Day 3 - The Black & White Challenge

This is a photograph of the front door of an abandoned farmhouse in Ovid, New York. I have been driving by this farmhouse since 1966 every time we traveled to and from upstate New York to visit family. I have photographed it over the years about 87 different ways.  When the front porch finally collapsed, though, then the front door and siding were in better light, and resulted in this photograph. I love how monochromatic the tones in this photograph are.

Day 2 - The Black & White Challenge

This is a photograph I did near Yuma, Arizona while on a photographic workshop with the photographer Mark Klett. It was a really cool trip, and we ended up camping on the Barry Goldwater Bombing Range, and exploring the Camino del Diablo! I was working with a 4x5 view camera, and Type 55 P/N Polaroid film. I tried scanning the Polaroid negative with my Epson flatbed scanner, and you can see inconsistencies in the tonalities of the sky. I have a print somewhere, but couldn't find it right away.

Day 1 - The Black & White Challenge

There is a thing going around on Facebook called "The Black & White Challenge."  It starts with a photographer nominating a friend to post one black & white image a day, for five days.  So my friend Stan Honda nominated me today, and I am off and running.  The project runs on Facebook, but I thought that you would enjoy seeing what I am posting there.  Some of you will see my Facebook posts, but for everyone else, I will be posting each of the five photographs here as well.  This is the famous Japanese Maple tree, photographed with a camera that my friend in Tucson, Dean Ketelsen insisted that I borrow from him.  That camera records infrared light, and thus the green leaves of the tree register as bright white.

Implosion!

Big changes to the plant yesterday!  I drove by in the morning and I could see the north wall of the plant still standing, but they were cutting the I-beams with torches.  When I came by again, late in the day, the whole wall was gone!  I talked to another man who was looking at the wreckage, and he explained how they brought the wall down.  Explosives!  Oh man, I wish I had seen that!  He said there were a number of quick explosions, which cut the bottom of the I-beams supporting the wall, and down it all came.  And I missed it all...  sigh...  Please click on this to enlarge it, and see more detail in the pile of rubble.

Skeleton People

Is this wild, or what!  This was a display in one of the booths at Photo Expo.  There were a bunch of painted women artists, painting other women and men as skeletons. The artwork was incredibly creative, as you can see here.  It must have taken hours to get this far in the body painting.  The result of all this was that a whole mob of photographers at the event were gathered around the booth, shooting like crazy.  Oh wait - I was one of them!

How Does She Do That?

I was at the Photo Expo show in Manhattan where you can see more photographic gear than you can shake a stick at.  While watching one of the speakers, I noticed this woman with this camera take a few photos of the speaker and the crowd.  I was stunned at how creative her hands were!  Knocked my socks off.  But her hands wouldn't show up in a photograph because the background was really busy and confusing.  So after the talk, I went up to her and asked if she would pose for me, and she agreed.  So I placed her in front of a white wall at the exhibit and this is the result!  Isn't this the coolest thing, for Halloween?  She works for the manufacturer of the camera she is holding, by the way.

Rise of the Jack O' Lanterns

We went to this really cool event tonight, even though it was outdoors and raining.  It is called "Rise of the Jack O' Lanterns."  It is a display of five thousand one hundred Jack O' Lanterns at Old Westbury Gardens.  These two photographs don't begin to do justice to all the creativity displayed by the artists who design and carve these wonderful pumpkins.  I could have shot fifty close-ups of individual pumpkins and you would be astounded.  But instead I did two photographs of the landscapes that were created.