Camping Trip!

Back from vacation in the June Lake Loop, bearing good and bad news.
Good news first - we had a great time! I shot some digital, brought along the Mark II for the very first time on family vacation, as well as the Yashica 124. Joe brought the field 4x5 and also his A2E. We shot some of our favorite films, 320 Tri-X in the Yashica, Delta 100 in the 4x5, some very old, color-shifted, semi-exposed Polaroid type 59, and we even shot one roll of Agfa 25. Oh how I miss shooting with Agfa 25. So in short, we enjoyed the trip immensely. I took a few digitals - mostly landscapes. But we did some fishing, some hiking, some fooling around town.

Here are a few shots.


















We stopped at Manzanar on the way home and left a 4x5 polaroid at the obelisk in the cemetary.











The bad news - I came home with a broken Mark II. It has started giving me Error 99 consistently, and it won't clear as normal. So I'm taking it in today and really hoping it will be fixed by the time graduations begin. We'll see.
I'm shooting with the 20D until it's fixed, and the 20D has a broken hot shoe. So I have an old bracket rigged up to hold the strobe out to the side... it's a pretty ghetto setup but it works.

That's all for now. Headed out to an assignment!

The Darkroom

One of the best parts of working in a wet darkoom, watching your image come up under the safe lights, prodding it with the tongs, is the collective that forms. In a place where everyone's images are set one on top of the other and you're looking at your neighbor's photograph as much as your own, you have the opportunity to talk about the process and critique. I love reading photo blogs because I get that same sense of seeing all the images as they come through the print dryer, still a little tacky. But the difference is that there is no conversation. No peering at a friend's negs through the loupe. There's no bulletin board to pin your finished images to, squeezed between everyone else's. You don't get any feedback on the process. You don't have as much discussion. 

Sure, there are comments to read, but it's not the same sort of unrehearsed, colloquial discussion. You can't say, well I like that shot, but this thing in the corner is distracting. It pulls your eye away and well, I just think - let me see that loupe again - yeah, I think this one is a much stronger image. 

So when I go through these blogs, sometimes I get a sense that there is no real community. Or, to be more precise, in this economy I get the sense that the community is also competition. If you can't make a photograph as good as the one on that blog,  you'll never succeed. There is so much more tension. And I feel like now that we're all holding our prints close to our chests, keeping them locked up in LCD screens and terabyte backup drives, you lose the intimacy of the print dryer. And the creative melting pot that comes with it. And the community. 

It can be immensely difficult to make interesting photographs every day without feeling the collective support and creativity of the community around you. That is sometimes the hardest part. 

Makes My Heart Ache...

Have a look.

Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light.

Lee Williams' darkroom really tugs at me - it looks so much like the little garage darkroom in which my father first taught me how to make photograms. I used my lego giraffe. Still have some of those.