Old Houses in the Deserts of Los Angeles

Several years ago I made a pilgrimage down to Southern California. I’ve always had a love and hate relationship with the larger metro area that people typically just lump into the label of the greater Los Angeles. On the one hand the traffic is monstrous and frustrating in the best of times. The sprawl and the row after row after row of generic apartment buildings and flat six lane roadways just make me sad.

At the same time, despite the massive population in the area, it is shockingly easy to find places where one can be isolated and alone. It is simply a fact that Los Angeles, and by extension, Southern California, is a place of contradictions.

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Photographed with a Mamiya C330 TLR and Fomapan 100 medium format film.

I only brought one camera with me on this trip, my Mamiya C330 TLR. I also only brought one type of film with me, Fomapan 100. Predictably, the sun was incredibly bright and harsh the entire trip and I found myself working with the film at ISO 50 nearly the entire time. I’ve always found Fomapan to be a great film to pull down to a lower ISO. Diluting Rodinal just a little bit and developing with some slow agitation tends to yield very low contrast negatives, something I needed to counteract the harsh lighting.

Only an hour or so outside of the greater Los Angeles area there were a lot of abandoned houses, totally falling apart and sitting forgotten under the unforgiving sun. No trees around, no people, not even paved roads leading up to the front doors. It was eerie and quite and made for a great spot to expose this particular frame that has long been my favorite from the trip.

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Natural Light With A Hasselblad 500c/m

I’ve never been completely comfortable working with really harsh natural light. Living in the Pacific Northwest I’m constantly spoiled with nice and even overcast weather. Every photographer knows, especially photographers who work with film, that overcast lighting is incredibly easy to expose. Bright and harsh light on the other hand can be incredibly difficult. Sometimes if feels like you have dark shadows, bright highlights, and absolutely nothing in-between. Losing out on detail in your final exposure is an incredibly easy mistake to make.

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Photographed with a Hasselblad 500c/m and Ilford Delta 400 medium format film.

This image is one of those rare cases where I think I made some very harsh lighting work. It was a summer afternoon and the light coming in through my studio window was harsh to say the least. It was so harsh in fact that the entire scene felts sweltering and hot. I wanted to play with the shadows and the light the best I could and I thought it would be fun to let it swirl about the shapes of the model’s figure.

To retain as much detail as possible I exposed a roll of Ilford Delta 400 down to ISO 200 and pulled back my development by about 30%. This tends to work pretty well lowering contrast and keeping detail in both the shadows and the highlights. I also won’t deny I bracketed the heck out of each exposure, working with three frames per pose. One and a half stops over, one spot on, and one and a half stops under. Not surprisingly, the image I liked best was the spot on exposure. I should learn to trust my light metering skills…

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Portrait Holding a Yashica 124g TLR

I feel like it is probably inevitable that when one is working with another photographer that all the cameras are going to come out eventually. In this particular case we were both admiring our respective TLR cameras - for myself I was working with the Mamiya C330 TLR and she had the Yashica 124g. Both lovely machines in their own right with their own distinct advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes it really is just a treat to stare at someone through the ground glass.

It was a really gorgeous spring day when this photograph was made and I was glad I brought along a roll of Kodak Ektar color negative film to work with. Sometimes Kodak Ektar isn’t the greatest film stock when working with people. Skin tones tend to lean really far toward the red which doesn’t always work well. Here, the red-ish skin tones contrasted against all the green foliage in the background is perfectly fine though. Even welcome in some respects.

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Portrait in Natural Light

In my small living space I have a window that faces toward the west. It is by far the biggest window and for a very short window every year there is a period of time when the light coming through it is just stunning for about one hour a day. Depending on the weather this is typically around the end of April through the month of May.

It’s a soft light, yet very bright. It swoops down low toward the horizon and casts long shadows that require only the tiniest bit of diffusion. A sheer curtain is enough to do the trick. There is just enough space to make a nice head and shoulders portrait with the standard 80mm f/2.8 Planar on my Hasselblad 500cm. Most admirably, it is the kind of light were it is really hard to make a bad image when I’m using it.

I made this portrait last may using that lovely evening light coming through my western facing living room window. It was kind of an odd period of time. COVID was in full lockdown mode still, at least around the Portland area, and I had to be careful with who I was choosing to work with. I was incredibly grateful that even in the scariest and weirdest of times I was still able to get work done that I am proud of.

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Water Reflections On Sauvie Island

I suppose it does not make me unique in any way what-so-ever that I’m attracted to reflections.

Mirror images tend to be a common theme in photography. Whether it is making a self-portrait in an actual mirror, or working with the doppelgänger of a human body reflected in the water, my creative instincts kick into over drive when presented with the opportunity to capture it all on film.

This one was surprisingly tough to pull off and most of the exposures on this roll of film where unsuccessful. You’d never know it looking at this photograph, but the water was moving quite swiftly thanks to passing boats and ships on a clear but windy day. On most of the frames the reflection is far too distorted to be at all interesting. But hey, that is why one gets twelve chances on a roll of medium format film. Twelve chances and one is bound to turn out the way you want it to.

That was thankfully the case in this situation.

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