grand central terminal

sometimes luck has a lot to do with the success of a picture - especially when that picture is taken with a holga.

i was up on the balcony with the camera sitting on the railing, the lens propped up by my keyless entry remote on my keyring, and i held the shutter open for about a second. after that i crossed my fingers and waited.



i keep finding myself drawn to symmetry and order in my pictures. i feel in a lot of ways like i'm taking portraits of places. showing the simple truth of what something is.

sometimes it's purely informational i.e. - "this building is here, i found it interesting, let me show you what i see" - and that's all. nothing groundbreaking in the way i take the picture, nothing to knock you off your seat, the subject just speaks for itself. and that's all it needs.

the photograph above is extremely symmetrical and orderly (despite the usual rush of the travelers and tourists), even down to the formation of the people in it - an inverted triangle with a single man at the bottom (looking at his phone or something) holding it all together and drawing your eyes up and into the gorgeous space of the grand central terminal.

i'm grateful that he held still for that one second.

cambridge, mass.

two and a half years ago, my family and i moved into a subleased two bedroom apartment just off of western ave. on memorial drive in cambridge, massachusetts. it was our first time venturing out and away from our families.

we immediately fell in love with boston and its surrounding areas. what we found when we arrived was a warmth and richness of life that was almost tangible. we only had 3 months to enjoy it so we made sure that we took advantage of all the time that we had there.

about a week before moving i finally found and purchased a large format camera in my price range. i was ready to take the dive and cambridge was a great place to dive into.

i would pass by this building every day as i walked to the “t”, boston’s subway, to go to work. this poor building looked like it was just plain tired of standing up straight – like it needed something more sturdy to lean on (like the building next to it). i also discovered what happens when you don’t check the corners of the ground glass carefully after raising the lens. the passing car was an unexpected bonus.




not too far away was this building on the corner of river street and pleasant street. i love this building - it's made of that dark red brick that you see so often in boston and the windows are framed by copper that has been streaked by years of green patina.




i only wish that i had more time to explore boston and cambridge with my view camera. i guess that's all the more reason for me to go back some day. i'll put it on the list...

double whammy!

to make up for my lack of posting the last couple of weeks i'll give you a double whammy.

first: let's all give a warm welcome to the shen-hao.

oh yes, this is my new camera and boy is it a joy to behold. it's time to say goodbye to my graflex camera. it has served me well but an upgrade was definitely past due.

the beauty of this camera (aside from its beautiful construction) is that it folds down into a nice "little" box so i can now tote it around with my supplies in a backpack.



yesterday, to christen this camera, i packed up my stuff and headed up the connecticut coast for a one day photo excursion. this leads to the second part of my post...

ever since the third grade when i did a report on rhode island i've wanted to visit that little state. but, despite living in new york for a year and boston for a summer, we have never been there. so, for my trip yesterday, i planned to make newport rhode island my farthest destination before heading home.

here are some of the stops i made:

new haven, ct - home of yale university.

i had expected a lively college town but what i saw when i got there told a very different story. so that's what i shot. i wasn't really there for very long so maybe i didn't get a good representation of what new haven is actually all about.

sperry auto wholesale in new haven - the first picture taken with my new camera. it was a very blank looking warehouse, very worn. it's about to be torn down to make way for yale housing. glad i caught it when i did!

i found an empty plaza on the corner of an intersection in new haven. there were a lot of empty park benches, a lot of cigarette butts and trash on the ground, and plenty of grass growing between the tiles. i knew there was something in store for me there.

then it was off to rhode island.

newport is a beautiful town. it would be a great place to spend a week or so.

i visited the grounds of a couple of the famous rhode island mansions. wow. unlike anything you've ever seen.

i wish i could have spent more time there but i had one more stop to make before i headed home - stonington, connecticut - another place i'd like to spend a week.

i'll get pictures up as soon as i have them. thanks for visiting.

new arrivals in the holga family

i've got some new arrivals in the holga gallery! - san francisco, manhattan, brooklyn, and washington dc. here are a few of them...

once again, the brooklyn bridge:



honestly, can anyone walk over this bridge with camera in hand and not take a few shots? it's such a great location - kind of a photo-cliché but that's ok, right?



love the flatiron building... and the raindrop-covered chair.

i modified my holga so it can focus as close as two feet. it really emphasizes what's in the center of the picture and get you some extra vignetting. the picture above was taken like so.



this is one of my favorite new additions. it just seemed to work out nicely straight from the scan. it's kind of a visual contradiction - everyone is there at the lincoln memorial but no one is looking at him. in fact, they've all got their backs to him. it makes you question the situation.

photographs from holgas have a distinctive style, i.e. lo-fi, (usually) square, optically inferior, etc., etc. it really seems to work well with certain subjects (for me, architecture).

so what scene or location would you want to see in holga form? is there something you feel would fit particularly well into this category? what do you think?

a run-in with the authorities, pt. 2

if you haven't read my post a run-in with the authorities, pt. 1, check it out and then come back.

so here's the photograph that i came away with (luckily i might say).


i'm extremely happy that one of the pictures turned out from that night. i don't think i'll be going back there any time soon.

here's the original photograph by george tice - petit's mobil station - from 1974.

things have changed quite a bit since 1974 when tice was there. the trees have shot up, the water tower has been repainted, and there's a lot more light on the tower. it's kind of lost it's looming qualities but i think it still works. it's one of those ordinary places made more interesting just by noticing it.

the brooklyn bridge

if you were to ask someone to name a bridge in new york city there's a very good chance that they would say "the brooklyn bridge". it has to be one of the most famous bridges in the world. as such it is probably also one of the most photographed bridges in the world. despite its superstar status i figured that i had better not miss an opportunity to photograph it while we're living in new york.

one catch with photographing famous places it that they all have their famous shots - sunset on delicate arch, yosemite valley, the golden gate bridge from the marin headlands - they're the pictures that you see over and over and over. if you visit these places at the right times you can usually see a row of people with their tripods set up to capture that famous shot for themselves.

i'm not against the idea of taking famous photographs for yourself, in fact i think it's a good place to start - just don't end there.

here are two familiar shots of brooklyn bridge that i took in december:



the straight on shot of one of the the towers...



the shot from brooklyn with downtown manhattan in the background...

now here's a shot that i took as i was crossing the brooklyn bridge. i guess it's not really a picture of the brooklyn bridge per se but rather a deeper view into manhattan which includes the brooklyn bridge (as well as the manhattan bridge, the empire state building, and the chrysler building).



the world is full of new ways of seeing things if you just take a little more time to explore and find them.

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.

pinhole pt. 1

pinhole photography is usually thought of as just something you "did in a photography class in high school" - something used merely as a learning tool to teach photographic principles and some of the history behind photography.

fortunately this isn't all it's good for.

so why use a slow, labor intensive method of photography in our digital age? a well-built pinhole camera with a carefully crafted (or laser-drilled) pinhole can take very high quality pictures. pinhole cameras can even be designed to take pictures that just can't be taken with regular cameras.

since pinhole cameras don't have lenses they have infinite depth of field - everything in front of the pinhole is equally in focus. also, since you are most likely making your own camera (they can also be purchased online) you can modify the film plane in any way you want to. a good example of this is having a curved back on the camera. i built a camera out of a section of 10 inch pvc pipe that holds 3 pieces of 4x5 inch film to form a sort of panoramic tryptich (here's a drawing of the camera). it has a whopping 150 degree view. the train picture in my blog header above was taken with this camera.

here's a picture of the gallivan center in salt lake city that was also taken with this camera.



here's another pinhole image that i took with a regular old 150 mm pinhole camera with 4x5 film. it's a staircase in the joseph fielding smith building at byu - looking up.


unfortunately if you're looking for crystal clear pictures then pinhole photography may not be for you. the images have a softer feel because the pinhole isn't able to focus the objects perfectly. however, this softness can also add to the aesthetic of the picture. if you're going for a sharper pinhole image you can use a larger type of film - like 4x5 inch sheet film - and the details will be a lot sharper.

it's definitely an exciting experience building a camera from scratch that actually takes new and exciting pictures.

as for pinhole pt. 2, i plan on making a camera obscura and photographing the image cast on the wall. for those of you who didn't have that high school photography class, a camera obscura (literally dark room) is a completely darkened room with a small hole at one end. the scene on the other side of the hole is projected (upside down and backwards) onto the opposite wall. it's basically the precursor to the camera. pretty exciting...

a healthy dose of holga

for some reason i feel that the holga lends itself well to architectural photography. maybe it's just my own preference, maybe it's because the holga's plastic lens cuts out sharpness and detail and reduces objects down to forms, maybe it's the square format, who knows. whatever it is there's something unique about the way it captures architecture.

here's a dose of holga architecture photographs...


this is the foot bridge leading to the wells fargo building in salt lake city with one utah center in background. if you've ever seen this building and/or bridge at night it's pretty exciting - it glows this great shade of neon blue - it's not harsh, it's just nice and cool. i tried this same shot at night with the lights on but it just didn't work. the color detracted from the forms of the bridge.


the utah commercial and savings bank building was built in 1888 and has since been squished between the two newer buildings on either side. it makes me feel kind of sorry for it - hang in there little buddy!


looking back at the parking levels of the portland international airport i noticed the soaring framework above - i had to take the picture. i thought it was fitting for an airport to have such a lofty structure.


the southeast tower of the salt lake temple - nice day downtown at a wedding...

a run-in with the authorities, pt. 1

we just returned from a trip to washington dc to see some some friends and some sites. we had a great time but on the way down we had a little run-in with the authorities in cherry hill new jersey.

the whole story begins a couple of years a couple of years earlier while i was at byu. i was just getting into large format photography and i discovered a book by george tice called "urban landscapes". he had gone and photographed typical scenes from typical places in new jersey - his home state. one of them in particular caught my eye. it was a photograph of a gas station in cherry hill, new jersey at night with a huge water tower looming in the background - the tower just barely lighter than the dark night sky. it's a beautiful picture.

as we were getting ready to head down to dc i noticed that we would be passing through cherry hill. i thought it would be neat to see the water tower so i found its location - thanks to google maps - and we planned to stop there. it would be dark by the time we would get there so i packed up my large format camera to get some pictures of it 34 years after the original picture was taken.

it used to be a mobil station but now it's a lukoil station with a 7-11 next to it. we pulled into the parking lot, i set up my camera, and started taking some pictures. with large format photography the process is quite involved and so we ended up being there for about 45 minutes while i took the of pictures.

i had noticed a "no loitering" sign when we pulled up but i figured that was probably just meant for local hoodlums, not us. anyhow, as i packed up and got ready to go maryirene mentioned to me that there was a guy in a car in front of us that had been there for quite a while and that occasionally he would turn around and look at us. i thought that was weird but didn't really think much about it. i went inside to use the bathroom and as i walked back out towards our car the man stepped out of his car and said "could you come here please?" and then "could you put your hands on the car, please?"

i was totally and utterly confused but i complied. he started asking me questions like "what are you doing?" and "have you ever been arrested before?". i explained that there was a local photographer that had photographed the water tower in '74 and that i wanted to do the same. his reply was "you want to take a picture of a water tower? at night?" "do you know why this looks suspicious?"

by this time - and quite suddenly - about five more police cars had arrived and there was a cop talking to maryirene. they asked us a ton of background questions - where we were from, what we were doing, and where we were going (maybe to see if our stories matched). luckily i had printed out a copy of the original picture and i had some test shot polaroids that i had made before they showed up. i think this may have helped back up our story.

honestly i never would have thought that taking pictures of a water tower at night would be a problem. apparently when people start taking pictures of infrastructural things in a community those concerned with homeland security get very very worried.

eventually they let us go - after about 45 minutes - and we continued on down to dc.

part two:

i figured that i would have no problem photographing in dc given its popularity... but i was wrong.

my friend and i got up early to photograph the lincoln memorial and the washington monument at sunrise. after a few shots right by the reflecting pool we hiked up to take some pictures from inside the lincoln memorial. once again i was questioned about my photography. "what are you doing?", "what website are you going to post the pictures on?", "you can't have a tripod anywhere on the monument.", "you can't post pictures from inside the monument on the internet.", etc., etc.

so off to the washington monument we went leaving mr. lincoln unphotographed.

i can understand the importance of national security but it made me sad that i was so restricted in my innocent pursuit of pictures.

the wonderful world of large format

large format cameras are as their name describes - large. most use film that measures 4x5 inches however some go up to 20x24 inches or larger.

the main advantage with these cameras is the size of the film. a 4x5 negative is 13 1/3 times larger than a negative from a regular ol' 35 mm camera. sweet detail. another advantage is that the front (the lens) and the back (the film) can be moved independently of each other - this lets you adjust the focus in the picture and also control the perspective. imagine looking up at a building - how the sides appear to lean in. the movements on these cameras allow you to keep those lines parallel. check out wikipedia's page on view cameras for another explanation.

this beautiful piece of work is the graflex graphic view 2. this is what i currently have - ebay, $330. it was probably made some time in the 60's and it still works beautifully today.

here are a couple pictures that i took with my large format camera when i was in san francisco with my dad last spring.

on the golden gate bridge just after the bridge police tried to boot us out (because our tripods might interfere with the pedestrians).

a view of the bridge from china beach

here are some links to some of my favorite large format photographers: joel meyerowitz, george tice, tom till, and jack dykinga. if you're ever in moab, ut check out tom till's gallery (he's a large format nature photographer) so you can get a feeling of what large format photography can do. it's amazing.