a brand new minneapolis no. 41, downtown on Flickr.
January 7, 2013
January 1, 2013
Check out the new issue of MPLSzine to find out what these people chose as their New Year’s Resolutions!
December 3, 2012
November 26, 2012
a brand new minneapolis no.36, uptown on Flickr.
This is Yuma. I stopped her for her portrait on a sunny afternoon in late fall. It was almost 60 degrees and in Minnesota in November, it’s reason to celebrate (it snowed 2 days later). Anyway, I asked Yuma how she got her name. She said that her dad told her he named her “Yuma” after his favorite movie, “3:10 to Yuma”! I’m guessing it was the 1957 version and not the 2007 remake…
(oh, and those two ghostly gentlemen in the background are graphics printed on the fence…bad job minding the background on my part!)
November 14, 2012
a brand new minneapolis no. 6 (nicollet mall) on Flickr.
Stay tuned for the return of A Brand New Minneapolis street portrait project, coming soon! (I’m out shooting for it now!)
November 8, 2012
November 7, 2012
Minneapolis Iconography No. 7: The Weisman on Flickr.
October 23, 2012
Minneapolis Iconography No. 3: The Minneapolis Public Library on Flickr.
Yashica Mat LM | Yashinon 80mm f/3.5 | Fuji Acros | Rodinal (1:100) semi-stand | Silver Efex 2
The Minneapolis Public Library is a great addition to Downtown Minneapolis, and no, it’s not a pyramid!
September 10, 2012
Mountain Morning on Flickr.
Nikon F-100 | Nikon Nikkor 105mm f/2.5 AI | Kodak Ektar | Post in LR3
Dawn in the Rockies
Press “L” to view in the lightbox.
August 9, 2012
Storm over Valley, Holga on Flickr.
This officially kicks off the film photographs I took over the past week in the Black Hills and in the Rockies of Colorado. I’d kill for a nice digital camera (fingers crossed that the Nikon D600 is real and that all D700 owners sell their rigs for cheap to pick up the new toy so I can buy cheap on the flooded used market!), but sometimes film, especially film shot on a plastic lens, gets results that digital could only dream about. I was struck by how many photographers, undoubtedly all amateurs like myself, were out shooting in the mountains. I wonder, if 1,000,000 people take a picture in the same spot, will there be 1,000,000 identical results? Obviously not, but with digital the chances are much higher. The dynamic range of the negative I started with would not be possible on one shot using digital. Even with HDR, the result would somehow look digital, processed. The reason I’m still out shooting with film (and my iPhone) is because it’s not always a different perspective that yields a unique photograph of a popular subject; sometimes it’s the medium. On that day, my medium was of the medium format film, plastic camera variety. Long live the Holga!
July 29, 2012
The Bandshell at Lake Harriet on Flickr.
Yashica Mat LM | Ilford FP4+ | Ilfosol DD-X | Post in LR3
Why film (especially if it’s medium format) » digital HDR.
Film. The original HDR.
May 26, 2012
May 18, 2012
Mill City is Crumbling and I’m going to Art-A-Whirl! on Flickr.
Prints
Holga 120N | Ilford HP5+ | XTOL (1:1) | post-processed in Topaz Adjust
Not really! There is some construction going on, I think on one of the grain elevators, which adds to the idea behind this piece. The overlapping images, I think, really give the sense that the mill ruins (now home to the great Mill City Museum) really are crumbling. It’s disorienting and one of the joys of Holgaramas—-you never know what element the process might add to your idea!
A quick plug for my photography business: I will be at that the 17th Annual Art-A-Whirl in Northeast Minneapolis this weekend. It’s the largest open studio art fair in the country. I will be at 1121 Jackson St., in the Waterbury Building, Suite #121. Come over and stop by if you’re in the area. This print and more will be on sale, with 10% going to Everyday Miracles, a local non-profit. Hope to see you there!
More info here: nemaa.org/art-a-whirl
May 10, 2012
Alone on Flickr.
Canon Canonet QL17 Giii | 40mm f/1.7 (shot at f/2) Kodak Tri-x 400 (shot at 1600) | Diafine
A few photos back, I talk about the experience of driving home just as the sun set and the fog rolled in and my impromptu adventure in a nearby nature preserve to try to take some photos of it all. It was a really fun, but kind of spooky walk/run through the dark, noisy woods. I half expected a werewolf to jump out at me as I walked along the trail back to my car.
Anyway, now for some technical, uninteresting notes: I developed this film using Diafine, which is a 2-bath compensating developer. Basically, the first solution embeds the developer into the film emulsion, but it doesn’t actually get developed yet. Three minutes later, you dump out Bath A and pour in Bath B, which reacts with the developer in the film to develop it. The magic is that you get a speed increase in most film (Tri-x is the gold standard at 2-stops) without an increase in grain (it’s of a different quality than, say, Rodinal’s grain). But you also get a pretty gray negative (this photo had some work done in post, but that’s the beauty of a rich, gray negative; you get so much flexibility). This is good if you’re scanning and even better if you’re scanning and guessing at exposure, like I was. Say you guess is a bit off and you expose as if the film were at ISO 400. The next frame, you expose as if it were ISO 1600. In most developers, one of the two frames will be over- or under-developed depending on what you’re shooting for. But with Diafine, you get just the right amount of development, regardless (to a degree) of what speed you shot the film at. This is great for shooting on the fly and something that builds in a lot of flexibility with respect to how you meter/if you meter. Now, there will be people out there who say that photography is a precise art form and that doing anything less than Ansel Adam’s zone system for shooting and developing is a travesty. There are also those who will say that you always need a $300 Sekonic light meter in order to properly expose each frame. Phooey on to you, I say.
May 7, 2012
Stuck Between Stations on Flickr.
Holga BC135 | Kodak Plus-x | XTOL (1:1) | post-processed in Topaz Adjust
“The devil and John Berryman, they took a walk together and they ended up on Washington talking to the river | He said I surrounded myself with doctors and deep thinkers | But big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers | There was that night that we thought that John Berryman could fly | But he didn’t so he died”
The Hold Steady’s “Stuck Between Stations” accurately names the Washington Avenue Bridge as the suicide location of the poet John Berryman, who jumped to his death from atop on January 7, 1972. It’s a famous landmark, not so much because of suicides, but because it connects the east and west sides of the University of Minnesota together. During the day, it’s filled with throngs of students on all forms of transportation. Luckily, for the winter months, it has a covered part that provides shelter from the Minnesota cold.
This is a panorama shot in-camera on film using a 35mm Holga. Holgas are great because you can use the shutter at all times, it’s not coupled to the film winder. To create these imperfect (but that’s the appeal) images, you take a shot, wind about halfway, take another shot, wind halfway again, and take your final shot. You have to guess where each frame lands in relation to the previous one. It takes some trial and error, but I think you end up with some special images.
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