Independence Day fireworks over Seattle’s Lake Union
Taken with twin Hasselblad 500Cs spaced 40 feet apart and triggered with an ingenious device created by my good friend James Baker. The photo is taken from James’ roof. There will be no public fireworks show in Seattle in the year of 2020. But next time I shoot them I expect to be able to trigger the cameras wirelessly, using motorized film winders. Looking forward to that!
Entrance to Rockwood Farm in Snoqualmie, Washington
Seattle Skyline from the Jose Rizal Bridge
I’m including this photo because I think it demonstrates a point about composition and fusion. The rail on the bridge is too close in the image, but It works because the line of trees behind it have turned to featureless black and have separated the railing from most of the rest of the shot. I didn’t do that intentionally. I’m not that smart! (There is a small stretch of road that meets the railing that you can see in one image and not the other). The point is that the darkness of the trees act as a separator making it like 2 photographs — the close railing and the far city, so it’s not so difficult to fuse. If there had been a close vertical element (like a tall signpost) that passed through both the near and far parts of the image it couldn’t have worked.
Some notes about this image: The Jose Rizal Bridge is a favorite spot for photographers, and you can imagine why. You need a long exposure to get traffic trails, but the bridge bounces horribly when the frequent buses pass by, so you need to time your shots to avoid them. The image suffers from lens flare that could have been avoided had I been more attentive. And the railing is painted with the ugliest of insitutional green paint, but under the vapor streetlights it looks like solid gold!
Our cat Edison abiding on a comfy chair.
I do plan to continue this pursuit, but it will involve rebuilding the macro box to accommodate two motorized Hasselblads that can be triggered wirelessly
This was shot with flashes. I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of the strobist blog. If you are interested in learning about using portable flash units, go there and start with Lighting 101. I can’t recommend it enough.
I like the eyes and whiskers of course but I especially love the hairs in Eddie’s ears. They remind me of fireworks trails.
Stepping into the snowed over creek is a bit of a challenge when doing cha-cha hand held stereo as my footing was wobbly and I was unsure if I was keeping alignment between the first frame exposed and the second. Alas, I liked this image enough to include it in this round.
If you’re in Mammoth, have a fun adventure on the loop
https://www.mammothtrails.org/trail/30/town-loop/
The Town Loop is 7.8 mi and a great run/hike. On the nature part of the loop is the Mammoth Creek and it is beautiful when snowed over, as seen from this roadside view which parallels the trail. Most people just ski during the winter, but hiking and running are fun too. The loop provides a family-friendly tour of town with access to a variety of outbound trails and staging areas. Mammoth Creek Park is a popular start point from which you can tour the eastern half of Mammoth–offering sweeping views of the Sherwins and connections to local schools, the library and dining/shopping–or the western portion, which cruises sleepily through Old Mammoth and past the Valentine Reserve to Eagle Lodge before turning into a quiet neighborhood on its way back out to the Main Street frontage road.
My kids loved climbing up on this.
Gold was discovered in the vicinity of Old Mammoth in 1877 and thousands of men rapidly flocked to the region in the hopes of striking it rich. Today, evidence of these industrious pioneers remains throughout Old Mammoth and no object is able to tell the story of Mammoth’s early history better than the historic Knight water wheel.
The photogenic Knight water wheel, located along Old Mammoth Road, is a preserved remnant of Mammoth Lakes’ industrial beginnings. Now positioned in the quaking aspen adjacent to the paved bike path, this cast iron water wheel has a row of spoon-shaped buckets (Pelton-style) and was a technological marvel in its time. This innovative turbine design allowed late 19th-century industry to generate more power with less water. Previous water wheel designs were inefficient, cumbersome, and required sources providing high volumes of water.
Due to the design’s practicality, Mammoth’s Knight water wheel has a very unique history. The wheel was originally manufactured by the Knight Foundry, located in Sutter Creek, California, in the mid-1870’s and was hauled from the Mojave area to the Mammoth Lakes Basin by mule and oxen team.
Did some skiing this winter up at Mammoth Mountain with the family and got them to do a morning run with me. Along the adventure we crossed this bridge located just to the North of Old Mammoth Road up and to the end of Waterford Ave. Sometimes the kids would stay still enough to get a cha-cha. My trusty Fuji GA645w is the only light enough MF camera I can take on an adventure hike/run, but you have to do cha-chas, hoping the left and right images are still enough to give the stereo illusion without retinal rivalry.
My first two images were taken in the East Block of Grasslands National Park in my home province of Saskatchewan, just North of the US border. It’s one of my favourite parks to visit. Since there are almost no trees (just a few cottonwoods down by the river), you can see a really long way. Consequently, you’re likely to see a lot of wildlife if you visit the park: pronghorn antelope, white-tailed deer, prairie dogs, badgers, ferruginous hawks and all manner of songbirds. Perhaps the most interesting is the burrowing owl, which makes its home in abandoned prairie dog tunnels. There’s also a herd of bison that they reintroduced to the park as a range land management strategy: the bison graze heavily on certain species of grasses, helping to keep a well-balanced prairie.
d22-1: Great Plains
d22-2: Badland Butte
There are no well-defined trails, so you are free to roam around how you like. There are not many visitors to the park, so you can really appreciate the surroundings and get lost in your own thoughts. Even though you can see quite far, there’s little worry about someone walking into the scene you’re photographing. A lot of people, particularly from rural areas of the province find it strange to “go camping in a pasture”, but it’s really a wonderful place to unplug from fast-paced life and just walk around and think about things. The (mostly) native vegetation and abundance of wildlife is also considerably different to a cultivated pasture. It’s hard to imagine that the entire lower half of this province was filled with native grasslands like these, before 90% of it was cultivated.
There was a pretty big storm the one day I went hiking, and as the lightning was getting closer, I realized how little cover there really was around me on the bald prairie. I rushed down to the bottom of a hill and crouched down to make myself small. There were some tremendously loud and bright lightning strikes nearby which were pretty scary. I felt pretty powerless. The Great Plains image was taken about half an hour later, after the storm had started to move on.
For Badland Butte, I wish I would have had a stereo rig that allowed me to increase the stereo base. I tried some cha-chas with the TL-120, but the angle of the shadows actually changed appreciably in between the exposures, leading to some somewhat unpleasant retinal rivalry. I’m fixing up a couple of Agfa Isolettes; hopefully I’ll have them ready to go for this summer. I’d love to hear anybody’s suggestions for a good slide bar. I found out that Jasper Engineering no longer makes their slide bars.
d22-3: Wild Sarsaparilla in Lingonberry
d22-4: Chokecherries
The last two images were taken in Narrow Hills Provincial Park, this time further North, but still in my home province of Saskatchewan. I really liked the subsurface scattering in the red Sarsaparilla leaves, and the background texture of small green Lingonberry leaves made for a nice detail shot. The Chokecherries image is from the top of an esker left when the glacier retreated. A trail runs along the top of the esker which overlooks several small lakes below. The lakes pictured here are called the Grace Lakes. I visited during the end of summer, so it got pretty cool at night.
Hope you enjoy! Thanks for all your submissions, I really had a great time viewing all the wonderful slides this time around!
Ian Andvaag
I had my slides all mounted and ready to ship a week ago. They had been titled, scanned, and fit into (seamed) sleeves. The problem was, they wouldn’t fit into the Dragon Folio box. It was then I noticed that every other slide in the box was mounted in cardboard. Mine were in plastic mounts. Instead of remounting my original four, I decided to save them for the next loop of Folio A. I mounted four new selections, all in cardboard mounts;
“Same As Surly Curs” – the title is a crossword puzzle type of clue (the answer is “growlers”). This was shot during what is possibly the least-known photography celebration; “World Toy Camera Day”, observed on the third Saturday of October. I employed a Holga 120 CF stereo camera with add-on wide angle lens attachments (which add vignetting) and a roll of Provia 400 to shoot a few photos on my deck to honour the occasion. Developed in a Jobo processor in my basement using Tetenal Colortec E6 chemicals.
“DISC-guises” – this image is one I originally considered a focal point failure, but I revisited it, mounted the chips and decided to submit it anyways. It was shot with a TL-120-1 on APX 100 film, and sent to dr5 for Dev1 processing.
“How To Winterize Your Vehicle” – I’m fairly certain that this was captured on one of a handful of trips to Mclean’s Auto Wreckers in Rockwood. When I feel the urge to go explore this vast car graveyard, I call ahead, then I bake something with beer for the Mclean’s proprietors to gain my admission – chocolate stout cake, raspberry beer blaster cookies….you get the idea. It’s either bake them something beforehand or share your photos with them afterwards, and sharing photos is just too much damned work! Shot with a TL-120-1 on Fuji NHP 400 negative film, then cross-processed in Argentix (Arista) E6 chemicals using a Jobo processor in my basement.
“The Jazz Standard” – this title is also a crossword puzzle type of clue (the answer is “Autumn Leaves”). This is a pinhole image, and I captured this just prior to Hallowe’en 2018, using one of Todd Schlemmer’s terraPIN Oskar^2 stereo pinhole cameras on a GorillaPod. I seem to recall that the exposure was somewhere around the 1 min. 32 sec mark. Todd’s cameras are 3D printed using environmentally-responsible materials. This roll of Fuji RVP was developed in a Jobo processor in my basement using Tetenal Colortec E6 chemicals.
With this image, we are trying to convey the model’s struggles trying to stay afloat in an ocean of popular media glamour imagery, which features predominantly thin women. Bazaans has a “Rubenesque” figure, so her self-image is constantly challenged as being inadequate. What is she doing there? Is she vomiting some of the published pop glamour imagery? I need your help: let me know if you can figure out what it all means.
This was shot in studio with strobes, I think with my “old” Sputnik.
I’m not sure what to title this shot. I’m not sure what exactly I’m doing with this composition or concept. About five years ago, a vague creative idea started to form in my mind, that intended to be a “challenge” to glamour imagery in general. The idea was to create nominally pinup, or nude, or glamour type imagery, but to embed into the image something that was disturbing. It might be an an odd or disturbing detail that would upend an otherwise tranquil scene, an “easter egg” that would only be discovered if you explored the image relatively carefully and closely. Or it might be an image that more directly challenges the conventions of glamour photography, or that shows in some other way the “truth” behind a model’s reality, which might be quite the opposite of what the picture superficially conveys. This project is naturally self-referential and introspective, as it examines my own critical thoughts on the nature of nude or erotic image making, what it means for the artist, the model(s), or even the audience… and by taking that examination directly to the audience, I hope to challenge the audience to examine itself.
So this picture of Selene is one of several attempts I’ve made over the past few years at creating a “glamour challenged” or “challenged glamour” type of image – I’m still finding my way in this project, and can’t say that I feel any of the resulting images so far are particularly successful. I am still dissatisfied with them.
The day began with Selene and I looking for some pretty, natural spot in which to shoot, and after some hours, we ended up at this river not too far from the roadside. We set up and shot numerous standard or ordinary nude and semi-nude images of her posing among the rocks in this little river. She knew that in the end I’d be asking her to be getting into the water, but by the time that moment came, she was reluctant – she’d already noticed how cold the water was, after having put her foot into it several times. But she was a champ, and finally took the plunge. She gave quite a shout upon first entering the water, but then concentrated on giving me some poses. I had wanted her to look both “attractive” but somehow in trouble, distressed or drowning (?) in this river – and I thought she came up with some passable looks. I think we were both surprised by how she hardly needed to act looking uncomfortable, or indeed of distressed. As we quickly learned the water was indeed brutally cold, and after only thirty seconds to a minute, she needed to come out. I wrapped her in blankets, shivering violently, and it took her probably twenty minutes to recover from this seemingly innocuous dip in the water.
Kat’s Full Service was shot at a perfectly chaotic and disheveled, local “hole in the wall” tire/repair garage in an older part of town. I’d been looking for a place like this for years, to re-interpret a famous picture by Herb Ritts, Fred (google “Fred with tires” there are actually several variants). After finding this shop in 2013 or so, I shot my first “Fred” session with my beloved partner M, and though this produced some wonderful MF3d images, I feel somewhat restrained in publishing them. To have greater freedom in publishing the image, I decided this past year to reshoot it with a “professional” model, and this slide is one of the images that came out of that session. (By the way, Kat really was a professional, and of the nicest sort. She was super helpful and accommodating in the challenging location, totally un-self-conscious and focussed on the modeling tasks at hand, and spontaneously creative in her posing, even after we had attracted a small audience of passers by. And she was fairly easy on the eyes, too;-)
Now, this particular image does not follow on the Herb Ritts image. (I did get one good facsimile of Ritts’s “Fred” with Kat on film, but I am holding onto it, read on). But at least this image is in focus! While this session with Kat produced many fine images on my digital rig, my efforts with film were unfortunately plagued by bad luck and, frankly, operator error due to my long absence from shooting. (The last time I’d shot a model with film was about one year prior, in the summer of 2017 – Selene at a river, an example included in this round of the folio). I shot three rolls of 120 with a “new” Sputnik, yielding 36 stereo pairs, and a pair of 220 rolls with my twin Mamiya 6 rig, yielding 24 stereo pairs. This particular shot came from the Mamiyas.
All of the Sputnik shots were essentially out of focus… either I made a mistake, or the lens markings were off. The garage in the background was in perfect focus, but the model herself was a bit soft on all of the Sputnik shots – a very great disappointment! This was only the second time I had used that Spud, which I had acquired in 2018, after the first couple of test rolls seemed to come out fine. But the session with Kat was more demanding: it was more close up, and due to the light in the shade, I had to open the apertures a little bit, shooting at f16 I think. The imagery, though “out of focus” for MF3d slide viewing, is however good enough for scanning and stereoview printing… but you know that is of little consolation.
All the Mamiya shots were in excellent focus, but a different type of operator error caused more than half the shots to be badly out of alignment – and in such an odd manner that there is no fixing it. I might include a copy of one of those in future, as an exercise or challenge for everyone to figure out what I did wrong. This view of Kat – “Full Service” – however does not suffer from the alignment problem. It is one of less than ten stereo pairs that ended up looking pretty good.
The upshot is that I’ll probably want to return to this garage a third time with a model – beating this creative idea to death as it were. I haven’t decided yet, but I imagine the guys at the shop won’t mind. They’ve been quite amused to have me there with a model.
PS: prior to the session with Kat, I tried to get two warm up filters for the Mamiyas at least, but couldn’t get them in time. Next time around the color will be much better.
Alright.. this one is a little bit nutty. I hesitated putting this in the folio, but I thought: it’s okay if people see where and how I make mistakes…. and yet it might still be entertaining!
The film had gone bad, probably just from old age. Both L and R show poor contrast, weak blacks. The film looks underexposed, though that seems unlikely to happen to me in studio. And the L and R film shows a slightly different color, both tending too much towards magenta. So: let that be a lesson to me: stop using twenty year old film!
But worse than these defects is that I shot too close… way, way too close up, given I was shooting with the twin Mamiya 6 rig, which has a stereobase of over 3 inches. What was I thinking!? I wanted to have an image that did not include the waist, I just wanted head and shoulders and chest. I’ve shot that way before doing cha-cha with a motor-drive Hasselblad (baseline of maybe an inch), but here for some reason I thought it would work out with the twin rig. Silly. Shooting from farther away might have worked better – if I’d had some longer lenses (e.g. 150 mm).
But still I think the the image is interesting. Note that even with the far points set at infinity separation – i.e. the edge of her elbow, not four feet away from me, set to infinity separation – the near points could not be brought to be “behind the stereo window.” So the actual space of her body, which spans a depth of just a foot or 18 inches, in the MF3d view geometry effectively spans five feet to infinity. There’s a lot of stretch!
This is the way I shot for many years in 35 mm film, using a twin rig of film SLRs. All those early images of mine look too stretched to me now – but I guess old habits, or old errors die hard.
I hope you can enjoy it anyway.
There was no post for Nik’s submission, so I created this post in August 2021 so Nik could receive some comments. -Ian Andvaag
1) Mt. Rainier Stream 8/4/10 F16 1/125
2) Untitled. [3Ders in front of Chihuly art installation at New York Botanical Garden]
3) Untitled. [New York Botanical Garden Pond]
4) Untitled. [Nik’s son, I believe]