Gina X Gene: Film Swap 1
Welcome to Foto Feb™, where we’re gonna be spending a little time celebrating some of the dope folks doing insane stuff with pinball photography. Nudge is lucky enough to have photographers from all over the country, with all sorts of different photography backgrounds. This month, we’ll do some stories featuring the dopest pinball photos you’ll ever see. Some stuff will be TOTALLY AMATEUR, while other stuff will be way profesh. This week we have two of my absolute favorites.
Gina Collecchia is a regular Nudge contributor. On top of taking some of the best photos for us, she also wrote the feature in Nudge 2. An in-depth look at how the Baltimore pinball scene is literally changing pinball’s soundtrack. If that sounds like hyperbole, then you’re just showing your whole ass right now because if you’d have read the article YOU’D KNOW. Jake Peterson and co are doing some wild stuff. Just google BSOS. Do it. I dare you. So yeah, go ahead and buy issue 2 if you haven’t yet. You won’t regret it.
Gene X Hwang is the co-founder and COO of Orange Photography. He’s taken dope pinball pics for years now. If you’re anywhere on the West Coast, you’ve probably seen him chilling and flipping and whatnot.
What the hell is double exposure photography?
It was a couple months ago that Gina mentioned to me that she and Gene were shooting some double exposure stuff. If you’re a normal human being, you probably don’t know what that means, so here’s the quick version. In double exposure photography, a photographer shoots a roll of film, which imprints a set of images onto the roll. They send that roll to a second photographer, who reshoots the roll. Now when you develop the film, both images are imprinted onto each other. The results are sorta wild.
So I was excited to hear that literally two of my all time fave pinball photogs were shooting together. When I got the rolls I was psyched. But enough talk from me, the dumb dumb. I’ma hand it over to Gina and Gene to explain what’s going on here.
What Gina said
I actually took extensive notes on this roll, in anticipation of being super meticulous about composition in the swap. But this was futile, as the composition was thwarted by the initial random offset of loading a roll of film into a second camera with a different loading mechanism than mine.
In summary, I shot the first 15 frames at Howard Levine’s private pinball collection up in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where he holds Classics tournaments a few times a year. I played well too, taking 5th of 30. (Editor’s note: 😏)
I had a killer game on Cleopatra, like 350k!
Howard has decorated with a lot of Grateful Dead memorabilia, vintage beer signs, a functional jukebox loaded up with classic rock and country songs about pinball, and machines organized by theme, like a row of bowling pinball games.
I suspect the black lights and UV-sensitive posters in Howard’s basement were inspired by Rock Fantasy. I like that you often have to blur your eyes to see past the pinball to Gene’s distinctly San Francisco frames.
These were a good experiment for film swapping, with bokeh-heavy shots an easy compliment to whatever might come next, and several frames of black light posters with patterned content laying out a canvas for portraits.
I finished the roll in Socrates Park though it looks like the scans got out of order somehow and the closeups of Greg’s Harlem Globetrotters complete the set.
What Gene says
When I got Gina’s notes on what she shot I was pretty impressed with her thoroughness but also I knew how film swaps, much like a game on an EM, can be chaotic and less planning can often work just as well. That made me start thinking about what might fit but knowing frames might not line up and such.
I did keep track of what I shot so I could remember later more than anything else. Anyhow the first few shots were around San Francisco and the beach, but then I traveled over Thanksgiving to visit my mom in Auburn, Alabama and there’s a bunch of stuff including our cat, Ginga-chan, the football stadium, Jordan-Hare, and a visit to an old cemetery (of which we barely have any in San Francisco, since all the dead moved to Colma years ago.
Colma’s city motto, is “It’s great to be alive in Colma” because the dead outnumber the living 😂
Then it was off to the airport where I got a requisite selfie I always include in every film swap roll I shoot and back to some pinball action and more San Francisco scenes. My Cheetah is featured as is my home bar, Gestalt and Emporium Oakland where there was a tournament as well as the official food of pinball, In-n-Out Burger.
I really love the checkerboard shot featuring Shannon Ducharme, an underrated but badass player in SF who’s starting to go to more tournaments so look out for her! The Asian kids were part of the Michael Jang opening I went to as well on a rainy ass day in December.
