Category Archives: Photography Blogging

Sunday Evening Photography Blogging

World Trade Center

“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”
— Henri Cartier-Bresson —

I took this picture from Ellis Island during a week-long photo expedition to New York City in June, 1999.  Not a particularly innovative composition, but it definitely compliments the quote.  This now hangs in my dining room.

Sunday Evening Photography Blogging

A few simple tabletop pictures of kitchen items.  It doesn’t look like much, but to someone with an engineering mind, creating art can be a challenge.

These were done using an old Nikon F2 purchased new back in 1976 when I was stationed at Keflavik, Iceland.  I used a 50mm f1.4 and 35mm f2.8 lens.  Film was TMax-100 and these are scans from 8×10 prints.

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The light came from studio flash unit off to the right.  I only used the modeling light rather than the actual flash, so these are long exposures, at small apertures, with the camera on a tripod.

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The an age of Photoshop and digital special effects, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to impress anyone with traditional black and white film photographs.

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I suspect a woodworker thinks of his shop much the same way as I think of my darkroom.  He likes being around his machines, he likes the smell of the wood, and he take prides in what he creates, even when it looks rather ordinary to someone else.

Sunday Photography Blogging

I’m an electrical engineer by trade, so my artistic capacity is somewhat limited.  My pictures are usually cityscapes, but I do venture into other areas on occasion.  For this series of pictures, I decided to try and capture a martini glass in the process of spilling.  To a slightly geeky person like me, this is art.

martini_1 martini_3 Below is a digital snap shot of the set-up.   Basically, I set the camera on a tripod and had a small, very high speed, flash pointed at the wall in the background so as to produce the backlighting necessary to completely avoid any reflections. On the floor is a soft (water proof!) cushion for the glass to land and a bucket with a sponge to clean up the mess.  I shot about 20 exposures (on B&W film, of course).  I simply filled the glass with water, dropped in the olive stick, threw it up in the air, and clicked the shutter.  The camera settings were all completely manual.  I cleaned up after every shot.setup1

Sunday Photography Blogging

I saw a bent up fork on the desk of a guy I work with. I thought it looked kind of interesting, so I asked him if I could take it home and do a picture of it. To add a contrasting shape, I painted a marble black and used an old piece of Formica that I had left over from when I did commercial photography part time many years ago. This is the result.

Fork and Ball

I used a Nikon F100 with an old non-AIS 35mm f2.8 lens. I think the film was TMax 100 developed in Xtol. The picture is scanned from an 8×10 darkroom print.

Below is a picture of the setup. After I quit doing commercial photography, I added a darkroom, frame shop, and studio to my house. I no longer do any work for money. This is just a hobby, but I’m obsessive about it.

F_and_B_set

The horizon light along the back of the baseboard is a 4 foot flourescent positioned slightly below the top of the table. The background paper was slightly behind the light.

Sunday Evening Photography Blogging

Yeah, yeah, I know.  This concept bears a striking resemblance to Radley Balko’s Sunday Evening Dog Blogging, but I swear that is pure coincidence…

My hobby is traditional photography.  I’m obsessive about it.  I shoot film, develop it, and print the pictures in a darkroom.

I have two Siberian Huskies, Lexy (Aleksei) on the left, and Nicky (Nicolai) on the right.   Lexy is about 3 years old and Nicky is 8 months old (and weighs 8 pounds more than Lexy).  Most of the time we use a little digital point-and-shoot for snap shots, but I hate the direct flash, so I keep an old 35mm with a flash attachment handy for when they do something cute.  The flash is bounced off the ceiling, making for a much softer light.  I took this shot one morning a couple weeks ago when the dogs jumped up on the bed to watch us get ready for work.

Lexy_Nicky_Nov_2012