My wide angle lens (55mm) for the medium format Pentax 67 camera is becoming my favorite.  It used to be that that role was played by a medium telephoto (135mm) because I felt that the fewer elements it covered helped make compositions more coherent.  But, the larger view has compositional imperatives of its own, and I'm enjoying responding to them.  It's a different way of seeing. 

In the creative arts it is often said, with liberal exaggeration, that 10,000 negatives, poems, essays, stories, films and musical works need to be made and discarded before a true voice is able to emerge from the slag heap.  As a cellist, I'm pretty sure I've paid my dues in hours, and effort.  In photography, I'm still workin' on it!

Below is one from this past winter that I want to print in the darkroom.  I had almost no time to set up the 'pod and camera for this, and was happy to get what was left of quickly changing scene. 

I like this photograph.  But, I like it more because it's the first time I've used "curves" in photoshop to solve a problem that's easily fixed in the darkroom...burning in the sky at a harder contrast than the ground (split grading).

Students of classical musical instruments, who are being guided intelligently, now are learning a host of skills that hidebound conservatories of my generation never would have deigned to offer.  That was due to both an elitist attitude and a total ignorance of popular idioms, improvisation, and creative new directions for the instruments being mastered.  Though I'm not likely to regain that ground as a cellist, I can certainly attempt to do so with photography.  Yes, I'm late to the digital party, but I'm determined to catch up as much as possible.  I will never abandon what I've learned traditionally, but I will expand the tool kit, as I've mentioned before, to include new skills I've been timid to try!

It's not easy to find the best light and weather conditions for other than post card photographs in the full sun of summer.  There's rarely any fog, mist, or other interesting phenomena once the sun is fairly high.  I ended up driving a very long way to find anything that interested me.  I made these just north of the "Hawks Nest" scenic roadway along the Delaware River within a state park.

The work I do in the summer time makes if difficult to take the camera out.  This weekend (July 14th and 15th), however I had the chance.  The first is a view of fields and sky in Pine Island I visited on Saturday...the black dirt region of Orange County, NY.  The second is of the lake at the bottom of the hill we live on very early this Sunday morning. 

For work, I usually get up at about 4:15AM every day.  This past Saturday (June 23rd) I got up then anyway so that I could drive to the places I pass on my daily commute that I can't stop to photograph. And those places can be gorgeous.  The two images below were made as I stood on the Bear Mountain Bridge between about 6:15 and 7:30 AM on the 23rd.  There was a dense, low cloud that wouldn't disperse despite the strong breeze I was feeling on the bridge. Eventually, though, the rising mist allowed me to photograph the upper of these two, and the lower, taken earlier, bypassed the low cloud altogether and appreciated the sky.

I've been reviewing the negatives from Bethlehem,  and have decided that I'd like to add one more to the several posted below.  I think this subject is grist for a whole body of work, but I only had a brief time with it, and wish it could have been much longer.

Perkins Memorial Drive is a road on which l have ridden my bicycle to the top of Bear Mountain (back when I was in very good form!).  Most annoying are the barriers that preclude parking a car anywhere along it. It's great for hikers, though, and the view of below is spectacular.  As there were no park police cruising the area during the early morning hour I made this photograph, I was able to park where I wanted to, but wasn't supposed to.  So...here is the result of my crime!

Every working day I drive slowly across the Hudson River on the Bear Mountain Bridge.  It is a brief trip spanning the river just below Fort Clinton where the American revolutionary army belted a huge chain just below and across the water to stop British warships from any further northward progress. Just beyond the bridge is West Point. (Sometimes I'm saluted on this bridge by cadets on their morning run, the most polite and respectful young adults you could ever want to meet.)  

There are no end of mornings that take one's breath away with their beauty here.  Clouds, mist, fog, wind, haze, snow, rain, and all their nuances are stunning, but while driving, not possible to photograph.   Today (May 28th) I didn't have to make the trip due to the Memorial Day holiday, but I did anyway just in case. I didn't think it likely there would be much to see as day dawned in warm haze.  I nearly turned around to go home when I saw fog in the distance. Yes!!  So, I finished the trip.  Here are three from the two rolls I used. If I could stop every morning that seduced me visually, I'd go into debt buying film.  (Yeah...I know...I could shoot digitally for next to nothing.  Sorry...not interested.)

The party tent images below were made adjacent to this photograph.  The Bethlehem Steel Works was an enormous industry in its time.  This photograph was made at the end of the sprawling acres of stacks, and 'ovens' that cooked the raw materials, separated the metal ore from other ingredients, and blended metals to finally make steel. In our era of sterile virtual realities, it's important to remember the gritty, sweaty, smokey, industrial sinew that once polluted air and water, but rolled out the material that built this country. 

It has not only been a while since I've posted a photograph here, but an even longer while since I've posted something new.  These three images were made on April 29th, in Bethlehem, Pa. beside a marvelous relic of rust belt industry, a steel mill.  It is awesome in scale and complexity, but I just didn't have the time before the concert we had come for to photograph it with the intimacy that can only come from time spent. But, along side the mill, there was a party tent that had been set up for an event yet to occur, and was completely available visually.  In the time we had to wait before the concert, I was able to burn two rolls of film.  Here are three from those rolls.

I should title this photograph, "From a Winter that Was"  This past one definitely wasn't!  I felt a bit sorry for all the ice fisherman who used to sit on their stools on frozen Walton Lake.  It did freeze, but thawed in a bit more than a week, and never was thick enough to support fisherman, skaters, or much else.  The issue in question is "global" warming, not local warming, but if this year were a portent of things to come even around here, it's a major shift in the climate.  I hope not, but who knows?

I enjoyed a wonderful adventure on Friday, April 6th.  We met up with a small group of painters at the Southlands Foundation, Gentle Giants 4H club farm in Rhinebeck, NY.  The painters (OH RATS*) had arranged to have one of the Belgian horses, (Turk), and a couple of donkey's available for them to paint.  I tagged along with my cameras, and had a grand time ranging within and beyond the paddock where the painters were painting.  We will return here (have an open invitation) many times, I think. A splendid place!!

*Old Hudson River Art and Truth Society. 

The two photographs below are from 2005.  They were made with my first view camera (ToyoView45D), and a very modest entry level lens (Rodenstock Geronar 210).  I had also just acquired an enlarger for 4x5 negatives, and couldn't wait to print these two.  But, the full negatives had problems I didn't know how to solve, and they have never been scanned or printed until now. (these are scans, but prints to follow immediately).  I have a sense of what to do with the prints that I didn't know back then.  The challenge is to achieve in the darkroom what is so ridiculously simple in Photoshop, but nothing I do there isn't a legitimate darkroom technique as well.  We'll see how well I do!

 

If you've visited this blog over time you've seen this waterfall before.  I've visited it for over 30 years, and always enjoyed it whether making a photograph or not.  This subject is done to death, of course, but, like portraits of people each is different.  Sometimes the image is a boring cliche, and sometimes it's a bit more than that because there's an inherent design that transcends the subject.  Whichever of those two possibilities you decide this exemplifies, I've decided it's more the latter than the former.

One great thing about film is that it's easy to keep forever.  Were I accumulating digital files, I don't know if I'd even be able to load one that's ten or more years old unless I'd updated the software I'd need to do that as often as necessary (and hope the file was uncorrupted as well). 

The 'graph below is a negative scan from a 2000 photograph.  I never printed it because I thought it was too 'unfriendly' with as much dark as it has.  But....now that I tone prints in thiocarbamide and selenium, the color changes that mood, and I've decided I like this well enough to print next week.  It's also cropped a bit from the full negative (another bit of progress from what I did 12 years ago), and I've noticed that this kind of photograph has now been done by a lot of people (probably had been then, too, of course, but I didn't know). 

Painters become better painters over time as they accumulate, and develop skills.  Yet, their creative vision most likely was there from the beginning and only needed refinement and added scope. The camera, though, nails the image as well earlier in one's development as later.  So....I don't feel that this 'graph is any less current in a way than if I had just made it.  I just 'see' it differently now than then.  Make sense?

It's been a weird, wimpy winter, and now we're experiencing a dramatically early spring.  LOVE IT!!  On Sunday we went out to the Rogowski Family Farm in Pine Island for their farm breakfast which was a real treat, and then meandered home slowly.  Not far from that farm the road crossed the stream below, and we parked a bit up the road and walked back with our cameras (3 people, 4 cameras just to keep the weirdness in play...).  I shot one roll of film from the bridge, and selected these two negatives to scan from the ten on the roll.  It pays to 'work' a subject, because, had I only taken two or three images from the bridge, I doubt I'd have gotten the two below. 

Being drawn many times to the same place is either a sign of perpetually clinging to the familiar, or being perpetually curious to discover nuances of difference the familiar undergoes from one visit to the next.  I hope my affinity for the falls at Beacon (NY) is of the latter sort, but I'm okay with its being of the former if that's the case.  Different here is the use of the P67 rather than the Mamiya TLR, and my surprise at the extensive sprucing up the site has undergone that has undermined its charm to a notable degree.  I've sort of made this same photograph before, but there are enough differences that I'm not reluctant to post it. 

I suppose I'm grateful for this year's mild winter, but it has been a big disappointment visually.  Except for last weeks light, and very brief snowfall (see last week's post), this winter has been dull and drab even in sunlight for the most part. So, I'm sharing a photograph from a golden autumn of several years ago when I was able to spend a few hours at a local farm with my very first view camera (a Toyo View with 210 Geronar lens).  Though this is a negative scan, I've now learned how to print this in a way that will be quite close to what you see below. 

This past Friday brought us our first modest snowfall so far this winter.  What made it special visually was that the air was enough above freezing for there to be fog, and a kind of misty drizzle persisted throughout the day.  For monochrome photography, those are among the best possible conditions.

We drove out to Montgomery, NY where I was eager to visit the horse farm again with snow on the ground, and that's the image with the trees and fence.  (There are several posts below of this scene in different conditions.).  The second image was made just around the corner from the first at a town park that has a lake, benches, and this little dwarf pine. Irresistible!  Best of all, though, was that I never had to shovel a single flake, and all had melted from the driveway by the end of the day.  Yes!!

These two photographs fulfill a very long standing hope that I would one day be in this place with my camera ready, and with the light doing what it's doing here.  The row of foreground trees grow along a little brook that bisects a meadow.  The mountain behind them is still a good way off, and when passing clouds very briefly subdued light on it, I was (at last) prepared to make the photograph.  It might seem surprising, but landscape and nature photographs can be as challenging as street, or sports photographs when the success or failure of the image depends on the critical timing of a "decisive moment".