Party 2017 // Super 8 + Polaroids

August 27, 2017

Definitely one of the most fun events to shoot on anything analog is the amazing Jazz Age Lawn Party every summer on Governor's Island in NYC. Once again, I was helping out the amazing crew at the Penumbra Tintype Studio by documenting on Super 8 their hard work shooting tintypes of guests and shooting Polaroids of the VIP guests.

Although as some people may point out, Super 8 didn't really surface until many decades after the 20's, it's still a very fitting format to shoot and especially seeing the final result projected is something special. So I shot using my favorite camera, the Nizo 801 Macro and I also opted to shoot some Impossible Project film and some Instax Wide in my custom Polaroid 110B from the 1950s.

With the instant film I opted for just portraits as for this event, the costumes and outfits are second to none! Some people are wearing genuine 1920s outfits they've scoured the planet for so they are quite a treat to shoot. And these days, Impossible Project's black & white film is really lovely. Sadly can't be shooting peelapart Fujifilm FP-3000B like I used to with it being $60/pack now!

Nonetheless, I shot a bit of the Penumbra crew in action shooting 4x5 and 5x7 tintypes and even managed to get one of myself at the end of the weekend. I'm not the most photogenic person, often being told I have a sad face... BUT the tintype master, Jolene, managed to get a solid portrait of me. It's really stunning. I returned the favor by shooting portraits of some of the Penumbra crew.

In the back of the event in the VIP section was analog guru Geoffrey Berliner with Curtis Wilcocks shooting peelapart Polaroids with Fujifilm FP-100C and his incredible Graflex Super D. He may correct me on that... The portraits have a wildly shallow depth of field and ultimately have a dream-like quality to them. In the main area was everything from vintage clothing shops, dancing, live jazz bands and even a mobile barbershop doing hot shaves! Michael Arenella is always at the front, directing the band and singing along with some special guests and the Dreamland Follies always have a few choreographed dances throughout the day in some marvelous vintage-styled outfits.

With a quick break to grab some food and drinks with my wife and a few friends who stopped by the event, it was quite the weekend. Not as hot as last August so that was a welcome reprieve. Perhaps one day I'll be behind the large format camera making tintypes... just have to learn how to first!

Super 8mm and Polaroid work featured on

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