HALF DOME

I recently took a trip to Yosemite with my good friend Carl. I had never been there and didn't realize how close it was to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Road trip!

It was hard for me to go to Yosemite and not think of Ansel Adams. I don't typically work in that style but I do enjoy his photographs and his books very much. Most everything he knew is in a book of some sort and his Zone System is the gold standard for black and white exposure, processing and printing. It's also hard to go to Yosemite and not notice Half Dome or walk away without a picture of it. Our campground was just below Half Dome's base.

Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California

The photograph was taken from Glacier Point and is fairly simple and straightforward; it does help immensely that the subject is so striking. What was fascinating was the number of people doing the same thing. I'm guessing that there were about 250 people standing beside me, behind me and in front of me. All kinds of cameras and lenses were being used, from view cameras to cell phone cameras. If you do a search on Flickr for "Yosemite" and/or "Half Dome" and then refine the search further by date (10/9/09 through 10/12/09) you can see I wasn't alone up there and that we all have very different results.

Ansel Adams' versions are much more dramatic and, after visiting Yosemite, it's easy to see why he printed his photographs the way he did. The grandeur of the park is amazing and the vistas are long and wide. You can see Half Dome from almost everywhere in the valley and when the setting sun hits the face it becomes even more beautiful.

The photograph was made with my Pentax K20D, digitally, and not with a view camera, as would have been appropriate in true Ansel Adams fashion. I didn't expose using Zone System calculations either, instead using my camera's auto-bracket function to get a good range of exposures once I had the basics down. While I haven't printed the image yet, I know what I want already.

If you want to hone your technique, pick up one of Ansel Adams' books. I have The Negative, The Print and The Camera in addition to Examples, the Making of 40 Photographs and his auto-biography. I've learned a lot from these books and continue to refer to them, as I did after I returned from Yosemite this week. Also, it's important to remember how much of an appreciation Adams had for nature; it shows in his photographs.

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GUADALUPE RIVER

This is an older photograph but it holds a certain amount of pride for me, it's the first photograph I had published in a book.

The book was titled "Texas On A Roll, Images of Texas by Texas Photographers". It was a book project sponsored by the Austin/San Antonio Chapter of the American Society of Magazine (Media) Photographers (ASMP) in conjunction with a national photography awareness initiative called Ten Thousand Eyes.

Dock, Guadalupe River, Hunt, Texas

I made the photograph early one morning while staying at Casa Bonita on the Guadalupe River, just west of Hunt. It was raining that morning and the river was fairly high, but the light was nice. The original photograph was made on Fujichrome Velvia slide film, ASA/ISO 50. It was slow, but like Kodachrome 25, had it's wonderful color qualities.

Most of my favorite images are in black and white. I have some favorite color images but they seem to come to me less frequently. The only thing I've noticed about my color photographs is that they don't convert well, if at all, to black and white. The composition doesn't hold together well and the photograph loses its sense of identity. Without the colors, my color photographs just wouldn't have much else to them. This one is a good example of that.

I had the original slide scanned with a Noritsu scanner and processed it in Lightroom. I had to spot a few specs but otherwise there isn't much in the way of processing. That's what was great about slide film, you either had the exposure or you didn't.

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PHOTOGRAPHING PEOPLE

Everett York was selling handmade barrels at the Windsor Fair in Maine. I watched him for a while and he didn't mind me photographing him one bit.

I had borrowed a Nikon F3 and a 24mm wide angle lens. I had never used such a wide lens before and enjoyed it immensely. At the fair, I use the retro-focus settings so I could work as if using an auto-focus camera. Much fun. In 1985, few cameras had auto-focus lenses. I used a fast film, Ilford HP-5, so I could use a fairly small aperture and still get a decent shutter speed.

Everett York, Cooper, Windsor, Maine

I enjoy photographing people. No two people are alike and the shutter catches every nuance differently. The act of making someone's portrait makes them timeless...their likeness is recorded forever if one wants it so. Every second changes a person's look, appearance and expression. The unpredictability of getting a portrait that you (or the subject) will be happy with can be unnerving, but also exciting.

I have always been a big fan of Arnold Newman and Henri Cartier-Bresson has a wonderful book of portraits title "Inner Silence". Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Rodney Smith are other favorites. I definitely prefer natural light even though I'm comfortable using strobes in a studio or on location. Artificial light always tries to mimic the effects of natural light and, even better, I like the unpredictability of using the sun as my light source.

I don't always like my subjects smiling, it simply distorts the face too much for me. I want to see what they look like. I also seem to always gravitate towards black and white as I find the color distracting. I also like people to know I am photographing them; it's courteous, and I seem to get better results.

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NORITSU NIRVANA

Scans have been hit or miss for me with 35mm film. The scans I've made of 120, 4x5 and 8x10 negatives and transparencies look wonderful. The only way I can describe the problem is that the 35mm scans don't look quite right, even though many scan very sharp. The grain can also come out rather odd.

I had been reading comparisons between the Nikon Cool Scan and flatbed scanners. I use an Epson 4990 for all my scans and for a flatbed, it works very well on everything from 120 film on up. After reading the comparison on 35mm film, I took some test slides to the local camera store, Precision Camera, and had them scanned with an $85,000 Noritsu. The results were amazing and I finally had the quality I had been looking for in my scans. The grain was sharp and pretty...film-like...and the scans were well-exposed, with a good tonal range.

Trina, Olney, Texas

I made Trina's portrait in the late eighties or early nineties. It was made using Kodachrome 25 (ASA/ISO 25), which is no longer manufactured. The film was beautiful, and for its time, very fine-grained. Kodachrome 64 was pretty close but didn't have the beauty of its slower sibling. K25 saturated colors but remained fairly neutral and was wonderful in the early evening, when this photograph was made.

I had the K25 slide scanned with the Noritsu and was impressed with the results. This option was cheaper than drum scanning at $45 a pop. At $1.43 I can easily have many of my archive selects scanned and spend my time editing them in Lightroom instead of struggling with inconsistent scan output on 35mm.

I've had my Texas Rangers work re-scanned and have a project from the Texas Cowboy Reunion that I can now work on. I'm a fan of digital technology and combining the two...hybrid...if you will, yields strong results. The original 35mm Kodachrome 25 slide of Trina was printed on Cibachrome paper, which I never had the capability or ability to do myself. I can now work on a print on my own time, producing a result that is more personal.

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