Category Archives: Cameras

Architecture, Black and White, Cameras, Landscapes, Medium Format Cameras, Photography

Monocacy Battlefield – The Farms – Worthington Farm

May 22, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Views of the Worthington House. This house was the center of a smaller farm operation (relative to its neighbors, at roughly 300 acres) through which the Monocacy battle transpired. Rebel forces had crossed the Monocacy river at a ford adjacent to this property, and set up an artillery position near the house, from which they could see not only the Thomas house, but the Union positions at the railroad junction perhaps a mile or so away. Throughout the battle, the Worthington family took shelter in their basement, and their six year old son watched the battle through the gaps in a boarded-up window. He would later publish a book about his experience.

This louvered window is most likely the window through which young Glenn Worthington witnessed the battle, as it has the best views across the property where the Rebel units would have positioned themselves.

A detail shot of the front door to the Worthington house

A view off the front porch, including the lawn where the Rebel forces took up position.

a view looking down the length of the front porch. This is very much like the front porch that would have been on the Thomas house.

I did take a view of the whole Worthington house front, but something went wrong with the negative and I don’t feel like spending several hours in Photoshop cleaning it up and trying to fix it. I’ll save it for another day and go back and re-photograph it.

Architecture, Black and White, Cameras, Landscapes, Medium Format Cameras, Photography

Monocacy Battlefield – The Farms – Thomas Farm

May 22, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

The Monocacy Battlefield National Park consists primarily of three farm properties, the Worthington, Thomas and Best farm properties. I’ll cover the Worthington house in a second post. What makes this special is the extent of original preservation of those three homes which were on the battlefield at the time of the fight, and in relatively original condition, with the same outbuildings and dependencies that were on the properties. You go to visit Monocacy, and you’re seeing nearly exactly what the Union and Confederates saw 150 years ago, although with more trees.

The Thomas farm had a large manor house on the property owned by a wealthy gentleman farmer from Baltimore who had acquired the property as a country home to escape the heat and humidity of the big city.

Changes made to houses always leave signs. The face of this house used to have a porch that spanned the width of the house, on both the first and second floors, and the second story windows were once full-length doors like the first floor windows. These would have been very useful in the days before central air conditioning to help catch a breeze in the summer. Also, the third story dormer windows are most likely 20th century additions, as is the decorative arch over the front door. The house itself was occupied by private owners into the 1960s at least, and now is used by the Park Service for meetings. While you cannot tour inside the house, the interior is in stable if not terribly original condition, which you can see through the windows.

The grand allee out front leads down to the Georgetown Pike (today known as Route 355 or Rockville Pike). It may have been a bit less dense in 1864, but it would have looked generally similar at that time. What a wonderful way to approach your home, isn’t it?

The Thomas farm is still a working farm – they have a herd of cattle, and crops are planted and harvested out of the fields. The barn itself is the same structure that was present in 1864 at the battle. The round silo is NOT original, as round silos did not show up until the first decade of the 20th century.

Another view of the silo.

Black and White, Cameras, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Portraits, Washington DC

Ed Bearss

May 21, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

One of the great privileges of living in Washington DC is access to cultural institutions. As part of the Smithsonian Resident Associates program, I get to take part in lectures and tours on art, politics, and history. As you can tell from my blog postings about my antique image collecting, I’m a big Civil War history fan. The Smithsonian Resident Associates program offers a wonderful series of lecture tours on the Civil War, the best of which are led by the inimitable Ed Bearss. Ed is a national treasure – he’s a combat-wounded WW II veteran, Chief Historian Emeritus of the US Park Service, responsible for raising and restoring the Union ironclad ship on display at Vicksburg, Mississippi (which he’ll say was a study in how NOT to raise a sunken ironclad), brilliant raconteur, and at 91, still leading tours 200+ days a year. And even at 91, he’s the first one off the bus and leading the charge across the field, the entire day. If you’re a Civil War fan, you probably know who Ed is – he’s one of the historians on-camera in Ken Burns’ The Civil War, and was a regular on History Channel’s “Civil War Diaries”.

This is a somewhat rare image of him on tour, as he’s got his eyes open. Often when he’s narrating the events of a battle, he’ll close his eyes. It’s not because of a vision problem – when asked, he explained that “it helps me picture the story in my head”. I feel so privileged to get to walk battlefields with Ed and listen to him tell the stories of the events as only he can, with his unique cadence and stentorian voice.

Black and White, Cameras, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Architectural Abstracts in Black and White

May 20, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

If there’s one subject that never fails, it’s architecture. Twenty-four hours a day, it looks different. To the patient and observant eye, even the most seemingly bland box of a building can be transformed into a study of volume and texture with the careful observation and application of light.

Steel girders wrapping a facade for protection during renovation become a study of patterns and of contrasting textures – the rigid linearity and modernity of the I-beams highlights in strong relief the delicate brickwork and moldings behind it, and the strong shadows cast by the evening sun bring out geometric repetition.

The white crane above the girder wall catches the late afternoon sun, a thrusting line that divides the blank sky with dynamic movement that creates multiple negative spaces instead of unbalancing the image with empty information.

This image would be even better in color as there are patches of blue in the stairwell that repeat in a subtle pattern, drawing your eye into and up the stairs, but even in black-and-white, the repeated lines of the ascending structure draw your eye through the image.

I like the vertiginous vertical lines of the apartment tower as you look straight up it. Believe it or not this was shot hand-held, no tripod, no level, just very careful eyeballing and steady hands.

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a magnificent slab of white marble. Even the outside spaces are all grand and awe-inspiring, very much in keeping with the goal of presenting and preserving the performing arts. Here the roofline is a dramatic act in itself, like a set piece in an opera playing on the stage within. Wagner couldn’t have composed it better.

Another vertigo-inducing shot looking straight up at what I call the ships’ prow building. The facade is mostly flat, but this arced wedge bursts forth from the surface like a ship’s prow cutting the waves.

Ship's Prow Building, H Street — Ship’s Prow Building, H Street

Black and White, Cameras, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Portraits, Street

Street photos

May 19, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Three random people shots from out and about.

While this shot is at least as much about the SunTrust Bank building in the background, I love how the cyclist passing through the shot turned out – he’s obviously in motion, with a lock of hair blown up and back as he moves. The blurred face makes it somewhat anonymous, an everyman on his way somewhere quickly, turning his head just long enough to look back at the camera looking at him. Actually kind of a rarity these days.

I liked the graphic design of his t-shirt so I set up my camera before he started crossing the street and waited until he was in “the zone” to snap the picture. He’s not tack-sharp because we were both moving at the time, but I think the slight softness of him and the people around him give a sense of movement as well as depth.

When I saw this character I had to photograph him – giant headphones combined with the fat stogie? How could you NOT?

Black and White, Cameras, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Watergate Complex

May 19, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Given the looming Watergate break-in anniversary in June, I thought it apropos to post some images of the historic complex to let folks get an idea of what the place looks like. The name itself is so iconic, so much larger-than-life, I think it tends to overwhelm all thoughts of what the place actually is. This was not some garden-variety office tower. Even back-in-the-day, this was a very high-end residential, hotel and office complex, with views of the Potomac River, Georgetown and the Kennedy Center. It is across the street from the Saudi Embassy and a scant several blocks to the State Department headquarters. The place positively reeks of old money – it’s quiet as a tomb at all hours of the day and night.

There are people around, as you can see in the image above, but they never seem to be coming or going in groups, or with any volume. Spaces where you’d expect to see lots of people, like around the fountain, or in the courtyard, are usually very quiet.

I’m particularly pleased at how well the first fountain shot turned out because of the white-on-white challenge. I was able to photograph it so that the white stayed bright but retained detail. It’s kind of like the egg challenge often assigned in studio photography classes – put an egg on a white backdrop and photograph the egg so the shell texture retains detail but is still white.

A very different mood for the same subject, just by changing the camera position and therefore the lighting on the subject.

I love the balconies on the Watergate complex – they wrap around it in undulating curves and add texture to what would otherwise be an extremely plain building. Seen from a distance, as a colleague of mine put it, the Watergate does look a bit like a cruise ship the 1960s forgot.

Another view of the courtyard. Again, just one person sitting alone at a table. There’s a restaurant down there, believe it or not.

The Watergate is a great place to practice architectural abstraction because of its size, shape and textures. This view feels like a whole bunch of zippers fanning out in a display.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Random Weirdness, Weird Randomness

May 15, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I know these have nothing to do whatever with each other beyond the fact they were all captured here in Washington DC.

A rather rare sighting – a Dodge Viper hardtop coupe on the street. They’re big, they’re bad, they don’t make good city driving. So it was unusual to spot one parked at curbside. I didn’t even realize the driver was still sitting in the car when taking the picture until I came around to the side to take another look at it, and he waved at me.

The back door to the Wonderland Ballroom. I was walking past it on my way home from another neighborhood walkabout and saw the sunset glow illuminating the upper story. Now an extremely popular neighborhood hangout that draws a youthful/hipster crowd, it was in its previous incarnation the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the city. It catered to an African-American male clientele, but the owner shuttered the club when he realized his patrons were mostly the same dozen or so elderly men who would come in, drink one beer all night, and sit around chit-chatting with each other. You can’t run a business on less than a dozen beer sales a night, even if you do own the building.

This is a liquor store near my office. I loved the old-fashioned lettering in the window that preserved the feeling the store was trapped in a 1940s time warp. I think it was the original lettering as it has the same feel as the Art Deco facade of the building. This highlights the importance of photographing things you see when you see them as they may not be there tomorrow – when I passed the store yesterday on my way back from lunch, they had replaced the old painted lettering in the window with what looked like a piece of white foam board with blue printed lettering, which while easier to read was nowhere near as pretty.

Another scene near my office – columns for a pergola, casting shadows across the brick pavers on the plaza.

Black and White, Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Changing Mural – Black Boy & Garuda

May 14, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I had photographed this mural before. The other day I was doing a walkabout in my neighborhood and passed it again, to see that the artist had re-worked the mural in new colors with new designs.

here are the original photos I took, in color and black-and-white.

The artist came back and re-worked the piece, keeping only the head of Garuda and the head of the black boy as compositional elements, and completely re-working the color palette.

This is one thing a traditional photograph can’t do – it can’t evolve over time being reworked into a totally different yet fundamentally similar image. At the point you transform a photograph this much, it’s no longer a photograph. It’s figurative and not literal. Part of the intrinsic quality of a photograph that makes it valuable and meaningful as a photograph as opposed to a painting is its relative immutability and the appearance of a binary 1:1 relationship with reality. We know of course that photographs CAN lie, and that they have figurative, non-literal properties, but the descriptive quality of a photograph is so powerful that we WANT to view them as purely, literally descriptive and non-figurative – “Photos don’t lie” and the visual equivalent of “if it wasn’t true, they couldn’t print it”.

So the question to you is, is this the same mural, or is it a different mural entirely, now that it’s been reworked?

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Washington DC

Flags, Pan-American Health Organization

May 13, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Ok, so you’ve seen me posting images of the PAHO/WHO headquarters building for the last few weeks. Here are some shots of the flags outside. There are 29 member nations, from Argentina to the United States, but also including France, Great Britain, and Spain.

Here they are snapping in a brisk breeze, with the Washington Monument visible in the background:

A close-up of several flags, with the PAHO building as the backdrop:

Looking up into the flags with the mid-day sun backlighting them:

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography

Homage to Vermeer

May 12, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

While I certainly don’t think of this as being anywhere equal or even close to a Vermeer painting, to me it has a little bit of that feel – soft light describing people working at gentle activity.

Thinking of which, if you haven’t seen the movie, Tim’s Vermeer, you really ought to. It’s a documentary about this inventor named Tim who got this wild idea about how Vermeer painted his paintings. Tim was a visionary in his own right, having pioneered digital video editing back in the early 1990s and received an Emmy award for technical achievement. Having been relatively successful in his career, he was free to go Ahab on his obsession with the idea that Vermeer used some kind of optical device to assist him in painting. Tim, unlike captain Ahab, was able to run his idea to the ground and survive the encounter unscathed. While nobody can say conclusively that Tim was right and Vermeer DID use an optical device, his documentary film and the end result are an incredibly compelling argument in favor.

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