Tag Archives: Kodak Ektar 100

About Art, Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Street, Washington DC

Photographic Vision, or: Re-seeing the same things

August 2, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Many photographers complain about “I don’t have anything to photograph where I live… there’s nothing interesting, blah blah blah… I get tired of seeing the same things over and over again”. If you’re getting tired of seeing the same things over again, then you’re not looking right. Not only are you not paying attention to what’s around you, but you’re failing to observe change in your environment and to record that change, which is one of the greatest functions a photographer can fulfill.

Case in point: two images of the same house, taken about two years apart. The first image is the earlier one. I was foremost interested in the gas meter as an organic pattern against the rigid geometry of the red brick and the white window at the time I took this one. The window and the gas meter were each singular objects set off against the dark, weathered red of the wall. At a bright and cloudless sunset, the meter casts a long shadow, further repeating its organic pattern.

Returning two years later, the house has been re-painted, this time in BRIGHT red, along with the gas meter plumbing and the bollards protecting it. Instead of looking at singular items tightly framed, this time I pulled back a bit and gave the scene a narrative – there’s a person visible inside the bars of the one window, the other window closed. The lighting is flat from an overcast sky, pushing the drama of the scene into the deeply saturated colors and the enigma of the house – who is that person inside? how did they get in there when there is no visible door? Why is the one window bricked up but the other one open?

By re-visiting the same subjects, we not only learn to see them, but to see them differently instead of as static, unchanging objects. It also helps with story-telling and narrative development. Being able to tell a story with an image is one of the key differentiators between a factual record (“on this date, this building/car/person/plant/animal looked like this”) and an artistic output (“why does this look the way it does? Who is that? Why are they there? Why are they doing what they are doing?”). I think that we should all strive for that artistic output and not just factual recording (not that there is no value in recording of facts – we need facts recorded!).

This is one aspect of photography that I would hope to help inspire my students toward, as an educator. But it’s also the hardest thing to teach – photographic vision is something that has to happen, organically, natively, within the individual photographer. The best you can hope for is to provide exercises to stimulate them in the direction of building their vision, and to provide constructive critical feedback to focus that energy.

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

Waxing Patriotic at the National Mall

August 2, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

A few views of the area around the Washington Monument and the World War II Memorial.

WW II Memorial, Fountain, Lincoln Memorial, Sunset

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

Architectural Abstracts – Color

August 1, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

If you recall my earlier posts of the World Health Organization/Pan-American Health Organization headquarters building, I like architectural abstracts. These are some color abstracts I shot on two different excursions – one down to the National Mall at sunset, and the other on my routine walk home from work.

The African-American History museum is still a work in progress – I think it is slated to open in 2016, but it could be 2017 or even 2018 before it is ready for visitors, even if the structure is finished (which it appears will be true sometime this year, from the look of it). The building design is made to look like a traditional African crown with three tiers of bronze-colored mesh. The repeating pattern of the mesh screening lends itself extremely well to abstraction, and the missing panels (from the architectural renderings on the signs outside the museum, they are in fact missing/uninstalled, and not intentionally empty) add a geometric counterpoint.

It’s nice to see that DC is finally getting some real architectural gems, and is not just filled with Classical-revival, Victorian, and Modern Industrial glass boxes. On a certain level it’s too bad the Corcoran was not able to get their financial act together several years ago and build the Frank Gehry addition to the school they wanted, as that would have been quite a striking change to the streetscape.

Although not strictly architectural, I thought the geometric forms of the crane against the solid blue sky made for a nice abstract and fit well with the overall theme; after all, it is a construction crane.

Far be it for me to accuse George Washington University of being architecturally avant-garde; most of their buildings blend in to the DC streetscape with an ennui-inducing banality. But their 1970s and 1980s brown-brick boxes do have some worthwhile details that break the monotony and catch the eye. Take this stairwell, for instance – the walls are blue, which pops out against the brown brick facade and dark bronze-color window trimming. And easily overlooked, the blue stairwell provides some continuity by breaking the space between the facades, each of which has a different styling for their windows. Without the stairwell, the contrast would be in high relief, and we’d think something went wrong during construction and/or they ran out of money and had to switch styles when they turned the corner.

This glass tower thrusts into the sky like the prow of an ocean liner, cleaving the plane of the facade like an Arctic icebreaker clearing the channel into Archangelsk through a wall of sea ice (ok, I’m being a tad dramatic but I wanted SOMETHING to say about it).

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

14th Street Graffiti

July 30, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

I often go on walkabouts on my way home from work with the Rollei in tow. I’m always impressed by the array of graffiti that’s been put up, and how it is becoming an accepted art form, with entire murals done in “graffiti style”. Here are some finds, most of them in a single alley off 14th Street.

I’m particularly taken with this segment of the mural, because of the optical illusion. If you de-focus just a little bit so you lose the texture of the stucco, it really looks like someone has made a GIANT tag on top of an actual apartment building.

I forget exactly where the two-headed Llama is located, but it’s near the alley mural. Very different texture and style, obviously not the same artist (the Llamas are a stencil, whereas the mural is almost entirely freehand). But Llamas are always cute.

I don’t know if the stencil is an add-on to the mural by the artist, or if someone else came along and tagged it on top of the mural. But the statement is both enigmatic and profound: “What you risk reveals what you value”.

Another M.C. Escher-esque optical illusion in the mural- when you first look at it you see a redhead with long, flaming hair streaming behind. Then you realize it’s a head with a chicken next to it. But it’s hard to keep seeing the chicken, and easy to go back to seeing the redhead alone.

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

iPhone vs. Rollei – who does it better?

July 28, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Another pairing of iPhone vs. Rollei in the battle of “the best camera is the camera you have”:

I was lucky that I got back around with the Rollei to take this shot because within a week of my return with the Rollei, construction crews had started work on the building and Mother Mary of the Takeout Passthru, the not-so-baby Jesus and the One-Eyed Wonder beneath them had been removed and replaced by a fresh sheet of plywood. Gone was the shrine to the blessed deli, replaced by the altar of rapid gentrification.

Cameras, Color, Digital cameras, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Street, Washington DC

The camera you have…

July 27, 2015 dcphotoartist 1 Comment

A while back I posted an item about sometimes the best camera is the camera you have with you at the time you need to take a picture. Certainly, there may be other cameras that are better suited to the task at hand, but they don’t do you any good if you don’t have them with you. To whit, the first image. I came upon this bit of graffiti in an alley between two buildings. It’s almost as if it were an art installation in itself, the way it’s situated. When I first saw it, the camera I had on hand was my iPhone. It certainly did a good job of capturing the scene.

I promised to come back with my Rolleiflex to photograph it again, to see how different the two cameras’ visions were, and how they rendered the scene differently.

It’s not really a fair comparison, given that the sensor for the iPhone is the size of a Q-tip, if that, and the film in my Rolleiflex is 2 1/4 inches square, or about 300 times the size. Also, the lens has a different field of view- the iPhone is somewhere between a 28mm and 35mm lens’ field of view (moderately wide-angle), translated into 35mm equivalent, whereas the lens on my Rollei is a “normal” (50mm equivalent). The two cameras give very different renderings of the scene – the iPhone gives you much more of a sense of the space, whereas the Rollei makes the graffiti the star of the show.

Here is the locked gateway to the space where the graffiti is. Now you can get a sense of the drama of it – it’s hidden behind a locked gate, guarded like some treasure on display at more than an arm’s distance.

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.

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.

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

Street Portraits

May 12, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

Just some random captures of people out and about. I want to get better at street candids, so I’m practicing. These are a few good examples, at least I think they’re good, for me.

I saw this man crossing the street early in the morning, loaded down with his bags. I don’t think this shot would have worked in black-and-white – the hodgepodge of tweed jacket, American flag logo bag, Adidas bag, and the plastic shopping bag wouldn’t pop if they were tonally similar.

I’ve posted the boy on the bus sleeping before. This one DOES work better in black-and-white because the brightness of his hat and shirt contrast with his skin color and give him a very peaceful, almost angelic look.

This man is watching the overhead sign announcing the upcoming station. I caught him in an unguarded moment, doing what everyone does on the train. Hard to tell if he’s a tourist or a local.

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