John Grade – Middle Fork at the Renwick “Wonder” Exhibition 2016

middle-fork-302_MFT72

Last year we went to an exhibition of installation artists called “Wonder” at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC.  Several artists made very interesting pieces for this show.  Using hundreds of thousands of pieces of reclaimed, old-growth cedar, John Grade built an intricate structure – Middle Fork – based on plaster casts taken of a massive, old-grown hemlock tree in the Cascade Mountains.  At Wonder, I shot cha-cha’s with my Sigma DP1-M and a Sputnik.  Tripods were not allowed, but I was incredibly lucky: each room in the Renwick had a fairly broad chair rail along the wall, wide enough to give good support to the Spud.  The exposures were typically 15 to 30 seconds.

Great Wall of China

This is the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall located 45 miles from Beijing.   It is one of the most thoroughly restored segments of the wall.

Photographed with a TL-120 using Provia 100F pushed one stop.    No tripod, I get good results with this camera using a waist-level finder and letting it hang around my neck.

Bagan, Myanmar

Bagan is famous for its thousand year old Bhuddist temples.   Many of these belonged to wealthy families who built them next to their houses.   The houses were made of wood and are long gone, but the temples remain.

Photographed with twin Mamiya C-220s using 135mm lenses, December 2015.  Prove 100F pushed one stop.  I used a tripod.   It was challenging hauling this huge rig around Myanmar and my family got a bit impatient with me at times, but it was worth it to get shots like this one.

Corn Dogs and Lemonade

Corndogs and Lemonade low

CNE midway

 

I spent a whole afternoon scouting angles for shooting time exposures at the Canadian National Exhibition midway. After I had shot two rolls of my well planned scenes, I had one frame left over. I quickly looked around for a nice angle and took this image to finish the roll. It was the best one of the lot. I feel quite fortunate that two spotlights on the corn dog stand were burnt out. Either one would have made this shot impossible, or at least very diminished.

TL-120, Provia 100f, f22, four second exposure (I’m pretty sure).

 

Charles Bridge, Prague

Hyper stereo image

Hyper stereo image

Some of you may get a feeling of deja vu with this one. It is almost identical to a shot I took with my TL-120  a few years back. This time I returned with my Lubitel rig to get a hyper shot of the wonderful and famous Charles Bridge in Prague, which I was just itching to do. The TL-120 image did not show enough depth for me. This one does. I was thinking about putting both images in the folio for comparison, but I would rather show some variety. I prefer this image to the original.

Provia 100f, but I have no idea what the aperture was, but the shutter speed was 1/125th. I never change that, lest I lose my matching shutter speeds.

 

South Bohemia Town

South Bohemia Town

Southern Czech Republic

We were on our way to a different beautiful historic town when we chanced upon this wonderful view. We stopped by the river bank and I set up my Lubitel rig and shot this hyper (about 16″ separation) using my trusty one-cable-release-in-each-hand synchronization method. As usual, it stopped a bird in flight. Provia 100f and almost certainly sunny 16 on this one.

Aspen Abstract

AspenAbstract_5_225x221This was a ‘proof of concept’ experiment in creating an abstract 3D image. It isn’t all I had hoped it would be, but it isn’t discouraging me either! Taken with the TL-120. Don’t recall the settings (I’m writing this after the slide was sent in, so answers could be on the mount!). Probably something like a quarter or eighth of a second exposure. Camera is swept down, hopefully level, and the shutter pressed when already in motion. I also don’t know if this image is the same one as the slide in the folio, but it’s in the same spirit.

Foliage (aftermath)

We have a number of trees on our property.  Last year we were very busy with our jobs, with Jet, late summer and fall, and so we kept having to postpone raking leaves… or we just didn’t feel like it.  foliage-aftermath_MFT-folio28AThe more they accumulated, the less we’d feel like it!  Sometime in December, we just had to do it.  It became a huge chore taking us the better part of two days.  I think we hauled two dozen TARPfulls to the curb, I bet close to a ton of leaves, no joke.  Only a 3D picture can properly convey the mass, the heaps and mountains of leaves collected.

Shot with Sputnik, f22 probably, 1 sec. on Provia I guess.