This is one in a series of images I took in 2004 and 2005 with a couple of toy cameras I have. Some images are local, and some are from a vacation taken to the Northwest.

Both cameras use medium format film, which is expensive to get index prints of, because an “index” print is essentially separate 4X4 pictures, rather than the usual contact sheet with lots of little thumbnails. Anyway, I have several rolls of these negatives lying around, and after reading about someone else’s method of digitizing them, I decided to give it a try.

Basically, you hold the negative up to a good light and take a photo of the negative with a digital camera, then fiddle around with the image in photoshop. These are the ones that turned out fairly well. I even left them in their plastic sleeves, and while that added some texture, I still got a pretty good idea of what each picture would look like if I were to pay to have it developed for real.

Click on the image above to see the others.

I visited some long-time friends this weekend in MPLS and they took me to my first May Day parade. A 30-some year tradition in south Minneapolis. One of the largest participants/organizers of the parade is the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre.

It was pretty cool. The whole thing took like 3 hours to go past, and while I didn’t have the best vantage point (it’s super crowded — thousands of people crammed into a small area to see this event), I got some pretty good shots of things as they went past.