Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Images from a rural road trip

Almost Gone!

Almost Gone 2


The green grass of home!

Abandoned

Very Tidy!

Big Tree and Old Building

Welcome To Earlville

Door in Green Wall

Why did they leave?

I guess we are not having dinner!

Up on the Porch!

Welcome Aboard!

Smallville!

Long trip home

Are we there yet?
So I love loading up the cameras and going to someplace in the car. No specific destination or subject matter, often with no idea of what the town our countryside will hold.  Images from a trip to northern Illinois back in December.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Tin Men and other industrial residents!

Red Tin Man
Makeup Please
Up on the roof!


Industrial Village

Industiral Village 2
One of my photographic interests. Part of my interest in industrial buldings are what I call Tin Men. These are material processing and colletion devices often found on the buildings which are used for industry. I call this one "Red Tin Man" The rest are just some other industrial and urban images I have taken recently.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Kodak Bankruptcy

Kodak Bankruptcy Announcement

Kodak Retina I -
Image From Ken Rockwell.com
This was my first camera. All manual!!!

Well the long anticipated announcement of Kodak corporation's bankruptcy has become a reality. The above link will take you to the basic facts of the bankruptcy filing. For those of us who grew up with photography and film or still still use film for some of our business or artistic work this is more bad news. How bad this is and what impact it will truly have will shake out over time. Without having any first hand knowledge or detailed announcements yet from the company about product production or availability it is safe to say that it is almost certainly going to mean some future changes. American Airlines, one of the latest bankruptcies is now reducing flights on unprofitable routes. Kodak will do the equivalent. This was likely a long time coming and so many factors have contributed. The radical very real growth of digital imaging, the speed that digital photography transformed into a high quality medium, the Internet, consumer convenience, poor corporate decision making, a global recession and increased capital standards by lenders where likely all factors. Still it is sad to see this iconic brand of a company faced with such a humiliating situation. Kodak, love them or hate them, have been an icon of the photography industry and of the American industrial landscape for all of my 50 plus years of life. My first direct experience with their products was as a junior high school kid shooting my first 35mm film with my father's Kodak Retina camera. A camera he picked up during his time in Germany during WW II. I was hooked and shortly after that my dad and I built a home darkroom developing Tri-X and Plus-X film in the basement of my parents house. Shooting pictures for the high school year book and experimenting in photography all through high school. Then taking photography again during architecture school. Photography and imaging, seemed to be there either as snap shots at family events, of finished projects at work or as art unto itself for its own sake. Kodak was always the primary provider of the consumable materials.



But then digital became all the rage and justifiably so. With the Internet everything changed. Photography transformed but so also did almost everything else from the analog world into new digital. Graphics, music, photography, architecture, banking, medicine, publishing, news they all have seen radical transformation as part of this virtual digital revolution. Ones and zeros. Who would have ever anticipated the impact of these changes 20 years ago. Possibly Nicholas Negroponte at MIT but not most of the rest of us. Certainly not the business leaders of Kodak well or maybe they did (read to the end). The death of the consumer film industry happened suddenly for Kodak and many others. If I am an example one day I was shooting film and taking it to Walgreens. The next day I was taking digital shots with my pocket sized Di Image and printing them from my network printer. I did no look back at all for a long time. For the next 10-15 years my film cameras were in the storage box replaced by several, ever improving versions of digital cameras. Remember the old Sony Mavica which capture images on a CD ROM? Or Minolta's Di Image cameras? Today I still shoot a lot of digital images with Nikon DSLRs. But look at the Sony NEX 7 to see how far, how small and how high quality, 24 mega pixels, consumer digital cameras have come. Today I shoot way more digital photos then I ever did film images, thousands in fact and almost every human with a cell phone has a digital camera at their beck and call. It is convenient and once the camera is paid for the images are free. Yes you still must pay for printing but I know that I print a very small percentage of the images I shoot and hey I can post them out here on my blog for people to see and yet it is.....FREE! Digital is more ubiquitous then ever and digital photography is not going away any time soon. Or until something better comes along. But that is what happened to Kodak. Something better, very much better came along. Not better in quality per say but better in convenience.



But here I was needing something more. Larger images, better quality and after researching it seemed that film might provide an option. We could not afford a professional and I had a long history with photography. I did not have the high end digital equipment but did have the knowledge and experience to go "old school with film. I needed or wanted high quality images, material cost per didn't matter as long as it was less then the cost of renting high end digital equipment shot. I only needed so many shots and could deal with the "inconvenience" as this is not a profit center for our company.



I had only just returned to film photography at the end of last year and for this very specific reason. I was going to start using a large format 4x5 Sinar F2 camera to photograph some of our finished projects, scan them with a flat bed scanner and have an alternative 100 mega pixel set up. Large format film was the standard for architectural photography for decades and it seemed to offer a very real alternative to buying or renting very expensive high end digital cameras/sensors. I have time and knowledge but am limited on money. Large format film is a "huge" capture surface by comparison, even when compared to the largest best professional equipment. It has properties that are still hard to match even today with the best digital equipment. But as I ramped back into the process and relearned techniques, dusting off knowledge that was long before stored away I realized quickly that the film industry had declined far more then I would have every expected. I found this out the first time I went to buy color transparency or "positive" film. Finding that the old standard Ektichrome was not immediately available. After some some work and some waiting I could locate E100g it's new cousin but availability was spotty and limited. Going on line however I quickly realized that Kodak, Fuji and all the film industry and analog products were in a significant state of transformation. Financial problems abounded and product cancellations abounded. Only a few like Kodachrome made the news. Typically the product would just disappear. Information boards are filled with rumors and panic.



The Kodak announcement is no surprise. Those of us who still want to use film as an option can only hope that they will figure out how to scale production down to make it profitable in smaller runs. Or sell the formula to someone else who will. It is unlikely that volume will ever require running whole plants dedicated to single products or product types. If all goes well production by Kodak or someone else will continue for a number of products color, black and white, movie, sheet film, roll film etc. If they don't manage the bankruptcy well they may end up the way of Polaroid with desired and desirable products just dying. Let us hope for a different conclusion. Apparently a Polaroid pissed off employees where shoving equipment out of second floor loading doors of the plant destroying it thus preventing any future buyer from ever being able to realize a value.
Before you basj Kodak too badly you should first remember that from high in the sky the ground is a long way off. The peak year of film production was apparently 2002. Think about that. In only 10 years a whole process became commercially obsolete! Kodak invented, innovated, created, marketed and profited as a giant for a very long time. The decisions that likely lead to bankruptcy where very likely made at the same time GM was making really bad decisions that lead to their, once unimaginable, bankruptcy. If anyone asks you who invented the digital camera sensor you should tell them. Eastman Kodak of Rochester NY in the good old USA The inventor of the digital camera or CCD sensor
See the information boards at Large Format photograpy and Annalog phototgraphy (APHUG) for more infomration on product availablity and alternatives. I hope film remains available but time and change marchs on!!!

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Monday, January 16, 2012

Today's post explores a wide interest in the built environment and architecture as seen through the camera lens. Taken on a crisp sunny Saturday morning and within close proximity this series of photos display a wide range of imagery. From urban shotgun houses to silver chemical storage tanks to a stately classical gate denoting an elite neighborhood. If you like these images please comment. I would love to know you impressions of my work. As a photographer I find the images compelling. The tanks are very sculptural. Like modern abstract sculpture they are pure in form. They remind me of organ pipes on a distorted scale. The column capital is pure classical architecture from a time when rules and specifics defined art and beauty. Rules that are no longer applicable for either art or architecture today. Yet these classical, formal details do posses and convey  a very real sense of order that cannot and should not be ignored.

Flora Place Gate
Corinthian Capital

Details

Hey Brother!

Organ Pipes

Tanks

Factory I

Factory II

Lone Shotgun

Keeping up with the Jones's
For those who are familiar with St. Louis. The tanks and the shotgun houses are in the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood. a neighborhood that is seeing considerable redevelopment and revitalization. Yet the "old" neighborhood and the "new" are in great tension. There was a double homicide one block away from where the "shotgun"  houses were photographed. Reminding us that our city and our society are in constant push pull of evolution.

Monday, January 9, 2012

Louis Sullivan- Architect

Tonight's post is a single image of an ornamentation detail form the Wainwright Tomb. It is so original and creative. The tomb is covered with these sculpted, completely original designs. Even as an architect who admires modernism it is hard not to respect the ornamentation and originality of this.

Friday, January 6, 2012

Photos From the Dead of Winter

Baroque

Very Crisp

Patchwork

Factory Color

Factory Black and White

Nothing left to advertise!

Storm Day

Clouds in the Garden

Chapel

Cornice

Tonight's post contains a number of photos I have taken recently. The lighting at this time of  year has long shadow and sharp colors. The weather has been unusual for December and January, brighter, warmer and clearer then normal. These shots include more from the "garden of death" as I call it as well as architecture from around St. Louis. Included some shots of an old factory now imprisoned in chain link.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Painting With Light



Tonights post are some shots that I call "Painting with Light". They are experiments with intentional  movement with light to capture colors in an abstract way. I am sure that many have done this before but I wanted to see just what would happen.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Happy New Year 2012

Ken Lee- "Images I like" My first post of the new year will take you to a web page collected by a photographer who I came across on the Large Format web site. His name is Ken Lee. You may follow the link to his personal work as it is quite good and worth a look. The link is to a site of images he has selected/collected from other photographers both new and old. The site has a number of images which show a wide variety, style and type of images both new and old. The heading of the site is "these I like". These images however were compelling for me as I seek to understand what makes a powerful, compelling image that will connect not only with me but with a broad audience. These images have a sense about them which is hard to ignore. They have risen to the attention of first book editors as well as now this particular photographer/web site editor. He has selected them individually. As I seek to understand what it takes to make profound, compelling images, something more then just snap shots or even interesting photos or well composed graphics, I am fascinated by images such as this. Images that rise up above others and connect with with the human psyche. Images that transport the viewer to another place. Images that have a compelling power and rise to the level of art. I, as as I view these, wonder, did the photographer work intentionally to capture that particular image? Or did they only realize afterward that they had captured and bottled that illusive quality? Did they themselves even realize they had made such a profound image or was it only others later who noticed that the image stood out from the rest as something special. As I struggle with my own work, to re-learn the patience of working with large format film, to make compelling images of my own, I think about these things. Today there is much debate about digital vs. film and other technical aspects of photography. As I work with film and large format cameras again I am reminded the difficulty of and work required to make film images. I have no interest in opening a debate between these two. But I will say working with my large format Sinar has given me a great respect for the photographers of the past who worked with combersome large cameras, film, tripods and managed somehow to get beyond those burdens to craft great works of art. It is so easy to forget a step, to not have the image focused, to forget to pull the dark slide or to just not be able to lug all the gear into position before the light is gone. Int that way digital imagery has diminished the impact of images as they are now so easy to make by comparison. The bar for a compelling image has in effect gone up as the digital equipment available makes the "technical" aspects of photography so much easier. Auto focus, programed exposure modes, etc. etc. all take the burden off of the photographer freeing him or her to concentrate on the "continent" and yet, because it is so much easier we are deluged by millions of images which are average or even above average. Capturing that outstanding or spectacular image, an image that really grabs a you, has become that much harder. Just getting to a unique location was enough in some cases in the past to set you apart. But with small, light, fast, simple digital cameras, good transportation and all weather gear that is no longer much of an obstecal. But when you look at the images in the linked web site you won't see many technological theatrics. They are in some cases very simple. In other cases they are serendipitous. But beyond all else they are compelling at a human level. They show little fear and are not patronizing.