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.

all content, no context

i find that some of my favorite pictures are those of subjects that don't have a pre-formulated meaning in my mind (or others' minds for that matter). they are subjects that when i see them i just think "this is a nice scene, i think i'll try to capture what i'm feeling here". the spontaneity of photographing like this can be exhilarating.



this is looking south from battery park - the southern tip of manhattan. at first i considered framing this picture with the statue of liberty in the background but then decided against it.

if i had done that it would have become a picture of the statue of liberty with a boat in the foreground and once you looked at it you would have labeled it a picture of the statue of liberty and that would have brought up thoughts of what pictures of the statue of liberty should be. by excluding it you are forced to make your own conclusions about what the picture is saying.

here's another example.



this is in the harvard square station of the boston subway. the picture was taken with my holga camera set on the ground with my keys under the lens to point it up slightly.

there's nothing in the picture that says boston or harvard or even subway. it's just a set of stairs and a couple of escalators in some type of concrete structure. without any context you have to look at the content to appreciate the picture - the strong lines, the blurred people moving on the escalators - all the action swirling around the empty stairs.

you're free to see what you see without any preconceived notions about the subject.

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.

a little more pinhole

here are a couple more pinhole photographs for your enjoyment...


this is an old abandoned office next to where i worked during college - it was pretty trashed on the inside and kind of falling apart in some places. for some reason i'm fascinated by old abandoned structures. seeing them is like talking to someone from an older generation - they have stories and experiences that you can't find anywhere else.


this is another picture taken with my panoramic pinhole camera. this is the sun setting over the beach at ocean shores, washington. i took this while on a road trip with a good friend. this was our first stop in washington on our way up to seattle. beautiful place.

this next photograph isn't a pinhole image but rather a picture i took to help demonstrate how images get flipped upside down and backwards when they pass through a pinhole or a lens.


the image is passing through one of my large format lenses and being projected onto the wall.

one more thing - during my last semester of college i had a technical writing class. for my final project i wrote a manual on how to build and use your own pinhole camera. so if you already have a basic knowledge of photography and you'd like to make and use your own here's a link to a pdf version of my manual. look for the box with the link that says "click here to start download".

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...

scenes from the boston subway

did you ever see castaway? you know how a friendship grows between tom hanks and wilson, the volleyball? well, while we were in boston i made a friend kind of like wilson; he was hand drawn (with what i think was a light colored lip stick) on a tile wall of the alewife station of the boston subway (the "t"). i would pass this little guy every day when i would get off the subway on my way to work.

i first noticed him because of his simple shape - an arc, a straight line, a squiggle for teeth and two eyes. i thought it was pretty clever. i also liked how it was someone else's addition to the "established art" that already existed on the wall - the painted tiles (which i assume were placed there to break up the monotony of the brownish red tile-covered wall).



i also love how the tiles are all a little uneven - it gives the wall more texture.

i've included this detail from the picture just to give you an idea of how awesome the resolution is on 4x5 film.



there was just something nice about the porter square t station. i loved the big arching wall and the big pipes sticking out on the side. the next best thing about this t stop has got to be the absurdly long escalator. i swear it must go up like 5 stories. don't look down if you have trouble with heights!



edit: i just discovered that the escalator goes about 143 feet from bottom to top. and at an angle somewhere between 25 and 30 degrees that would put it at a total of 60 to 70 feet vertical rise (thanks pythagoras!). so i guess i wasn't too far off when i said it went up 5 stories!

he-man, army guys, and ducklings

one of the great things about the holga is that its lens suffers from a bad case of astigmatism (among other optical "defects"). this means that the further away the object is from the center of the image (towards the edges of the frame), the more out of focus it will be in the picture. although most people would find this to be a problem, it actually adds to the aesthetic of the pictures it takes.

one way to take advantage of this feature is to center the subject in the picture. this isolates the subject and makes it stand out more in the picture.

here's fisto from masters of the universe hanging from my rear view mirror with some onlooking army men.

and here are jack, kack, lack, mack, nack, ouack, pack, and quack following their mom, mrs. mallard, on their way to the boston public garden.

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 holga

"Did you think your eyes were open?"

"I'm afraid to say that until this very moment they have been closed. The unassuming Holga is here to save you from a future of digital pixels and images shared on small screens on cameras or phones. We have all become numbed with photography, there is no denying it, but a chunky camera made almost entirely of plastic has been put on this Earth to save us. It will reawaken your vision, fill you with joy, make you see beauty when you thought it had disappeared forever, and bring out sunshine on a cloudy day."

- www.lomography.com/holga/

the holga is a cheap, plastic medium format camera (it uses film that is about 2 1/4" wide) - and it only costs about 30 bones.

the beauty of this camera is that it really makes you rethink the way you take photographs. the process is as follows: after estimating the focus of the camera, choosing one of the two aperture options, pointing it in the direction of the subject (the squinty viewfinder is only somewhat effective in framing the shot), and tripping the single-speed shutter you hope that the picture turns out alright. in the end you will be amazed by what this camera can accomplish given it's extremely rudimentary design.

i took the following photographs with my holga when we lived in cambridge massachusetts last summer.

central square, cambridge massachusetts

harvard square t station