I cannot believe that Daniella is 2 already. It’s both amazing and scary how it seems like just yesterday I brought her home from the hospital and she’s already running around and telling me what to do. I am a sentimental person. I get attached to things and memories and I have keepsakes from my childhood that I brought with me from Belarus and hopefully will be able to pass them on to my kids someday. With very few exceptions those keepsakes are not store-bought items – they are things that my mom or my grandparents made. Daniella has a ton of toys (she is obsessed with puzzles and probably owns every puzzle ever made by Melissa & Doug). However, my wife and I are huge believers in DIY gifts; for every special occasion, on top of store-bought toys and presents Daniella receives a couple of things that Irina and I make ourselves. For her first birthday, Irina made her a huge cloth book with different activities. Last Christmas, we made her a toy kitchen. About a month before Daniella’s 2nd birthday, Irina was at the library and came across an amazing book – The City ABC Book by Zoran Milich. At first, I wanted to buy that book for Daniella, but Irina suggested that I make a similar one instead.

I spent a few days wondering around downtown, Strip District and the Southside and this is what I got…

I’ve been obsessed with photography since I was 8 years old. My mom gave me a Smena 8 – an old Soviet-made rangefinder and I was hooked right away. While my friends played outside I spent hours (and sometimes days) in my darkroom. There is something magical and relaxing about developing film and printing your own photos. When I started photographing weddings on my own in 2000 I went for the Cadillac of cameras – Hasselblad. I borrowed money from everyone I knew and bought two used ‘Blads – a 500CM and an EL/M. In 2005 I got swept up by the digital craze and traded both of my Hasselblads for Canon gear. I never quite got over the loss of those beautiful medium-format hunks of metal. Don’t get me wrong – I love digital photography and I am not trying to start yet another film vs. digital debate. I simply miss film. In the past couple of years I’ve been shooting a lot of 35mm black and white film for my personal projects (and developing it myself in my basement). However, there is nothing that compares to the beauty of a larger negative. I kept telling myself that buying a medium- or a large-format camera would be a complete waste of money, that film is expensive, that if I start doing more serious work using film I’d have to buy a negative/slide scanner. All those were good reason not to buy yet another film camera. I decided to go with my heart. I really could not justify a Hasselblad, so I settled for a time-proven workhorse that is Mamiya 645. I already have some projects in mind, so hopefully I’ll be able to post new photos pretty soon.