Large format memories and... a CHALLENGE?

I am often reprimanded by close friends and family for having literally tens of thousands of photos that I have never shown anyone - negatives, prints, and digital files... many hard drives full. So I am declaring June to be Blog month. I am going to post 5 days a week, from the wildly random old stuff, to personal favorites or brand spanking new stuff. If you dig my posts, help encourage me with comments and let me know what you'd like to see more of!

The photos above are personal favorites of mine, taken when I was in John Telford's Large Format zone system class. I learned so much in that class (and really all of my photography classes.) The top photo was inside a seemingly ancient wooden train car on the edge of the Salt Flats in Utah. If you look closely in the ground glass, you'll see the image flipped upside down... why you ask? (sorry fellow photo geeks if you already know why) Lenses naturally flip the image, and most non-35mm film cameras don't have what is called a Pentaprism. (a part of the viewfinder that flips the image back the way it should go.) Cue the NBC more you know music.

The bottom photo was taken right before shooting one of the most difficult photos of my life. Why so difficult? Well, you can't tell in this photo that the stairs where I eventually set up the camera on, are very steep and narrow. In addition, they had piles of dirt pressed up against them and well... layers of excrement from either rodents or birds. This made this steps disgusting to walk on, and very slippery. The tripod I was using at the time was broken so that it would almost imperceptibly tilt far enough right to ruin the photo every 60 seconds or so. Also there were some crazy huge swing/tilt action on the film planes with a gnarly bellows extension if you know what I mean by that. Hope to see you back here often throughout june!