Category: Lighting

A Case with Character

Timothy Price6 Comments

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I’ve been searching for a reasonably priced case for my 4X5 view camera. Most of the cases made for 4X5 view cameras that would fit this model were more than double what I paid for the camera and lens for cases in good condition, and $100 or more for cases that were pretty old and beat up. After lots of searching I found the above instrument case that had the right dimensions for $25 with free shipping. I got a call from the reception desk that I had a package that is really heavy up front. I was wondering what came in that would be heavy. I walked up front to find the case, and when I picked it up it is was very light. I asked Beth about it and she said that the delivery guy wrestled it in through the front door on a dolly, and then used both hands and his legs to slide it off the dolly like it weighed a ton. Either he was paying attention to the “Delicate Unit Handle with Care” sign by the handle on the lid, or he was a drama queen. Besides being a great price, very sturdy and light weight, this case has been all over the world with stickers from airports in China, Columbia, Chile, and the Dominican Republic that we were able to easily identify. With a little cutting on the foam, it’s a perfect fit for the camera with room to add compartments for film holders, dark cloth and other accessories.

The photo below is a 4X5 view camera selfie of sorts.

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All Your Chair Are Belong To Us

Timothy Price4 Comments

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Every time Laurie gets up from of her chair at the end of the table, Guildenstern gets in it. Once she moves Guildenstern off her chair and sits back down, René bombs his way over to her, flying from chair to chair (three chairs in all) to get across the counter and finally onto the table and over to Laurie.  I didn’t have the best lighting for capturing René in flight in these shots, so I set up a flash and tried to get him to do is chair to chair flight again, but he would have nothing to do with flying to the chair with that new fangled light source off to the side of it.

I adapted today’s title from the video “All Your Base Are Belong To Us”, a video that goes back to 2001. The title of the video was taken from a line in the 1991 introduction to an adaption of the arcade game “Zero Wing” that had really bad Japanese-to-English translation. Around our house, whenever you get up from a chair, a cat or a bird is likely to occupy it because to them “all your chair are belong to us!”

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Christo Style Construction

Timothy Price2 Comments

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When I saw the old Audio Express building that is being remodeled into some kind of restaurant all wrapped up in plastic, I thought of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who are well known for wrapping islands, trees, rivers and creating other large wrapped environmental installations. We heard Christo speak many years ago when we were art students. I don’t remember much of what his talk was on, but I’ve always been impressed with his work. The construction workers created a nice piece of art, wrapping the building out of necessity to keep the fresh plaster from freezing. They didn’t understand what I saw in the plastic wrapped building that was worth photographing.

On the other side of the parking lot, the strings of red chiles and surroundings had a “wrapped” look of their own through my telephoto lens.

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Route 66 and All That

Timothy Price12 Comments

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The last time I photographed the Route 66 Diner, I believe three years ago now and the wall at the entrance off Central Ave. (old Route 66) didn’t have all the old signs and Route 66 memorabilia nailed to it. The mess of signs makes for an interesting collage under the distorting eye of my 17mm lens.

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Ghetto Scanning

Timothy Price8 Comments

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I processed a batch of 4X5 negatives I took of the Sandias and a railroad bridge with my 4X5 view camera over the past few weeks. Since I don’t have a scanner that is made to scan 4X5 negatives, I did “ghetto scanning” of the negatives by making a film holder out of a sheet of card stock, placing the holder and a negative on my old Epson 1260 scanner, placing a sheet of paper over the holder and negative, and holding a lamp with a 25 watt light bulb over the paper the negative is under as a back light while scanning the negative. The scanner is set for reflective scanning, so it doesn’t quite focus on the negative with a backlight, but the process sort of works, giving the resulting images a vintage look.

Since I’m still learning how to process 4X5 film using a daylight processing tank, when I first pulled the negatives out of the tank after the final rinse, they were purple in the middle. Oops! I hadn’t fixed them quite long enough, and I needed to agitate the tank more during the fixing process. So the negatives went back into the tank for another round of fix with more aggressive agitation. After  another round of hypo-clearing agent and another rinse, all the purple was gone, but the double round of fixing left the negatives a bit uneven.

Then there’s the issue that the lamp I’m using for the “ghetto scanning” doesn’t fully cover the negatives, so I get bright edges on the images in the resulting scans. I did a little “burning” around the edges in Photoshop to even things out, which worked a pretty well on some images, and didn’t make much difference on others.

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Cat

Timothy Price9 Comments

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Rosencrantz stepped on my iPhone that was laying on the counter next to my computer. He activated Siri, which asked him what he wanted. He meowed, and when I looked at the phone Siri had brought up the Wikipedia for cat. I tried to photograph it with Rosencrantz stepping on the phone, but I got too much glare of the phone’s surface, so I had to prop the phone up against my coffee cup. Rosencrantz still wanted to step on it, and stuck around for the photo. Rosencrantz is also a bit of a magical cat as he can apparently go through walls. We’ve let him out and then all of a sudden he’s back in and vice versa. It the second photo I got him half way in and out of the screen.

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