At least, as far as photo galleries are concerned nowadays. Check out this link to a "Currently Hanging" post over at SLOG. It’s of a rather nice black and white photographic print now hanging at the McLeod Residence gallery in Seattle. Here’s the caption:
Walter Grio’s Waiting (2008), framed digital print on Kodak quality paper, 16 by 20 inches
…on Kodak quality paper. They’re talking about inkjet printer paper there. The same stuff I run through my Epson R1800 when I want to make a nice print for somebody. They don’t have to be silver prints anymore to be gallery quality. That’s how far the technology has come.
My dream of home ownership had always included space for a full function darkroom. I’d have needed space for both a "dry" and "wet" side, the dry side having enough space for a nice Beseler enlarger setup and the wet side would have had to have had space enough for a darkroom sink I could put 16 x 20 paper processing trays in plus the washing equipment. I figured it would have to be the size of a small bedroom. When I bought my little Baltimore rowhouse half its basement was already finished as a knotty pine den with a bar and I fretted about whether or not I wanted to demolish that and put the darkroom in it’s place. Thing was, I also wanted space to put in an art room, plus an office/computer room space.
Well…the front bedroom became my office and the basement den became the art room and as it turns out, all I need for a darkroom is just the little bathroom in the back of the basement which I can make light proof enough to use for loading my film tanks. I develop my film at the bar and when the negatives are dry I run them through my Nikon film scanner and into Bagheera, the art room G5 Mac and I don’t need a paper darkroom anymore which is great. I can’t make 16 x 20 prints here at Casa del Garrett, but the Epson will handle paper up to 13 inches wide and at some point, when I can find it in the budget, I intend to replace it with something like the Epson 3800 that actually will do 16 inch wide paper.
And then I can make gallery quality prints right here at home, and I don’t need that big darkroom anymore. And I don’t have to mix up gallons and gallons of chemicals and then clean it all up after I’m done and waste one sheet of paper after another to pinpoint exactly the right mix of paper contrast, exposure and development. Not only is the digital darkroom cleaner, it is more, far, far more, productive. I get it right once on the computer, either in Aperture or Photoshop, and it’s right every time I send it to the printer. And I’m here to tell you that touching out dust specks is a heck of a lot easier in Photoshop then with a brush and dye on one print after another. Oh…and dodging and burning? I do it once in the computer and get the identical results for every print I make from then on.
I still like working with black and white photographic film, and color slide film and I’ll probably never stop taking my film cameras with me places I go. But I am so glad I don’t have to deal with having a paper darkroom anymore.
…taken just a few moments ago while I strolled around the area by my hotel just before dawn. And brought to your computer through the magic of digital photography and the World Wide Web. Seriously…an old friend of mine called me on his cell phone late last night as he was driving south through Wilmington Deleware, and there I was chatting with him on my cell phone while I was strolling around U.S. Route 1 in Key Largo and you have to appreciate that we both grew up in an era when telephones had wires connecting to them to the wall and a long distance call to just the next state over was a lot of money, and there we were chatting to each other with little devices that just fit in our pockets, he in Wilmington and I in Key Largo. And we haven’t really lived all that long.
Via Slog… Geeze…if you want to see what the end of the world would look like…the island of “Gunkanjima” is probably the place to go…
Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called “Gunkanjima” that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship – so, the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship island.
Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world’s once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its peopl disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.
Wow. Check out the photos. Man…my cameras and I could have a grand old time there…
Photo Gallery Number Four, Road Trip, now available for your viewing pleasure in the Photo Gallery. Also Gallery One, Philadelphia 2004 and Two, Rehoboth Beach 2007 are back up, and Three, The Shadows and Light Sessions, is still there. I have enough space on the web now that I think I can just keep these galleries online as I keep putting them up, so that people can keep wandering through.
When I get back from my own little holiday road trip later this month, I’m going to start making a push to try and sell some artwork to help raise funds for Morgan Jon Fox’s documentary, This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. I’ll likely also be offering to sell high resolution signed 11 x 17 prints from any of my photo galleries. 100 percent of the proceeds will go to Morgan to help him finish his documentary. More on that next month…
Okay, Gallery Three – The Shadows and Light Sessions, is up, Here. You probably want to read the About The Images page, Here. This is as I said, a younger me. But I’m still pretty happy with the work I did back in the early 70s. I can’t say in all honestly that I am completely comfortable with it. But it’s me. Looking at my own work, I often find myself thinking of something the composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams is said to have remarked upon hearing his forth symphony performed for the first time: "I don’t like it, but it’s what I meant." Yeah. Pretty much.
On The Boardwalk, Ocean City New Jersey, Winter 1973
The Rehoboth Beach one has been up almost five months now and my goal since starting to work in Apple’s Aperture software was to have a new one up every quarter or so. But what really motivated me was a conversation I had with my Friday happy hour pals in D.C.
Jon Larimore, a dear old friend and former sysop of the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS once upon a time, had weeks earlier paid me some of the best complements I’ve ever had on my photography and my photographic eye, when he viewed the Rehoboth Beach gallery. What made his complements especially delightful for me is that he once worked for the National Geographic Society, and all his working life there he was swimming in some of this world’s absolutely first rate photography. He knows good photography when he sees it. Well…last Friday some friends who’d been with us to Rehoboth Beach came to the roving happy hour and I finally had a chance to ask them about the Rehoboth gallery. One of them took me aside during the evening, asked some questions and made some observations that really convinced me he was getting what I do, at the level of someone who is really into photography. He saw it. And what was more, he really liked what I was up to. Not everyone who appreciates photography is going to like my photographic voice. They’re just not.
Well…Jon later told me that the guy works for the Smithsonian Institute, and he knows from good photography too. So I told them before the evening ended that I’d be putting up a new gallery soon. This is what I’ve been working on, between weekend household chores, here at Casa del Garrett yesterday and today.
This next one is from a book I tried to do back in the mid 70s. Back then the options for self publishing photography books were limited and you really needed money to pull it off, which I didn’t have much of. So I devised a scheme for hand binding a book of photos that consisted basically of pages of silver paper photos (we didn’t have PCs back then. let alone photo quality ink jet printers) dry mounted on archival board. I hand made every one, and I think I sold like about a dozen of them before giving up. Nowadays I could use any of dozens of Internet companies that let amateur photographers create their own photo books on a limited production basis. Even my photographer’s software, Apple’s Aperture, now has a built-in system to let you create and publish your own photo books.
But I was really proud of that first effort, vanishingly small as its print run was, and my basic style and the themes in my photography have not changed much over the years. I called that first book, Shadows and Light. If you saw the first gallery I put up here, the one of Philadelphia images, you saw my pure photographic voice there, as it’s matured over the years. You can see the distance from the twenty-something photographer who did Shadows and Light back in 1975 to the Philadelphia gallery in late 2004 in the sure footed way I do it now. I know what I’m doing. I still don’t have words for it, but I’ve learned that a graphic artist doesn’t need words to understand themselves. That’s why we’re graphic artists as opposed to writers or poets. We deal in imagery. And looking back on those early images, which is what I’ve been doing lately for my Big Scan project, I’m really pleased with how well most of them hold up. I sure can’t say the same for my early efforts and painting and cartooning. Those embarrass me. But the photography I did as a young man still holds up, at least to my eye. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing it for decades now. Mostly.
So the next gallery is going to be from the Shadows and Light sessions, circa 1973-75, when I can finish scanning enough of it in to make a decent gallery out of. Expect it sometime this coming week. It’s a younger me. But the voice is there, sure and certain. That really amazes me in retrospect. I went through a period of time when I just put my cameras away and didn’t touch them for years because I was sick of looking at what I was seeing in my photography. It was a bad time for me. But time passes, the universe expands and cools, and I picked my cameras back up again, around 1998, because sooner or later I just had to.
The Hey I Got A Remote Control For My Camera Glam Sessions
A few shots I took of myself with my new remote for the EOS 30D. That’s the cable dangling down from my hand in all these shots. What’s good about the remote is that it sets focus and exposure correctly, while I’m sitting in front of the camera, unlike the timer, which sets both as soon as you press the shutter release instead of waiting until just before it takes the shot.
These were taken in an ad hoc test of the remote while I was sitting on the steps leading down to my art room.
…is that you risk running across ones of an old crush wearing really, really sexy cut-offs like guys used to back in the 70s before American males became paranoid about being sexy below the waist.
I always had a pretty well organized filing system for my black and white negatives. My slides were another story. Since I wasn’t in a position to be able to afford a color darkroom back when I was a teenager, I just made do with keeping them in the boxes they came back from Kodak in. Occasionally I would develop my own color slide film, which you could theoretically do without a major darkroom setup. But the old Kodak E-4 processing kit was expensive and at the end of it was the tedious task of mounting all those slides yourself. So I didn’t do that too often. But I did it enough that I can at least say that, yes, I did some of my own color work back then. Just not prints.
So the slides had their own very haphazard filing system which was basically just numbers on the boxes, and a little info about what they were. Now that I’m well into the Big Scan project, I needed to get them a tad more organized then they are. See…the boxes of slides never had contact sheets associated with them like the negatives did. If I needed to find a particular black and white photo I would look through the contact sheets for it, and when I found it that contact sheet would have a number on it that corresponded to a glassine envelope with the negatives for that sheet in it. But to find a particular color slide I had to rummage through the boxes until I found the one I thought it was in, open it, and sort through the slides, eyeballing each one until I found what I was looking for. So searching for a slide always meant handling and shuffling through a lot of them, in a way that searching for a negative never did.
The end result over time was a mess. Over the years far, far too many slides ended back up in the wrong boxes. At one point there was a group of them I just gave up on, and tossed them all together into one big box. I tried buying projector trays and storing a few boxes of slides in those, so I could search using a projector or slide viewer, instead of handling them all individually. By the time I got around to getting all my old slides organized for the Big Scan, I had about three concurrent filing systems for them, and none of them were up to date.
So this weekend I’ve been sorting them all back together, into their original roll film groups. The problem was worst in the slides from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. That bunch needed a lot of work getting them all back together in the right order, and it didn’t surprise me. That period of time in my life was right before the decade when I just put my cameras (and all my other art tools) away, because I just couldn’t cope with my feelings. As badly alone as I’m feeling now, I was really crushed emotionally back then. Life was just complete bleakness and I felt I had no future to look forward to at all. I just couldn’t bear to look at anything I did creatively because that inner desolation kept staring back at me from all of it…
…and ironically enough, that’s when I turned to computer programming as a creative outlet. So in a very strange way I’m earning a damn good living now, because of this horrible personal life crisis I had back then.
Anyway…It was like an intensely condensed review of that part of my life before a lot of darkness fell. And one-by-one all my old boyfriends and all the old crushes, all the guys who made my heart beat, and who one-by one broke it a little more, came popping out of the stacks of slides back at me. Including one I saw just a while ago, that I really, really wish I hadn’t, of one guy in particular who I became way, way too strung out over once upon a time, and who told me a year ago that I needed to stay in the closet if I wanted to make more friends.
I was sorting through some slides I took on a visit to see him when he lived down in Florida back in the early 1980s. We were strolling along the beach and I snapped a few shots of him. He’s just wearing a light short sleeved shirt and these really nice cut-offs. Sometimes he’s smiling back at the camera. Sometimes he’s looking handsomely off into the distance.
Funny how beautiful a tornado can be to behold. I guess that’s why there are storm chasers. But they know to keep their distance. I didn’t.
I’ve had the camera bug since I was an elementary school kid, but it wasn’t until high school that it began to get really serious, and the finger candy really expensive. Luckily mom was pretty forbearing about my turning the one bathroom in our little two bedroom apartment into an occasional darkroom. She always encouraged my creative outlets.
I’ve been going through my old high school negatives recently for a couple projects I’m working on here and I came across a few shots I took of myself in my bedroom mirror with the latest prized camera. Here are three documenting my climb up the SLR latter, from my first Petri FT to the professional grade Canon F1 I spent a summer working at a fast food joint to buy.
The Petri FT, circa 1970. I’m 16.
The Miranda Sensorex, circa 1971. I’m 17.
The F1, circa 1971.
Note the little plastic film canisters I’d taped to the camera straps. That was the style back then among us camera kids. It kept your spare film handy and it made you look hard core. But when I got out into the world and tried to make a living at it I found that they just got in the way…so I ended up taking them off.
Both the Petri and the Miranda had front mounded shutter releases instead of the usual top mounted, which was and is unusual (I don’t think any camera maker does that anymore), but I found I preferred it. The Miranda had full aperture semi-spot metering and a removable pentaprisim. But when I saw that first Canon F1 in the store I knew that was the camera I could spend a lifetime taking pictures with.
The flash you see on the F1 is just for show in this picture. I very seldom used a flash, even back then. Once I started developing my own film I pretty quickly gravitated to Kodak’s Tri-X Pan which was high speed for the time, but if you were careful about how you developed it you could get pretty nice not-so-grainy available light images off it. All these images are from Tri-X negatives. The only time I every really used the flash back then was when I was covering sports events for my school newspaper (it was called The Advocate… (grin)) Note how the flash hot shoe actually clipped on over the rewind knob on the original F1.
The Petri and the Miranda got sold, each one to help fund the purchase of the next. But I still have that F1 and I still use it and it’s been with me just about everywhere. It took all the 35mm color shots you see in my current photo gallery. That camera’s the best. I’d sell the house before I’d sell that camera.
Oh…and I still have the little stuffed tiger you see there perched in front of my dresser mirror.
These are shots taken during my weekend trip with some friends to celebrate New Year’s at Rehoboth Beach. It’s my first experiment at using Apple’s Aperture software to organize and publish my photos, and all in all I’m finding Aperture a pure pleasure to use. With one really irritating exception. It doesn’t seem to be able to handle the very large file sizes that result from the scans of color medium format film. Scans off my Hasselblad are running almost half a gig and Aperture just doesn’t seem to be able to handle them…at least on the hardware I’m running.
Aperture has a reputation, not unjustified, for being a resource pig. The first versions of it were, I’m told, horrible. But 1.5.2 isn’t so bad at all, if you give it at least a couple gigs of ram (I’m running three in Bagheera now), and if you’re using your machine to process graphics you should be running with lots of memory (and hard disk space) anyway. But Aperture handles very large Tif files poorly. So poorly the image display becomes garbled and I get the spinning beachball of death when I try to work with those images. This time, since I was creating a web gallery, I loaded the Hasselblad image files into Photoshop and bumped down the resolution, and then saved them back out to work with in Aperture. That did the trick. But I shouldn’t have had to do that with a program that bills itself as being professional grade. For the record, Adobe’s Lightroom beta handled those files just fine. But I like Aperture’s toolkit and workflow much better.
You can create a web photo gallery pretty easily with Aperture. I did some minor tweaking of the html pages Aperture produced, but not much was needed. You can see the results for yourself. It was a snap. With Aperture this process is so easy now, that I can see updating my photo gallery much more frequently then once every couple years.
It’s interesting, but with the new film scanner and Aperture, my film cameras, and in particular my Canon F1s, are becoming much more useful to me then they’d been. I’d seen my use of film going on the decline and my sense of it was that my future was going to be digital whether I wanted it to be or not. I bought the Canon EOS 30d digital SLR last spring so I could more easily put my stuff up on the web. But the integration of my film cameras with the computer is considerably tighter now, and I’ve been using an F1 since I was a teenager. I like my F1s. They’re like old friends. They fit comfortably in my hands and I don’t have to think about it much when using them, I’ve done it the manual way for so long. You wouldn’t believe the number and the variety of settings there are on the 30d. On the F1s there are only focus, aperture, shutter speed and film speed. That’s it. If you asked me to recite all the settings on the 30d I couldn’t do it.
The only problem with the film cameras is taking them on the road with me means I can’t see what I’ve got until I get it all back home and the film processed. With the digital camera I can see what I’ve got right away. I can even post it up on the web right away as long as I have my laptop with me. But I reckon the F1s are still essential to me, and always will be. I’ve been using them for so long, setting my focus, and my exposure manually now for so long, it’s really second nature anymore. They’re more an extension of me then the digital camera gets for now, and probably ever. I can just concentrate on what I’m seeing when I use them.
I think I may not be the only one who feels that way about the Canon F1s. I’m noticing that one of those in good condition still fetches a pretty good price on eBay. Best camera Canon ever made.
That last one was probably taken with the 50mm f4 Distagon. On a 6×6 format camera (that’s 120 roll film) a 50 is actually a very wide angle lens. For a sense of scale, see the small group of people walking the trail in the lower right hand corner. I used no filters, nor any Photoshop tweaking, other then kicking down the resolution for posting to the web. The sky really is that blue out there.
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