Life in the Tropics
Who knew? In my return to using film in medium format cameras, I exposed some color transparency film last month. I haven't done that in 8 years! The image below was exposed using a Fuji 617GX on Velvia. More to come.
Playa Estero, Santa Catalina, Panama
Greek Geometry
A black and white triptych made with film; Astypalea, Greece.
I spent two months this summer on small Mediterranean islands. Although I captured color images digitally, all my B&W work was exposed on 120 film using a Hasselblad. Needless to say upon returning home, it was thrilling to process B&W negatives and to make work prints. For the past several months I've been printing B&W images digitally; I'm convinced that my return to black and white film and format cameras justifies a dedicated B&W printer. More on that in the New Year.
New Tab-IPhoneography
I've been sorting and editing Iphone captures for a new tab for Mybigphatphotographs.com photoblog. I'm still not quite convinced of the sequencing yet, but I like the overall content. Interestingly, last evening I made the capture below while having dinner at the inlet of the Shinnecock Bay, in Hampton Bays, NY. I lost all interest in my meal for about ten minutes while I made the capture and post processed it. Be sure to click on the tab "Iphonegraphy" and see what's been interesting to me visually for the past year or so.
Deus Ex Machina
I thought I had already posted this image on mybigphatphotographs. But I see that I haven't. It's a self portrait from the same time period and same space as the previous posted Too Many Me's. While I lived on St John USVI, I had the distinct experience of Hurricane Hugo. Many houses were destroyed by the storm, including the one next door to where I lived. The roof was blown off, and virtually everything inside was blown away or shredded. All that remained was the house's masonry walls. Weeks after the storm and after the contents of house had been removed, I started using the blown house's interior as a natural light studio. I made a series of portraits there, including a bunch of self portraits. This one, Deus Ex Machina, is my favorite. I have a 20"x24" print of it over my desk in my "lightroom", and, for me, it certainly stands the test of time. I made it with 4x5 view camera and a 90mm lens.
This image has always resonated of Tina Modatti's hands of the Puppeteer (above); I remember thinking of it I as I played with the shadows of my hands on the white wall before I made the exposure. And as a sidebar, I'd urge that anyone interested: to read about and to explore her relationship with Edward Weston, particularly in Weston's Day Books. I especially found their year together in Mexico during the mid 1920's fascinating. He taught her photography; and in some respects, I think she became the better photographer of the two. And what a time to be an artist living in Mexico.
Moonrise over Mt. Rundle
I believe I've bored everyone to tears who follows me on Facebook with landscape/skiing images from Alberta, Canada. So here's one last one: the back side of Mt. Rundle in Banff, Canada with a full moon in the eastern sky, right at sunset.
Hose Head
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I lasted posted to my blog. Sometimes, life just has a way of taking over. But have no fear, I've been tirelessly capturing images. Most of my images have been the product of iphones. I've always been a promoter of alternative cameras, starting with plastic Diana cameras in the '70's. In a way, iphones are kind of like old school toy cameras; certainly a lot of the photo apps ape toy camera photography with countless filters, some even named Diana. Go figure. So, as I distill down a year's body of iphoneography, I'll you give one of the early ones; interestingly I was at this location last week, and the nozzle is no longer there, but the hose is, lying almost in the same place.
Just A Whole Lot Going On
I feel as though I have woefully neglected my photography blog over the past month. Well, actually I have neglected it. My attention and efforts have been focused on my foodblog: www.2gourmaniacs.com, and on two television shows that I am doing on local public TV. The first show, Moment2Moment: 35 Years Behind the Ground Glass, is a series of 8 shows, each 30 minutes long where I talk about various photographic portfolios and collections that I have produced over my career as a photographer. I will also have guests photographers and gallery owners who will talk about their work as well. I've taped two shows already, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that to sit in front of TV cameras for 30 minutes without commercial breaks, and articulate intelligently even about a topic on which you are an expert is a daunting enterprise.
Another big time commitment is selecting my photographic images (50-60 per show and they have to be already digitally scanned, of course), formatting them, digitally sizing them and sequentially putting them in a specific software program in my Mac laptop so it can be later hardwired to an Avid system at the TV studio: that process (or workflow as it's now called) has given me the howling fantods (to quote D.F. Wallace) more than once.
And...and...Rosaria and I start taping our cooking show, 2Gourmaniacs, Crazy 4 Food, the last week of this month. Yipes. And, oh did I mention that I'm querying literary agents for a cookbook entitled The Hamptons' Home Cookbook. Right now, there just doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day.
So, I'll give you three images: 2 color images exposed on film, and a food capture from two days ago. The dog was photographed in Belize twenty years ago, and "Drinks" was photographed ten years ago on Mayreau Island, in the Grenadines. The food image was captured here in Southampton a couple days ago for a blog post about asparagus and stone crab claws....needless to say, they were delicious after the shoot.
Three From at Sea
My recent post about Offshore in Mexico got me searching for images I took during sailboat deliveries in the Atlantic. Here are three Polaroids taken on different passages. I'm amazed how much they look like one another and how they could have been taken within five minutes of each other. I'm guessing they were each exposed somewhere out around 65 degrees West Longitude heading southbound. Up until three or four years ago it was possible to still buy Polaroid Spectra film. When I heard that Polaroid was about to go belly up, I stocked up on Spectra film packs. Now I'm down to 60 shots. (Although there is talk about a group taking over the old Polaroid production facility in the Netherlands, and beginning to make Polaroid film again.)
I've taken a lot of Polaroids in the past thirty-five years. I've collected some of them into a book called A Couple of Stops Down at the Speed of Light. You can check out some of my Polaroid images by either clicking here on by clicking on the PhatPolaroid's' tab above.
Sword Phish Club
A couple of years ago, I saw a photographer's portfolio of incredible prints. Naturally, I can't remember his name. What was so interesting about the work was that the prints were platinum prints that had color added to them by means of putting the platinum prints through a large format digital printer. I can't remember how he dealt with the registration issues. What struck me was first the subjects he chose (a lot of grays, blacks), and how intense the printing process must have been. I had already closed my wet process darkroom when I saw these images. But, it immediately occurred to me that tonal separations would be easy to do digitally. So, I started experimenting with images. The image below was from a color negative. After scanning and imaging the file, I duplicated it in photoshop. One version I converted to grayscale and made the necessary exposure adjustments, and then converted it back into RGB. With the other version, still in RGB I selected several of the predominating colors, one at a time, adjusting the saturation and hue and then copying and pasting them as layers into the B&W version. Registering each layer was simple. Once I had all the layers pasted in and registered, I adjusted each layer's opacity.
Waiting For the Parade
It's funny, I've never really considered myself as a street shooter. Some of big names of that genre that immediately come to mind are Lee Friedlander, Ralph Gibson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus. Of the four I mentioned, the last one, Arbus, used a medium format Rollieflex, the others used 35mm Leicas. The image below was taken in New York in the 90's with a an old Rollie which had belonged to my grandfather, and that I nickname affectionately after him, Ralph. I took a lot of photographs with Ralph. It was a fixed focal length lens (80mm) camera. In the 70's, when I changed formats from 35mm to 2 1/4, I rarely went back to rectilinear framing. The square format of 2 1/4 just felt so natural and right for me. I used Ralph as my point and shoot camera for along time, finally retiring it for a Hasselblad in 1994.
These guys were part of the Polish Day parade in Manhattan, and the patch one guy's sleeve says Bound Brook, which, as we all know, is in northern New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge. I've always loved this image, the way these two guys look, the drum thingie sticking out the one guy's belt. I can imagine these two having been friends and part of a marching band for years.
