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Monthly Archives: December 2017

Mysteries of the upper Dan River

⬆︎ The Dan River along Kibler Valley Road, Claudville, Virginia One of my New Year’s resolutions is to go on more photo-taking and hiking expeditions. Yesterday I explored the upper Dan River, on a quest to figure out where the river comes down out of the Blue Ridge Mountains into the foothills. The Dan River […]

First analog photos

The first roll of film from the Mamiya RB67 has been processed. The camera certainly works, but I have some stuff to learn. For a first roll, it wasn’t bad. Here are two of the ten shots. It’s available light, shot on a table beside a north-facing window, camera on a tripod. They’re experiments for […]

Two silly photos

Click here for high-resolution version Nothing meaningful here … just that I’m continuing to experiment with black and white photography, both analog and digital, using household objects as models. These photos are digital. I’m still waiting for processing on my first roll of analog film with the new Mamiya RB67 portrait camera. Click here for […]

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, by Steven Stoll. Hill and Wang, 2017. 412 pages. ★★★★★ During the past couple of years, an extraordinary series of books have brought to our attention just what a sorry state the world is in. Ramp Hollow is the latest. Some of the others (many of which I have […]

The white deer

It has been months since I’ve had a chance to get a photo of the white deer. I saw her this morning from an upstairs window. I grabbed the camera and shot the photo from the front porch. Then I dashed upstairs to get a telephoto lens. But by the time I had attached the […]

Farm porn

Click here for high-resolution version A high dynamic range photo of a farm on Flat Shoals Road, Quaker Gap, Stokes County, North Carolina. This is a digital photo and will become part of an experiment to compare results from a film camera with HDR digital photos.

Truck porn

For high resolution version, click here. For those who don’t share my truck fetish, I apologize. To me, carefully engineered machines are art. The beauty of military trucks is that there is little or no concern for showroom style. Rather, it’s all about function and the military specifications. I believe I have identified this truck […]

I return to the Mystery House

Somehow I knew that only special people could live in that old house. There were many clues: The complete absence of no-trespassing signs; the horse tracks; the lace curtains in the upstairs windows; the smoke from the kitchen chimney; the unpretentious elegance of the clutter; the not giving a hoot what people think; not living […]

Analog photography, here we come

A portrait of the abbey’s new Mamiya RB67 single lens reflex camera. • Click here for high resolution version Sentimental as some of us may be about older, high-quality professional cameras, analog photography is not obsolete. There’s no longer a camera shop in every town. But good film is still made by companies like Kodak […]

High dynamic range photography

HDR photo, adjusted in Photoshop. Click here for high-res version. I am just beginning to experiment with high dynamic range photography. I won’t go into detail here about what that is, but the short version is that the camera shoots multiple versions of the exact same photo, at different exposure levels. Then, special tools in […]