Three Greens

Marsh #1 - White Center

Two Birch

This was captured at the east end of the White Center baseball park. The telephoto was extended to about 270mm (35MM equiv.) and the aperture was F5 so the trees in the foreground are well separated from the background.

The sensor in my D-SLR is 4/3 format which gives more depth of field than a full frame 35mm but far less than my fixed-lens 12X zoom with a 1/2.5 sensor. When I first started shooting with the fixed-lens ultra zoom I was puzzled by this since I hadn't really gone to the trouble to figure on the impact of a sub-miniature sensor. After some thinking about it I recalled years ago working 4/5 view and 5/7 studio cameras which at times required F64 to get things into focus.

For technical treatment of depth of this issue see: Depth of Field.

The Parade Ground Fort Lawton 4/16/06

Two views from the parade ground at Fort Lawton. One view looks NW showing the one remaining building on the west side. I also dug out a shot from winter of '05 which shows the building up close. Another view looks east up toward the ridge where the officers quarters are still standing and the radar dome dominates the skyline. There used to be a whole row of buildings on the lower west side of the the parade ground but the government decided they were too much trouble to maintain and burned them down which opened up the view to the west but really abolished the historical look and feel of the place. Now it is just another park.


There used to be a rifle range south west of the parade ground with the firing toward the bluffs. Early in 1942 my father was at this fort to qualify with the 30-06 for the army. He achieved the top rating (expert ?) with the rifle but only marksman with the Colt .45. Then he was off to MIT for a one month crash course on Radar after which he was shipped off to Iceland to command a radar installation where he remained for the duration of the conflict. When I was running out here in the late '60s you could still find shell casings laying in the grass.

Hard Light on Elliott Bay - 04/16/06

Lighted Ship - Eliot Bay 04/16/06

Bearded Man - Pike Place 04/16/06

Passover

Photo taken at Fort Lawton (aka Discovery Park) on Sunday 4/16/06. This fine looking group of young people are standing at the view on the south bluff which looks over Eliot bay. This is a wonderful place. I used to run this trail when I was attending SPU in the late 60s. At that time the Indians were staging an occupation claiming that by treaty the land was rightfully theirs since the Fort was surplus federal land. I didn't follow the details but when all the smoke cleared the Indians got the short end of the deal (once again) the feds gave them a cultural center but not the land.

Black Beret - Pike Place early 70's

You can see more of this fellow under Black Beret.

By the Sea

Three Tree Point

Took these on the way home from Lincoln Park today. I am Looking south from the bluff just north of Seahurst Park in Shorewood. Three Tree Point is in the foreground and behind it is Point Robinson on Maury Island, if you click on the top photo you should be able to see the lighthouse at Point Robinson.

Green Trees and Bench - May 2005

Lincoln Park May 2005, see Empty Bench for winter scene.

More Okanagan Trip '72 - More "Bad Art"

This is another bad art post to remind you that I posted the best photos early on so you need to look in the archives to find them.

New Angkor Market - White Center

This is the first post in a series on White Center Washington. The New Angkor Market took the prize for the shop on main street most worthy of being photographed. It was a difficult project complicated by traffic which kept trying to get in my way and run me down. The physical dimensions of the subject required a lot of photos and sort of shoot around the store approach.

Eby's Prairie on Whidbey Island - August '72

Eby's Prairie on Whidbey Island just north of Fort Casey looking west toward Port Townsend and the Straight of Yuan De Fuca.

"Spring Training" a Happening - April 5, 2006

This series was inspired by a "happening" called "Spring Training" by Robert Rauschenberg in 1965.

The photo was taken on April 5, 2006 at Hicks Lake or Evergreen Highschool depending on your point of view. My cousin Brad and I used to jump motor cycles at Hicks lake in the late 60s. .None of this has anything to do with Spring Training but that is perfectly OK according to the anti-rules Robert Rauschenberg established for a "happening". A happening is anything you can get away with.

Okanagen September '72

This is more stuff from my "Andrew Wyeth" period. I put this in quotes because I am sure Andrew Wyeth would not have wanted to be associated with my photography. Andrew Wyeth didn't just paint feel good landscapes intended to arouse an emotional response in alienated urbanites who have vague warm fuzzy feelings about rural life. Andrew Wyeth had a mystical connection with his subjects about which he had something to say which more often than not was rather the opposite of warm and fuzzy. Anyway, I am not going to play art critic here.

My photos of decayed and ruined farms can be read as a commentary on what has happened in the last three generations of my own family. My grandfather Elmer was a homesteader in Montana who married another homesteader. Life was very hard. He worked with cattle and tamed wild horses (broke them). He worked as a mechanic, he ran a grain elevator, he worked and worked and worked and when the dust bowl came he was driven by hardship into exile once again from Montana to Idaho and then again to Spokane Washington. My photos of farm buildings and equipment sinking into ruin are echos from my past not just pretty pictures of farms.

Andrew Wyeth Period - Broken Wagon April '71

First off let me admit I am not very excited about this photograph but there was a time when I liked doing this sort of thing. When I was a kid my dad used to drive the family out to ghost towns on sunday afternoons. One of my favorites was Wilkinson northwest of Mt. Rainier. This town still exists because the road to the carbon river entrance to Mt Rainier goes down main-street. In the early '60s the ruins of the mine and coke ovens were in reasonably good condition. The town had a fine example of an Russian Orthodox Church, the first one I ever laid eyes on.

This photo was taken during my Andrew Wyeth period in the early 70's when I was taking a lot of heat from my artist friends for doing shots like this one. I was tolerant of my intolerant friends. My grandfather Elmer Fox had run into Charles Russell numerous occasions when Elmer was working cattle operations south of Judith Gap Montana. My father picked up a very nice print of a Charles Russell (embossed on canvas) when he was back for the Hedgesville Reunion in '87. I have the print in my office hanging across the room from Nighthawks by Edward Hopper.

I grew up with abstract expressionism, Pollock, Klein, Rothko, Newman, ... and you can see some of that in my landscapes but I also was a big fan of Hopper and Wyeth and the whole notion of trite subject matter was in my thinking silly. So we joked about it. I can remember on a cold clear sunny winter morning in '72 Steve Graham showing up at the Center for work after driving down the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a wonder full view across the sound of the morning sun on the snow covered Olympics. While we were sitting over coffee he described the view as breathtaking and the turned to David Hastings and said "bad art".

This shot was taken early in the morning on an April day of 1971 somewhere west of Ellensburg on the same road that takes you to Vantage and George (see Desert Photos) but 50 miles before you get into the most arid portions of the state . I was testing a Canon-P rangefinder, sort of a poor man's Leica, which I had picked up used. It was a nice old camera but I wasn't sold on rangefinders, had always used SLRs so I ended up dumping the camera after about two rolls of film. I posted it full frame to show how I had composed it with a rangefinder.

Desert Photos - June 1979

A two hour ride on the back of my cousin Craig's motorcycle will get you from the swamps of Seahurst park over the Cascade Crest and out to a landscape that looks somewhat like Mars down along the Columbia River. This Photo was take from somewhere near between Vantage and George Washington two towns on the rim of the gorge west and east of the river. I remember the wind was blowing (always is) and that I had my 20lb harmonically dampened pan head tripod with a lead counter balance mounted to the bottom of the post so I could shoot with my 500mm Nikkor mirror lens under adverse conditions. I also had my 300mm Nikkor along with me and I am not sure which was used for this photo. Probably the long lens, in '78 & '79 I was partial to the 500mm but always carried the 300mm and 200mm along.

More Bad Art - Okanagen September '72

This is a reminder to look in the archives for the more serious stuff. Another bad art photo, taken primarily to annoy my friends whose aesthetic sensibilities are easily outraged. This was take on a road trip with David Hastings in September '72 through the north cascades into the Okanagen territory of Eastern Washington. Photo was shot on Agfachorme 64 using a 28mm Nikkor lens.

C. Stirling Bartholomew & Ed Sherman 1972

C. Stirling Bartholomew is seen here looking out the window while his friend and colleague Ed Sherman studies. Photograph was taken at the Center (a.k.a Grapevine) where I was employed for two years after college.

The second photo was a snap shot taken in the summer of 1970 at the rummage sale which Dorothy Hurley and her team put on to help fund center. The house in the background was a small store which sold quality used items with the same purpose. CSB is in the foreground with the flag. The irony of the flag might escape some of the gen-x people. CSB and David Hastings were both conscientious objectors working off our two years of alternate service.

Lower Duwamish River - January 31, 2005

The Green River becomes the Duwamish River before it empties into Elliott Bay. The tide flats at the lower end are full of birds who pay no attention to the toxic waste hazards.

Collaboration - Dave Hastings 1974

Collaboration with Dave Hastings

This is another post in honor of the late David Hastings who was part of a small circle of coconspirators in the early '70s. The people in the oil painting are all from one roll of Kodak record film I shot at the Pike Place Market one day in July of '73. It was the only roll of record film I ever used. See the previous comments about shooting scrap for Dave Hastings and with Kathe Kushe

This photo was taken on March 1, 1974. I had been studying portraiture for two years when I took this photo including a paid apprenticeship under the award winning Merlin Parker. Looking at it now I can see a number of obvious mistakes like failing to obtain tonal separation between the subject and the background, which is complicated here by using an oil painting for the background.

The camera was A Mamiya Universal Press with a 150mm lens and a 6X7cm film back loaded with Ilford HP4. I was trying out a few rolls of Ilford after shooting almost nothing but Tri X for hundreds of rolls. These negatives came out thin (under exposed) but printable. I had a habit of shooting Tri X slightly over, say a third stop depending on the contrast of the subject and then developing in D76 at 68f for six mins rather than nine to get a soft negative and then printing it on Kodak #3 paper. Hard negatives were a royal pain to print. My notes tell me I developed this HP4 for 7 mins which is probably short of the specified time. The negatives have a nice tonal range in the mid tones but the blacks are blocked up and the negatives look overall kind of thin.

One reason I didn't shoot much Ilford 6cm roll film was the flimsy film base. Tri-X had a nice thick film base which was easy to mount on a spool for processing but Ilford was so flexible that mounting it was a difficult process. I didn't really find Ilford HP4 a major improvement over Tri-X which was a wonderful film.

Fauntleroy Ferry

Why so many photos of ferries? Take a look at a map of western Washington and you will get the point. If you want to go west from where I live you can proceed for about 400 yards and then you will need a boat unless you want to get wet. This is true from Olympia on the south end of the Puget Sound to well up into Canada. There is only one bridge way down in South Tacoma and unless you want to drive many miles out of your way to take that bridge you will need to take a boat trip.

I can see the Fauntleroy to Vashon run from where I live. The sights and sounds of ferries and sea gulls and mountains and water are images that represent life in Seattle.

Stairs to Post Ally - Pike Place '73

This is one set of stairs that leads from the main level of the market down to Post Ally. There are several others. Post Ally ends under the market, or more precisely in the market. It enters a tunnel and takes a right turn that brings you up a cobble stone lane to first avenue. This is a little scrap of Seattle history that predates the automobile.

Razor Haircut - Pike Place '73

Four Old Men - Pike Place '73