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Showing posts with the label photography

The Italian Cemetery

For the moment, I'm living in Redwood City. One of my favorite motifs is cemeteries, and I'm not far from where most of San Francisco buries their dead: Colma. Follow the link by clicking on the sample photo below if you want to see more.

Orthochromagic: The Black Rose

Back in the beginning of photography, film and plates were orthochromatic. Orthochromatic means the material isn't sensitive to red light. That makes processing easier, since then it's possible to navigate a darkroom, load film, and even develop "by inspection".  But since any subject with the color red in it became darker with Ortho film, certain scenes became problematic. Blue skies were rendered white, skin color with more red pigment went dark, freckles and zits were emphasized.   In the early part of the 20th Century, panchromatic films became the norm. Ortho film was still the norm for many technical uses of photography. For example copywork, typesetting, etc. But with panchromatic film, tonalities of the world around us were more accurately mapped to their associated gray tones. Today, when film photography itself is already a rarity, I've opted to play with the unusual characteristics of film including the color sensitivity. What happens to a red rose on a...

Death and Taxes

 On May 15th I had an appointment to scout out a photo location for a future shoot at San Francisco's Sutro Baths. After that recon mission I planned to head down to Colma - "City of the Dead" planning to shoot some large format shots.  I brought my little digital kit, and also filled the back with an 8x10, and 4x5 Toyo monorail kits which took up most of the room in the back of my "cheese wedge" (Gen II Prius.) Normally 15 April is tax day in the US, but due to the pandemic, this year tax day was shifted a month late to 15 May (or actually the next work day, but forget that since that kills my title of "Death and Taxes".) So that afternoon I spent a lovely day at Colma's Italian cemetery. A few things struck me on my visit. First off, how quiet and peaceful it was. I only encountered one other living soul in the couple hours I was there. The weather was perfect from my point of view- cool and overcast with the sun popping out now and again. I'...