step aside, messr. cartier-bresson

After much delay, finally located a relatively inexpensive scanner with an attachment capable of handling medium format negatives (an Epson 1650). I’ll be adding images to the gallery over the next month, although at some point I’ll need to put together a much better layout to organize them. Actually, at that point I’ll probably need to redesign the entire site.

Still, my log files tell me people are coming to the site even in its current iteration, and at the moment I barely have to post (thank goodness I gave up sleeping and going to the bathroom!), much less to rack my brain for feebly ‘creative’ design ideas. So you’re stuck with the site as it stands. Shut up and enjoy the pictures.

vaseline

A friend is curating an upcoming NYU exhibit of young New York photographers reflecting on the city in the wake of September 11th, and asked that I put together two or three prints for the show. Flattered, I accepted before realizing I had no idea what I might photograph. After spending about a week racking my brain, I finally reached a mental image of what I wanted: crowd scenes, the city’s hustle and bustle, but viewed through a dreamlike haze in darkly exposed black and white. I blew through several rolls and hours and hours of darkroom time experimenting with different techniques that might yield what I wanted, but none of the prints looked right to me. On a lark, I decided to buy a very cheap filter, cover it with a thin layer of Vaseline, and shoot a few rolls through it. It came out perfectly.

I’m still trying to decide which shots to use for the show, but as soon as I do, I’ll scan and post them. As several visitors have pointed out, the newest picture in my gallery is about six years old, and at that point I was mainly shooting color wildlife and nature photography (to sell through a stock photo agency) rather than the black and white portraiture and street photography I mainly do now. I’ve been meaning to add more recent images to the site for a while, but good medium format scans are expensive and difficult to come by. Time to bite the bullet and get some scans done.