American Southwest Days, 7-14

After leaving Death Valley, I drove to Mesa, AZ where I stayed with my sister, did some work on my in-laws house, bought an iPhone, and took a few photos. While in AZ, a Shen Hoa 4x5 camera and Calter N 210mm lens found their way to my doorstep. I can tell you, I was excited.
After using the Crown Graphic I was surprised by a few things, how ugly but amazingly easy the old Graphic was too use compared to my new Shen Hoa, and how much I instantly loved my new camera. It is a work of art all on its own. 

After a few days of anticipation, I finally had a chance to take the camera out. I drove out to Saguaro State Park, AZ and hiked for a few hours, not really knowing what I would find. I came over a little knoll, and was greeted by this view and decided "this is it". It seemed like a good fit for the 210mm Calter. It's a short telephoto on a 4x5. It equates to about a 70mm on a 35mm camera.

Weaver's Needle and Saguaro. Shen Hoa 4x5 with Calter N 210mm Lens. Shot with TriX320 b&w film.

All and all, I am pretty darn happy with this picture, and also recognize it as a learning experience. Some opportunities have to do with camera operation, and some just with photography composition.

What do I like.
  1. I made it. Completely manual. With a wooden field camera.
  2. I metered a difficult shot perfectly and got dead on exposure. The highlights are held and the shadows aren't blocked.
  3. The detail, sharpness and contrast are out of this world. (you can't really tell that from looking online)
  4. It will forever remind me of a completely awesome 10 days I spent with my family decompressing from 4 years of pharmacy school.

What I can learn.
  1. Better composition. What is that stupid light colored branch in the lower right hand corner and why did I lop off the top of that cactus? Other minor things are I don't like the way the mountains look as they leave the right side of the frame. I need to remember that telephoto lenses will foreshorten and flatten perspective. This three cacti look like they are similar distances from the camera, but the one on the right is about 20' and the middle cactus is about 45' and the left is 30'. I wanted more of a feeling of standing "among the cactus".
  2. Planning. From the time I set up and focused to the time I snapped was over an hour. When I set up, the cacti were side lit - top to bottom - and were much more interesting. I was thinking I would take this picture a little later than I did (so the sky and foreground would be closer in exposure), but then realized the shadows were creeping up my cactus.  I had to shoot or I was going to lose all the interest in my foreground element. 
  3. Making pictures with sheet film is hard. I exposed a lot of 4x5 negatives on this trip. You are not going to see very many because most of them had technical difficulties, ranging from incorrect loading of film, to double exposing, to forgetting the dark slide so there was no exposure. You get the idea. I now have a checklist.
  4. B&W is all about luminosity. That sky was pretty amazing in color - bleh in B&W. 
The other thing I learned when I was in AZ - Barry Goldwater was an amazing photographer. 

Next up - The Grand Canyon and Sedona!




 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CPAC Soccer Game

Image
I was finally able to attend a soccer game and watch Kathryn play. It was so much fun to watch Kathryn and the other girls play so aggressively. They have completely dominated the first two games, outscoring their opponents 9-1. I was surprised on how big the pitch was. Those girls were running! Kathryn is playing on a U-11 team. About half the girls are playing up from younger age groups because our club is brand new and just starting out. Watching the younger girls play tough on (sometimes much) bigger girls was inspiring.  The team's coach, Ian Hill, is really quite different from other youth sports coaches. He coaches with Love. Sounds corny, right? It's not touchy-feely namby-pamby stuff. He is teaching the girls accountability to your teammates, coaches, and parents because you love them. He makes them run at practice until its uncomfortable (maybe even some tears) because he wants them to know what it feels like in a game to keep going when you think you can't run
Read more

Choosing where to live.

Image
Not knowing where we will be next year is starting to take its toll. On me, on my family, probably on my performance at work.  I obsess about it. "Where do we want to live?" I have my list. My goal is to find a community that maximizes the number of things on that list. Polly has a list, but it is much shorter, or contains secret elements that I don't know. Her list, as far as I can tell is: 1. Access to grandbabies. 2. Church members in adequate numbers that we don't practice our faith on an island, or in a fishbowl. That is a short list. My list is more complicated. It has lots of items, and the those items change in relative importance as the seasons of the year, and my life, change. I like the outdoors- that has always been and will always be true. I find that I get depressed fairly quickly if my senses are deprived of the outdoors. The sound of the wind through the trees, the smell of woodsmoke and pine, the simultaneous sensation of a warm sun on my bac
Read more

EIGHT

Image
Purple Mountains and an Emerald Lake I am just now starting to go back through the photos from my backpacking trip through Glacier from a year ago. When I first got back, I was too miserable and sore to even think about it, then I got busy. Then I forgot. Now I'm procrastinating school work. This was such an amazing trip. I wonder how people used to do it, slogging along with some external frame, canvas pack that weighed a ton and absorbed  water and if I had to guess, it probably didn't even hold every thing you needed. I used an Arcteryx Bora 90 which kept my stuff dry, organized and on my back. In fact, the only thing wrong with my pack was it was too big. You never want to be the guy with a 90 liter pack when everyone else has a 60 liter pack.
Read more