Michele + Jet in Philly (Zagar A208)

Sometime around 2017 we visited Philadelphia to take in a concert by Raffi, whose music Jet just loved to pieces. It was the furthest South that Raffi had ever travelled in his very long career of live performance for young audiences (Raffi is Canadian). Raffi is getting pretty old these days, so we jumped at the chance to go see him. Of course, a stereoscopic angle had to be included, so I undertook to find some of Isaiah Zagar’s thousands of murals. He has practically covered Philadephia with these distinctive works, which have a lot of stereoscopic interest, on account of the liberal use of bits of mirror. Learn more about Zagar’s opus here: https://www.phillymagicgardens.org/about-philadelphias-magic-gardens/about-isaiah-zagar/
Photography was done with a Sputnik shooting Velvia 50. But the weather was not as bright as I had hoped for. On the ground you can see my test exposure rig, a twin rig Sigma DP1 Merrill.

Poetry By Dead Men

In “full confession” mode, I’m here to tell you I have nothing new to offer. I have not made a single image since the Before Times. That’s more than three years without loading the camera, finding the scenes, composing the image, and tripping the shutter. It is a dissatisfying mental place to be, but I just haven’t wanted to create any images.

So from this melancholic zone, I’m reaching into my box of treasures to offer you some images from those whose work has inspired me, and from whom we will be seeing no new images. I’ll try to have some new images for y’all next time around. Continue reading

The Built Environment – Architecture and Machines

Ages ago, I shot this view of the (then) new UVA Hospital with a Hasselblad, maybe two of them on a bar – in any case this is a cha-cha to obtain the necessary stereobase, which was probably around a foot, judging from the parallax in the image. I imagine the exposure was around 30 seconds. Extra credit for the astronomers in the group that can identify the stars in the sky:

UVA Hospital, Charlottesville, VA

My “day job” is technical illustration. My clients are engineers at the University of Virginia, mostly. One day I went to visit a lab, and discovered this gigantic machine. Impossibly complex in its construction, for all I knew it could have been a time machine. So I started calling it the “time machine,” whenever I mentioned to my engineer client, and that I’d like to come in some day to photograph it. The title of the image that I finally made says about the same thing. For real, this is a Directed Vapor Deposition machine. A big electron gun hits one material, vaporizes it, and the vapors are deposited onto another material. Believe it or not, it is not a custom made machine. You buy these things retail. Cost? about $1M:

Temporal Continuum Distortion Analyzer (Posterior Aspect)

In or around 2012, I had the opportunity to photograph inside a retired coal-fired power plant not far from where I live. This plant, in Bremo Bluff, VA, was the first “automatic” coal fired power plant built in USA. “Automatic” meant in those days that most of the valves, flaps, conveyor belts, and other machinery was centrally controlled. Which means, there was a central control room, where through the use of electrical switches, one could remotely actuate any of the hundreds of valves in the plant – as these were electrically actuated. I’m sure there was a measure of fear or distrust in the system early on, as plant operators were instead used to shouting control commands at a team of plant workers, on whom one could surely better rely to get the job done than the new-fangled electric motors.

I worked on three separate days in the plant to make photographs, using with great pleasure John Thurston’s custom TL-120-55 for the wide angle views. I am forever indebted to John for his generous loan of the camera to me that year. In this view we have my old friend Chuck Holzner up there on another level (see the white hard-hat?) taking some of his own pictures. Along the left side of the view, rising up through the various levels, is one of the four burners in the plant. These are 100 foot tall furnaces (not counting the smokestack outside the building!), that included Ash removal apparatus at the very bottom, a furnace chamber 1/3 of the way up including hundreds of pipes for heat exchange (i.e. for boiling water, making steam), and at the top a variety of filters to capture particulates in the exhaust. I’ll guess this was a three seconds exposure:

Bremo B 418 Main Room

Elsewhere in the plant, I captured this view of just a tiny fraction of the pipes and plumbing that, along with grated floors and vast spaces, characterized the place. Probably a thirty seconds exposure in this dark spot:

Bremo C 515 “Pipefitter’s Nightmare”

I’ll close with an image obtained in or around 2014 at the United States Botanical Garden in Washington, DC, where I fell in love with the “Jungle” greenhouse that is central to the place. In this three-stories tall greenhouse, one can commune with a variety of lush tropical plants, even in the deep of winter, and witness the slow motion battle between the built environment and the imprisoned flora. This picture was taken with a Sputnik, a good bit after sunset – I like the interplay of just a little natural light in the background, with artificial lights in the foreground. I imagine about a ten or twenty second exposure.

USBG-1302

Two views from the “No Spectators” show at the Renwick Gallery

In 2018 we traveled to visit the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. Descriptions below in part taken from online sources:

No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man brought the large-scale, participatory work from this desert gathering to the nation’s capital for the first time. The exhibition took over the entire Renwick Gallery building and surrounding Golden Triangle neighborhood, bringing alive the maker culture and creative spirit of this cultural movement.

FoldHaus Art Collective’s Shrumen Lumen: The elements of this sophisticated, interactive cluster of fungi each has its own particular character responding to human interaction. As participants step on the footpads located beneath each cap, the mushrooms gently grow and “breathe.zzzzz’ In daylight the grouping appears ethereal white, while at night, it magically transforms with embedded LEDs that glow through the translucent outer skin to bring the installation to life.

Truth is Beauty by Marco Cochrane. Cochrane first sculpts his pieces by hand before constructing them from steel triangles at grand proportions. Built using a mold of the original clay sculpture, the version of Truth Is Beauty in the gallery is one-third the size of the fifty-five-foot tall figure that appeared at Burning Man in 2013.

Both images acquired with my Sputnik, about 30s exposure f22 I guess, on 100ASA Fuji RDPIII film.

Cedarcrest Inn Spirit Succubus

In spring of 2012 we had a holiday in Asheville, North Carolina, for cycling on the road and in the mountains.  It was beautiful.  Though warned about the ghost, we elected to stay at the historic Cedarcrest Inn, where we got the Romeo Suite.  Of course we tried to capture an image of the ghost, meeting with limited success using some long exposures in available light (thirty seconds!).  Shot with Sputnik.

Sarah gets a tatoo

 

Sarah was one of my more productive models back in the day, with whom I was able to create possibly the most difficult (and most erotic!) imagery of my career.  One day she let me know that she was getting a new tatoo on her back, so I invited myself over to get some snaps.  Shot with Sputnik, handheld I think.

 

BTS: Chuck Comes Across a Wood Nymph – St. Mary’s Wilderness

 

Chuck Holzner was a onetime contributor to the MF3d folios, and we occasionally worked together on a project.  Here we are in the St. Mary’s Wilderness, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, about five years ago?   He joined me and my model for a fairly strenuous hike to find some nice situations where we could photograph lovely Maia, who was a champ trooping along in the woods for several hours.  We were heavily laden with cameras and snacks and water!  He brought his sputnik, I brought my sputnik plus a TL120-55 on loan from John Thurston (many thanks!), plus a couple of digital cameras, and all the necessary tripods.  Thus armed, lots of silly pictures got made.

(by the way, the tag “BTS” stands for Behind The Scenes)

Liz 323

In the early aughts I worked numerous times with Liz, who was not just good looking, but quite a friendly jokester too.  At the time, I had this inflated vinyl chair sitting around in my studio, and every single time she came for a photo session, she would remark how much she liked it.  So finally, one day she came and again she said she loved the chair, so I asked her if she could show me how much she loved it, and could I photograph her loving it?   That’s how this session came to be.  Numerous really good images came out of the session, but probably my favorite one is this flub – the flash had failed to fire in synchrony with the shutters.  She had just gotten down on the floor to receive the chair, and teasing me, had starting moving with it just so (you know what I’m talking about), when I shot this image impromtu, really before I was ready.  All the subsequent images were well lit, but none showed this energy.  Sometimes the best images are visible and available for only a moment, and too much gear or technical complexity leaves them inaccessible… or too much thought and direction spoils them.

Shot with twin Hasselblads CM500 on a bar, electric twin release.