Category Archives: Photography

Bertha Been Down So Long It Looks Like OUT to Me

Posted by commart on

True.

Two or three months ago, not a lot of social contact, a quiet phone, adrift on the World Wide Web, albeit with a kind of anchorage on Facebook and habit in the area of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” in the form of a blog, BackChannels, I just couldn’t take another of Bertha’s rumbling ink fixes without knowing — not gambling — that I would sell, say, 20 fine art prints at above $100 each to cover the costs of what the big hulk of a now old HP B9180 unit would drink in Vivera inks.

I pulled the plug.

May Bertha rest in peace.

Unless a B9180 enthusiast catches this post on the web and sweeps in to rescue Bertha in the very near future from an ignominious end at the local landfill’s electronics shed — to be followed perhaps by a glorious resurrection associated with precious or toxic metal recovery in an enterprise somewhere close by a southeast Asian circuit board recycling junk pile — I’m done with printing.

Could I get in another printer of same or better quality?

Yes.

Do I wish to?

If my wallet felt thick and my future with the same felt secured, I would, but I’m hedging today.

It would take the assurance of a $5,000 commission or project to resume printing.

Bertha, I’m Sorry — Times Change

Not only have I unplugged the printer, the best commercial print shop in my town, First Look Photo, is closing its doors at the end of the month.

A Canon retailer, First Look lost out to B&H for my silly spending on Nikon gear, but it got some money for the fine art papers on which I enjoyed printing.  Still, what has happened to The Print?

Those stacks of 4 x 6 and 5 x 7 inch prints that used to make the rounds of hands at kitchen tables worldwide have been transformed into cloud-delivered images on smart phones and so many other gadgets with screens.

Look, Ma — no film, no paper, no wait for processing, and just as good as the big camera’s picture!

And no photography store down the boulevard either.

However, I do have in mind an alternative camera shop two towns or so up the highway.  Even so, everything one might want may be shipped in from an online store, the friendly chit-chat with the sales staff excepted.

If the print is really the thing and my signature on it worthless, I can resume posting at Fine Art America. On that venue, I cringe to place a value on a print that would fall below the cost of the printing and framing as charged by the establishment.

Aye, ‘Tis the End of an Era

There may be more to this story than laying to rest a fine old bitch of a printer and witnessing the passing of the place you could go into with dreams and a credit card (be careful, be very careful) and emerge with a nifty chunk of glass and a thick semi-technical manual filled with pages on composition, light theory, films, developers, and curves.

The good news: I’ve left a Nikons D200 and D2x, a complete “lens library” AND a field that on even the eve of its invention — think Talbot a little more than Daguerre — longed for the classical past or, also, maximized the value of a soft paper negative with romantically printed Greek tableaux.

Indeed, in photography, the exploitation of fine old methods turns out . . . kind of cool.

On my last visit to the local camera shop, the other guy at the counter was looking at the stock of RC papers (those who know, know) for his basement darkroom.

He asked.

I answered, “No ferrotyping needed for that”.

Kind of cool all of that back there in yesterday.

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Impromptu Photography In A Garden

Posted by commart on

As with other good things in my life, today’s indulgence involving a Nikon D2x — shoots weddings! — and a date with an hibiscus started with an hour’s playing music with a friend who later tossed me a cold beer best consumed out on the patio at a table beneath an umbrella next to which a single potted plant had chosen to express itself with deep red petals and colorfully extended style and stigma.

This is the next day.

After posting on another subject (comment on a book on Soviet history) on another blog, I grabbed the bag with the camera that I had hoped would have produced by now a financially serious living and, ooh baby, such a lightweight Gitzo that with that bag (“Billy” — those who know, know, and we could have much fun chatting further about “style” and “stigma”), there’s never a problem getting out the door in a hurry (except I left the circular polarizing filters in another bag with another camera).

Still, whether a fuse blows while you’re singing at a mic (that happened to me once with the “America Show” at the Omni Shoreham, Washington, D.C. with a fife and drum band behind me and a sea of faces somewhat obscured by the lights behind them: I just pushed a bit harder and whatever I got I gave), or you reach in a bag for a filter that’s not there, you adjust plans, or style, and keep going.

I love gardens.

I know the one on my balcony has perhaps gotten old for strangers, but it’s where I take coffee in the morning and enjoy a glass of wine late in the afternoon or early evening.

It’s entertaining out there, although these days I may admit I find a 3 p.m. “feeding flock” moving through the trees opposite rather entertaining too.

In any case, with a camera, a garden becomes its own magical theater, a macro-cosmos of shifting breezes, clouds, and light, suddenly as hot and humid as July, just as suddenly spiked by a cool breath of air or the unexpected appearance of The Bug.

2013-07-01-D2x-a-006

We’re all caught somewhere in the middle of our lives when we’re engaged and focused on the thing we like to do and do well.

Is it work or is it not work?

Meredith is welcome to give me The Call (mid-Atlantic USA, loves gardens, shoots and socializes well).

* * *

Outside of the Big Media Cities, How is the market for ambitious photography these days?

I had to shut down “Bertha” (there will be a post soon) for her bad ink shooting habit — next time: Epson, but it’s going to take a $5,000 print order, fifty percent up front, to get me to take that plunge again.  Pulling the plug didn’t feel good, but keeping her warm and hearing her bump and grind started to feel like a daily visit from the protection boys.

No, sir, that business model, that plant that sits in the corner and says, “Feed me!” doesn’t work.

So what to do with this capability?

Except with light tent items or textiles (fashion and catalog), I’ve no urge to be the mass producing object, event, and young person’s photographer: that’s just how I’ve felt when I have felt compelled to watch, say, David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago three or four or more time over the years — it’s so gorgeous!  Also, still, innovative and meticulous in the craft.  As everyone in this game has, I’ve watched my share of film and still enjoy the work of a solid “DP”.

Despite Bresson’s offhand remark about geometry, visual intimacy and surprise may go far beyond workmanlike framing — one wants to work toward the mystery of the object and find in its color, detail, and rhythm its strangeness.

With humans, there’s want of connection “through the lens”, whether chilling or warming, left isolated or engaged . . . I don’t want to mess with nice expression, nice expression, nice expression, smile, one more time, good, nice expression, nice expression.

Unless she’s a babe.

Even then, I want more in the story — more atmosphere and mood, more intimation, more “about to happen” or “just happened” or “might happen”.

* * *

It was good getting out in someone else’s garden today!

That’s one “bottom line” — the other seems to be finding the clients and projects that pay, essentially validating the value of the effort and sustaining it.

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Teaching, Statuary, Augusta Memorial Park, Waynesboro, Virginia, April 9, 2013

Posted by commart on

Statuary, Augusta Memorial Park, Waynesboro, Virginia, April 9,

Of course, I would like to post commissioned work on this blog, but, alas, as regards the above, I was merely a passenger on someone else’s trip yesterday (see “Statuary, Augusta Memorial Park, Waynesboro, Virginia, April 9, 2013”).

My work has a reliably luminous quality these days, and for that, many thanks to Nikon glass and Adobe software.

Composition: sturdy, formal (most of the time), focused.

Luck: unbelievably good, although I am one of those who believe there is no bad light — in fact, as long as there’s light, there’s visual atmosphere.  Perhaps with what I call “response photography” — the photographer as traveler through an environment — atmosphere x subject x depth-of-field x frame becomes the photograph, and atmosphere itself I interpret as location x lighting extant or lighting design.  That’s why in “constructed photography” — the photographer as producer who imports into a frame the elements of his work — the determination of mise-en-scene (everything in the scene, visual and intellectual) leans so heavily on building a set and lighting it or discovering a location and working with season and day to construct a moment for recording fit to concept.

Back to luck: if you go out to a garden to shoot flowers and encounter heavy gusts, you might be unlucky.  Of course, if you go out without intention other than to find something lovely or worth the film — these days, editing time at the computer — and you catch long colorful stems trembling in the light and blurring here and there at lower speeds, well, you might be lucky after all.

Be all that as that may be, thanks to my friend, I had a good day afield and at times lost among memorials and their elegiac and familiar figures and encouragements.

Augusta Memorial Park, Waynesboro, Virginia, April 9, 2013