Alex and Molly Triptychs

For Caroline's birthday this year, I wanted to do something special involving the kids. She just got a promotion at work, including an upgrade to her very own office. With all that fresh wallspace, what's a guy with a camera to do? Right — start shooting. I decided to do a little photo essay of Alex and Molly. Some not-so-traditional portraits. So, I annoyed them for an entire weekend (more than usual) by following them around the house with my camera. I decided to attach my 50mm f/1.8 and do everything with that. I enjoy the discipline of using a single prime lens in that it forces me to conform to what the lens will allow (in my case, a 50mm turns into an 80mm with the 1.6 conversion factor for my Canon's sensor size). I also wanted very shallow DOF and the max aperture of 1.8 makes that very easy to accomplish. The three of Alex and the three of Molly were matted in a horizontal line in two separate frames. I was very pleased with the final product, and so was Caroline. Unfortunately, looking at them here, they lose a lot of the subtle tones and gradations. I still need to work on my processing so photos look decent on the web.

High and dry at the marina

I recently went poking around in some boxes looking for old negatives and contact sheets from school. Most of my favorite shots were taken with my Hasselblad 500 c/m. Unfortunately, my film scanner can't handle anything larger than 35mm.

This particular shot was taken in Monticello, Indiana. I was driving thru the area and noticed that this channel had been drained to make some repairs to a valve somewhere in the area. All the boats had to be floated out to Lake Shafer or pulled out altogether. I walked down the bank into the muck with my Nikon FE2 and Nikkor 28mm f2.8 lens and made a few images. I didn't stick around long for fear of losing my shoes in the mud! At the time, I had been shooting with Kodak Tech Pan quite a bit because I liked the high resolution it offered. However, I was developing it in diluted HC-110 instead of the recommended Tech Pan soup, so I always had to deal with very contrasty negatives. I tried to tone it down a bit but I still have a lot to learn about post-processing in Photoshop.