Still beating on still lifes...

Letting it evolve.  Nearly there.  I think.

I kept building it taller, better, adding more stuff while simplifying the overall build.  I'm scrimming the light source like mad.  Getting complicated.  Need to process some film and see where I am.

Not bad.  Glad I shot a piece of film.

Might go with this.  

It collapsed overnight.  That's common.  Usually falls into a big trash can with a towel draped over the opening to keep from breaking things.  I might set it up one more time....or I might decide it's done and do some more cups and ice.  Or shattered nautilus.   Or candles burning on a broken cup.  Or whatever evolves next.  

The Map is not the Territory. You can't tape the territory together.

Working on a map for a guy who is going out West to Shiprock.  Fired up the printer and then taped the results together.  Makes a fairly compelling map.

South Dike from the BIA13 cut to the main rock.

West Dike and South Dike.

Still working.

Working away.  Letting ideas evolve.  Tore down the shell and crockery and started stacking dice in half a cup.

Without studio lights on, just checking the base set-up.

On the ground glass with the light on.

Next one.  Got a little bit of work to do yet.  Gotta twist the dice.  Elevate the spoon at the balance point.  Add a couple of old coins.  Move the wishbone to the shadow.  Move the ivory button on the end of the spoon.  Might twist the spoon in a vise.  Clean up the bullet in the clothes pin angle so it reads a little better.  Just styling moves.  I shot two pieces of film and shouldn't have.  I can process it and look at my exposure.  It's two exposures, one for the flame and one for the rest of the image.  F45 which is at LEAST 64 in this case due to bellows extension.

Still life-ing in the studio

  Nautilus and seashells are old news.  Been done.  Still, I'm having a good time with some 100 year old busted crockery, broken and complete shells, lighting, 8X10, et.

Using an Ektar 250 Wide Field lens from the 50s or earlier.  The Ektar is an old lens but I like the angle of view and perspective.  I'm not sure this camera is going anywhere else but right now it's working in the studio.

There's the old monster with a light shade clamped to the side.  I use more camera controls than you might think shooting still life images.  I appproach them like little buildings and either look up, down or straight in at them.

The busted cup group:  Conneticutt.  Canyon de Chelly.  Shiprock.  Texas.

I'm using light dams and scrims and reflectors, et.  Every still small-product trick in the book.  I have a box of old crockery I picked up on a hotel photoshoot 20 years ago up in Conneticutt. (I was interested in the creek full of old busted dinner-ware than I was in the photoshoot, though the client was happy at my hotel results.  There had been THREE hotels on that site, it turned out and the old ones just tossed trash out the back door into the creek.)   The tin funnel was given to me by Debbie Fleming Caffery that has been sitting around the studio for 30 years.  Ebay Nautilus and a broken nautilus whose origin I have forgotten.

Learning.  Light from the wrong side.

  Figuring exposure and contrast with a Pentax spot meter.  Not using strobes, just Dynalite modeling lights in little softboxes.  By the time you cipher the bellows extension, the reciprocity departure and then cut the development time a bit for the extra contrast brought on by the long exposure, you are juggling lots of cats.

  Fun process.

Wish I could enlarge 8X10.

This assembly is probably still in place in front of the camera, unless overnight vibrations got it.  It has a soft place to fall if it all tumbles down- that cost a nautilus to learn.  I'm going to go pull the trigger on it sometime today.  19 pieces of 8X10 film left.

  The water temps are going to fall.  Outside the first cool air front of the season is raining its black heart outside right now.

Waterfalls of the past.

A post in the Large Format Forum got me to thinking about waterfalls.  There aren't many in East Texas and really none worth mentioning.  This isn't rock country or big elevation country.  Yosemite and the Sierra: that's the spot.

  I've been to Yosemite five or six times.  Not enough.  The waterfalls run full in the spring and dry in the late summer and fall.  In the winter they freeze the rocks around them.

  They are big, unlike East Texas Landscapes.  And its the West.  Here landscapes are like interiors rooms and the subject matter is within arm's reach.  Very intimate.  There isn't a horizon line.  Out West thats not the case.  You have to be able to handle a very different scale, size and space.

Vernal Fall, Spring 1998.

  My earliest negatives of Vernal fall are from 1973, the first time I saw it.  Steve Erwin and I had driven out to go to the Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshop.  I had a Hasselblad, 80mm and 150 lens and a Tiltall tripod.  I went up the stone staircase of Mist Trail past the Vernal and turned around.  The big Spruce tree across from the falls hadn't been broken off by ice or lightning at that point.  Nice negatives though I rarely print back that far any more.  I'm sure I have some prints in boxes.  I'd never seen falls of the size and scale and power of Yosemite.

  I climbed to Upper Yosemite Falls trail with a 35mm one afternoon and came down in the gloaming.  Those negatives are still in my file.

  Above is the standard view: off the bridge with a long lens looking up the canyon in afternoon light.  I had the luck of an overcast day.  It would make a nice print though it is a much-photographed scene.  You can never step twice into the same river and all that.  In this case it's best not to step in the river at all around the falls.  Several people die every year at Vernal and the bodies aren't usually found until the water drops in late summer.  There are people in this shot at the top right edge of the falls.  That will give you some scale.  They are standing where people stand when they get washed over.

  This is such a nice little honest image I think I might make some prints of it when the water cools off this fall.

  Bridalveil Fall, 2005.  I wish I had gotten closer and just shot the falls and the iced rocks.  Seems the footing was impossible.  I don't print this negative, because the only part I am really interested is that little bit in the center.

Lower Yosemite Fall, 2005.  Katie and I walked up to see this with my camera.  Horrible footing off the trail.  Slick boulders with gaps between them.  Terrible for tripods.  I shot this and another negative detail with a 450 Nikkor.  It had movement from the wind and this one isn't very sharp.  In the overcast light it was nothing but dark wet blacks and glowing high tones.

  Katie and I went to Yosemite and got caught in a two-day snowstorm.  Wonderful weather.  The Valley floor shops were open and the trams running, but very few people around.  We risked our lives going to Bridalveil parking lot and walked from Yosemite Lodge to Lower Yosemite Fall.  Snowy and overcast.  

Below Nevada Fall.

  Nevada Fall, 1998.  Chris Johnson and I were on our way back down from a trip up to the Diving Board on the edge of Half Dome.  The route emerges from a faint rockclimbers trail to the main route headed for the tourist cables up the far side of the dome.  It picks up the Merced river and then drops into the canyon past Nevada and Vernal Falls.  I worked and worked on the rock in the low center and the driving, swirling spray.  Some branches were back to clear the view and others tied aside.  The fall is to the left and the spot where I was standing pretty damp.  Mid-morning sun was behind the mist.  The water was thundering and the mist blowing around in the canyon.  It was the biggest active thing I had ever photographed.  I was using Tri-X in my 5X7 holders and it had been changed without Kodak making an announcement.  The new stuff was lousy on highlights and I've never printed these.  They don't quite come together enough to suit me.

  I shot upper Yosemite Falls with my 35mm and 5X7.  The sun was too direct.  Nothing special.  When Katie and I were there I lusted after a shot from Colombia Point of the frozen cliffs around upper Yosemite Fall.  That would be a wonderful shot but a terrible slog in the snow.

  All with 5X7 Deardorff off a tripod.  Love to have another shot at these Sierra falls, though the one I would really love is to get a desert waterfall pouring off Shiprock after a storm.  Those only run for about three minutes, so you have to be in position.

Dry waterfall channel at Shiprock.

  All of these images are with a view camera off a tripod.  I wasn't worried about camera movement, only the depiction of the flowing water.  Shutter speed makes a huge difference in the rendition of moving water.  Too fast and you turn it to ice.  Too slow and it dissolves to a fog.  A shutter speed of 1/4 second is usually balances the water and the flow.

  

  

Photographing with the Classics.

 I put a roll of HP5 film in a 1960s Canon 7Sz rangefinder.  It's got a rare 50mm F.95 lens on it.  That's quite an exotic combination.  There are forums dedicated to rangefinders and whole exhibitions built on images taken with this lens.

It's a neat old camera but I'm having a difficult time with it.  First- I like a little wide-angle in a view.  The 50mm normal on a 35mm camera is neither fish nor fowl for me.  Second, I've spent a lot of time looking at iphone projections and SLR images over the years.  Looking through a rangefinder, with a big chunk of the view obscured by the edge of the lens, and hunting for the approximate framing is making me pause.

 The light meter is long gone but exposure guessing is kind of fun.

  It's heavy.  There must have been some thick-necked photographers back in the 60s.  Probably be more fun on a tripod.  With a polarizer.  But then it's a view camera with no rise or fall.

Monument Valley short video.

Monument Valley Day trip.  Sheep.  Fenceline.  Rocks.  The usual stuff.

TSRA Calendar, 2014

  Shot in the studio.  Every year I have to come up with 14 new firearms and 14 new backgrounds.  Sam's Coyote Bar and Grill has been my source the last two years with his collection that hangs at the restaurant.  It was much easier/faster to shoot at the studio than go on location.  Jackson kept things moving along with picking and transporting and giving me a second set of eyes on the photos.

  I set up two shots in the studio and was able to shoot one, move to the other and then go back for a correction if I needed it.  Used the Nikon 300 and the 18-200 DX lens.  Most of the lighting was softboxes with a main and then a big overhead to fill the reflections, plus a silver card for the shadow side.  It was a mess of tape and reflectors plus all the shims and wax globs under the guns.  The Good Doctor Sneed  couldn't make the shoot this year since I had let it go so long but his rifle racks were used on the 3D shots.

 Like most years, it's a little pistol-heavy.  Pistols fit the format and are easier in nearly every way because of their size.  One little soft-box and a silver card.  I stood on an applebox and shot overhead.

Same shot with a background change.  Just out of the shot are the stands, clamps, tape, reflectors, et.  Telephoto at the 200mm end.  Harder to get rifles to relate than you might think.  You don't want to drop a firearm....

Big overhead softbox turned way down is just out of sight overhead.

Adding old vintage cameras.  Some of the shots are pretty similar but they get looked at one at a time for a month, not in a group so it helps cover the similarities.  Plus, you do want them to have the same esthetic.

Here is a different approach.  I've shot a calendar with most of the guns suspended like this.

Always have to have a few new backgrounds.  This is a hand-made building stone from the wreck of a building near Shiprock.

Thanks to everyone who helped!  None of these projects get done alone.  Let's hope it makes the TSRA 100K!

Navajo Fence Art.

  The junction of New Mexico 491 and BIA13 South of Shiprock, New Mexico is a natural meeting, vendor and hitch-hiking hub.  There is plenty of gravel to park on and plenty of traffic on 491 South to Gallup and BIA 13 to points West.  All three corners are littered with handmade signs for vending, church announcements, political campaigns, rodeos, target shoots, et.  Strong, well-built, four-strand barbed wire fences keep the desert back.  Hog wire runs to the corners from 200 yards out.

Wind-held plastic tarp in fence line.

In the fence wire, sometimes, there are paintings.  Stuck there by artists and abandoned.

I've never seen a good painting in the wire, in fact, they are usually disasterous attempts at art that demonstrate what art isn't more than they demonstrate what art is.

   These painting sometimes disappear.  I assume they are taken for decoration, to grace some hogan or trailer of minimal art appreciators.

  Other times, they suffer a different fate.  Like being burned in place.

O. Winston Link.

I hope there are worse things than being locked in your darkroom and forced to print.

Shooting photographers.

Tough job, especially in Egypt.

Proofing Shiprock: West Hill.

The West Hill is a tricky drive and a fairly easy walk, though you are still motivating around at 6500 feet or so.  Its one of those 20 minute up/five minutes down situations.  There is a rock cairn on the top with someone's ashes inside in a container.  Usually has a set of unmatched lizards as well.  I had been there at least twice before.  Three trips up this visit.  The last two I parked my car end-on to the hill so it wouldn't show as much in the negative.

 West Dike in morning light from West Hill.  Probably a light yellow filter.  Cropped to fairly extreme horizontal format, though I am using the whole negative left to right.  Shot with 120 Super-Angulon.

Blue filter from much farther away.  Previous shot is from the dark-capped West Hill.  The Rock Cairn is right on the crown.  Can't wait to print this.  12 inch Ektar or the 450mm Nikkor.

Afternoon shadow of West Hill.  This is about as far South as the shadow swings.  Most of the year the Sun is to the South of this position and the shadow tracks over toward Shiprock on the left.

Rock Cairn, West Hill.  Just after sundown.  Birds use this as a perch it seems.

Nice blue filter shot of the rock from the West.  Cropped a little to the horizontal.