New video up.

More darkroom stuff- some printing last month at the studio.

Run to Houston to show prints:

Katie and I stashed Lucy at the dog-sitter and made a dash to Len and Cathy Kowitz home in Houston to show prints to a monthly meeting of a local photo group.  Very accomplished and prestigious bunch. Lotta photo-horsepower on hand.

Joe Aker assisting on prints.

Describing the meaning of meaning in the bottom of some image.

Demonstrating standard Shiprock poltergeist size.

Hawking the book that explains it all!

This morning we went to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to see the War Photography exhibit.  It's a big show: 500 prints, and very intense.  Probably best viewed in several trips.  From there we went over to Houston Center for Photography to meet the Assistant Director for Education, Juliana Forero.  Very nice meeting there and showed a  little work.  I'd like to get on their donation list again for their auction and the workshop list. 

  We hit Niko-Nikos for a late lunch and headed North in the rain.  Glad to be home.  In the darkroom tomorrow.

Proofing negative files.

  40+ years of sheet film negatives, all processed, sleeved, numbered and boxed.  The only thing I didn't regularly do until about 10 years ago was PROOF everything as I shot it.  Now I have several thousand unproofed negatives sitting in archival boxes.

  Last year I decided I would start whittling away on this project.  Adding proofs to the boxes of negatives won't fit in the files, so I go through and toss out the worst exposure, pinholed extra negs, shots ruined by flare, et, et. Should have done that earlier and would have done it if I was proofing as I went.

   For years I shot both sides of a holder at each scene so there are a couple of each.  Sometimes I started shooting before something happened and shot until it stopped so there may be as many as six or eight negatives of one scene.  Easy to cut down.  The spares don't go in the trash- they move to other boxes.  They'll hit the trash later I'm sure.  Probably along with everything else.

  Since I have shot film my whole adult life it's like going through a personal visual diary.  I can remember where I was, who I was with, what the light was like, what lens I was using and so on.  There are negatives of the cars I was driving.  I go back to the same rock faces out West time and time again.  Quite fun but also pretty revealing about my visual growth or lack thereof.  I'm not very sacred.  It's been a struggle and there is certainly a case to be made that I haven't improved at ALL beyond learning the technical ropes and being able to afford more lenses.  (Boy, I wish someone had made me shoot 5X7 -with a wide angle, from day one.)

  Very rarely do I find a negative I don't remember well, though there are some boxes I haven't looked at in 25 years or more.  I'm not finding any great gems but I there are some pretty interesting shots and some I will be interested to look at more carefully as soon as I finish proofing them.

  I did find one little series: The Lewis Hotel- a little fleabag three-story dump just off downtown here in Tyler that I got obsessed with.  It was a ruin and being gutted out for restoration when I started looking at it.  No power inside.  Full of doorways, bouncing light, bad wall coverings, scuzzy windows, cracking paint and crazy piping.  I used a Sinar with a bag bellows and a 90mm wide.  I shot every few days.  There's enough to make a little exhibition.

Bad bathroom.  In that white window are the downtown Tyler skyscrapers.  Might be able to conjure them up in a real print.

The front exterior after demolishing a whole set of add-on rooms.

Main staircase at the front door.

Hallway.  No air conditioning ever so each room had a screen door and a real door.  The tied-up curtains are for privacy.

Room view.  I'm just iphoning these files.  This can be a really rich print.

That's five shots.  There are easily 20 pretty good images from close-ups of old room numbers or paint cracks to exterior full-building scenes.

  It was about 1982.  I made a very distinct decision to shoot in PERFECT light and go back time and time again to the same scene until they wrecked it out or I was satisfied.  It was the first instance where I seriously manipulated lighting by blocking off windows and/or adding reflectors.  I printed a couple at the time but that was it.  Pretty easy negatives.

  Boxes and boxes of negatives.  It takes a day to proof one box in the darkroom.  Probably take a couple of years to finish, God willing.  I proof all my stuff before filing now.

TSRA Calendar Photoshoot

Every year, (for the last few years), I've shot the TSRA calendar.  It's a class piece.  Takes about 15 set-ups with firearms and a couple of background shots of rock or bark.  12 months, front and back cover and at least one extra image.  I pick the guns, supply the backgrounds, do all my own styling, shoot, edit, sequence and send off the shots.  It's a fund-raiser for the TSRA and a very effective one.  Without taking undue credit from the hard-working folks who do the computer work, printing and mailing, plus sell the thing, I can take credit for morphing it from an ungainly mess of bad images to a fairly sophisticated piece.

  There is even a little bit of a video up on the Blackfork6 Channel on youtube.  Not very good because I was dang busy trying to do all the above.,

  Just got started.  First image of the project was a Colt and a Savage owned by Jackson and I in a drawer at the studio.  Simple, with a little styling and natural light.  I used a couple of light dams to keep bright spots out.  Uhh.. Not much styling or propping.  It's what the drawer actually looks like.  Sometimes I have to clean a pistol at work.  Still:  You work with what you have at hand.

Nikon 300 on an old Tiltall tripod.  Windowlight and light from a tungsten desk lamp.  I'd like to have about three more of these in the bag before the real photoshoot starts.  The backgrounds and props are the real difficulty.  I use the same backgrounds a couple of times and then they are done.  I've got an old tattered American flag that has made four calendars.  Can't go there again.  Always on the lookout for fresh backgrounds.  35mm on the Nikon zoom.

Update:  Vintage firearm ads that Huffpo thinks we ought to be bothered by.  Wimps.

Photorito.

It HAD to happen, sooner or later.

Printing with Fred.

Fred Picker, curmudgeon, salesman, photographer, designer and general all-around visionary with a very dogmatic and practical side.  His Zone VI enlarger is now up and running.  Ebay.  Fred died in 2002.  Very sophisticated enlarger and electrics.  The enlarge is actually kind of cheap-feeling compared to the Omega 5X7 I was printing on.  Lots of stamped metal.   The timer, sensors and variable contrast head are amazing.  I'm HOPING it gives a better/smoother illumination field.  I really can't tell yet, but it ought to.  The head is a 6X9- much bigger on all sides than my 5X7 negative.  The negative carriers are exact to the negative size, but a little thin-feeling when you are used to your own museum board or Omega carriers.  I printed six negatives, made 12 prints and might have three that will survive.  Not very good odds.  I'm still in the learning curve though I have figured out all the buttons and switches.  The hanging focus knob is a trip, but very handy.

  Printed on 20X24 so it was some expensive lessons.  More printing tomorrow.

Enlarger set-up in the darkroom.  I was changing filters under the lens to change contrast.  Very nice to be able to move around in half-contrast grade steps.  Now I'm dialing it in on a control.  One know for soft and one knob for hard.  The timer measures the light the head is putting out and changes the timing interval to keep it the same for different colors of light, voltage shifts, et.  It has a beep so you can hear it speed up and slow down as things change.  Weird.  But accurate.

Happy with this print but it takes a lot of light.  That probably means its off a bit.  Scene was one of those negatives I kept "remembering" even though it was filed away in a box.  Shot off the side of the bridge at Butler Creek.  First time to print it.  Still sitting in enlarger for tomorrow.

Big copy of a rock wall from Shiprock trip.  Lighter print than it shows here.  Got it.  Just have to spot it.

Might be a little dark and soft on this one.  Very close.  Never printed before, though I have shot this scene several times on different trips.  I think I counted up six nights over the years on this ledge, one trapped behind the waterfall during a thunderstorm.  First light, so you have to sleep up there to see it.

Too dark in the shadows.  The rock has an incredible filigreed texture that I need to do more to bring out.

Completely missed on three other negatives.  Too dark on a little Anasazi rockwork in the Shiprock climber's cave and weird uneven printing in the other two.  It could be that this enlarger doesn't like dense negatives.  I'll find out more in the morning.

  Thanks for all your good works, Fred!

Darkroom Reorganizing.

  Shelf up. I must have bought that shelf in about 1995.  Never been installed anywhere.  It's really a great shelf. That cleared the clutter off the counter top.  Lots of stuff going out the door.  Maybe today the lenses and electrics will come in for the new enlarger and I will see if it actually comes on!

  Close enlarger is an Omega D2 with an Omega cold light head on it.  Had an Aristo Grid head on there but the light color was too blue to print on multi-grade paper so I switched back to the dome/ring-tube light head.  It's got a negative of White House Ruin in it from 1976, cranked up high enough to make a 16X16.  Just waiting on a printing day.

White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly, 1976

Going to be fascinating to see how much better/different the Zone VI enlarger prints than my old big Omega.  It had uneven illumination in the corners where the tube in the head was closest.  Didn't matter much on some negatives but was a bear to handle on negatives with delicate skies or lighter ones.

My darkroom gun is a loaded M1 Get-Off-My-Lawn Garand.

Just because.

Faced with installing new enlarger.  Ansel at Yosemite in 1975.  Polaroid P/N negative.  Just for luck.

This print is available for sale.  On 8X10 paper, 150.00

Blurb Book at a bargain.

The Blackfork Guide is available this month at 10 bucks off by putting in the code: GIVE10 in the discount box when checking out.  Makes it even more worth it!  (I did an edit after finding one more typo.  Very nice thing about electronic publishing.)

TCC Photo Gallery show opens.

25 prints up.  Tammy Cromer-Campbell did a nice jog sequencing and hanging them.  Sold five during the evening as a nice crowd came and went.

This one went to some friends from Dallas.  Nice print.  They got the first silver print of it, ever.  I've had as a digital scan but never printed it on real paper.  Very satisfying print and a well-behaved negative.  On Ilford Multigrade warmtone.

Dr. Sneed talking to Scott Campbell in front of The Dot.

One of my students, Michael Morse along the gallery wall.  He and his mother came along with Edie, their dog.  I barely remembered to take a photo, was busy talking all evening.

Katie and Dr. Sneed at Osaka, just around the corner downtown.

Sneed and I spent the day taking down my Omega D3 and putting up the column and head of a Zone VI enlarger I bought from the estate of Mark Noble in Washington State.  The electrics are still coming so it's not operational, but looks like it's going to be fun to use.  Fred Picker, RIP, along with Mark.

New old used enlarger.

  Problems with printing multigrade papers and enlarger head illumination, (nearly all of them are uneven), led me to start shopping around on Ebay for the last enlarger ever designed...a Zone VI model 2 5X7.  Found one in Washington State and managed to get it for a fair price.  One of those pack-and-ship Fed-Ex/UPS stores overcharged me for shipping it down here, (about 4X what normal shipping might be.)  My current enlarger is a 1955 Omega D3, built for 5X7 with a huge domelight-with-flourescent-tube head.  I've made some great prints with it, but it's awful for even illumination with hotspots at all corners.  If you have a dark negative, it's hardly noticeable but lighter tones are always tough.

  Trading my 60 year old enlarger for a 21 year old one.  There aren't any enlargers from this century.

Omega D3 5X7 coming out.

Zone VI 5X7 going in.

  I'm hoping the ZoneVI is a fix.  Got it in today and now I have to uninstall my D3 and install this one.  Looks great.  Hoping for the best.   All the timers, stabilizers, lenses and negative carriers are coming in at a reasonable rate via the seller and my Fed-Ex account number.

Elwood 8X10.

  The usual disaster.  I have most of an 8X10 enlarger, a corroded Elwood, beached on the studio floor.  I rebought a head I had sold for my D2,  (the aristo now a spare), bought longer lenses and mounted them with great effort on the D3, (still missing one lens flange), now they have to go over to the Zone VI.  Bought another D3 at a bargain off ebay, but they couldn't make a reasonable shipping price from New Jersey so that was cancelled.  Purchased everything twice, as always.  I'll start ebaying out the spare parts I guess.

  This one belonged to Mark Noble, from Washington State.  He bought it in 1991.   His widow is selling his darkroom stuff bit by bit.  RIP Mark, and thanks.

  Going to miss my little stainless steel wire filter holders that I rigged up.

Show delivered in Longview.

  Can't wait to see it hung on the walls.  Always a revelation as to how a curator, in this case Tammy Cromer-Campbell, will sequence and group the prints.  I try to give the installer complete control with only a few notes about what the prints are.  This is quite a selection.  Glad to have this part done.

Friday evening, 5-8, 207 North Center Street in Longview in conjunction with an evening Art Walk.

The official LINK