OKLAHOMA FILM SCANS

Yukon's Best Flour, Yukon, Oklahoma 1995 from a 4 by 5 scanned negative.

I am a fan of Photographer David Plowden. My first exposure to his work was from his book A Time of Trains which is still one of my favorites. David photographs the industrial aspects of our country. I am not trying to emulate his work here, but certainly give him a nod of the hat.

A LITTLE SUNSHINE IN OUR LIVES

A Sunny Sunset in the Dead of Winter, 2013

I mostly go early in the morning to photograph in town. Yesterday evening, I decided to see if the lighting would help with some subjects that I have been working on for awhile. I usually exclude autos, but last night I had no choice. Nothing to write home about, but...

PERHAPS I AM GOING TOO FAR WITH THIS

Still Finding My Way With the Ghost Train, 1995/2013

One of the really fun things about the work that I do is that I am seeing my old photographs in a new light. Perhaps I am actually seeing them in ways that I could not understand back when I took them. I think I am taking some of my past vision and applying my compiled knowledge of an additional twenty years of maturity.

What ever it is, I am having a great time not only making these modifications, but in linking my past with my present. In some ways I am going back in time to when I took this image, and I am passing some knowledge to myself in a weird sort of time warp. If nothing else, I am not stuck in a single process or work flow.

TAKING NEGATIVITY A BIT FURTHER

Playing With the Ghost Train, 2013

I really had fun with this image last night. I love the "printing plate" look that this has. I did take a look at how it appeared as a positive, but it was too washed out in the lower left foreground from sun glare.

I felt compelled to print it, and I did. I think I like it.

SEEING THE POSITIVE OF THE NEGATIVE

A Negative View of a Retired Railcar, c. 1995

I took this photo with my four by five sometime around 1995 at the Western Railway Museum near Fairfield. I always enjoyed looking at my negatives, and this is the view that I had while I was making prints in my enlarger. I became adapt at making judgements as to how the image would look as a positive after the processing.

If you look closely you can see the black dot of the setting sun in the left edge of the photo.

WORKING WITH PEOPLE

Five Ladies Waiting Black and White, Arcata, 2012

I have several variations of this image, and I am trying to figure out which one has the most impact. On top of that, I want to know how each variation creates or fuels its unique impact. So for today, I will compare the color image with the black and white.

Waiting for the Solar Eclipse in Color, Arcata, 2012

Products of the Scanner

Safety First, Ely, Nevada, c. 1995

I am still scanning my collection of four-by-five negatives. This is one of them from a trip I made over highway 50 in 1995. 

MORE PRETENDING TO BE A STREET PHOTOGRAPHER

Star Struck, 2012

I like all the elements of this composition. That the subjects are  looking in other directions adds some tension. This photograph just begged to be black and white.

THE LINE BECOMES BLURRED

In the Community Forest When Nobody is Looking, 2012

The more that I play with these images - the more I like doing so. To me these have a strange and welcoming mixture of representative values mixed with the abstract. 

PLAYING WITH THE BLUR

My Copycat Attempt at What Rick Gustafson Creates, 2012

This is out-and-out copying Rick's process as best I can. I was out photographing awhile back, and was having to use slow shutter speeds, and I thought to myself, "why not go with the blur". So I made a few attempts, and this was the best of the lot.

PATRICK'S POINT ONE YEAR AGO

My Way of Saying "Good Morning", Patrick's Point, 2012

SHADOWS ON THE WALL

Baggage Cart at Lamy Station, 2010

I worked on two variations of this image, and ultimately settled on this the full-frame image. The camera I used for this image was my all time favorite - my old Sony R1.

I shared my thoughts about that camera a couple of years back. The main issue that I had with it was its extremely slow write speeds. Once I started shooting in the "raw" format, the camera became very slow. I read recently that if one took two images in rapid succession that the buffer would be full, and the camera unusable for about nine seconds. So if I were shooting a landscape in HDR and needing three shots in rapid succession, this camera could not deliver. I tried over and over. What would happen is that the clouds would move so much between the three shots that it became a problem later when I was working to assemble them as an HDR image. Nowadays, there are software solutions to at least part of the problem.

I did not have that problem with this image because it was a single shot, and I had shot it in the raw format so that there is plenty of information available for me to work with. I think this photograph shows that.