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Author Topic: I'm Going To Do It Again  (Read 5384 times)

RSL

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I'm Going To Do It Again
« on: June 15, 2012, 05:23:56 pm »

I'm going to break my rule about waiting a couple weeks before showing anything -- again. I may regret it, but this time I'm a bit more sure I won't. Got these two in the penny arcade this afternoon. Made my day.
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #1 on: June 15, 2012, 05:34:48 pm »

I'm glad you didn't wait. They're priceless!
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Dave (Isle of Skye)

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #2 on: June 15, 2012, 07:45:33 pm »

Truly excellent  ;D

Dave
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Tony Jay

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #3 on: June 15, 2012, 08:00:45 pm »

I'm with Eric.

Priceless!

Regards

Tony Jay
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wolfnowl

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #4 on: June 16, 2012, 01:55:26 am »

She's a cutie alright!

Mike.
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Kerry L

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #5 on: June 16, 2012, 06:51:39 am »

Man, she's groovin'

Great photos
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seamus finn

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #6 on: June 16, 2012, 07:05:43 am »

Lovely stuff, Russ  - just shows there are pictures everywhere, even in the most mundane places.

Incidentally, waiting a reasonable while before making up your mind about an image is a fascinating process - not that you needed to in this case. Personally, I find revisiting files a year or so old is quite an enlightening experience - stuff I thought was ok many months ago turns out to be rubbish with the passage of time, and then, the opposite occasionally happens and it comes as quite a jolt to your judgement. At the moment I'm going through a spell of serious doubt - I don't know if what I'm shooting is completely useless. I guess I'll have to put the stuff aside for a good while and then have another look! Or maybe I'll post a few here....
« Last Edit: June 16, 2012, 07:26:51 am by seamus finn »
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Tony Jay

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #7 on: June 16, 2012, 07:13:30 am »

Courage Seamus we all go through that experience from time to time.
Hopefully it won't be long till you find your mojo again.

Regards

Tony Jay
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Rob C

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #8 on: June 16, 2012, 09:01:43 am »

Tony, it may be too late. Mojos die too.

When I was young I couldn't tell if I had a mojo or not, because I never gave him/her - if I have to think of one at all I'd like to think of it in the feminine - any space: I took the Nike route and just did it. And it usually worked well. I guess that mojos become the imaginary alter-ego that it's comforting to blame when things go pear-shaped, as they always do in the end. C'est la vie.

Enjoy the mojo-free times whilst you can. When you can't, do as I do and spend too much time on websites. Websites are definitely part of old age; the saying used to be that with age one replaces conversation with a litany of ailments - now I think that cosy concept's been superceded by the Internet. The self-administered drug of the masses.

;-)

Rob C
« Last Edit: June 16, 2012, 02:53:32 pm by Rob C »
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popnfresh

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #9 on: June 16, 2012, 09:12:22 am »

Russ, these are so much better than that log photo I can't even begin to tell you.  :D :D :D
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RSL

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #10 on: June 16, 2012, 01:15:59 pm »

Lovely stuff, Russ  - just shows there are pictures everywhere, even in the most mundane places.

Incidentally, waiting a reasonable while before making up your mind about an image is a fascinating process - not that you needed to in this case. Personally, I find revisiting files a year or so old is quite an enlightening experience - stuff I thought was ok many months ago turns out to be rubbish with the passage of time, and then, the opposite occasionally happens and it comes as quite a jolt to your judgement. At the moment I'm going through a spell of serious doubt - I don't know if what I'm shooting is completely useless. I guess I'll have to put the stuff aside for a good while and then have another look! Or maybe I'll post a few here....

I've been having the same problem since I got back to Colorado, Seamus, but the slump's starting to lift now. I was beginning to wonder whether or not I'd lost it for good, and then the woman in the wheelchair outside the church popped up. Then, yesterday, I got the best penny arcade pictures I've gotten in a long time. So I guess I'm on my way out of it (in spite of the log in the back yard). Tony's right. We all go through a slump from time to time.

You're right: re-visiting old stuff -- files or negatives -- can be a fascinating experience. Last fall I went back through my contact sheets from Vietnam, just to see if I'd overlooked anything worthwhile. Turns out I shot bags and bags of informal portraits of the people around me. I vaguely remembered doing that, but I'd forgotten the extent of what I certainly didn't think of as a "project" at the time. I was shooting B&W film, mostly with a Canon 7, and the film was processed locally in a shop in Can Tho. I suspect the guy was using Dektol on my Tri-X, so the results are rough, but, somehow, the results fit the subjects. You can see the scans at http://www.russ-lewis.com/asia/Paddy/VietnamFaces/index.html. I wouldn't want to hang my reputation as a photographer on these pictures, but I do find them fascinating. I've forgotten the names of most of these people, but I remember all the faces.
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Tony Jay

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #11 on: June 16, 2012, 05:10:49 pm »

Rob I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that!

Actually I think there may also be some serious horse sense in there too - thank you.

Regards

Tony Jay
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jule

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #12 on: June 17, 2012, 03:35:05 am »

So I guess I'm on my way out of it (in spite of the log in the back yard). Tony's right. We all go through a slump from time to time.


Hey Russ . Your stump image was way bad!... and so much so...that i don't think i will ever be able to photograph a stum again without thinking 'slump'. Perhaps we should have a 'stump' challenge. Second thoughts..perhaps it would be best not!  ;D :o

These are way more exciting and excude life. Great!

Julie
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seamus finn

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #13 on: June 17, 2012, 08:15:38 am »

Quote
Last fall I went back through my contact sheets from Vietnam, just to see if I'd overlooked anything worthwhile. Turns out I shot bags and bags of informal portraits of the people around me.

Russ, that's a wonderful gallery of military faces from a bygone age - and great technique too. I love the gritty effect,  shallow depth of field and beautifully blurred backgrounds. 

When a modern digital camera produces anything like that these days, the internet techie critics are reduced to shock and awe at the miracle of modern technology. How easily they forget what was being done before digital photography was only a twinkle in somebody's eye.

By the way, very clean scans too - little or no scratches, hairs, dust or any of the usual debris that plague my own humble scans - thanks very much to the Nikon Coolscan V Ed which takes no prisoners with any flaw in the neg.

Anyway, here's to Tri-X and in this neck of the woods, D76 or ID11 developer with perhaps Ilford FP4/HP5 as well as the Kodak range. Those were the days, hunched over a baseboard in the dark, inhaling deep lungfuls of developer/fixer fumes, fretting, fretting, fretting.... Come to think of it, despite all the fantastic advances, I don't think there is yet a greater rush that seeing that print slowly emerge in the developer dish - but, hell, what a price we had to pay for the thrill.
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #14 on: June 17, 2012, 11:41:02 am »

Seamus is right. Those Vietnam portraits are first class stuff. Nicely seen, beautifully executed.

Eric
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Riaan van Wyk

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #15 on: June 17, 2012, 12:43:20 pm »

Seamus is right. Those Vietnam portraits are first class stuff. Nicely seen, beautifully executed.

Eric

Yes indeed.

RSL

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #16 on: June 17, 2012, 01:39:30 pm »

Thanks all. Now, with trepidation, I've got to consider what I'm going to do for my next act. As HCB said, it's all luck, but you gotta be there when the luck happens, and it doesn't happen very often.
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RSL

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #17 on: June 17, 2012, 01:48:08 pm »

Anyway, here's to Tri-X and in this neck of the woods, D76 or ID11 developer with perhaps Ilford FP4/HP5 as well as the Kodak range. Those were the days, hunched over a baseboard in the dark, inhaling deep lungfuls of developer/fixer fumes, fretting, fretting, fretting.... Come to think of it, despite all the fantastic advances, I don't think there is yet a greater rush that seeing that print slowly emerge in the developer dish - but, hell, what a price we had to pay for the thrill.

Hi Seamus, Got to tell you about the darkroom two friends and I built in Korea. There wasn't any place locally in Taegu or on the base that could do personal film processing or printing. You had to send your stuff to Japan (or the States), and wait and wait. The war was over and we were snapping up a storm, so we were desperate.

We were living in open barracks left behind eight years earlier by the Japanese. The buildings were wooden frames covered with chicken wire, covered in turn with a messy variety of concrete. As one wit remarked, "You could throw a cat through the walls." We requisitioned one corner of a barrack, scrounged some lumber and plywood, built a couple interior walls and put in a door.

There wasn't any running water in the barracks, so we found a discarded F84 tip-tank, built a frame outside our new "room" to hold the tank fairly high, and bribed a flightline crew chief to deliver it, ran some pipe through the wall with a faucet on the end,  and bribed the guy who drove the drinking-water tanker to check it on his rounds and keep it full. We mail-ordered an enlarger, some trays, a couple film tanks, and some D-76 from Japan, and scrounged a bunch of outdated paper and some Dektol from the base photo lab.

It was one of the most rinky-dink setups I've ever seen. The worst problem was the lack of temperature control, and as any Marine from those days can tell you, it gets damned cold in Korea in the winter. We used a tabletop electric heater to give us a bit of temperature control over the film processing, but printing was something else. It takes a long time for a print to come up in developer that's, say, 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

But in spite of the problems (nowadays for some mysterious reason called "issues,") the thrill was there when the film finally dried and you could begin to see what you'd got. And, as always, watching a contact sheet come up in the cold developer was a thrill you just don't get in Photoshop. But, as you pointed out, you don't get the fumes either, and you don't have to do all the cleaning up afterwards.

I don't remember what the print was like, or even if there was a print, but here's a scan of one of the callow youths involved in the project, from what to me seems an unbelievably good negative considering the method by which it was produced. I can still smell the developer.
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seamus finn

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #18 on: June 17, 2012, 04:57:39 pm »



Russ, during nearly 40 years as a newspaper editor, I've heard some strange stories about Press photographers and how/where they developed film while on the road, but your tale takes the biscuit and is up there with the best of them.

A friend of mine - he was a Marist Brother and a keen amateur photgrapher - was involved in a situation the reverse of your own. He was stationed in Nigeria and his problemn was the ferocious heat and intense light coming into his room. He used to get into bed, cover himself with a heavy blanket and take the film out of the camera in the dark. One day, he proceeded as usual, managed to get the film on to the reel, and only then realised he had forgotten the developing tank.  As any photographer worthy of the name would do, he stayed put while the temperature soared, risking suffocation rather than give up on his precious thirty-six undeveloped shots. When help eventually arrived, he was so exhausted he was barely able to summon a decent breath. But he never again forgot the tank.
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amolitor

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Re: I'm Going To Do It Again
« Reply #19 on: June 17, 2012, 07:09:00 pm »

I like the first one very very much, and I will be the first to admit that "street" isn't anything I understand much about.

The second has a lot going for it, but I think the background material isn't as strong (I loved the out of focus adult butts in the background of the upper right of #1) and more important I find her sight-line to be confusing. I'm almost certain she's looking up at the display of the Guitar Hero machine, but there's something about her posture or something that makes it look like she's looking between it and the next machine which, I think, weakens the impact a little.

Let's be clear here, as I often seem to leave this part out: She's a fantastic subject, a super cutie, and you've got two wonderful photographs of her here.

Andrew
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