Random Musings

Hiatus

Tue, 3 Jun 2008 19:57:28 -0400

My web site and blog have had a long hiatus.

It is now up with a new look and a lot more content.

Mostly the redesign has been in a deep think about changes.

Like a flower which stays dormant as a seed for a winter’s season, when it is ready to burst the soil and grow, there’s not much that can hold it back. This is how I approached this redesign. Once started, the transformation took only a few weeks of coding.

Safari web browser is the optimal browser to use with my site. I’m looking forward to the new Firefox 3 which is scheduled for a June release. We’ll see how it renders my efforts.

Please look around, enjoy the images, and feel so inclined to hire me. Grin.
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy

Kodak Aero-Ektar 7" (178mm) f/2.5

Thu, 7 Jun 2007 17:48:05 -0400

Added new images to the home page yesterday.

Two new photographs captured with a converted RB Graflex Series D 4x5 SLR camera seen in the above picture.

The reason I call it converted is that I’m not using the stock lens that came with the camera. With a custom lens mount, I attached a Kodak Aero-Ektar 7” f/2.5 lens. As mentioned in the previous “Cherry Blossoms” posting, the Aero-Ektar is a World War II era lens used for aerial assessment of bomb damage. The K-24 camera was mounted to various airframes, such as a B-17, B-24, or a P-38. I removed the lens from the K-24 camera I purchased on eBay.

The lens has a very shallow depth-of-field when used with a wide open f/2.5 aperture. With 4x5 sheet film, the lens is just slightly longer than a normal 150mm focal length lens traditionally used on a 4x5 format camera. Being a lens engineered for clarity, what is in focus is very sharp, but used close to a subject, the out-of-focus areas of the image have a wonderful look that is hard to achieve on “modern” lenses.

If you are interested in more information about this lens, please check out the links on the “Cherry Blossom” posting in my ‘Muse.’

Thanks Sue Bloom for my portrait with the Graflex/Aero-Ektar camera.
• Washington Cherry Blossoms
• http://www.suebloom.com/portfolio.html

Mstislav Rostropovich

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:47:22 -0400

It’s always sad to wake to the news that a person you met has died.

Mstislav Rostropovich, for me, was more than a musician. He was an ambassador to our humanity. Listening to a performance by the maestro, whether solo on his cello or conducting a full orchestra, was to look deep into the heart. I recommend Johann Sebastian Bach’s cello suites 1–6.

Town & Country magazine gave me the privilege of meeting Rostropovich in 1989 at the home of the Chilean Ambassador. Here he is pictured with (left) Mrs. James Scott Rosebush, Chairwoman of the National Symphony Orchestra’s Annual Benefits Fundraiser, (right) his wife opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, and (far right) Mrs. Octavio Errazuriz, wife of the Chilean Ambassador to Washington, DC.
• http://www.sonyclassical.com/artists/rostropovich/bio.html
• http://www.amazon.com/Bach-Cello-Suites-Nos-1-6/dp/B000002RUY
• http://www.townandcountrymag.com/
• http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=41865
• http://www.rostropovich.org/founders.html
• http://www.theodora.com/wfb1989/chile/chile_government.html

Cherry Blossoms

Thu, 5 Apr 2007 17:45:36 -0400

Snow flurries joined the morning walk with the dogs today – an extended April Fool’s joke.

That’s fine by me because they reminded me of the flurries of Cherry Blossom petals that filled this past Monday.

It’s the Washington DC Cherry Blossom Festival season again, an event I’ve enjoyed since 1983 when I moved to the DC area. This year I celebrated the explosion of finely pink blossoms with a “new for me” old camera.

The camera dates back to the 1920s or 30s, but its exact age can’t be known without looking up the Folmer Graflex Corporations serial number records. There’s a good chance the camera is older than my father (sorry dad).

I wasn’t satisfied with the lens that came with the camera because I had an idea to expand on the visual theme a friend was doing with another type of old camera / lens combination. So I reworked how lenses mounted to the front of this wood and brass R.B. Graflex 4x5 Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera. The camera now sports a 1944 Kodak Aero-Ektar 7” f/2.5 lens, a lens I removed from a K-24 aerial camera designed for World War II era aircraft. This camera was used in B-17’s to P-38’s (the Twin Tailed Devil). Its primary mission was to photograph the destruction rained down on Germany and Japan from high altitude.

Now I have an amazing machine that marries the ease of use of a modern SLR camera, with the superior quality of large format film, and the incredible funky look of a lens no modern camera manufacturer can match. Due to the length of the lens, the camera cannot focus on infinity, but that doesn’t matter to me. What I wanted in this rig was a camera I could use for close portraiture and detail images.

Monday’s seventy degree weather and hundreds of Cherry Trees in peak bloom is a scene everyone should experience at least once in their life with or without my crazy camera.
• http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/photos/photos.htm
• http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/
• http://www.nationalcherryblossomfestival.org/cms/index.php?id=390
• http://www.nwmangum.com/Kodak/graflex.html
• http://www.pbase.com/cameras/kodak/k_24_aerial_camera
• http://www.johndesq.com/graflex/aeromemorandum.htm
• http://www.boeing.com/history/boeing/b17.html
• http://www.p-38online.com/recon.html

Elizabeth Edwards

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 17:44:02 -0400

It breaks my heart learning anyone is battling cancer, and it especially hits home when the news breaks about someone I’ve photographed. My mother died of the disease.

So I was saddened when John and Elizabeth Edwards told the world that Elizabeth’s cancer is back in a form that is only treatable.

I met Elizabeth briefly during her husband’s run for the Vice Presidency. Evan Kriss, of the New York Times Magazine (now with the Washington Post Magazine), called with the assignment. It was a typical “front of the book” job portraying the subject full length against white seamless paper so the person could be “dropped in” to the text of the page. But this assignment had a twist.

Elizabeth didn’t want to be published full length. She only wanted a head and shoulders length image. The magazine reluctantly agreed with the terms, but I was told to try to “talk with her.”

The room I was ushered to was your typical odd shaped storage closet, but with a makeshift sign on the door that read “Press.” There were no windows, crap piled up everywhere, trashy furniture, and a couple of holes punched into the walls, as if a fist was taking aim with its frustration.

Elizabeth arrived with a great deal of enthusiasm. She carried herself with genuine charm, and the tinge of nervousness of someone not totally comfortable being photographed. She also showed up wearing mismatching slacks to the rest of her outfit. Very smart if you don’t want to be published full length.

The back drop was prepared for a full length image. I made my best pitch of why it was important to be published full length for the consistency of the readers expectations.

Elizabeth kicked off her shoes and said “No” still with her engaging smile. Again very smart if you don’t want to be published full length. My assistant immediately hung the gray seamless up because that’s want the magazine asked for if she wouldn’t pose full length. I took a couple of full length anyway just for my own laughs.

Of course the one thing none of knew that day was that cancer was already growing inside Elizabeth.
• http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003635018_mrsedwards25.html
• http://johnedwards.com/splash/
• http://www.cancer.org/docroot/home/index.asp