Prowling the calles and the ramparts of the Medieval Spanish city of Caceres after midnight, the rain was falling in a fine misty drizzle. I captured all the images with an iPhone and Moment lenses. Although I had a tripod, I chose to hand hold every capture. A couple of great nights of “street” photography.
Drying fish on the beach In Nazare, Portugal. Shot with an iPhone and a Moment 18mm lens.
Who knew? In my return to using film in medium format cameras, I exposed some color transparency film last month. I haven’t done that in 8 years! The image below was exposed using a Fuji 617GX on Velvia. More to come.
Playa Estero, Santa Catalina, Panama
Playa Estero, Santa Catalina, Panama
A black and white triptych made with film; Astypalea, Greece.
I spent two months this summer on small Mediterranean islands. Although I captured color images digitally, all my B&W work was exposed on 120 film using a Hasselblad. Needless to say upon returning home, it was thrilling to process B&W negatives and to make work prints. For the past several months I’ve been printing B&W images digitally; I’m convinced that my return to black and white film and format cameras justifies a dedicated B&W printer. More on that in the New Year.
I’ve been sorting and editing Iphone captures for a new tab for Mybigphatphotographs.com photoblog. I’m still not quite convinced of the sequencing yet, but I like the overall content. Interestingly, last evening I made the capture below while having dinner at the inlet of the Shinnecock Bay, in Hampton Bays, NY. I lost all interest in my meal for about ten minutes while I made the capture and post processed it. Be sure to click on the tab “Iphonegraphy” and see what’s been interesting to me visually for the past year or so.
Four drops of water
I thought I had already posted this image on mybigphatphotographs. But I see that I haven’t. It’s a self portrait from the same time period and same space as the previous posted Too Many Me’s. While I lived on St John USVI, I had the distinct experience of Hurricane Hugo. Many houses were destroyed by the storm, including the one next door to where I lived. The roof was blown off, and virtually everything inside was blown away or shredded. All that remained was the house’s masonry walls. Weeks after the storm and after the contents of house had been removed, I started using the blown house’s interior as a natural light studio. I made a series of portraits there, including a bunch of self portraits. This one, Deus Ex Machina, is my favorite. I have a 20″x24″ print of it over my desk in my “lightroom”, and, for me, it certainly stands the test of time. I made it with 4×5 view camera and a 90mm lens.
This image has always resonated of Tina Modatti’s hands of the Puppeteer (above); I remember thinking of it I as I played with the shadows of my hands on the white wall before I made the exposure. And as a sidebar, I’d urge that anyone interested: to read about and to explore her relationship with Edward Weston, particularly in Weston’s Day Books. I especially found their year together in Mexico during the mid 1920’s fascinating. He taught her photography; and in some respects, I think she became the better photographer of the two. And what a time to be an artist living in Mexico.
I’ve started thinking about my self portraits again. I have a folder of them which I occasionally look through. Most don’t really stand the test of time, but there are a few which could make the cut. This one was from over twenty years ago, on St. John USVI. It’s an accidental double exposure on 4×5 film.
This one was captured yesterday. Photographic technology certainly has changed in the time span between them, buy my intention hasn’t; nor has my commitment to self portraits.
I believe I’ve bored everyone to tears who follows me on Facebook with landscape/skiing images from Alberta, Canada. So here’s one last one: the back side of Mt. Rundle in Banff, Canada with a full moon in the eastern sky, right at sunset.
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I lasted posted to my blog. Sometimes, life just has a way of taking over. But have no fear, I’ve been tirelessly capturing images. Most of my images have been the product of iphones. I’ve always been a promoter of alternative cameras, starting with plastic Diana cameras in the ’70’s. In a way, iphones are kind of like old school toy cameras; certainly a lot of the photo apps ape toy camera photography with countless filters, some even named Diana. Go figure. So, as I distill down a year’s body of iphoneography, I’ll you give one of the early ones; interestingly I was at this location last week, and the nozzle is no longer there, but the hose is, lying almost in the same place.
Hose Head
Photographing in Spain always brings out the BOLD in me. My first trip there was in 1974, and I ended up staying for a while with my girlfriend’s mother on Ibiza during the late winter. I was just starting to make photographs; I didn’t have a clue what to do with a camera other than push the shutter release. One image I made was of small hilly, mountainous island jutting out of the Mediterranean with the weak winter sun behind it. Later, back home someone saw the photograph and told me what an artist I was. I had never even considered the possibility of being an artist. Bottom line, that photograph plus a couple of others from around New England got me hooked on photography. A year later I quit my day job, I hopped on a Polish freighter, and I moved to Europe with all the accoutrements for a B&W darkroom (Those were the days). Once in France, I started to teach myself photography. That didn’t mean I was a photographer yet, even by a long stretch of the imagination. But I had the bug, and I started to learn. During the year-and-a-half that I lived in Europe I spent a lot of time in Spain. And after I came back to the United States, I periodically returned to Spain to visit friends and to photograph. My most recent Spanish sojourn was for my wife’s 50th birthday several years ago. It was one of my last trips using film as my primary photographic medium (although I was beginning to dabble with a digital point-and-shoot camera). From that last Spanish visit, here are a pair of Spanish images, bright in color, abstract in composition, intentionally painterly, and without manipulation.
