Sermon on the Mount

I was recently searching through some old folders of my images that I have stored on my external hard drive.  I came across this image and was surprised that I haven't seen it since the day I took nearly ten years ago.  I am certain that I must have many more interesting images lost in the numerous folders on the six or seven external hard drives I have sitting on my desk.  The photographic image that is stored digitally is prone to being lost in the many folders created and to storage equipment that has become outdated.  I have hundreds of DVDs with many images that I have made over the years but my new Mac computer no longer has a DVD drive.  Cellphones are the camera most used by young people today.  Pictures are taken and uploaded to social media sites that have a lifecycle of a few moments and then are lost in a place we call cyber space.  The printed photograph is fast become a thing of the past.  Think how important the recorded document has been to learning about past civilizations.  In our current digital culture we are the most recorded and documented people to have ever lived, but the future generations may not find much preserved documentation of our time because of they way we store it.  The family photo album has been lost to our desire to store everything digitally.  When I look at the few old photographs of my grandparents taken in the early nineteen hundreds I have a great appreciation that they were made and survived the many years.  I find value in the printed image and make it a practice to print the images that inspire me photographically, as well as print the small family photos for future generations to have a recored document of their family history.

Terlingua Cemetery

This image is from a series I have been working on with nighttime photography.  This image is comprised of two images blended together in Photoshop.  With the first image I use a light painting technique to light the crosses and grave sites.  This exposure was around five minutes giving me enough time to navigate around with my flashlight and paint in the areas of the scene I wanted lit.  It was a full moon night and the stars were not visible.  I made a separate night sky exposure of just the open sky on a later date when the sky had plenty of stars.  The first exposure on the full moon night gave plenty of detailed to the distance mountains, giving depth to the image.  Making these kind of images takes some planning.  I usually scout out the location in the daytime to plan my composition and lighting for when I am there in the dark.  Once I am at the location at night I first make a test exposure at a high ISO to see the composition and make any adjustments that are needed.  I use a Sony mirrorless camera and with the live view and manual focus features, it makes determining my focus point fairly easy.  Night photography can be fun with some proper planning and being carful when moving around in the dark.  If you have any questions about this technique contact me and I will try to answer your questions. 

Mission Church-San Francisco de Asis

I made this image in 1986 using my view camera and Tri-X film.  I recently made a scan of the negative and seeing the image brought back many memories of my days of using a large film camera.  I enjoyed the slow process of working with a view camera and time setting up and evaluating the light and composition. It took years of practice to master the process of working with large format equipment.  I remember the day I made this image. The sun had set and the last few minutes of daylight gave a soft glow to adobe structure of the church.  It was a calm and quiet atmosphere as I worked in the fading light and some of that comes through in the final image.  I had seen a photograph of this church made by Paul Strand that he made in 1931, and it had a lasting impression on me.  In my early years of photography I would spend countless hours at the library studying the works of the early masters in photography, their work had a major influence on my style of photography.