Photo Sessions
Photographed with a Mamiya M645 1000s and Ilford FP4 medium format film.
Spending a little bit of time playing with the balance between light and shadow on black and white film. This image was a bit of a challenge and I probably sat in front of the computer moving the brightness and contrast dials back and forth on my film scanning software for way too long. I can only imagine how obsessive I would be over this negative if I was making a print in the darkroom!
Photographed with a Minolta SRT-101 and Fomapan 100 35mm Film.
I’ve been organizing negative sleeves the last few days and pulling out a few frames here and there to make fresh scans of images I long ago disregarded or dismissed. Sometimes this can be one of the many powerful aspects of working with film. With a digital camera there is a tendency to delete the images we don’t initially have a fondness for. Either that or we tend to move the images to some external hard drive which in turn gets shoved in a drawer and eventually becomes incompatible with whatever operating system is current.
In other words, the images are quickly forgotten.
With film, there is more of an incentive to revisit your old work every once in a while. Sometimes there will be a frame you didn’t think much about when you first developed the negative but might speak to you years later. In the case of this image, I don’t think I ever even scanned this particular frame. There were a few other images on the roll that I gravitated toward and this frame was set aside in my mind. Now here we are almost seven years later and I’m giving it a fresh scan and posting it here on my blog.
Photographed with a Hasselblad 500cm and Kodak Tmax 400 speed film.
Much like most of the world at this point I continue to self-quarantine at home. I fully admit this has put me in a strange headspace. On one hand, I’ve always been a fairly introverted person and I relish in alone time, not to mention love having all the time in the world to work on projects. On the other hand, with so many people scared and uncertain I’m really not feeling all that creative.
In order to keep some sense of normalcy going on however I’ve made it a point to do something photography related every single day. Mostly this means developing film and editing images. This images comes from my latest photoshoot with Devi which we did back in January. It was an incredibly quick session which we did around eight o’clock in the morning in a hotel room in downtown Portland. I was lucky to have some fairly decent natural light coming in through the window which is a bit of a small miracle considering it was January. Traditionally overcast in January is so thick in Portland that early morning hours are pretty dark. I did have to use a tripod though as I was photographing this at around 1/15th of a second wide open at f/2.8.
I’ve also made it a point to type at least one physical letter a day. Most of the time I’ve been writing letters to politicians, local, state, and federal. In part because I feel like now is probably the most important time the average person can speak out and also in part because I just simply want the excuse to use my typewriters. Considering I seem to have all the time in the world right now I might as well use it constructively.
Over the next few days I also plan on loading some film in a camera and making some images. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to undertake as a subject matter as of now. Maybe some self portraits. Obviously getting outdoors and working with a model is not much of an option right now. However, sometimes making art is about working with what is available to you. That’s an important thing to keep in mind. Especially right now.
Photographed with a Canon 20D digital SLR camera.
We are living in interesting times. I’m not going to deny all the news about the Corona Virus scares me. It scares me a lot. However, rather than panic I am choosing to take some time and do the things that give me peace and fulfillment while at the same time keeping myself and others safe. This means getting caught up on undeveloped film and editing images that have been sitting on the back burner for way too long.
This image was made well over a decade ago when I was going through a brief period of time working exclusively with a digital camera. I was really broke, having just recently moved to a new state without a job or any real game plan. So I figured it was best not to spend money on things like film and instead just make the best of the equipment I had available to me. This meant a Canon 20D with the cheap as hell 50mm f/1.8. I actually loved that equipment combination at the time though these days it probably wouldn’t thrill me all that much.
I don’t own the camera or the lens anymore but this image has been sitting as a RAW file in my “Images to Edit” folder since the day I tripped the camera shutter. It feels good to finally get around to editing it and sharing the image here.
Photographed with a Hasselblad 500c/m and Fomapan 100 speed film.
I’ve been incredibly busy lately with regular life stuff. That sadly means a little bit less time for photography which I guess we can all just dismiss as “adulting”.
I made this photograph toward the end of 2019 on a very cold and windy day when I was hoping for just a bit more summer weather before fall kicked in. Behind the model you can see the shapes of a rather cute and petite lighthouse located on the north end of Sauvie Island. I didn’t have a wide angle lens with me (what was I thinking!!?) but I still like the way the structure in the background sort of overpowers the entire frame.
Over the coming weeks I hope to get back on track with a few photo shoots and some focused work on getting images edited and film developed. Until then, enjoy this short little post and stay warm!