Its all about a true black....and good mid tones

Talk about a hard shot to get right, but I did. This pic of the bridge and mill in Burfordville MO was taken fall of 1977 for my Black and White photography class. It was exercise in the "zone system" as formulated by Ansel Adams...one of my long time hero's for so many reasons.

Just a little taste of spring

Shot this in March 1976 could be dogwood. Could be forsythe. Both were the first to bloom in MO once winter was done and before the rest of the stuff was ready to go.

This is from a scan of the original negative done with an Epson V600 Photo scanner, set the dpi for a max 12800 (extrapolated) that picks up every little piece of grain. I dumbed down the images just a couple of notches so it loads faster here.

Funny how my love of things up close was there in the early work. I like how the depth of field is so shallow that only a couple of blossoms are in focus.

A few more from the archives

This is sort of fun digging into the archives and digitizing things for posterity...or at least until the next big thing comes along.

I've always loved isolating trees and showing off their individual beauty in a forest. I particularly like this set of images. They were shot in Northern Minnesota on my grandparents property on Bear Island Lake outside of the town of Ely where they lived. Can you tell from these images that Ansel Adams had an affect on me even in my early years?

Some trends go back ages...

I have a new scanner and among the tasks I have for it is to take my old B&W and archive them all digitally.

One of the things I've noticed in my early work was an affinity for natural lighting, even low level for all the drama one can get from the images shot under such conditions. Also noted that I did a lot of very moody black and white work both indoors and outdoors.

These images are of some family members that cooperated with me and my experimentation back in the day. Both are very natural portraits that I am still very pleased with many years after the fact.

Interesting for me also was my propensity to not only store them for safe keeping back then, but I also noted the basics such as film used. In this case these were shot in good old Tri-X Pan at ASA (we call it iso now) 400, no pushing was done.

Praise be...the new scanner arrived

Can't wait to find in storage all of my negatives,not just those stashed in with the trusty High School yearbooks. This gem came from the first set I shot with my first brand new, spanking way cool 35mm camera that I bought with all my graduation gift money.

Best I could find to celebrate the arrival of my new scanner, an Epson V600 that is comes set to scan both negatives and transparencies. Should be interesting to see how it does with the old Kodachromes...will it reproduce the same rich color? Right now am pretty amazed at what it does with old color negatives like this July 4th shot done summer of 1975.

test...just a test of a new tool in my arsenal

I bought a flip cam...mostly for use over at So Cal Auto Blog the possibilities are endless. Maybe do some tutorials on stuff I do with CS5? HDR? Just random stuff like this test video that I put together fooling around with the simple tool earlier today? I don't know, what would you like to see?

Camellia...orton style

I just love how a pretty blossom becomes oh so romanticized with the simple addition of a couple of steps in Adobe CS5.

I've done the steps numerous times in other posts this time around will skip the details on how I got there and just let you enjoy the image.

Interesting Online Gallery for me...Gallerish

So as part of my near daily quest to find new venues to show case my art work I stumbled upon Gallerish, an online gallery for Los Angeles.

Its pretty nifty, certainly is a no risk venture to show case ones art. The nice thing is that they permit linking to your own website at no extra fee. Pretty slick way for new/emerging artists trying to build a following of collectors to get some exposure. Their home page link HERE.

Of course I set up my own brief online gallery with them. You can find me HERE.

A little diversion and play time with Polaroin

Yesterday a friend turned me on to a web site called Polaroin. Link HERE. It creates Polaroid style images out of your digital photographs regardless if shot with a cell phone or DSLR.

I played around with it a bit yesterday and am having fun with it. Though I do mourn the day Polaroid dissolved itself and quit making film its nice to see it replicated with a fun online app. (I have ample Polaroid images from over the years, loved the look and feel of the images and have quite a collection of their cameras so my mourning is twofold....can't use the cameras I have and can't play with the process again in the future).

Of course it got my wheels turning and wonder if there is a point to duplicating it in Adobe's Photoshop CS5. Art for the sake of art has its purpose and I just may do so. Stay tuned....

HDR to the rescue

This image would have been nearly impossible to capture without the aid of HDR post processing? Why you ask? Well the "wall" behind was actually a bank of white plexi that was back lit and several stops brighter than even the spot lit car. Shooting it bracketed +/- 2EV solved the problem when I used those files to generate an HDR image.

The final image was then tone mapped with Photomatix. After that it needed no other post processing 'cept for some minor color correction work.

The car is the Mistubishi i-MiEV (electric car) due on sale later this coming year. More about the car on So Cal Auto Blog.