Box Fan

This reminds me of some photographer, Minor White, perhaps.
Look close, you can see things through the windows.
The next two posts show you the context.

Red & White

Nikon FTN

What's wrong with this camera? Two things, It has a through the lens (TTL) metering system thats what the "TN" in FTN stand for and you can see it. It is the big fat box sitting on top of the camera. Second, the back that covers the film plane falls off in your hand instead of being on a hinge. That makes it easy to mount motor drives and bulk film backs but makes it a pain in the neck when you want to load a regular 35mm canister. You need a third hand to hold the back.

Through the lens metering systems are for hackers. I am back carring my Gossen Multi-Beam with me at all times. I leave my DSLR set on manual exposure and use the Gossen for incident readings were possible. The only case where this is a problem is extreamly long lenses with unreliable light transmission like my early Nikors 300mm f4.5 and 500mm Mirror. Whats the problem with TTL metering? It is dumb. No matter how smart the product literature tells you thier metering system is it will make dumb mistakes. I have never met a metering system that knew how to locate 18 percent reflectance or middle gray. The current meters can guess where the whites are and can tell you if the whites are blocked up (a nice feature) and they can guess where the shadows are and tell you were they are blocked up (another nice feature) but theyj cannot tell you when you should sacrifice the shadows to save the hightlights or when you might like to let the hightlights burn out. In other words the the best current TTL metering systems are still far inferiour to a handheld meter in the hands of a photographer who knows the zone sytem and how to use it.

Red Bars

Two Windows

The texture here reminds me of Jasper Johns.

Two Windows with Flags

9640 16th SW - White Center

This guy insisted that I take his photograph.

Security Light

Room 303

The Blue Door

I have been reading about Robert Oppenheimer and "The Bomb" which has been a source of inspiration for some of these recent posts.

Nighthawks Architecture

Speaking of Hopper, what is wrong with this picture? All that glass and no superstructure to speak of looks like a building that would not be found in the real world. If you look close at the far left end of the room you will see what looks like a post in the corner but even then there is a lot of roof resting on that post.

Vent

More Homage to Edward Hopper

High Tech

Stadium Personnel Only

five plus one with two empties

Gas & Electric

Security Tape

Keep Kids

de Kooning, Kline or Rothko?

Who does this remind you of?

Wired

Belltown Billiards

Single Service

Double Service

White Apartments

White Garage

Barge Slip - Elliott Bay

open other end

Ballerina Summer 1978

Ballerina 1978

This girl was about fifteen years old when these were taken. She was soon on her way to NYC to dance for Robert Joffrey and after that to be a prima ballerina in some major city in the south, perhaps Atlanta but its been so long I don't remember.

Seven Tug Boats

Tied Up on the Duwamish

Tied Up on the Duwamish

Shameless photoshop manipulation on this one. Looks ok at low magnification but the artifacts look pretty bad at 50% or higher. The dramatic sky was in the original image, not imported from somewhere else but I had to created a separate sky layer and use levels to set the black and white reference points as well as moving the middle gray up toward the high end to increase the contrast. This is all standard photoshop stuff for dramatic skies and in my humble opinion the result is a visual cliche.

To get the contrast looking good on main subject I ended up sacrificing the front end of the inside tug boat which was almost black. The resulting image is a little confusing, looks like a tug boat with two cabins. Look at the previous photo Tied Up at the Silos and you will see the front end of the second tug. I "fixed" the problem with another layer for the front end of the inside tug. See below. You will need to click it to enlarge the image to see the difference.




Working with the Olympus E-500, I do not shoot with the preset Olympus "vivid light" turned on, I set it to "normal". I set the ev compensation to -.7 assuming that I am using the TTL metering. I also carry an ancient Gossen Multi-beam which allows me take incident readings. Lately I have been leaving the exposure mode dial set to manual and controlling the bracketing with the exposure dial. This works for subjects that are not moving.

I prefer to shoot slightly soft negatives. This is a hang over from my early B&W work. In high contrast lighting I would shoot Tri-X exposed at 320-400ASA with half stop bracketing and develop in D76 68f 6 1/2 to 7 minutes which produced a slightly soft negative. If there was significant material in zone two then a third stop over (ASA 320) would help preserve it while under development would compress the highlights. The advantage of using Tri-X or Ilford HP4 was the long toe on the density curve. This translated into zone two shadows with detail that you could see if you didn't push your highlights too far up with long development times.

A soft digital negative (Olympus calls it "normal") is just a little bit flat which insures that your highlights will not block up and your zone two shadows will not be lost. A negative like this will nearly always require a levels adjustment but it is far better to do this later than to try and get your digital camera to do it right the first time and risk bringing home an image you cannot fix.

Three Cranes - Lower Duwamish River

Pully

Duwamish Plant

Tied Up at the Silos

Two Tugs at Silos - May 06, 2006

This was take this afternoon on the lower Duwamish river.

Yankee Clipper Shore Base

The Flag - May 2, 2006

This was taken across the street from the New Angkor Market in White Center.