Three shots of the light sculpture in operation, taken with the Rolleiflex, hand-held, using Kodak Portra 800. I thought it would make for a different take on the piece compared to the video (which was shot on my iPhone, thus the shakiness). The light sculpture has been set so that it will never in fact repeat itself exactly.
Two more from Gettysburg itself, and three more from the Catoctin Furnace.
The rail depot is now a little museum, with exhibits relating to Lincoln’s visit.
The iron master of Catoctin Furnace was responsible for all the finished product coming out of the factory. His house was quite large. Today it stands in ruins. The ‘root cellar’ image is my assumption of what the space might have been – it is not labeled on the site. I’m guessing at its function by the proximity to the house (it would have been immediately behind the house, near the kitchen). The other possibility is that it is the spring/well for the house. Since I lacked a flashlight, I did not go in to try and find out what was in there.
Two shots of a former house turned liquor store turned redevelopment project on 14th Street.
A perspective study of the brickwork trim on the front garden retaining wall of some houses on 13th Street.
The front of the world-famous Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street in Northwest DC. You can see the new mural in the alley that depicts Bill Cosby (and Dr. Martin Luther King, not visible in this photo) – one of the two people who can eat at Ben’s for free (the other ‘person’ being the Obama family).
I just liked the way the door caught the reflections in the glass as it was closing.
Just another one of those quotidian things we see every day and don’t pay much attention to.
The entrance to a new Japanese restaurant that is very much in keeping with the spirit of a real Izakaya in Japan – spartan in appearance and compact in size, but still welcoming. Rumor has it that the food is excellent – I will have to give it a try some day soon, although their menu is a bit seafood-intensive for me as I’m allergic to shellfish (shrimp, crab, lobster and scallops).
To close out the show, here’s a manhole cover that has been thoroughly inscribed with graffiti. I liked the contrast formed by the regular geometry of the manhole cover and the grid of the concrete with the organic shapes of the leaves, setting up a man-vs-nature conflict, only to be complicated by the man-made disorder of the graffiti.
More adventures in Rolleiflex-land for those who care about such things. All of these were shot on Fuji NPH 400.
This is looking West on G Street, across the street from the National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum (they’re housed in the same building, the former US Patent Office, once the largest building in Washington, occupying an entire square block. Designed to be fireproof (although proven later due to budget cuts during construction to NOT be as fireproof as designed), it was home to Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Ball). If you saw photos of this street from 30 years ago you would barely recognize it – the entire neighborhood was in rough shape, and despite the museum’s presence, not a safe place to be. They wouldn’t let school groups wander beyond the museum – it was straight from the bus to the building, and back directly into the bus in those days. The whole neighborhood smelled of Eau de Homeless. Now, drinks at Zola are $10-15 each for bottom-shelf liquor, and dinner for two at Rosa Mexicano around the corner will routinely set you back $70-100.
As you can see, sitting on the steps of the Portrait Gallery is a popular pastime, although not as popular as it used to be amongst teenagers who used to congregate there in large numbers pretty much all year round. The downside was that they weren’t absorbing culture – they were there being teenagers, being rowdy and noisy, sometimes getting into fights, and other inappropriate behavior. So the museum installed speakers that play classical music. Beethoven, the ultimate teenager repellant!
More of my DC nightscapes- I was testing out the Fuji NPZ 800 that I had in my film inventory. A surprisingly good result from a film I’ve had sitting around again for the better part of a decade.
You can definitely see the grain in these images, but it’s nowhere near as pronounced as the grain in 400 speed 35mm film. It also handles mixed lighting pretty well, but it’s not Kodak Portra.
Oh, by the way, these were all hand-held. THAT’s why you shoot 800 speed film!
What I’ve Learned About Photo Gear Over the Past 40 Years
Terrific summary and great dispelling of the constant upgrade myth. A great photographer can make great images with a pinhole or a Brownie box camera, in addition to a CaNikSonEikaBlad. A mediocre photographer gets caught up in an upgrade chase thinking gear is the solution to a skills problem. Don’t get me wrong, gear is fun, and its always nice to have the right tool for the job – there are photos you can take with a Canon 5D that you can’t take with a Hasselblad, and photos you can take with an 8×10 Sinar you can’t take with a Leica (the old “don’t use a hammer to do a screwdriver’s job” adage). But when it comes down to it, it’s far to easy to blame the tool when we don’t get what we were looking for (“I would have gotten the photo if only I had an xxxx”). This is part of why I’m fixating on my Rolleiflex. It’s just one camera, with just one lens – it’s forcing me to pay more attention to what I’m shooting and how I’m shooting it rather than running around with two or three bodies and half a dozen lenses in two or more formats. My Argentina trip of a few years ago was a prime example – I had the 5×7 with six (SIX!!!!) lenses, 13 film holders (13!!!!), and a tripod, along with my Contax G1 with 45mm and 28mm lenses. While I did take some wonderful photos in each format, I’m pretty sure both suffered as a result. Certainly, there were photos I could not have taken with one that I did with the other. My Recoleta cemetery photos would not have happened with the Contax, and my street scenes in San Telmo and La Boca would not have happened with the 5×7. But by dividing my attention between the two systems and two ways of thinking probably meant that I wasn’t fully in the mindset of either system and then tried (and failed) to make images with one that would have been better done with the other.
If you’re familiar with twin-lens reflex cameras, you know that they have certain limitations (close-focus capability or lack thereof, parallax compensation required, non-interchangeable lenses) for the most part (the Mamiya C22/33/220/330 family being the notable exception to most of the above). My Rolleiflex certainly falls into that category. One thing Rollei did was they came up with a special close-focus auxiliary lens set, which they called Rolleinar. Rolleinars come in four strengths, with the #4 being a rarity, and the #3 uncommon to find today. They’re basically diopters, but with a twist – because parallax worsens the closer you get, they include a special diopter plus prism for the taking lens so you can still compose a frame with relative accuracy. I have a Rolleinar 1, and I’ve been playing around with it. It’s good for getting closer for tight head-and-shoulders portraits, and for doing simple macro-ish photos of flowers and textures and the like. Here are a couple of shots I took with it outside the florist’s by my office – as you can see, it will get you close-r, but it’s far from 1:1 reproduction. Both of these were shot at or near minimum focus for the camera. Film is that same expired Fuji NPS 160 that I’ve been shooting through.
Here are some semi-abstract shots of the bikes of Capitol BikeShare, docked in their parking docks at Farragut Square. I saw the bikes’ shadows and the repeated patterns of wheels, spokes, seats and handlebars caught my imagination.
More Rolleiflex 2.8E/terminally expired Fuji NPS 160 action.
A few nighttime photos in the fog. I think these really captured the atmosphere of the evening. It had been warm in the daytime, then rained, and when the rain stopped, it was already dark, so we ended up with this cool fog. I wanted to capture that feel of the streets at night in the fog, and since I live somewhere very residential, I figured this was a pretty safe place to do it as there wouldn’t be much traffic to worry about if I stepped into the street for a four second exposure. All these were taken with my Rolleiflex, on expired Fuji NPH 400 film. The reason why I’m shooting all this expired film is not that I’ve got some kind of outdated film fetish, or that I’m a cheap-ass bastard and refuse to buy fresh film, but rather I’m just having fun experimenting and I don’t want to use “good” film on experimental stuff if I have some old film that nowadays is for all intents and purposes free but for the processing cost.
But what about the square, you say? Aren’t all Rollei photos square? Well, I do love square photos, and that’s one of the reasons why I love the Rollei so much. But there does come a time when you have to look at the photo and decide if a crop makes the image stronger. In all of these cases, the original square composition had too much something – too much sky, too much foreground, etc. So I cropped for more dynamic compositions that didn’t have so much dead space in them. I think these are much better.
Just thought I’d do a re-visit of all my Glen Echo color work, to put them in one place. When I get a bit more organized, I’ll put my platinum/palladium Glen Echo photos together and do another mini-gallery. This has all been shot with a mixed bag of films and cameras. Mostly my Rolleiflex 2.8E, with one nod to my Canham 5×7 (the Glen Echo sign at night – it’s special enough it gets its own row). The films have been Kodak Portra 160NC, Kodak Ektar 100, Fuji NPS 160, and Fuji NPH 400. With the exception of the Ektar 100, most of the film used has been anywhere from a couple years out of date to almost a dozen years expired. Which says a lot about the quality of modern color film emulsions.
Part of the purpose of this exercise was in response to a discussion recently on an online photography forum I read where someone was complaining about how hard it was to take good photos in places you are familiar with. While I love travel photography (I’m getting ready to indulge in some serious travel photography early next year, probably one of those once-in-a-lifetime trips – I’ll keep you updated as the time approaches), I think it’s absolute baloney that you can’t take interesting photos of places you know and see every day. If anything, the opposite is true. But each type of photography requires a different mindset. Photographing on the road requires you to be able to filter out the extraneous detail because it’s ALL wondrous and new. Photographing at home requires you to turn off the detail filter so you start finding the interesting stuff you ignore because it’s what you see every day.
Photographing my own neighborhood is about recording and observing change – it’s like doing a series of portraits of the same person – this week in a suit, next week in a sundress, then later in an anorak, this year a little taller, next year a beard, the year after with a tan and a buzz cut. The Glen Echo photos are another form of portraiture, portraiture of a place. Places can have spirits and identities, and their face changes over time, just like a person’s.
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