going low budget - branching out

for a long time i could only use slide film (usually fuji velvia or provia) or professional black and white film.  i did this in order to have what i thought would be highest quality pictures possible.  i felt that only the best would do.

as part of my therapy to break me of this mindset i bought some fuji superia 400 speed film - your standard print film - from walmart, took some snapshots, then had it processed at walgreens (just the film) then scanned it myself.

this is a big step for me.  in the end, i have to say i'm very happy with what i got.  the scans are somewhat unsaturated and grainy but i think it actually adds to the feel of the pictures.

at the detroit science center...

out garage sale-ing...

and the rest from a recent in-town vacation...

thanks for looking.

greetings from the lavatory

it has become a habit of mine to carry my camera with me at family gatherings or other similar outings. i enjoy snapping candid shots of what's happening around me - conversations, kids playing, friends laughing, etc. those pictures also make for great little surprise gifts for the people in them.

the picture above (the obligatory self portrait of photographers everywhere) was taken on one such outing. my family had gone to buca di beppo - which i think is becoming a family tradition at christmas time - and i had my camera right there with me... even in the bathroom.

after this trip i have to admit that i kind of burnt myself out photographically. i developed 8 or 9 rolls of film and then scanned something around 200 pictures and cleaned up most of them in photoshop - all within a week's time. it was awesome, i got so much done... but i haven't so much as loaded a roll of film into my old canon since. no need to fear though - the fire has been lit again.

i've got plans to explore the farmlands of northwest indiana now that it's warming up. i also might get a second chance to photograph in boston next month (if i can fit it into the schedule).

other than that, my next item of business is selling my old view camera. with the proceeds from that camera i should be able to buy a decent used lens.

it's good to be back.

the truth

"the camera never lies. the film sometimes does." - rodney smith, from the end.

depending on how you define truth, the camera (or film) rarely tells the truth. photographs are stylized moments in time, made visual. the camera by it's design actually modifies the truth of what it sees depending on various factors - shutter speed, aperture, focal length of the lens, film characteristics, grain, and camera movements (with view cameras), etc.

i've often heard people say that they want to capture exactly what is in front of them - the truth of what's there. but in my opinion it's the way that cameras distort the truth that makes photography so exciting.

despite what i've just said, i've discovered (for myself) an exciting way to show "truth" in photography - by photographing people when they don't expect to be photographed.

what do people (almost inevitably) do when someone's about to take a picture of them?

"smile!"

that's all good and fine but sometimes it's hard to really catch someone's personality if they're always putting their smile mask on when being photographed. sure it takes some guts to snap a picture of someone (even family) when they're not expecting it - but to capture them in that natural setting can be truly rewarding.

- unrehearsed subjects caught in a moment where the truth is subjective.

christmas in florida

the year my wife and i were married we went to florida with her family over christmas vacation. i would definitely recommend doing this to anyone - the crowds were minimal, the weather was great, the water was swimmable, and the opportunities to photograph were new and exciting.

we stayed at ormond beach (near daytona) in a hotel that sat right on the beach. on the other side of the hotel was "a1a - beach front avenue" (think ice ice baby). the thing about the east coast that was new to me was that you can't watch the sun set over the ocean. to get that view you have to be up for sunrise. however, for some reason this wasn't a problem for me. i love to get up early on vacation to go out and explore.

this was one of my first chances to get out with my newly acquired canon ae-1. i think i was shooting on fuji astia slide film.


this is what most of the mornings looked like. as the sun came up the sky glowed a bright orange. it was awesome.



the sky shifted to a beautiful blue gray as the sun rose higher. the gentle slope of the wet beach made a great mirror for the clouds and birds.



just a stone's throw up the beach was this sign warning swimmers of the perils in the water - along with the pelican standing guard. the message of the sign spoke loudly to me as i have a fear of swimming in anything but swimming pools - i don't like not being able to see my toes...

you can read more about the nathan f. cobb here.

as a side note - here's a picture that my brother-in-law took of me from the hotel during the trip. thanks eric!

salt lake city

one of my favorite things to photograph is the urban landscape. i love seeing the way man made things fit into and interact with their surroundings. the urban landscape has many similarities to the natural landscape - a row of buildings is a canyon wall, a bridge is an arch, city lights are stars, streets are rivers, etc.

given enough time in a city an emotional attachment begins to grow. things that would mean absolutely nothing to someone else begin to have sentimental value. i quickly grew to love boston and new york city, and after spending four years in provo at school i grew to love its subtle uniqueness.

i spent a couple off years at the university of utah before i got married. sometimes after classes i would take the train into downtown salt lake city and just walk around with nothing to do but explore and see things. it's an interesting experience to be in the middle of a city with no particular agenda - to be able to just watch everything else happening around you.

a couple of years ago i spent an evening photographing salt lake with a friend. here are a couple of the shots from that night.

there is a time right after sunset but before dark that the sky glows a deep cerulean blue. this is one of the best times to get pictures of buildings - especially well-lit buildings. you can get the lights, the building, and the sky all within a nice range of exposure. this is the main entrance to the open air gateway mall which used to be the union pacific train depot.



this shot of the salt lake temple, the church office building, and the joseph smith memorial building was taken from a parking lot a couple of blocks west of temple square.

back to my roots - oregon

the next big trip my dad and i took was to oregon.

first of all, our family has some history with this area. for the past 12 years we've gone up to the same little house the oregon coast every couple of years. it's beautiful, the back yard is the rocky shore with a little sandy cove. at high tide the waves come crashing up onto the rocks - it's hard to resist the temptation to roll the giant driftwood logs into the water and watch them get tossed around by the waves like they were made of foam. at low tide you can go out and play in the sandy little cove among rocks covered with sea stars and mussels, or you can go search the tide pools for other little sea animals. did i already mention that it's beautiful? oh yeah.

when my dad and i went up we stayed in a hotel in portland - about 30 minutes away from the columbia river gorge. it was april so everything was superbly green. in all we spent a few days there - about half of which was spent in the gorge.

this is elowah falls - we were lucky to find a little path that led down to the river from the trail. we had to scramble a bit but the view was worth it.

once again we had to scramble to get this view - except this time it was up instead of down. it had actually started raining as we were hiking up to this waterfall - wahclella falls. after i took this picture it started raining even harder so we found some shelter under an overhang down by the falls. we weren't really prepared to be shooting in the rain but i was able to get a few more shots closer to the falls.

one day we spent driving down the coast from cannon beach - picture mikey from the goonies matching up the holes in the dubloon with the rocks off the coast - that's where we started. after that we headed down the coast, had lunch in nehalem, then stopped in at the tillamook factory for some awesome cheese and ice cream. our destination for sunset was a beach in the little town of oceanside.


there was a main area of the beach but to get where we wanted to go we had to hike through a wet, dark, roughly hewn tunnel that was cut through a large land mass that juts out into the ocean. the tunnel takes you to the appropriately named tunnel beach and if the tide is low enough you can walk further to agate beach where you can find - you'll never guess - agates! just don't get stuck back there at high tide - you might be in trouble.

if i remember right the picture above was taken from the point between the two beaches. i had climbed up onto some rocks to be able to get a better view of the water with the rocks.

this last picture was taken from the old columbia river highway at sunrise. it looks down over the columbia river with the vista house (a historical rest stop and very stately building) in the bottom right - the bump on the hill right above the 'p' in 'copyright'.

this was one of those mornings where we got up way too early to catch the light that was too beautiful to pass up.

back to my roots - utah

my first adventures in photography were with my dad. we usually went camping and took photographs of where we went. sometimes we would stay up way too late or get up way too early to take pictures. i remember one night that we spent looking up the narrows in zion national park right next to the virgin river. it was one of our first experiments with star trails. it was cold and we probably didn't have enough layers on. but i loved it. i loved the sense of discovery, of the unknown, the solitude, and being with my dad.

that was one of the first (if not the first) of many photographic excursions. southern utah seemed to be the destination of choice in those first years. among other places, we photographed arches national park, bryce canyon, and nine mile canyon - (below).


we spent a good amount of the night here trying different exposure times, different lighting, etc. for this one we left the camera open for about 45 minutes with a coleman propane lantern shining on the petroglyphs for just a couple of minutes.

fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the road that ran right next to this petroglyph panel was taken out and you can't get as close to it anymore. for some reason that makes this picture even more special to me - more unique.

another memorable trip was down to "the wave" in arizona. right between kanab and lake powell there is an expanse of red rock/desert known as the paria canyon-vermilion cliffs wilderness. to see the actual "wave" you have to get a permit (of only 20 offered per day) and hike in using landmarks to guide the way - or a gps. at the end of the hike you find yourself in this wavelike (hence the name) formation of striped sandstone. i was lucky enough to get there and snap a few shots before the sun was hidden by clouds.


to say the least this place is incredible.

thanks dad for getting me into photography and taking me to these amazing places. i'm indebted to you.

a few more pictures... and a theory

here are a few more pictures from my latest batch.


elliot.


kaylinn pulling a face... or her face, i guess.


elliot and sam learning about robots at the m.i.t. museum - thanks eric!


cute taylor ann.


so i have a theory, and here it is...

the more time and effort you put into something the more value it has to you. it may not be a monetary value and it may not hold any value for anyone else but you but it still has value. i think that's one of the reasons i still do film photography. if i had a digital camera i don't think i would value my photographs as much.

when i release the shutter i understand that i am using up a piece of film that i will have to develop, scan, and retouch in photoshop. i believe that because of this i am more careful about what i am doing with my cameras - especially large format where setting up and taking a few pictures can take a half hour! this may not be the most cost-effective or efficient method to do photography but it works for me and i love it.

a little fuzziness is oh so nice

say hello to sam as seen through my old canon ae-1, a 30 or 40 year-old metal body slr.

i've heard people say they want to get away from the "point-and-shoot" look and get a "nice camera" that takes great pictures with "fuzzy backgrounds", etc. i've also heard of people going out and buying an slr hoping to get those great pictures but then being disappointed with the point-and-shoot-like results from their expensive new slr.

so what's the problem? how do you escape the grasp of the point-and-shoot?


their are two solutions to start with - both relatively easy to implement. interestingly enough, the camera actually has little to do with the problem.

the first is the flash. if you just use the default flash settings you'll get a very brightly lit picture just like a point-and-shoot camera will give you. you can usually set the flash to a "fill flash" setting or manually tone it down so it's not so intense. and don't be afraid to bump up the iso setting in low light. but this is all beside the point, i want to talk about the fuzzy backgrounds that are oh so nice.

the fuzziness is caused by shallow depth of field and the two things that effect depth of field are the size of the aperture (bigger = shallower depth of field) and magnification (higher magnification = shallower depth of field). as for the magnification, think about macro photography or telephoto photography - both magnify the subject quite a bit and therefore produce shallow depth of field. this leaves big apertures to do the work when it comes to normal shots of people and such.


back to the problem - most new slr's come with zoom lenses (everybody loves zoom lenses, right?) and most zoom lenses don't have very big maximum apertures so it's a bit more difficult to get the fuzzy effect with these lenses.

solution? sacrifice the zoom capability and get a fixed focal length (non-zoom) "normal" lens. something around a 50mm lens should be good. just make sure the lens has a big maximum aperture - you can find this right in the description of the lens. it will say something like "Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor Lens" - the number 1.8 is the maximum aperture. remember that with apertures the smaller the number is the larger the aperture will be, so an "f/1.8" lens is pretty good.


all the pictures in this post were taken at f/1.8 (wide open) at about 1/60 or 1/125 second on 400 speed kodak tri-x film without a flash.

these lenses are also very inexpensive - usually somewhere around 100 bones. you'll have to zoom with your feet instead of the lens but that's a small price to pay for a big aperture.