Spent today galavanting around San Jose participating in the A-Z City Challenge as part of the Lomo Sampling Games. These are happening all over the world over the month of September and then winners will get a trip to Vienna, Austria. Lomo is a russian camera that seems to have this cult following. We went to a gallery opening last night at Gallery AD - Anna Domini that had a showing of several hundred Lomo shots. I had heard about the competition via an email, but got more info last night and decided to participate. (warning: Trying out a new DHTML script for the popup page of images and captions. This popup window with the pics seems to make Netscape 4.x on the Mac crash. It is a little slow to load on Netscape on the PC but does work. Every now and then a weird error message pops up but it doesn't seem to keep the page from working. I am working to fix it.)

The A-Z City challenge is basically a photographic scavenger hunt across a city. Anna Domini is the Lomo Embassy in San Jose and was therefore hosting the competition for the city of San Jose. The festival Tapestry in Talent was going on downtown, so it made for good shooting fodder. I basically had 5 hours to shoot the 26 items on the list - they could be interpreted in various artistic ways and then I had to get the film back to the gallery. They also lent Lomo cameras - which was good since I didn't have one. I also carried the PenCam (set on the lowres setting) with me. While I was wandering around downtown looking for the items on my list, I was also making my way with the SharkByte map around the city center shooting more of the cool arty sharks. I managed to capture several of them but more are to be found. There are sharks here, images from the Koi pond at the Japanese Friendship Garden and other misc. things from my day including my car, some cool sculpture and a nice mannequin.

I am not sure where my film from the Lomo shoot is going or if I will ever see the pictures. They could all really be bad - you never know the first time you use a new camera. I assume I will find out something at the end of September which is when we are supposed to hear how we did.

I have ordered the Lomo camera version that has four apertures that shoot over a 2 second time frame. Should be very cool - a whole wall of photos from this type of camera was at the gallery last night. Can't wait.