Miscellaneous Art
Click on the thumbnails to view the enlargements.
This is a portrait of a guy named Richard Larkin. I was shooting with some guys
in London (including Chris Ennis, and apparently one of them expressed an interest in shooting a guy
with a beard. So one of the other guys came up with Richard. I shot the
photo on Ilford Delta 3200, and for some reason the negs turned out thin, which is
why this picture is so contrasty. We worked at Bruce Fairfax's studio in
London, and he took care of most of the lighting. This photo was printed by Melissa at
The
C Lab at 650 Broadway in Manhattan. She's quite good, so bring her some
stuff if you're in the area.
This is a photo taken in New York's Times Square. The print is awesome.
The blacks are black but there's still shadow detail (in the building in the
background on the right) and the floodlit areas aren't blown out (look at the
enlargement to see what I mean). You'd never believe that this is, in
fact, a scan from a one-off Polaroid T-672 print shot on a 30-year-old Polaroid
180 camera.
This photo was shot on Polaroid T-56 Sepia instant film. It's a one of a kind 4x5
image! So what is the thing pictured? It's the Lightware case that I bought to
haul my flash heads around in. Not much of a photographic subject, I'll admit, but I
wanted something to shoot with the Sepia film, and it was there, so I shot it. I
like the photo quite a bit even though it's really ordinary. Unfortunately I don't think
Polaroid makes T-56 anymore. My box says "Limited Manufacture Film."
The photo on the left is my first photo with my new Arca Swiss Discovery 4x5 monorail camera. It was
shot on XP2 (non-Super), which I had developed and printed at a lab in Pittsburgh, where
the photo was taken. (I don't have the hardware to develop or print my own 4x5 at this
point.)
The photo on the right was actually taken before the first photo, but I didn't print it for a few months. It's the side of the chapel near the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh.
I recently purchased a fan to blow hair around and thought that I'd shoot some photos of
it. These were both shot on my Olympus OM-4T on Ilford HP5 Plus developed in Microphen.
The grain is pretty good for an "old technology" ISO 400 film. The lighting
pattern that you see in the second photo was due to my use of a parabolic reflector. The
guy in the first photo is yours truly. :-)
An airplane at Newark International Airport, New Jersey, USA. I didn't develop this roll
of Tri-X myself. I sent it out to a lab, and they soaked it overnight in Uncle Bob's
Grain-Enhancing Developer From Hell. The negs were so dense that I could have made a sun
shade out of them. Fortunately the photos were taken on a grey, rainy day, and the grain
enhanced the somber feeling.
A still-life of my Olympus OM-4T system. I just saw it lying on the table and decided to
take a picture of it (after a little tweaking). I used T-Max 100 in my Bronica SQ-Ai. This
is probably the sharpest, most detailed print I've ever made.
This is a photo of a sculpture with a diameter of about six inches. The sculptor, who
fashioned it out of metal (brass?) in her apartment in the former Ex-Lax building in
Brooklyn, responded to a Usenet ad I'd posted and asked me to shoot some pictures of her
work. It was a bit of a challenge given the limited depth of field available; I had to
focus on a plane 1/3 of the way from the front of the sculpture to the back and stop all
the way down to f/22. I shot this on Tri-X since this was shot in the middle of the period
during which I was using Tri-X for everything.
I had to argue with overzealous Port Authority security drones in order to take these
pictures. The exposure was something like 15 or 30 seconds, so of course I needed a
tripod, and the PA regards anyone that sets up a tripod near the WTC as an evil
professional photographer looking to make money off their precious building without their
permission. I took the pictures with a Minolta 5xi and a Sigma 18-35mm zoom at the wide
end. The second photo gives me vertigo!
This is a photo of a church in Cambridge, England. Anyone in the world can wander in and
shoot an identical photo, so give it a try! I used a Contax RX and a 25/2.8 lens. The shot
isn't pin-sharp because I had no tripod and the exposure was longish (1/8 or 1/15), but
you probably can't tell from the scan.
A recent photo taken at the harbor at Leigh-on-Sea when I was out there visiting Ashley Redding. (Contact him if you're in
Southeast England and need a good picture taken!) Probably every photographer who has
visited since this boat was beached (presumably some time ago) has taken this picture. My
version was shot with a 20-year-old Contax 139 Quartz and a 50/1.4 lens. I originally
printed it as an 8x10, but the large areas of nothingness on the top and bottom of the
photo bothered me, so I cropped it to the panorama format that you see here. This was the
first decent print that I made at the Drill
Hall.
After writing the above, I discovered that due to the tides, pretty much every boat in the Leigh-on-Sea harbor is beached twice a day, so this boat might be off sailing even as you read this!
I wasn't sure whether or not to include this as art. It's a photo of the Winter Garden at
the World Financial Center in New York City. The palm trees are real. They keep dying and
having to be replaced. This picture was taken a few years ago, so they very well may have
given up on them by now. I made a real effort to make this photo symmectrical, which was
harder than it looks because I was shooting with a Nikon 35Ti compact camera.
Last updated November 19, 2001