Stops for Turtles

I first met Amber around 2008 when we both worked in a Fossil store at the mall. At the time she had a handful of tattoos that I don’t recall being visible at work, but over the years have come to encompass much of her body. She arrived in a tube top and shorts to make her ink accessible for the shoot, and our conversation began with me exclaiming, “You have a lot of tattoos! When did all this happen?”

“I was trying to look through, when it kind of blossomed. 2014 is kind of when it started getting heavy,” Amber said.

“I like to go at least twice a year. But money is a huge barrier. I do forget, quite a bit, how many tattoos I have, especially in the work that I do, like therapy with kiddos and adults and adolescents. Especially this time of year, I find it so hilarious because I’m covered. And then if I keep working with them, and they see me throughout the seasons, they’re shocked that I’m covered in tattoos. So I made sure that my profile picture, that like I’ve got a shorter-sleeved shirt on, and it’s showing at least some of this.”

 “And sometimes people are not cool about it. Or are shocked, and I don’t want to be the topic of conversation, especially in my line of work. I want it to kind of be like, ‘Here’s who I am,’ at the beginning. I’ll even, during the winter months, sometimes wear capris or intentionally roll up my sleeves.”

Amber got her first piece at age 19, a black outline of three birds on the back of her shoulder. “I got it because my sister was going to get hers touched up, and I was like I really want something. I liked her tattoos and I was like, I will never regret this one because it has to do with my family. So it’s my mom, my dad, and my sister, and then the house that we grew up at had those orange day lilies. I was like I’m just going to pick three birds, because I love birds, that represent the qualities and character traits of my family. And I drew it initially, and then the artist barely did any edits, which I also liked. I was nervous about that, of having something on my body that I would look at later and be like, I don’t like that.”

She didn’t expect her collected ink to grow as exponentially as it did, but found deeper meaning in her tattoos as her body grew into adulthood and changed as well. “I thought I would be a person with like, four. I thought this was going to be my biggest tattoo [the birds on the back of her shoulder]. And then I fell in love with it. Especially growing with my body and getting used to my body and all of its changes. Like, these are permanent things that are really cool, that I can look at and enjoy no matter what my body looks like or does.”

Her favorite piece is the tangle of pumpkins on one arm, inked by Sara Bell at Lucky 13 in Richmond, who has done most of Amber’s nature-related tattoos.

On her opposite arm are two examples of the same species of newt at different stages of life. “The orange one is an adolescent version of the same one on the back, the back is the adult version. It’s an eastern spotted newt. I grew up catching them in my backyard. They’re an amphibian, so whenever it rained in my backyard, they would come out and walk around, and you could find them really easily because they’re orange. And then as adults they live in bodies of water, so I had to get the adult version too. They’re so fun. They’re so beautiful.”

She has a similar story tied to the blue-tailed skink wrapped around one knee. “Our cats would grow up catching them and biting off their tails, and their tails always grow back. Which I thought is just incredible. Even now, my cat brings them to me. I’ll find them in our rain barrel so I’ve covered up our rain barrel so they can’t get in there. They’re just really pretty. Something that has that vibrant of blue.”

Many of Amber’s nature tattoos are designed with the animal’s habitat and life stages in mind, the most impressive depicted down the entire length of one leg—the full life cycle of a monarch butterfly also inked by Sara Bell. “The caterpillar’s down there, the eggs are here, the chrysalis, and then him coming out of the chrysalis, and then him full grown.”

“That is the swallowtail butterfly,” she says of the piece on her opposite thigh. “And all of the things that she either feeds off of or the caterpillars lay their eggs on and eat. Queen Anne’s lace, thistle, fennel.”

All of Amber’s nature tattoos are chosen from some sort of personal attachment or experience she has with the species, like the box turtle on the back of her leg. “I grew up in the woods, and I would also catch them along with the newts. When I got my license, I would always stop and get them out of the street. They were always crossing the street where we grew up because we lived kind of in the middle of nowhere. So much so that my sister and my dad made this vest for me. It’s like an orange vest, like a safety vest, and it has ‘stops for turtles’ on the back of it. Because they’re like, ‘You’re getting out of your fucking car on 81 to like get a turtle out of the road, can you at least wear a vest?’”

I have a lot more of Amber’s tattoos and stories to share in a second post coming soon, including work commemorating loved ones and identity. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Expiration Date

My good pal Steven is sort of the king of expired film. It makes up the bulk of what he shoots, often taking advantage of the low saturation to make esoteric double exposures. I’m sort of new to expired film myself—I’ve shot it occasionally over the years, but more recently added it to my regular rotation.

Expired film is almost wholly unpredictable. The age of the film usually matters less than how it was stored—heat especially has a detrimental effect on film and can render the roll unusable if not kept in cooler conditions. You can find expired film on eBay pretty easily but even the most reliable sellers often don’t know much about where the film has been before they came into it, so any roll bears the risk of not developing images. I’ve had good luck so far, both with expired film I bought from sellers online and rolls gifted to me by friends who found a random roll in a drawer, but even the best expired film often has some limitations.

Most of the expired color film I’ve shot develops a bit underexposed and soft, as seen in the images in this post, which are unedited aside from basic color corrections done when scanned by the lab. Sometimes I like that, but good, bright daylight is your best bet. I shot the above shots just before sunset in a shady area, and the two photos below on the same evening but in more direct light. You can see where the latter two still have the slightly muted effect of expired film without losing as much color saturation.

I’ve shot some black and white film that expired in 1997 (images not featured in this post) that came out beautifully, completely unable to tell the film was expired, and some other black and white that developed with a sepia tone due to the condition of the film (also beautiful). Most of what I photograph isn’t that important in the scheme of things—I rarely take on paid work, and most likely wouldn’t shoot expired film for a hired job unless it was requested, and most of my other work is part of ongoing series in which if the shot doesn’t come out, there will be more opportunities to try it again. I have yet to shoot a roll of expired film that did not come out at all or did not make me happy, but it can happen, and there’s nothing lost if it does.

All images in this post were shot on the same roll of Kodak UltraMax 400, expired in 2008 and purchased on eBay. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Birds in Flight

The first time I photographed skateboarding was in the year 2000 with a disposable camera that came equipped with a surprisingly effective zoom lens. I was hanging out with a guy who skated and tagged along with him and his friends to Dirty Curb and a random southside parking lot, catching shots of the boys airborne over a gap in the garage or grinding the yellow paint off a parking block. Over the next twenty years, I went in and out of photography, upgrading to a Minolta SLR that I lost in a bar when I was 22 and burning through a couple of digital point-n-shoots that met their deaths after being dropped one too many times. I took a lot of self-portraits and ran an outfit blog circa 2011, and toyed around with street photography, always documenting my life. Photography became a more concentrated medium for me in 2018, and it didn’t take long to find myself back in a skate park, remembering that joy of catching a skater in flight.

I wrote a little bit about my relationship with skate photography for Ilford Photo’s Community page in November, which you can read here, but the gist is I love the shapes the skaters’ bodies make mid-trick, how they resemble birds taking flight or dancers caught in the middle of a move. I love closeup shots that fill the frame, photos that focus not on the trick or its success, but the joy of the movement. Followers of my Instagram have probably seen me talk about this before, but so much of skate photography is about capturing a successful trick, and I like to encourage people to look at the beauty of of the movement regardless of its outcome.

These photos were taken recently at a DIY in Richmond, tagging along with another band of skaters who graciously let me into their spaces. In 2022 I shot less skate than typical of the last few years, and I’m really excited to jump back in. I shoot a lot of film—it’s always exciting to see the developed images, especially since I normally hold off until I have several rolls to send out to the lab and it can be weeks or longer between when I shot a roll of film and when I see the actual photos. Skate photos are always the ones I’m most excited to see, and never tire of down the road.

All photos in this post shot on Rollei Retro 400S (the film) and a Minolta X-700 (the camera). Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.