Dave Bellard's not-so-daily journal and sketchbook
My first blog post of 2020, finally. I wanted to start off the new year with an idea for a blog series I’ve been kicking around in my head for some time, which I’m calling the “99 Cent Record Bin Adventures”, dedicated to pretty much exactly what it says, digging through the forgotten vinyl of the ubiquitous “99 cent” section you find in every record store and thrift shop. Seattle is one of the music capitols of the world, so naturally we have…
Read MoreAre you tired of the same old Christmas music b******t this year? Check out my FUNKY CHRISTMAS playlist
Read MoreI was in Ecuador in late October, about one week after the massive riots that shut down the city for almost the entire month had ended. The protests were a response to the new president’s austerity measures proposed by the IMF, and had effectively shut down Quito and the surrounding areas….
Read MoreThis past October I had the good fortune to attend the wedding of two very dear friends, Itala and Alan, which took place at a historic estate-turned-resort named Hacienda Cusin in the equally historic town of Otavalo, Ecuador. The wedding took place on Saturday afternoon…
Read MoreI have no idea what possessed me to shoot a roll of my precious Provia 400 color negative film with a polarizer lens. For one thing, Provia 400 is a very rare film to find these days. Fuji doesn’t make it anymore and if you can find any for sale in the expired film marketplace it’s usually expensive. As you may or may not know, shooting 120 film (or any film for that matter) is a costly endeavor…
Read MoreI normally don’t shoot B&W film, but I had a few rolls of Ilford 1600 B&W film in my freezer and thought I’d give them a shot, so to speak. I shot one roll at Ruby Beach in Olympic National Park on a grey Sunday last march and the other last June on a weekend trip in Vancouver, BC…
Read MoreHere’s another roll of this great Retrochrome 320 vintage slide film from Film Photography Project that I shot in this past summer. I shot this roll in the Olympic National Park on a cloudy September weekend, which meant a lot of overcast mountain shots and even some good fog photos. However the chipmunk at the campsite….
Read MoreThere’s nothing more fun for me than finding and shooting a weird vintage or expired film on my cameras, and I recently shot and developed a few rolls of a super cool slide film called Retrochrome 320, a 35mm film custom rolled from the folks at Film Photography Project. According to their website, the Retrochrome 320 is a government surplus film that was originally made for industrial and government applications, most likely stored in a deep freeze…
Read MoreThis is a long blog post, so for those that just want the executive summary, here it is: Facebook is a shitty company with a shitty product, and I stopped using it.
Read MoreI recently featured some work on the website using film shot with a very bizarre and unique camera rarely seen in the U.S., the Mundus Color 60. The Mundus is a french camera made in the postwar era that shoots still frame photos on 25ft rolls of 16mm film…..
Read MoreI was digging through my archives recently and came across some old photos of a project I had years ago called CINEMA SUPER 8. It was a monthly TV program comprised entirely from super 8 film I had been shooting in various locations around the world, which I edited together…
Read MoreI visited the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh last April for the second time in the past ten years, and it was even better than I remembered it. Warhol is a contemporary artist whose body of work needs, and deserves, a museum dedicated to his legacy, and It’s great to see it in his birthplace. They do a good job of rotating the pieces…
Read MoreNew month, new blog post: a few scans of medium format film I shot in Tokyo in 2017. I put the developed film away after getting it processed and I wasn’t sure if I would even use it in artwork. I hadn’t even looked at it closely when it came back from Dwayne’s Photo. Fast forward to a few months ago, I was sorting all my recent film…
Read MoreWelcome 2019 and the first blog post of the year. I’m going to use it to close the book on some unfinished projects from the end of 2018. Like a lot of you I’m sure, I don’t make resolutions for the new year….
Read MoreThe other day I was organizing my artwork archives at home and I unwrapped some pieces I produced a few years ago when I worked at OpenStudio DC, a screenprinting studio that was on Florida Ave in Capitol Hill (later moved to Ivy City and now relocating to Baltimore). I started printing there in 2013, and it was a pivotal time for me as an artist…
Read MorePrint delivery day is always a great, but this new batch I got in are really special. There’s no better feeling for me than seeing a film composition when it’s enlarged and printed, and really it’s the first time the art “exists” as something to be regarded..
Read MoreGiven all the attention being drawn (hilariously) to the forest management practices of Finland, I thought it would be a good time as an American who has actually seen - and extensively photographed the forests of central Finland…..
Read MoreI’m going to dump a bunch of photos and thoughts in this post, simply to get them off my hard drive and onto this digital broadsheet. I titled this “The world that winter..” because it feels like every month that passes by in this age of ascendent fascism will be …
Read MoreI recently had a milestone in my artistic career, my first magazine article as my Radiance series was featured in Issue 10 of Create! Magazine. It's not quite a "article", It's more of a short artist profile. The magazine is a bimonthly publication…
Read More
