photo: Fern, digital black and white, 2010

The One More Time Marching Band from Eugene visits the Creswell Fourth of July parade. photo: Twirler, 2010

Some law requires logging companies to leave a few seedling trees here and there when they cut down the forest in Oregon. They look like sad sentinels, head and shoulders above the replanted monoculture landscape. Photo: Seedling tree, digital black and white, 2010

Just about the time you think you’ve got everything under control, more or less, something insists on changing. At least, this is a happy change. After some years of being convinced that digital was not for me — not, at least, for serious work and for lasting prints — I’ve finally figured out how to

Walking around in the woods this evening. photo: Ferns, digital black and white, 2010

I’m in Ashland for the weekend to cover the summer outdoor theater openings at the festival. Saw “Twelfth Night” Friday, which was great, and “Henry IV, Part One” last night, which was less so. Also caught “She Loves Me,” a fabulous musical, at the indoor Bowmer Theatre yesterday af

I’ve just signed up for SoFoBoMo — “Solo Photo Book Month” — which invites photographers to photograph and produce a book of photography in one month. Starting now (well, almost). It’s a great idea. You have 31 days in which to shoot the photos, design the book, create a PDF and upload it

I’m figuring out, at last, how to use digital black and white carbon prints for hand coloring. Turns out the carbon pigment is well bound to the paper — mostly. So what you need to do is remove the loose particles. About 30 seconds under cool running water and an all-over scouring with a paintbrush seems to [...

I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what is going on here — obviously it’s some kind of digital artifact — but I do love the look. This is taken at ISO 3200 in the garden at twilight, shot into the sky. And good news on the printing front: MIS sent a new ink system, [...]

photo: Garden leaves, digital black and white, 2010

photo: Grape leaves at twilight, digital black and white, 2010

… But I really like it. I was out this evening at twilight shooting pictures in the garden when I began to get this odd edge effect around the grape leaves. The photo is shot into the evening sky, matrix meter +2 stops, at 3200 ISO. The leaves have a wonderful outline that must result from [...]

I came across this baby desert tortoise — he’s about the size of a woman’s clenched fist — working his way across the desert floor near the Visitor Center at Red Rock Canyon, a wonderful place to hike just a half hour from Las Vegas. photo: Tortoise, 2010

We’re just back from a week in Las Vegas, where we headed to enjoy sunny days, desert hiking and the wonderful strangeness of life on the Strip. One thing that especially struck me while we were there was the fact that everyone in Vegas is happy, in a way that everybody in Oregon, isn’t. People aren’t cons

The Eugene Concert Choir decided, in an effort to promote their upcoming “British Invasion” concert of Brit-influenced choral music, that it would be fun and entertaining to recreate the iconic cover of the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper album. It turned out to be a lot more work than anyone realized — an

After a couple weeks of playing with it, I have to say that digital black and white is growing on me. The proof, of course, is in the printing. And that has always been digital’s weak spot. But let’s start with the strengths. Everyone pretty much knows the advantages that digital offers over film in terms of [..

photo: Garden bench, digital black and white, 2010

I love this effect. And the neat thing about digital is that you get instant feedback on whether or not you’ve done it right. On the other hand, I still haven’t figured out how to print digital BW so that the prints can be hand colored…. a longer topic for another post. photo: Pear tree and moon, [...]

If it’s not love at first sight, it’s close. The K-7, which arrived last week, has been a clear winner for me, right from the first touch. It feels as good in the hand as, say, a Nikon F100 without being big and heavy. Ive been using it every day, especially as I begin to explore the idea of [...]

I’ve been keeping the printer busy with experiments in black and white. As you can see in the photo, I’m working out ways to make digital prints that — maybe — look something like the black and white prints I get in the darkroom. And, yes, it’s a steep curve. The material you can read [...]

One of a series I recently posted to my web gallery. I am getting to like the faux-documentary look of harsh flash on nature subjects. Photo: Night Forest 4, 2010

OK, I’m not a total Luddite. (I’m writing this on a computer, after all.) And I truly am interested in digital printing. Up until lately, though, I haven’t much liked what I saw. But reading more the other day about carbon-ink printing on 100 percent cotton watercolor paper — and, especially, the fac

I popped this 2008 photo of a ranch gate in Harney County — that’s Oregon’s high-desert cowboy country, east of the Cascades — out of a frame to rotate in another photo this morning. Then I realized I had never put it on the website. The picture was taken on a very cold day at Roaring [...]

Photo: Forest path, 16×20 hand colored black and white photo, 2010 Here are three new hand-colored prints that I was able to enjoy finishing up on a rainy Sunday afternoon. All are from recent black and white excursions into the woods around our house. This one, above, shows the trail that leads from our driveway to [.

photo: Wild turkeys along Bear Creek Road, 2010

We came over to the coast for a long weekend — without rain gear. It will be a quiet weekend inside…. photo: Rain, 2010

It was the golden age of newspapering — had we but known it at the time. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, newspapers across the country were hurtling into the stratosphere, fueled creatively by good journalistic karma left over from Watergate and driven financially by a booming economy that had nowhere else but news

Salad from dinner the other evening. Not too fascinating in black and white; I’ll see whether color perks everything up a bit.

Here’s a quick flash-blur shot in the woods taken on the Pentax 645. It’s not stunning, but I really like the way the vines creeping up the front of the tree to the right were outlined in shadow. That’s an effect I keep working to replicate, not always successfully. Again, one to be colored and reposted.

One of the great advantages of film over digital is subtle. With digital, you never have two more frames to shoot at the end of a roll after you’ve finished your project. So with digital, you just quit shooting. With film, you’re forced to shoot two more. Or one more. Almost no one ever just [...]