Images and More

A PERSONAL ENDEAVOR

2011-01-04T21:08:00.016-06:00

One of the best things about photography is that it is personal. You can do your own thing...copy others or be unique; or work from an abstract, surrealist or documentary point of view. What matters is to use your eye and your mind and let your images reflect your perception.

I have been photographing since high school. My father taught me the basics of cameras, film and exposure. I still have some of the equipment I learned with: a Sekonic light meter (that requires no batteries) and an Edixa Mat single lens reflex with a Schneider lens. While it wasn't clear or obvious to me when I started, I ultimately learned that good photographs have little to do with equipment. In the environment of the craftsman, I went beyond my teacher. I learned, I explored, I grew.

Stairway, New York, New York

I could have made the photograph above with a range of equipment. A view camera, a Holga, a point and shoot, the camera on my phone. I used my digital Pentax K20D to photograph, looking upward, the stairway in the Apple store in New York City on 5th Avenue and 58th Street. It was a quick grab and I knew I had something interesting. My daughter, Sophie was wondering what I was doing.

It's all about the way we look at things. It really doesn't matter whether you see beauty or drama. Photography is a personal endeavor and is more about your vision than the materials used making the image. For me, there is the added benefit of holding a tangible product in my hands, a print. While I embrace digital wholeheartedly, I feel better when I generate a print. It will last.

Making images is a never-ending pursut. If you get bored or tired with one approach, work around it and come up with something that works better for you. No limitations. Most of all, relish in the simplicity of creation...no politics, no lies. Just a photographer, her tools and a subject.

www.antoniogerman.com

GREAT SALT LAKE

2010-12-05T20:32:00.014-06:00

I'm not much of a sunset photographer, as much as I enjoy watching the sun rise and set. What I really like about early morning and late afternoon is the color that's created as the low sun works it's way through the atmosphere. Interestingly, my typical photographic approach during these times is to have my back to the setting sun so I can photograph the soft, warm light that wraps itself around everything in front of me.

I was in Salt Lake City a few weeks back, working for three days. I had been to Salt Lake City many times but had never been out to see the Great Salt Lake. I had an idea of what the lake looked like, having seen it from above on inbound or outbound flights. I like window seats.

Sunset, Great Salt Lake, Lake Point Junction, Utah

During my visit, I asked a colleague, Nate Young, (http://cruxphoto.wordpress.com) for some location tips and he came up with four options...go to the hillsides around the lake, hike Ensign Peek, drive out to Antelope Island, or go west to the Interstate 80 frontage road. I realized I didn't have enough time for the mountain, hillsides or Antelope Island so I drove a few miles out to the frontage road. I knew I wanted some shoreline in the photograph and getting to it would be easiest from the road.

Most of my images are in black and white. The original is always taken in color and I then convert to B&W using my editing software, Lightroom. This photograph actually converts very well to black and white but I wanted to show the color, emphasizing the reflection on the water. I love the low light of the setting or rising sun in Texas, or anywhere else where it's flat. The horizon, without mountains, lets the color hang for a long time and, with a tripod, you can photograph well after the sun has set. The only error I made is waiting a little too long to run out to the lake. The sun sets much earlier as it ducks behind mountains instead of the flat terrain common in many parts of the west, including Texas.

It had snowed in Salt Lake City earlier in the week and as soon as the sun set it became cold quickly. Surprisingly, three of the local ski areas, Alta, Solitude and Snowbird had already opened. I drove back to the city and went for some good Mexican food at the Red Iguana. One of the great perks of traveling is that you expand your list of restaurants to choose from and locales to photograph. I always carry my camera in a backpack with my laptop and while my shoulder gets some stress I frequently discover fabulous places.

It's always about the light. Photograph the air as Ted Orland instructed me some years ago.

www.antoniogerman.com

LLANO ESTACADO PUMP JACK

2010-05-01T10:08:00.019-05:00

Pump jacks, or grasshoppers, are a common site in Texas. I live in Austin, where they are not as abundant but as you head west their presence increases. This photograph was made near Post, Texas in Garza County, just southeast of Lubbock on U.S. Highway 84. In this part of Texas and further south towards the Edwards plateau lies the Permian Basin, where most of our West Texas Intermediate crude comes from. If the oil doesn't have enough pressure to make it up by itself it needs a pump to do the job.

If you've ever spent any time in Lubbock you know how to appreciate flat and windy. Lubbock sits at an elevation of 3,256 feet but you wouldn't realize it just by looking around. Roughly 2,000 feet lower than Denver, this part of Texas, or more accurately, the Great Plains, is simply flat as a pancake.

Pump Jack, Highway 84, Post, Texas

As you drive northwest from Abilene to Lubbock, you don't realize it, but you're going uphill, slowly, about 10 feet per mile. Abilene sits at an elevation of 1,719 feet and Lubbock is at 3,256 feet. The only place you notice a marked change in geography is at Post, Texas a town located on the edge of the eastern escarpment of the Llano Estacado.

The Llano Estacado, or "staked plain", translated from Spanish, is a large geological formation of over 32,000 square miles, which makes it larger than New England. Most of it lies in Texas with 4 counties in New Mexico. The Llano Estacado is the largest "mesa" or tableland in North America and continues north up to Tucumcari, New Mexico at 4,000 feet and Clovis, New Mexico at 4,200 feet.

Spanish explorers found it so flat and nondescript that they used stakes as navigation tools. I consider myself fortunate to have the convenience of a vehicle AND a map. I can only imagine crossing this area on horseback with few visible landmarks, and worse, no water. In spite of all this, I do enjoy the area's history and light. The setting sun lasts for hours and with a tripod you can photograph long past sunset.

Just as ironic as the elevation and the flatness, these pump jacks are giving way to a new source of energy, windmills. Because it is so windy, energy suppliers have been placing windmill farms in these western areas of the state.

If the Llano Estacado interests you, read John Miller Morris' "El Llano Estacado, Exploration and Imagination on the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico, 1536-1860." A friend, John has written this award-winning book about "Lo Llano" and is an Associate Professor of Social Geography and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

www.antoniogerman.com

HALF DOME

2009-10-16T16:47:00.004-05:00

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.

www.antoniogerman.com

GUADALUPE RIVER

2009-10-04T17:09:00.007-05:00

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.

www.antoniogerman.com

PHOTOGRAPHING PEOPLE

2009-09-27T10:42:00.002-05:00

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.

www.antoniogerman.com

NORITSU NIRVANA

2009-08-22T16:54:00.009-05:00

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.

www.antoniogerman.com

THE POWER OF LIGHT

2009-08-19T12:19:00.014-05:00

This is another image that made me stop while driving. I'm still in work-print stage as I think the file can be tweaked further to improve the sky and foreground. The fence was that white and it's what caught my eye. It's a great example of what light can do that dodging and burning, flashing or contrast masking can't do as effectively.

I was driving west on Interstate 30, just east of Dallas, Texas approaching the town of Mount Pleasant. There were storms moving along to the north and south but I hadn't hit a lot of rain or weather on the thruway. The light from Texarkana into Rockwall was fabulous...a soft chalky yellow that made everything come alive, as it did the fence.

White Fence, Interstate 30, Mount Pleasant, Texas

The brightness of the white fence grabbed my attention immediately. It's almost as if a sliver of light was hitting only the fence, separating it dramatically from the green pasture surrounding it. I wasn't going to stop for the photograph; I had already made plenty of pictures that day and knew I'd be arriving in Austin late. I made a U-turn 4 miles down the road.

I took quite a few shots of the scene and bracketed heavily. I knew noise might be a problem and the slow shutter speed was going to compromise sharpness. I didn't have a tripod and I don't like parking on the shoulder of the interstate, it's dangerous.

The results were exactly what I expected. I actually like cloudy, overcast days. For those of us who have worked with studio lighting, strobes and floods, clouds are the ultimate softbox in the sky. During storms, especially in Texas, that lightbox takes on some very interesting colors and tones. The best thing about the light on days like this is that it seems to wrap itself around everything in sight, transforming mundane objects into something that they wouldn't be under normal circumstances.

As a result of the color of the light, the location of the storms and the way the remaining sunlight hit the scene, the fence became very bright white. You can't (easily) create that in the darkroom or on the computer, it's just the light. That's precisely why I made the U-turn.

Ted Orland once told his workshop participants to "photograph the air". That was good advice. Light can turn the simplest objects into something special; next time you see a sunset, don't photograph the sun hitting the horizon, turn around and photograph the light transforming your world.

SQUARED COLOR

2009-08-09T22:39:00.009-05:00

Black and white always seemed logical and intuitive to me. Additionally, I see my images in black and white even before they're made with the camera.

Since the development of digital technology and inkjet printing I can now print my color photographs. Prior to that I just took my negatives and slides to a lab. The hardest part for me was always the color balance...making sure whites, grays and blacks came out neutral. In black and white, that was never a problem.

I always color balance in Lightroom first, usually by simply clicking on a pure white piece of the image. After that it's a matter of adjusting saturation, local contrast, sharpness and tonal range. In color, what I always find difficult is determining the accuracy of the colors in the photograph while still being interpretive of the scene.

Green Door, Palamós, Girona, Spain

I made this photograph in Palamós, a beautiful village in the Province of Girona north of Barcelona on the Costa Brava. My cousin loaned us her flat for a week and while you can easily walk the town from end-to-end in a short amount of time, the photo opportunities could get limiting. Early morning and late evening made the narrow streets very dark or very bright with a lot of contrast. Digital cameras don't like bright areas (Zones VII and VIII) giving way to deep shadow (Zones III and II).

The door and wall were in shade, with the top of the image just starting to get some morning light. I prefer to look for a little more in black and white but with color what grabs my attention are the graphic qualities of the image and how the shades and tints fill the frame. In this photograph, the quality and angle of the light helped...and while I wouldn't have picked that green or that red for my house...someone did.

It's great to go out and look. Sometimes you don't think you're going to catch any fish but, more often than not, you do. Even if you have an empty day, at least you hone your eye a little and work on your vision.

www.antoniogerman.com

ARCHER CITY & ANARENE

2009-07-30T22:29:00.015-05:00

I've always been intrigued by Archer City, Texas. It's a small town (1,848 population) in north central Texas about one hour south of the Oklahoma border. Oil country. Cattle country.

My wife's family is from Olney, just 19 miles southwest of Archer City. We also lived in Wichita Falls, 25 miles north. Archer City carries quite a bit of fame for such a small, one traffic-light town. The novels (and movies) "The Last Picture Show" and "Texasville" take place and were filmed in town. Larry McMurtry, the author, is from Archer City and owns a collectible book store that draws people from everywhere. When Bogdanovich and McMurtry were driving around Texas looking for a town to set their film in they drove through Archer City, Bogdanovich saw the flashing red light in the intersection and said "this is it". True story.

In the movie, the town is called Anarene, which no longer exists, but was located halfway between Archer City and Olney. The only thing identifying its location is a Texas historical marker by the side of the road on Highway 79. I've always liked the name Anarene. After checking my links in Wikipedia, it appears the town was name after Anna Laurene Graham, a name combo that I have found to be common in Texas.

Wildcat Cafe, Highway 79 and 25, Archer City, Texas

I was driving south after making some photographs just north of Archer City, again on Texas Highway 79. The sun had already set but the sky still had a deep blue color to it. I stopped my truck next to the Wildcat Cafe and bracketed a lot to ensure a good exposure and make sure that I had an image that didn't have a lot of noise. It was dim so I used the mirrors on my truck as a tripod and turned on the anti-shake switch on my Pentax. I wanted to see if it worked as advertised. It did.

I'm very pleased with the detail as the range of tones is long. The sign was bright white and I didn't want everything else dropping to black without detail. The darker areas held up well and have a nice softness to them that works well. Sometimes the shadows just get muddy but these turned out great, with a little "creaminess" that is helped by the sepia toning.

There's nothing left of Anarene but I'm confident that I'll find something along the road there to photograph. My wife's great aunt, Johnnie Belle, taught school in Anarene in the 1920's when oil brought 200 people in. The school house is also gone and the only reminder of the town is the historical marker and the occasional "re-branding" of the water tower in Archer City during filming, when the tank reads "Anarene".

www.antoniogerman.com

LARGE FILM, LARGE CACA

2009-07-19T12:54:00.009-05:00

That's actually a quote. During a photo workshop with Anne Kurutz I started to notice a lot of dust on my negatives after switching from a 35mm Olympus OM-1 to a Yashica Mat 124G twin lens reflex that uses 120 roll film. The more negative surface area you have, the stronger the likelihood that you're going to end up with dust (caca) on your images. This photograph was made on 4x5 sheet film. I was asking for trouble.

The trouble was self-imposed. I purchased an old Speed Graphic (Graflex) press camera without the range finder for $75.00 and had a wonderful 150mm Rodenstock lens put on it. The camera offered just enough movements to keep me happy. I had already used an Omega View rail camera which had plenty of movement but was too big and cumbersome. Unfortunately, I didn't clean my $75 wonder very thoroughly after purchasing it.

Rock of Ages Quarry, Graniteville, Vermont

When I tilted the camera up to make this photograph, the dust I had neglected to clean on the inside of the camera bellows fell onto the sheet film. Dust spots on B&W film usually look white; however, because these specs had landed on top of the film prior to exposure, the dust spots came out black, which you can't spot and have to etch with an exacto knife from the print. I don't think so.

Enter digital photography. I was never able to print this negative using traditional wet darkroom techniques because of all the black AND white spots. I scanned the negative and edited in Lightroom. It's time consuming, but I can remove all the spots with the spotting tool as the software doesn't care what color they are. It prints beautifully and is one of my favorite landscapes.

I grew up in Barre, Vermont, which is next to Graniteville. Barre is called the "Granite Center of the World" because the granite quarried there is the most common rock used in tombstones. The derricks and cables in the photograph are used to lift the cut granite from the bottom of the quarry. The area had immigrants from all over, who came to look for work quarrying stone or carving designs into finished slabs. It's in the middle of the Green Mountains and only a short drive from the Canadian border. A great place to grow up.

www.antoniogerman.com

RAFAEL NUNEZ CONTRERAS

2009-06-15T17:27:00.011-05:00

I ran into Rafael on my way back to Saltillo from Mazapíl, México. I had spent the day at the Peñasquito gold mine, about 25 kilometers west of the town of Mazapíl in the high desert of Zacatecas state in north-central México.

The road that goes from Salaverna to Concepción del Oro is fascinating, to say the least. Everyone had recommended that I not take the "old" road. Until the mining project began, it was the only way to head west from Concha del Oro to Mazapíl, Salaverna or Cedros. Two new roads had been cut through the mountains to accommodate the heavy equipment and increased traffic that would be coming and going from the mine. The new roads were OK, but nowhere as interesting as the original road. It was narrow, literally hand-made, full of curves and constructed of large river rocks embedded in dirt. Everyone told me to take a four wheeler...I employed my Ford Fiesta rental instead. Needless to say, it was a fascinating drive down a seldom-used road. I didn't pass or run into any other vehicles but I was stopped by Rafael's herd of goats just before the abandoned village of Aranzazú.

Rafael Núñez Contreras, Aranzazú, Zacatecas, México

I parked the rental in the middle of the road and yelled up the mountain to say hello. He was very friendly and never really stopped talking after that. I quickly asked if I could photograph him and we continued our conversation. I've always been fascinated by shepherds and he didn't disappoint. They always have a calm and nobility about them that is reassuring.

I made the photograph with my Sony R1, which is a wonderful camera. It has an LCD viewer on the top of the camera that allows it to be used like a twin lens reflex. I've used a Rolleiflex and a Yashica Mat 124G and love them, still do. No one expects you to look down into a camera and that's precisely what makes them so appealing to photograph people with. I also love the square format, their shutters make a faint click, they use 120/220 roll film and the lenses are fast and tack-sharp.

I still have the Sony but replaced it as my regular camera with a Pentax K20D SLR. The Sony has a 10.3 megapixel CMOS sensor that creates a very nice RAW file. The primary reason for replacing it was the shutter lag. The Pentax shutter fires when the release is pressed, the Sony had a frustrating lag that got absolutely silly when photographing people, like Rafael. It seemed like I wanted to take the picture after the one I had already committed the camera to, thereby missing a shot. Live and learn.

Rafael made my day. I had had a long day in the hot dry weather and was physically tired. I perked up after meeting Rafael and enjoyed the 2-1/2 hour drive back to Saltillo. The rental car did feel a little different once I hit smooth pavement again. Hey, it's a rental!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/antoniogerman/2485045350/

TONING

2009-05-28T14:30:00.015-05:00

Toning has the ability to completely change a photograph.

I used to selenium tone all my gelatin-silver black and white prints. I could never really tell the difference, it's just what a lot of photographers did. I always struggled with toning, and found it difficult to tell what color the print picked up unless it was held against a neutral image or another toned image. In a wet darkroom, toning also added another step, another tray and another chemical. I finally ended up using the different photo papers that were available to get the right tone in my black and white prints.

Glenn Krueger, Texas Ranger, San Antonio, Texas

If I wanted a neutral black and white paper, I bought Agfa Brovira, Oriental Seagull or Kodak Elite. For warm-toned printing, Agfa Portriga Rapid was the hands-down winner. Having a variety of papers on hand got expensive, so many photographers stuck with one paper for all their work. I remember paying about $48 for a 100 sheet box of 8x10 paper. I preferred contrast graded papers like Seagull and Brovira so printing effectively and efficiently meant you had to have various grades on hand in different sizes.

Digital technology has changed all that, in good ways and bad. Toning an image, or making other modifications, is now a matter of clicking a button or making a menu selection. Computer monitors can be more forgiving than prints so the result has generated images that, in my opinion, are grossly over-processed. Photographers aren't thinking of what they want from an image or project and simply try to create something that looks cool with little thought to the end result. My pet peeve is the portraits and head shots that are Photoshopped to make the skin look like porcelain. No one has skin that perfect! As with paper, just think about what you're doing, what you want for your end result and then experiment.

In the picture of Ranger Krueger I used a light warm sepia tone preset that introduces just enough warmth to color the B&W photograph and soften the overall look, or tone, of the print. I'm much happier with the warm toned prints than with the selenium toned gelatin silver prints I have of the same subjects. The warm tone just works better with the individual portraits and fits better with the overall theme of the project. I also like the color it gives the white highlights, they just look creamy rather than snow white.

I do have to give thanks and credit for the presets, which I accessed through a Flickr group called Presetting Lightroom assembled by Markus Griebling. The presets I downloaded were developed by Glenn E. Mitchell II, Ph.D. and I downloaded them through the Flickr link to Dr. Mitchell's profile or you can also go directly to his blog and website called The Light's Right.

FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, ELLSWORTH, MAINE

2009-05-23T09:03:00.007-05:00

I made this photograph of the First Congregational Church in Ellsworth, Maine while on a trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. My good friend Carl and I stopped when we saw the steeple. We had driven quite a distance and he hadn't yet seen the "right" white steeple of a New England church. He lives in California, I live in Texas. No white steeples.

First Congregational Church, Ellsworth, Maine

Churches in New England look very different from churches in the West or South. In Texas, they frequently resemble malls. I'm partial to New England churches, I grew up in Vermont, after all, and I prefer their architecture, design elements and presence. Most are located on the town square and echo the no frills, no nonsense character of the area's founders and inhabitants. We stopped at around noon, it was a clear day and the sun was bright, turning the white church into an opportunity for interesting black and white imagery.

The color file is OK but lacks interest. I use Adobe Lightroom and photographs like this make me appreciate the software even more. I made sure I had a good white exposure and didn't worry too much about where my blacks would fall. The sky was very blue and in Lightroom, I first converted the image to grayscale and then selectively adjusted the tone of the sky with the blue slider, taking it down from a middle gray value. I wanted the sky almost black and adjusting the blue slider allowed me to do that without affecting the value of the white clouds in the image. Burning the sky area or using the graduated filter tool would have brought down the value of the sky but would have also muddied the white clouds, which I didn't want.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/antoniogerman/

ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

2009-05-08T08:30:00.016-05:00

I drive a lot with my work selling and setting up mobile concrete batching and mixing equipment for Cemco www.cemcoinc.com. I prefer driving as I have my own vehicle, tools and space but, more importantly, I get to see new parts of the country and find interesting subject matter for photographs.

Oil Storage Tanks, Archer City, Texas

I was driving from Olney, Texas to Erie, Pennsylvania (a 26 hour drive) and noticed these oil storage tanks just South of Archer City on Highway 79. I drive by them a lot but the sun was low and they just stood out. I stopped my truck and made some photographs.

Archer City is home to the writer Larry McMurtry, author of "Terms of Endearment", "Lonesome Dove" and "Brokeback Mountain". In the smallest of Texas towns he has established a store well-known amongst collectors of fine and rare books called "Booked Up". Archer City has one stop light at the intersection of Highways 79 and 25. The area is surrounded by large ranches and oil storage tanks are a common sight in this part of Texas and more so further west as you enter the Permian Basin.

The sun was very low and I set my camera for ISO 800, which I almost never use because of the grain/noise. However, I knew I would end up converting the color file to black and white and wanted to see if I could get a similar "grainy" look with the rather high ISO I was using.

I liked the results but it's the light hitting the metal that works. These tanks can get quite ugly but I just wasn't seeing them that way when they grabbed my attention that day.

It appears, after reviewing my archives, that I have a large number of roadside images of man-made objects that fit well together. I stop to photograph often and because I'm always driving somewhere I don't like to hike far from my truck or sit and wait for the light to get just right. I just stop when the light is right.

THE DISTRACTION OF COLOR

2008-06-16T08:45:00.010-05:00

I have always leaned towards black and white photography. I'm not sure why, but when an image clicks with me, it's always in black and white.

Black and white was always cheaper than color and when I first became involved with photography I could barely afford the camera and lens, let alone endless processing and film costs. In the 80' s, a roll of color slide film was about $4.50 and processing from $3.50 to $5.00. I didn't churn a lot of color slide film through my camera and always watched film usage. Black and white gave me more financial latitude.

I do have color images that I enjoy but it's harder for me to put together cohesive projects in color. I get distracted. Black and white has an ability to focus attention and especially with portraits, really direct emphasis upon the subject. Black and white imagery is an abstraction but we're so used to looking at them that we don't think of it that way.

Gordon, Essex, California

I photographed Gordon in Essex, California. He owns a tire shop with his father and we were driving from the Los Angeles area out to Lake Havasu, Arizona. The 110 degree temperature, age of the tires on the trailer and weight of the boat were more than the tires could handle. We had already changed 2 tires, ran out of spares and Gordon's tire shop was a welcome sight.

I printed the original version in color and sent him a print. Some months later I re-printed the photograph and converted it to black and white using the channel mixer settings in Paintshop Pro. The result didn't surprise me but it did make me take a step back to re-evaluate. The black and white print has a simpler overall look to it and the subject, Gordon, simply looked better. The color photograph wasn't about the color anyway and I liked the way the black and white version made the deep black of the background tires look.

The color portrait is on Flickr and both images are fairly straight as are most of my photographs. I almost always use curves to adjust contrast, sharpen appropriately and start making test prints. I know one thing is true, color balancing is easy with digital technology, but it has never really been an issue in black and white work.

TERRELL COUNTY, TEXAS

2008-05-11T21:41:00.008-05:00

I recently watched "No Country For Old Men". The film takes place in Terrell County, Texas, a very sparsely populated county in West Texas that borders Mexico.

I drove through Terrell County in January while returning to Austin from a few days' worth of work in Fort Stockton. I hadn't watched the movie yet and I drove most of the north-south length of the county just enjoying the scenery, disregarding the speed limit and interacting with the U.S. Border Patrol.

Take a look at a map and you'll see few towns. As a result, there aren't a lot of people in Terrell County, either. The 2006 census reports a population of 983 people in 2,358 square miles. There are no incorporated communities in Terrell County and the two towns I drove through (the only 2 towns, by the way) are Sanderson and Dryden. As a point of reference, Rhode Island covers 1,214 square miles, or about half the area of Terrell County.

Fort Stockton, Texas, 2008

At first glance counties like these appear to be dry, barren wastelands and perfect locations for the violent characters depicted in "No Country For Old Men". It's all in your perspective and I find these remote West Texas locations fascinating. It's a rough landscape but there is a lot of beauty in it. When the light gets low it isn't blocked by mountains or dense trees, making everything in these broad, arid landscapes turn infinite shades of red and orange, as the setting sun hangs on the horizon for what seems like hours.

The picture here is a result of just that effect. I was finishing some work on a concrete plant just off Interstate 20 late in the afternoon. A trucker had just disconnected his cattle trailer from his truck. We see cattle trailers a lot in Texas and they aren't much to look at. This is the first time I've ever seen one transformed. As the sun set, the shiny metal surface of the trailer turned into a color that resembled copper or bronze. I dropped what I was doing to run over and make a few pictures before the light was gone. The next morning I had a few curious concrete truck drivers wondering what the hell I was doing with the trailer.

I've never considered myself a landscape photographer but it's apparent that photographing the land in counties like Terrell tells as much about the people that live there as it does about the land in the image. Making a living in areas like these is not for everyone. Imagine settling there 150 years ago.

LAKE HAVASU FILL FLASH

2008-04-04T10:36:00.014-05:00

I go out to Lake Havasu, Arizona once a year with two friends. Lake Havasu is on the Colorado River between California and Arizona, roughly 100 miles South of Las Vegas, Nevada. Even at the beginning of June it's blistering hot and not unusual to reach 110+ degrees. The best thing about the trip is that there's not much to do except run around on the boat, jump in and out of the water to cool off and drink beer. It's relaxing.

Large hoards of people go to the sandbar, park their boats and walk around in the waist-deep water. It's a big party with lots of people and everyone seems to have a camera, me included. I've built up an interesting collection of photographs after 4 years of traveling out there and have assembled them in a collection. You can see a bigger group on my Flickr account or my website.

Lake Havasu, Arizona, 2003

It's not typical of the photography I do but the results are interesting, nevertheless. The sun is always bright because there aren't any clouds in the sky. The best results come from using a point-and-shoot camera, my Canon G2, with fill flash. Even though the camera is only 4 mega-pixels the image quality is solid. I can't enlarge them much but they look fine at about 9.5 by 13. They're a little gritty but that seems OK given the subject matter.

The point-and-shoot approach is critical as everyone moves around fast. The crowds also get thick and a lot of images are made without even looking through the viewfinder, like the one above. It's not my typical approach but making images like that keeps you loose. I've spent too much time and lost a lot of pictures setting up a 4x5 on a tripod. Putting an auto-focus camera on automatic and holding it out at arms length and pressing the shutter takes a leap of faith for those of us who don't typically do that. If you're used to carefully framing, composing and studying each and every picture this approach is refreshing...and fun.

Printing is fairly straight forward but the biggest problem I had was balancing the color at first. I use the color balance settings in Paintshop Pro to select a neutral color like white and then let the software adjust automatically. This usually works great. The problem with this group of pictures is that everyone has a sunburn so the pictures look red. I always end up removing a little extra red just to make them look fairly neutral.

I've noticed something interesting about this group of photographs. I have most of my digital images on Flickr and can see how many people view my photographs. I get regular comments and most of my photographs have 40, 60, and 100 views on them. After I uploaded the Havasu series the view counts went off the charts. I have two photographs with 1000+ views on them. Why? Most of the Havasu pictures have women in bathing suits in them and the two with the stratospheric view counts have women wearing even smaller bathing suits in them. Go figure.

TEXAS RANGERS

2008-03-17T14:28:00.015-05:00

I photographed some retired Texas Rangers back in 1990. It's been almost 20 years since I made the photographs and I really hadn't done much with the group of images except print one or two negatives. The picture below was selected for an exhibit in 1991 and I've recently collected all the negatives and organized them and am having a set of 18 or 20 prints made. I'm trying to also scan the negatives but it's proving a little tougher than I thought to scan 35mm negatives. I haven't had any trouble with larger negatives.

Texas Rangers are now part of the Texas Department of Public Safety and have a lot of history and myth associated with them. After the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) they are one of the oldest law-enforcement groups in North America.

Texas Ranger, San Antonio, Texas

There are plenty of photographs of Texas Rangers and I may have beaten some of the recent rush by photographing them in 1990. Most of the pictures I have seen show them with firearms and play heavily off of the mystique that surrounds them. I was able to spend some time with them and made an effort to just let the individuals and their faces speak for themselves. I was going for something simple as I assumed these guys wouldn't have a lot of patience.

I was impressed by all of the gentlemen I photographed and was even a little taken aback by what I found. I expected to find just what I had read and seen on TV and instead discovered a serious, dedicated group of individuals whose honesty, dependability and intelligence was obvious. The expectation of finding rough, gun-slinging "one riot, one Ranger" types was quickly dispelled. They all welcomed me and were very aware of their place in history. Every single one of them had an odd sense of humor about events that would make most of us wither.

I knew I wanted to make simple black and white portraits. I banged around a little from a thematic viewpoint and found that the 35mm format with normal to wide lenses and natural light suited the subject best. I had seen some photographs of Rangers in Texas Monthly and tried an approach similar to that of Dan Winters at first but it didn't seem to suit the subject or my desires adequately. It did work well for him; his portrait of Joaquin Jackson is well done and widely recognized.

I hadn't printed the negatives since I took the original photographs but have recently had Iris Davis (Davis Black and White) print a selection of images. Iris is a great printer and because I don't have a wet darkroom anymore I rely on her skills and equipment.

You can see a few more of the prints that I had made on my Flickr account. They are low resolution scans of prints so they don't look great but they work.

BRIGHT, MID-DAY SUN

2008-02-17T17:51:00.006-06:00

Photographers live for the sweet light. The early morning or late afternoon light that is so flattering to even the worst subjects. A lot of us even like the light left after the sun goes down. It makes for very long exposures but has a look and feeling that can't be described. At just the right time, everything seems to glow.

If we photograph in the middle of the day it's usually out of necessity. Fill flash helps with people and open shade softens the blow. Most photographers don't go looking for it. I live in Texas and photograph a lot in the Southwest and we get used to hot, blazing sunlight. It's almost a shame not to photograph because it is part of our landscape and can be made to work in our favor.

Phone Booth, Essex, California, 2007

I made the photograph above just off Route 66 in the California desert. There aren't a lot of people living in Essex, but it does have a tire shop that can repair trailer tires that pop in the heat. It's one of the few instance where I take a picture in bright, harsh sunlight, but it also made me think a little of the conditions and the result.

If you live in Texas, California, Nevada or any of the other Southern states you learn to love and hate hot summer temperatures and bright mid-day sunlight. Photographic materials such as film and digital sensors do not respond well to harsh, contrasty light. That doesn't mean we should stop making images. While this photograph isn't a good example, bright, directional sunlight can turn objects, even large tracts of land, into shapes that can make for very interesting photographs. Don't try and expose for the highlights and shadows and expect detail everywhere; our materials aren't made to handle that range.

Look at the shapes the sunlight creates or the shadows and contrast that only happen with direct light. In my photograph, the hard light made the background go to almost full black, making a nice frame for my phone booth. A frame for a frame. The little sliver of sky on the left reminds me of the time of day and conditions.

Study what you're photographing and learn to see in your head how the subject matter and light will respond with your photographic tools. Reflections become interesting and you can always be certain you'll have fast shutter speeds for nice, sharp images. Turning the subject matter into graphic elements is a good exercise and you can start to see how different things look when you turn highlights and shadows into pure black or pure white (if photographing in black and white). If you're photographing in color, sunlight can make colors pop or turn them into surreal elements in your photograph. Whichever way you go it's always fun to experiment and see what happens. Nowadays, it's not even a waste of film!

I have some images on Photoshelter, a web-based stock agency.

DIGITAL WET DARKROOM

2008-01-24T13:24:00.004-06:00

Confusing title?

Most of what I photograph and print nowadays is digital. I have so many silver negatives that I like to slowly go through my archives and scan negatives that I want to print digitally. At first, I had a lot of trouble scanning anything. I persisted and seem to have found a good technique for black and white and color negatives. It's a work in progress as I haven't been able to get good results from 35mm color slides, even Kodachrome 25 positives.

The black and white negatives have resulted in more successes. The image below is a good example. I photographed Joe while I was working as a teaching assistant at the Maine Photographic Workshops in 1985. Can you guess what his profession was? The photograph was made with a 4x5 Graflex camera and a 150mm Rodenstock lens using Tri-X sheet film. It's a good negative, maybe a little flat but easily printed.

Joe, Rockport, Maine, 1985

I have always been pleased with the original print that I had made in the late 1980's. I no longer have a wet darkroom and so I scanned the negative. The scan, and the resulting print surprised me. While I still like the original, the scan produced a file that has more options, or potential. The tonal relationships in the image are more subtle and the scan really brought out some highlight and shadow detail that I was overlooking. Some of what is going on here is going back after many years and re-printing a negative, however, the scan is giving me a better base to work with, more than 20 years after the photograph was made.

I learned the hard way that it's important not to over-scan negatives. My Epson R2400 printer has an optimum print resolution of 240 to 360 dpi. Anything above or below that and the quality won't be there or you're wasting space. I had been trying to scan negatives at 2400 or 4800 dpi and obtained lousy results thinking that the more dpi I had in the scan, the better the print. The opposite is true. The pixel count has to be there, but printer dpi is different.

The information is obviously there on the original negative but the Epson 4990 scan has a soft quality to it that gives me a broader range of possibilities. I edited the image in Paintshop Pro and did very little. I used the channel mixer to convert the image to grayscale and then used curves to play with the contrast some. I printed the image on Velvet Fine Art paper using the Advanced Black and White settings in my printer driver. The final print reproduces the soft quality of the open light under the porch and resembles watercolor paper in its appearance and weight. It has a little texture and doesn't have the hard gloss of a gelatin silver print.

There's a lot of discussion about the death of photography and images that are radically altered or manufactured entirely in Photoshop. I don't have a problem with that as it's just a way of creating images. What I am enjoying is taking a traditional photographic image and reproducing it with digital technology. I think the problem is digital imaging is hitting its stride and we don't know what to do with it yet. I'm just happy that I can still print old negatives, even some that I couldn't using traditional methods.

As always, it's the photographer using the tools at her disposal. The most important tool is the eye.

Check out my website: www.antoniogerman.com

Southwestern America

2008-01-09T13:07:00.004-06:00

I just sent a book off to be published (keep reading). I used Blurb, a print-on-demand service, to design and print the book. It was idiot-proof and exciting. I don't know if it was the thrill of getting my own book printed but they sure make it easy. You can look at part of the book here in pdf format.

I've been traveling throughout the Southwest in the last few months, including Mexico, and have made many photographs. I compiled the book using images from Texas, México, New Mexico and California. At one time, they all were part of Mexico (Nueva España) or even further back, Spain. That's the common theme.

I ordered one book, using a 7" x 7" square hard-cover format. I'm pretty comfortable with the layout, I just don't know how the pictures will reproduce. My biggest concerns are the resolution, which shouldn't be a problem at that size, and the color. My monitor, printer, papers and camera are calibrated to each other and I don't know how they'll play out with Blurb. I'll see in a week when my 46 page book shows up.

Mazapil, Zacatecas, Mexico, 2007

Processing the photograph doesn't take a lot of work. I processed the image in Paintshop Pro at 16 bits. It was made with a Sony DSC R1, 10 megapixels, at about 8:50 a.m. on November 20. The RAW file is 20 megabytes and exposure was 1/250 at f 6.3. The morning sun was still fairly low and directional.

I use un-sharp mask to sharpen all my images and color corrected by selecting the pure, bright white on the door jamb. I also used curves slightly to bring the black values down a little and enhance the texture of the wall. The contrast is already there and didn't need much extra. I re-sized (no re-sampling) and printed on Epson Archival Matte on an Epson 2400 printer. It prints very well and the colors in the edited image are very representative of what I saw that morning. The pink wall literally stopped me in my tracks when I saw it while driving through town. The town of Mazapíl, like many Mexican villages, had doorways and walls of all colors, none of them neutral. It was beautiful. I hope the big rush on the gold mine doesn't spoil the town.

Mazapil is in the high desert in the state of Zacatecas and the name is of Nahua origin and means "venadito" or "small deer." The first contingent of Spanish explorers arrived in this area as early as 1554. The first permanent settlement was established in 1562. The area attracted many miners and soldiers, thanks in large part to the great wealth of its silver deposits. Today Mazapil is still an important mining center, producing silver, gold, lead, zinc and mercury.

I was working at the Peñasquito gold mine, located about 15 kilometers west of Mazapíl. I commuted 2-1/2 hours each way from Saltillo during the week I was there. The morning and evening light was perfect and I made a lot of photographs along the road when I saw something interesting.

Here is a link to my Flickr photographs if you want to see more of my images. For travelers, if you want to see a town that makes Mazapíl look mundane, take the old road, made of large rocks embedded in dirt, not cobblestones, that runs from Mazapíl to Concepción de Oro and stop at Aranzazú, an uninhabited village.

Make, Don't Take

2007-12-07T19:06:00.003-06:00

I worked for a summer at the Maine Photographic Workshops as a Teaching Assistant. Every week the new workshop schedule would start and David Lyman, the Director, welcomed everyone to Rockport and gave a brief presentation.

The most memorable thing I took away from his sessions was the approach that photographers should take, especially as we descended on a small fishing village in Maine. He always reminded us to make pictures; taking pictures implied that we were removing something from our subject.

The jargon in photography is very aggressive and it shouldn't be. We take photographs and we go on a shoot, for example. I prefer to make photographs. It's a technicality and I may be making something of nothing but it's the way I approach what I do.

Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, 2007

Usually, if I point my camera at someone I like to talk to them. I rarely use long lenses and typically use a 24 to 50 mm zoom lens. If I photograph people I want to be up close and communicating with them. The stolen, long lens shot just never made sense to me. I also don't like the way long lenses compress space.

The mentality, mindset or approach you take makes a big difference in the output. If I remind myself that I'm making photographs...creating something new...I pay attention to each step (exposure, printing) and make a conscious effort to be thoughtful about the process and realize that I'm making something. I'm also more gentle with the subject, whether I'm photographing people, objects or the land.

TECHNICAL SIMPLICITY

2007-10-21T10:37:00.003-05:00

Keep it simple.

Photography has always had a strong technological side. Whether it's calculating processing times for Tri-X or FP-4, paper developer combinations, fill flash or exposure values the technical part is always in your face.

I've never had a problem understanding and applying whatever technique was necessary. The best photographers for me have always been the ones that produce images where the technology wasn't obvious. Digital imaging seems to have made technology even more omnipresent than before so I've found myself consciously looking for simplicity.

I don't have a workflow. At least I don't think I do. I don't use layers and don't consider the number of layers in an image to be a mark of greatness. My camera only has 10.2 megapixels and I'm not hunting for one with more resolution. I used to have a lot of film-based camera gear and found that the more I hauled around with me the less images I made.

Chama, New Mexico, 2006

I was recently inspired by an interview I read in Rangefinder Magazine on Jay Maisel, a very well known name in our field. The pdf article is interesting and talks about a paradigm shift. Jay's admission to not being a technical person and keeping Photoshop usage to a minimum is refreshing news.

Another photographer, Alex Majoli, of Magnum, photographs with point-and-shoot cameras, Olympus C-5050 and C-8080's. Go figure. I personally like his images and can understand why he chooses to work that way. The simplicity of the equipment is obvious but the quality of the image is there also. My 10 megapixel DSLR already has resolution much better than Tri-X although the tonal quality and range isn't quite there...yet.

Photography has always been and will always be closely related to technology. In the 1800's photographers "enjoyed" the fumes while processing daguerrotypes; today we're dealing with monitor calibration and color gamut. Technology does matter, but sometimes we don't give enough credit to our eye.

Printing

2007-10-16T16:37:00.003-05:00

I've always printed my final images. While reading an article recently, I got the impression that because of the internet, web pages and digital imaging, printmaking was losing ground to the computer monitor. I may be wrong but I'll address it anyway.

Digital technology is wonderful and the ease of looking at pictures on my monitor keeps me sharp, motivated and creative. I still believe, however, that fine photographs should be placed on media; touchable, "archivable" material, like paper.

Aransas Pass Beach, Texas, 2007

In a recent issue of Camera Arts, Jim Hughes, the Editor-At-Large, touched on the subject as well. Photographs look very different on a computer monitor than they do in print. I'm not going to go into the technical details, but when I hold a print in front of me, I see relationships, textures and details that I just don't see on a monitor.

Traditional wet darkroom materials run the gamut from metal to paper to glass. Digital imaging is new so the variety of output materials just isn't there yet. A tintype or albumen print has a presence and quality that electrons don't.

Surprisingly, I've had a lot of fun experimenting with the variety of papers available to inkjet printers. I still use a lot of glossy papers but find that my photographs have a softer quality using the matte papers. Although it doesn't suit all my images well, Epson's Velvet Fine Art paper is heavy, has a lot of texture, archival quality and a feel that let's you know you're holding something substantial. Digital imaging has revived many paper manufacturers such as Hahnemuehle and introduced new papers like Moab. All good in my opinion.

While I have embraced digital imaging wholeheartedly, looking at photographs on a monitor is still too much like watching TV. Quality printmaking has always been an important, and necessary, step in our craft. Some photographs do very well no matter how they are printed; the actions, relationships or events they depict simply hold enough weight to stand alone. However, when printmaking itself is as much of the process as making the image, it becomes a truly magical result. When you look at the results that fine printers such as Ansel Adams, John Sexton or Paul Caponigro produce it is extraordinary to behold. They create an image that would not exist without their hand having created it. Tones comes alive, blacks have inky depth, highlights have just enough detail and midtones pull everything together. Art.

I'm not in their league and few of us are. It is the reason, though, that I always print my final images and never let them exist only on my monitor or hard drive.

Long Delay

2007-10-10T09:17:00.003-05:00

As you can tell from the dates, I've been negligent in my blog activities.

A recent reading of Dirck Halstead's The Digital Journalist prompted me to get back in gear. He releases a new issue every month and what I enjoy the most about the articles is the condition of people and events in the world we know nothing about.

Alcatraz, California, 2003

I do this for fun; I like to write and enjoy photography. While it is enjoyable and very rewarding to see your images and stories on the Internet I've realized that it's more work than I thought. As I don't have a website with my portfolio on it (yet) this will do just fine.

In the same vein, it's important to be creative and not be a slave to your job, career or work. Like The Digital Journalist, being creative allows you, or forces you, to look at the world a little differently. Whether we see the relationships between colors, the sadness or joy in people's faces, or forms that exist only in your viewfinder it's important to remember that's there more to us than our little circle.

I store my images on Flickr so others can see them. I submit images to JPG Magazine because there's a possibility they'll print one of my pictures. What I've realized is that you have to show others your pictures; photographs exist to be shared and that's why they're so effective at telling stories. Whether as a photo essay or an individual image, a photograph immediately creates a feeling, a thought or an idea in the viewer, just as it did with the photographer.

Communication...perception.

I made the Alcatraz image during a tour of the prison. I recommend the tour; the island is fascinating and how many of us get to see the inside of a prison, especially one as notorious as Alcatraz. From a different vantage point, you can see San Francisco through the window in the picture. I have never been incarcerated but I imagined how horrible it would be to have the view of civilization well outside your reach and access.

If you enjoy submitting images and seeing them in print check out JPG Magazine. It's a photography magazine that uses images submitted by its readers. I wish I would have come up with the idea. They have themes and I find it useful to see how my individual pictures sometimes fit within a theme; it makes me identify things in my photographs that I didn't see on my own.

Color

2007-07-08T13:54:00.003-05:00

I have spent a lot of time, money and materials photographing in black and white and still make a lot of black and white images; mostly with my digital camera.

One of my favorite films, now discontinued, was Kodachrome 25. It was beautiful. It was very, very slow but when the slides came back from the lab I was always captivated by the colors. Fujichrome Velvia came in a close second at ASA 50 back in the olden days.

I've also created a lot of color photographs and have been making more since digital technology and printing materials supported the effort. The long-held advantage of black and white's archival permanence is disappearing in the face of competition from inkjet technology. The choice of papers available in today's digital imaging marketplace is astounding and the watercolor papers are wonderful to work with. I have been able to print color images in my own "darkroom" that rival and exceed the results I was getting from professional photo labs.

Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, 2006

On the inspirational side, I follow a few photographers whose color work always motivates me to do better. Cape Light, a photographic project by American Joel Meyerowitz is a remarkable series of photographs taken on Cape Cod. They have a soft, airy look to them and depict the sky and the water in marvelous detail and subtle tones and colors. To me, it is as if you can feel the air and the light. William Albert Allard is one of my favorite overall photographers. His attention to light is always present in his images and all of the work I am familiar with is produced in color. He has a simple approach to photography that yields beautiful results. I get the feeling from looking at his pictures that he walks around casually, always observing, always creating. One of my favorite images is of a baseball player at bat taken through a cyclone fence!

I was fortunate enough to assist Ernst Haas for one week during my employment at the Maine Photographic Workshops in 1985. I had always enjoyed his photography and it was refreshing to work directly and interact with a photographer who I had always admired. While his photographs are very strong and emphasize hard colors, I found a gentle, quiet man who kept to himself and taught other photographers to follow their own instincts, not his, when photographing. A good teacher.

Another 20th Century photographer, Elliot Porter is more in the traditional vein but his images are also very remarkable to look at first hand. I have held his original dye transfer prints in my hands and the detail, color and beauty just astounded me. Take a look at Poplars and Hillside, Newfound Gap Road; make a trip to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas to see the image first hand; it makes a world of difference. You can see the fine detail and the vivid color created by an 8x10 camera; in the end, it's as if you can feel the leaves shaking in the breeze.

Last note. John Szarkowski died July 7, he was 81. As many in the photography world know, he was one of the most influential people involved in photography during our time. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York he served as Director of Photography from 1962 to 1991 and essentially made photography what it is today; having supported its position as a legitimate art form. Slate has a wonderful article on his contributions and his book "Looking at Photographs" should be in every photographer's library.

By the way...I always post my pictures and not those of the photographers I mention. I am not a copyright lawyer so don't want to post a copyrighted image on my weblog that I have no right to.

Light Zone and Creating Images

2007-07-04T12:02:00.002-05:00

I've found something new.

A new toy...so to speak...a new gadget...and it's not a power tool.

As you can tell, I'm a big fan of digital imaging. I don't use Photoshop or even Elements because I found them difficult and unintuitive to use. I've been using PaintShop Pro for a long time and have produced marvelous results using it. I consider these products equivalent as I use very few of their functions to generate prints. I never output in CMYK and focus a lot on enhancing local contrast within tones in my image; much like I did when producing prints in a traditional wet darkroom.

Dodging, burning, developer selection, paper grade and film development all contributed to creating a fine print; those were the tools I used to create what I saw when photographing. The same holds true in digital imaging; my problem with a lot of the digital imaging packages available today is the "disconnect" I experience when using curves, histograms and levels to modify tones in my images. It seems like I'm back in my Statistics class (I got a "B"); I always wanted the conclusion and didn't have too much patience for the numbers part. Light Zone takes a different approach that I have found to be much more intuitive; to me, at least. I guess you could say it removes the numbers.

I've downloaded LightZone and have been playing with it for a day. If you're interested, there's even a blog hosted by LightZone's creator, Fabio Riccardi, called simply LightZone. There's a 30 day free trial so no harm done.

Lake Havasu, Arizona, 2003

The image above was NOT created with Light Zone; I needed a technical break so I defaulted to a simpler image for the time being.

I have been playing with LightZone and adjusting it's properties so I can work consistently. I did take an rgb file from my Sony DSC R1 and converted it to grayscale using Black and White Styles. I even selected the red filter setting to lighten the subject's skin tone. I then used the zone mapping to increase and decrease the selected values of the tones/zones in the image.

I knew I wanted more contrast and lowered the darker values (Zones III and below) to bring them all closer to black. I also wanted to increase the higher values to separate them from the face tones (Zone VI). The slider was moved up just to make the whites a little whiter. This saved me from N+1 development! The software makes this incredibly easy as it has a thumbnail of your image showing you in red what values will be affected. If you look at your photograph and picture in your mind what values you want to convert you are halfway to creating your print. Easy. Intuitive...and VERY photographic.

Wet darkroom work was magical but never difficult. Good technique yielded outstanding results. The same holds true in digital processing. It's not necessary to go overboard with layers, sharpening algorithms and other tools to create beautiful pictures.

Give it a try. I see a lot of people, including pros, "going back" to a Holga. By the way, have you tried microwaving your plastic Holga? In the 80's it was the Diana. My point is you can do the same with your computer; use simple tools and techniques to create fabulous images.

Digital Imaging

2007-06-29T08:54:00.002-05:00

If you read my last post you'd think I frown on images that are extensively manipulated digitally. Not so! I personally am a big fan of digital imaging as it has revived my love of photography. I like how inkjet prints look and feel; I'm observing that the resolution of today's digital cameras and files is much better than 35mm film and is even approaching 120 film quality. If you get proficient with image editing software you can dodge, burn, mask and correct to your heart's content.

Birgit, Rockport, Maine, 1985

The portrait I made above is of Birgit Blyth, at the time a student at the Maine Photographic Workshops. Birgit is now an artist creating wonderful prints using an interesting non-digital technique with "traditional" photographic media. The portrait was made with a 4x5 Graflex and the negative was very poor. I nailed the focus but not the exposure (batting .500). I scanned the negative and worked with it in Paintshop using just curves to turn the muddy grays into the whites I saw when I took the picture. The negative has sat in my archives for 22 years and digital technology allowed me to finally produce in print what I saw that day.

John Paul Caponigro makes wonderful photographs and works with them extensively in Photoshop. His photographs involve a lot of technique but I think you'll agree the results are beautiful. His website is also a good source for technical articles on imaging, equipment, software and technology.

Jennifer Reagles is another artist whose work has intrigued me. I'm not sure what she starts with - whether they're photographs or drawings - but she uses Paintshop and Painter to modify her images and compose marvelous results. One of my favorites is Central Texas Winter which really nails down the color of our landscape in Texas during the winter months.

Everyone creates their own magic. Figure out what makes you tick and work with that. If you like straightforward imagery (like myself) and don't like to fuss around the PC too much then walk down that road. If you're comfortable spending more time in post-production on the PC or Mac creating images with multiple layers, effects and filters then run with it. Once you make enough images and work with them you'll find what you like. Either way, don't be a slave to technology and use it to create what you want and what you saw.

Thanks for reading.

Paintshop, Photoshop, Gimp, Picasa, etc.

2007-06-26T10:18:00.003-05:00

I personally use Paintshop Pro XI for image editing. I organize my pictures with Picasa. I try to keep it fairly simple and low-cost.

I read a lot and get quite tired of seeing so much emphasis on Photoshop. I'll try and stay positive but after trying Photoshop and Photoshop Elements I found them difficult to use and way too expensive. I'll date myself...but remember the stranglehold Lotus 1-2-3 had on spreadsheet software? I'm hoping Photoshop goes the same way and that photographers realize that they can create wonderful images using software that's free or that costs $100 or less. By the way, GIMP, or the GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free download and is quite powerful.

I don't play a lot with my digital images and approached it from the same viewpoint when I worked in a traditional wet darkroom. I guess if the picture is there that's enough. I've seen way to many mundane, bad images "Photoshopped" to death and turned into "art".

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, 2007

Most of the time I sharpen, re-size, correct and balance color and use curves to get to my final print. I do calibrate my monitor with an $89 Pantone Huey and download and use the Epson printer profiles for my Epson 2400. I print almost exclusively on Epson Archival Matte and have been working a little with Velvet Fine Art paper as well.

I'm making these comments to point out that options are available and to emphasize that simplicity has it's place in a highly technical field. Sometimes as photographers we like to brag about how difficult, time-consuming and expensive a shoot was. I've been learning that the opposite generates good results for me, and it may for you, too. Hey...take a bunch of pictures without looking through the view-finder the next time you're out with your camera. The image above is an example.

Magnum and Slate

2007-06-21T10:55:00.002-05:00

Magnum has been around for a long time and has some of the world's finest photographers associated with it. Slate Magazine is an on-line newspaper/magazine that always grabs my attention and has informative reporting on a wide variety of topics. The two, Magnum and Slate, combine to create an on-line selection of images, Pictures That Changed The World that are always well presented and wonderful to look at.

Magnum includes some top-notch image-makers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alex Webb, Bruce Davidson and Josef Koudelka. They've been around for a long time and have inspired many photographers to dedicate themselves to making images.

I always look at photography, and my camera, as a "pass" that I can use to open doors, meet new people and see different places. I'm speaking for myself but I have at one time in my life or another, aspired to travel the world and document a new place or a strange people (strangers). Photographers either do this for a living, like the Magnum photographers, or do it as amateurs, like myself. Either way, it's relevant and exciting.

I'm always reminding myself that all photographers basically use the same tools: their eyes and a camera; it really doesn't take much more than that whether you do it in your hometown or in some far-off land.

I always enjoy looking at their pictures...and anybody else's pictures. It keeps me motivated and refreshes my eyes. Pick up your camera and look for the interesting around you.

Mexico City, Mexico, December, 2006

First Blog; June 18, 2007

2007-06-19T21:06:00.006-05:00

Really don't know what to expect as far as looks, and responses but I'll have to start somewhere. Here we go...

I made this picture in August last year during a trip to Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. The color of the doors and the texture of the straw in the adobe caught my attention. Not much was done to the photograph in terms of editing; some sharpening, color balance and curves to enhance local contrast.

I am half-Spanish and my cousin Carlos from Terrassa, Spain made a trip to the U.S.A. with his family and friends. Eight of us followed Route 66, starting in Amarillo, Texas all the way to Santa Monica, California.

It's a fairly straightforward picture taken with a Canon G2. I can't enlarge it too much but it does work very well at 8.5 x 11.