Love shooting on the beach. Whether it's surfers in the water or people having fun on the sand. Speaking of sand, getting grit in the camera, lens, and tripod legs is a real risk you run. See those two fuzzy spots in the upper right corner? Bet they started showing up after a lens change. Ouch.

Shooting old school! 50mm lens, B&W .jpg images. Wow.
It's always been recommended that photographers just starting out spend a lot of time with just one camera, one lens, and even one type of film, developer, and paper. The idea is to remove the equipment from the process. To learn to pre-visualize every image as you see it in the viewfinder, right through to the finished print.

I'm thrilled to see that this approach still works, and that through the magic of the digital process pre-visualization is still possible. That these images look exactly as I imagined them in my mind's eye is hugely satisfying.

Been looking at a lot of '60s and '70s B&W photography lately...Winogrand, Friedlander, Bullock. It's a pure way of seeing. And of course I was doing the same thing just a decade later. Didn't shoot color for many years. Now I 'see' in color, so it's more of a stretch sometimes. But, I found that after days of looking at B&W the transition was much easier. Fun.

Had a lot of fun just casually shooting over the weekend. Family was in town, no tripod, no bag, just a camera around my neck some of the time. Night and twilight shooting used to 'be my thing' back when we said such things, and it was really fun to just shoot around.
The image below was taken from the car, with a 24-105mm f4 lens, 125th sec, wide open at 3200ISO. Would love to have had this kind of quality at 3200 back in the day. :-)

This shot was even more of a 'one-off'. So dark I honestly couldn't see what was going on, but the results are magical. 1/3 sec wide open at 6400ISO. Wow.

Neither one rises to the level of 'high art', but sure was fun!

If so, I probably have a killer shot of you!
Everything is posted on my photo sharing site: http://chrisstump.smugmug.com
Enjoy!

One of those flat light afternoons on the Potomac river yesterday. The morning was glorious, but I alas was not able to get outside until later.

I set forth, fearing the worst but strapping on the 5D anyway.

And there you are, white balance and some lens correction to the rescue, and some very nice images.

It's always fun to get out and shoot.

[Canon 5DMKII, ISO 400, 85mm f1.8, 1/3000th at f4]

Great article recently on the Literate Lens blog here: http://wp.me/p25Qfq-4D

One of Magnum's premier darkroom printers is backed up with traditional fibre paper printing orders from archives of the likes of Cartier-Bresson and Capa.

Boy does this take me back. I was printing black and white in my parent's basement in Junior High, and color a couple of years later. Of course, I ended up starting a commercial color lab years later in which we did every process except Kodachrome [K-14] because it was so cost prohibitive...for instance, Kodak required a certified Kodachrome engineer be on-site 24x7 before they'd even sell you the chemistry, or so the story went.

Anyway, we did C-22 and E-6 film processing from 16mm Minox up to 8x10 sheet film, and RA-4, CibaChrome, and B/W enlargements up to 30x40 inches.

All of the custom printing was done using fairly traditional enlargers and easels, except we did add in some 'smart' enlarger heads over the years. The Durst AC800 was an amazing machine, and sped up testing from an average of 3 tests before final, to often times just one test. Given around 15 mins through the paper processor this was a huge time saver. We seldom created repeatable 'recipes' for prints as the Magnum printer did, but this was because most of our print jobs were one-off for a customer, and we moved on to the next job. For my own prints of course I would make notes.

Add in dry mounting, matting, lamination, and One-Hour processing capabilities and we were a busy lab. Out front we had glass counters full of cameras, bags, tripods, frames, and all the traditional gear.

Fast-forward to today, and it's just amazing to me how one-of-a-kind our film images were. I heard of artists burning their negs after so many prints had been made, in order to make existing copies rare and more valuable. Heck, after a dozen moves in as many years I'd be hard-pressed to put my hands on more than 1% of the images I've made on film, and many of those in scratched or bent condition. However, with proper backup and archiving techniques images made today should be available in original condition for years to come.

It's a great time to be making images!

How appropriate...listening to Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" while driving to spend Christmas week in the deep, dark woods of central Maine. The family met first in Boston to see "The Nutcracker" at the BSO. We walked all around the ol' stompin' grounds, and I did some night shooting.

5 degrees this morning in northern VA. A normal winter day in New England perhaps, but it's closed schools farther south today.

Has me day-dreaming of coming summer days on Second Beach, or maybe sailing off-shore.

Can't wait!

[5D mkII, 24-105L]

Fun food, punch, and great new friends at a homestead in Maryland...

These .jpg images were captured with my old war-horse pocket camera, a 7+ year old Lumix. The good points are a relatively high pixel count for the year and a Leica lens.

Cons, of course, are the itsy-bitsy sensor size which limits well, everything, and the lack of an optical finder.

Still looking for the digital replacement for my beloved M3.

[Lumix FX-7]

Christmas week without power is an interesting experience. You’re reminded that the most important inventions of the last century were indoor plumbing and domestic hot water.