We're having our second show at the Wallkill River Gallery. The back of the show-card says:

"An exhibition of oil paintings and black and white photographs in the main galleries of the historic Patchett House, home of the Wallkill School and Gallery.

April 1-30, 2009

Reception on Saturday April 4th, from 5 - 8 PM"

Any of you who can make it to the show will enjoy seeing the Patchett House at the very least. It's a mid 19th century structure that has been beautifully restored. It's located at 232 Ward Street (17K) in Montgomery, New York. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday 9AM to 6PM
The webaddress is: www.wallkillriverschool.com

We'd love to see any of you who can drop by for the opening, or hear from you if you visit the show during April.

Sunday, the 15th of March, was a gorgeous and springlike day. I couldn't wait to get out of the house and exercise myself and the camera which I did with great pleasure. Before I hiked at Goose Pond Mountain State Park, I stopped at the bottom of the "hill" we live on to photograph these images at Walton Lake. The top image is of a fence that separates the public access part of the lake from someone's teensy little postage stamp plot of lake front. The bottom image is of two of the aluminum fishing boats that have wintered over rather badly topside up in the rain and snow. A couple of guys have some serious bailing to do!

Here are yet a couple more from my perambulations around the pond at Goose Pond Mountain State Park two weeks ago. I've titled them as "Winter Light" one and two, but they're really not images that should be titled beyond the imperatives of time and place. Were "winter light" to be a meaningful title, there would have to be less than one percent of the gazillion images that call themselves that to be significant.

They have yet to be printed. I am about to embark on a toning journey that may deepen the sense of mood and light, and these are grist for that exploration. We'll see.

Here are another three from yesterday (March 8th) at Goose Pond Mountain State Park. I've returned here over and over again for several years now, and I recognize in photographing it, the same mentality I seem to exhibit when I buy clothes. Blue, denim, khaki., blue, denim, khaki, white., blue, denim, khaki, white with stripes, black, black black...etc. etc. These negative scans may become prints eventually. They're 6x7 negatives that I've cropped to my nearly obsessively favored squares. They will almost certainly end up being toned with thiocarbamide and selenium, so what you see here isn't really what they'll look like. And...I've Photo Shopped them a good bit in the manner I will likely utilize when I'm printing them for real, so they're not really pure scans at all. Anyway...the joy is in the discovery and the execution, and the next best part is yet to come, i.e. the darkroom. I would abandon photography in a heartbeat if I had no recourse but a completely digital continuum. The irony is that digitizing film is my absolute first choice in previewing negatives...I've not made a contact sheet in years. But, after that, the "real" photographic process begins for me, and I get to retreat to my warm, and cozy darkroom. Will the weekend never come! ;-)

Today was a gorgeous respite from the last few wintry weeks. I can only hope that we've seen the last of ice and snow, but I'm hedging my bets on that...we'll see. My younger son was born on April 8th, two days after a monstrous blizzard of 14 inches or so of snow on April 6th 1982, so who knows. I'm going to hang up the shovel and drain the snow blower; I could be wrong! ;-)

After a reflective week following the portfolio review, I'm enthusiastic about my work...I feel empowered to make my own decisions, and utterly comfortable being dismissive of the bullshit that one reviewer had a hard time defining as "contemporary photography". Of the six people who evaluated my portfolio, most were very enthusiastic, one was exceptionally helpful, another was indifferent, and the rest spanned the gamut in between.

These two images were made on February 28th, and represent a direction I'm eager to continue pursuing. The chaos of nature is utterly hypnotic to me, and I hope to become yet more attune to the order that, nonetheless, resides therein.

Woo Hoo!....a happy occurrence!

Fraction Magazine, an on-line photography 'zine has included one of my photographs in the APUG (Analog Photography Users Group) group show. There were apparently 200 submissions, and 29 images were chosen. So...I'm happy about that, and grateful for the selection. Here's a link if you'd like to see what was chosen of mine, and the rest of the remarkable 'graphs that have been published.

www.fractionmag.com/

This is to be the third in a series for the portfolio review of similar views of the same scene in different iterations: early snow, fog, and winter snow. It amazes me that I've not printed this before. The negative is a really good one. The negative was made with the 4x5 Shen Hao and 250mm Fujinon lens.




Well, I decided I preferred this negative after all to the one from my previous post. It looks more like what I had in mind as a variation on the other 'graphs than the more vaginal first choice. And....don't go there!.... there aren't any issues in my life...just enjoy the pic hehe..... ;)

Well, believe it or not, this is a view from the exact same spot as the Beacon stream series that I posted on November 29th, and a springtime series of the same thing I posted in July of 2007. I guess this must be the place I find the most varied and inspiring, because I've never yet found another that has so much dynamic interest, and so many different moods in one very confined area. This will get printed on Friday evening I think, and is a good candidate for the review portfolio.

Here are another two from the negative files. These were never printed for reasons I can't exactly recall, but I think I was looking for pristine leaves, and these weren't. But I no longer care about perfect leafy greens, and so these will become prints today! It's also a good thing to look at them on a day which will not top the low 20s in temperature, and be reminded that spring will return eventually....yup...yessir....I think so....

It's a cautionary tale, too, for digital photographers that the files that get deleted are gone for good. I keep my film negatives forever (unless they're totally wrecked somehow, but that almost never happens), and when I revisit them perhaps years hence I find that some have become appealing to me as I've grown and evolved in photography. Were I to have tossed them, I'd have needlessly lost a record of past visual exploration that may just have needed time to mature, and be recognized.

I've signed up for a portfolio review at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, which is a wonderful institution through which I've had the privilege of attending workshops by the photographers Mark Klett, and Mark Citret a number of years ago. This review will demand no fewer than 20 photographs with 25 suggested as an even better portfolio size. There will be five reviewers I will get to select among twenty who will discuss my images with me. They, of course, will expect to see a "body of work" which means that the photographs need to be at least vaguely related by subject, or be a series that comprises a specific project. I emphatically do not think of myself as a "project" photographer, although I do think a thematic link among the pieces selected is a good idea.

In any case, I am combing my files to assemble a set of negatives to print again, or for the first time that will make a worthy body of work to offer the reviewers in addition to my current new photographs which I have very pointedly made with a thematic link in mind.

So, the image below is one of those combed from the negative files I've not printed thus far. It's from Goose Pond Mountain State Park where I have made countless negatives that far exceed the time I have available to print the bulk of them. But....I like this one cropped a bit as it is from a 4x5 neg that is wonderfully sharp and crystal clear. I have no idea at this point if it will make the cut of photographs I choose to present, but at the moment...I like it!

Here's another reminder of springtime to join the two photographs below. I am really, really sick of this cold, snowy stuff we're going through now, and need spiritual sustenance to hold out till the REAL! springtime rolls 'round in about four months. Yikes....is it going to take that long....sigh....

I am so sick of shoveling snow and breaking up ice and slipping and sliding around and trying to not fall down and dealing with winter around here in general that I'm posting these two pictures of summer and spring for no other reason than it makes me feel better! ;-)

This photograph is meaningful to me because it was taken at the farthest spot I trudged to in Goose Pond Mountain State Park yesterday. The snow was at least 10 inches deep and exhausting to hike through especially with the 4x5 kit on my shoulder (I don't have snow shoes...yet...). And then my spot meter refused to stop blinking and give me a reading. I suppose it was just too cold for it to work properly as the battery was okay (it worked normally when I got home). This is a "sunny f16" guesstimate exposure that worked out well.

I wish all of you who visit here a joyous holiday season, and a splendid new year.

Stopping in New Palz for lunch at the Gilded Otter, we noticed that the Wallkill River was waaay out of it's banks from the rain and sleet that has fallen in the last few days...far more than we thought. So we parked by the river where the bike trail continues and spent some time with the cameras despite the significant cold. We then drove up into the Gunks which were utterly beautiful with their icy coating on every twig and branch. It was too fantastic to even attempt serious photography, being more important to just take it all in without saying WOW too many times too loudly. However, the third photograph below was irresistible, and finished the roll of film for me.

This morning's sleepy trudge to the kitchen to pour some coffee was quickly changed to a brisk trot to get the P67 loaded with Delta 100, the 135mm lens secured to the body, the whole kit mounted on the 'pod, and myself out on the deck to record the gorgeous glitter of overnight sleet that stuck to everything. It didn't last long as the sun blasted the frozen bling back into liquid that cascaded into the already sodden dirt..but I didn't have to shovel anything ;-)

I had some time to spend in Beacon, New York recently, and since all of the galleries were closed (which I was eager to visit, and then disappointed to not be able to see), I found myself drawn to my favorite natural spot in that town...the falls. Here are a couple of images made with my new-t0-me Mamiya C330 and the 135mm lens I've had since the late 80's I think. I love square...(not that there's anything wrong with rectangles!).

Sunday (November 2nd) was crisp, and sunny, and irresistible for any kind of outdoor adventure. I arranged a much lighter and more limited 4x5 kit for a long walk at Goose Pond Mountain. It's remarkable how simple one's tools can be, especially in this era of megawhizbang autodigitastic cameras. I just took along 1 lens (210mm Nikkor), 5 film holders (10 sheets of film), my light meter, dark cloth and the 4x5 folded up on the tripod. More just wasn't needed.

This photograph is a negative scan, but will likely become a print in the near future. I feel as though I'm beginning to lose my ability to accurately guage a scan to really resemble what the print will look like (the print will be a great deal better), but it does offer a sense of what's present in the negative, and over time, will allow me to imagine how I may go about making prints that are more satisfying...a digital contact sheet.

This is a totally unmanipulated scan of a negative I made about five or six months ago. It was one of the first photographs I made using my then new-to-me Nikkor 210mm f5.6 lens on the 4x5. I very, very rarely photograph man made stuff, but this had a nice design, great texture, and just enough character to make it seem worthwhile. I'm still not sure it'll ever become a print, but if it grows on me, perhaps it will. BTW, for those who are from around here, it was taken of an outbuilding on the roadside by Museum Village. I'm not certain if it is a part of the actual site, but it's an antique building nonetheless.

Columbus Day weekend offered us an opportunity to visit Cape Cod, which I have missed a lot over the past ten years or so. I used to take my boys there for a week or two at the end of August, and we all fell in love with the place. So here I was back again after the long interval, and I got to do some serious photography at sites that stayed in my mind in a very visual way. We also went to a slew of galleries, and saw some wonderful work that was mostly painting. However one Cape photographer...Janet Woodcock...was the highlight of what we saw for me. Her work seems to have evolved from decades of really knowing this area deeply, and there's nothing else that quite allows that to happen in so special a way.

Here are five that I like among about thirty or so that I made with the 4x5 using the 210, and 250mm lenses. They were all taken at the National Seashore in the town of Eastham in the vicinity of the Salt Pond Visitor Center, and Coast Guard Beach.