Kodak tower and my studio • click to embiggenOne of the special 'features' of the good old days, photography-wise, is that with which I am reacquainting myself as I scan some older 8×10 color negatives - f**king DUST.

FYI, in the good old days, a standard item in my darkrooms - I had 3, one for film loading, one for film processing (color & bw), and one for printing (color & bw) - was an industrial-size (about 5 ft tall) cylinder of compressed nitrogen with a pressure regulator and spray nozzle. Dust didn't stand a chance with that kind of 'dust-off', but, if you didn't set the right spray pressure, neither did an 8×10 negative - a negative could be literally ripped in half with too much spray pressure. Believe me. I know.

And, FYI, PS dust and scratch removal / digital 'ICE' is a very poor substitute for nitrogen in a tank. Those software 'solutions' to dust and scratch removal all depend on image blurring, which, in my book, is no solution at all. That's why, when I made the leap from high-end P&S digital cameras (sealed body = no dust on the sensor) to dslrs, I went with Olympus - their in-camera dust buster has been and is a perfect solution to sensor dust. I have yet to see a single dust particle on an image file.

In any event, today's picture is for Paul Maxim who opined on yesterday's picture; "Just wanted to say how much I like the river image. For those of us who once lived there, it's just so typically "Rochester" (and I don't mean that in a bad sense). You can literally feel the humidity. How long ago was this taken?"

Thanks, Paul. The picture was taken circa 1981-84. I can't pin down the exact date because my camera's EXIF data was erased from internal memory 'card'.

Today's picture is of the Kodak tower / corporate headquarters. Also depicted is my first 'solo' studio - note the big white air conditioner on the right. That window, the 2 to the left, and extending back to the 2 windows on the alley side of the building was my studio space. The picture was taken from the roof of the building (the Smith Gormley building) that housed my 'new' studio and loft living space.

This little NW corner of downtown Rochester - 1 block long, 2 blocks wide - was comprised of mostly empty (but not abandoned) old loft buildings. 2 photographers,including me, had studios in Searle Building. 1 photographer had a sort-of studio and illegal living space in another building. I felt there was a pent up demand for artist lofts - studios and legal loft living spaces - in the Rochester community. So, with the permission and support of the Smith Gormley building owner, I renovated the building - 6 stories, 72,000 sq. ft. - creating 20 lofts, all of which were leased before the renovation was completed.

The building had 7 photo studios and a variety of other artist and artisan studios. Everyone lived in their space. It was an exciting time - we were truly urban 'pioneers'.
A Smith Gormley loft • click to embiggenWithin a year, the neighborhood had 3 music/dance clubs and 2 restaurants. It didn't take long after that for the big developers to notice what was going on and today in the St. Paul Quarter (as it is now known), the Smith-Gormley is one of the original loft-style apartment buildings in downtown Rochester, and, with its position at the heart of the St. Paul entertainment district, remains a sought-after address.

It still amazes me that I started it all.

Genesee river and falls • click to embiggenLast evening, in a 'minor' inebriated state (the wife worked at home and women kept calling me all day long), I stumbled upon the Sundance Channel and William Eggleston and the Real World, part of a week long series of films about photographers presented under the banner of Lives in Focus. Much to my chagrin, I discovered that the series started on Monday and continues through this Friday. I can't believe that there wasn't an internet 'buzz' about this series and I can only hope that reruns are in order.

The photographers profiled are; William Eggleston, Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff, Helmut Newton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Peter Beard, and Tina Barney. That's quite a spectrum of talents and genres. The Eggleston film was done in a handheld cinéma-vérité style (each film in the series was done by different film makers) that really complemented Eggleston's photography and his approach to picturing.

And, it is his approach to picturing that struck me the most, in as much as I came to a 'I am not alone' realization - even though Aaron thought that Eggleston looked like someone with alzheimer's walking around with a camera. But, as always, it's the pictures that matter and Eggleston's are absolutely amazing.

"The banal, then, is still banal, but now it's engrossing. I suppose this must be seen as progress, but Eggleston's belief has been and remains that what the resolutely high-minded call banality is the stuff of life itself. It is where we live -- but not only there. Much has been made of Eggleston's oft-quoted statement "I am at war with the obvious." Here he is, not atypically, saying a good deal less than he means. Eggleston loves the obvious -- he hates, and is indeed at war with, the idea of it, the contempt in which it is held. He sees what's in the gutter but also looks up to the heavens. As Malcolm Jones, an unusually perceptive critic of Eggleston's work, has observed, "He addresses the meanest objects with unstuttering love." ~ Stanley Booth/salon.com

even more FYI - today's picture is from a scan of an 8×10 color negative.

Rebuilding the rust belt • click to embiggenYou have probably noticed that I have been posting a number of 'blasts from the past' (aka, 'nfscd'). There are a number of reasons for this.

First and foremost, as I have mentioned, I have had to address the issue of 'sorting' all kinds of stuff as part of my office move. In the process, I have (once again) found how amazingly difficult it is to get rid of some stuff that's been hanging around for eons. Stuff that seems of little significance to others but, nevertheless, seems to have some kind of hold over me. Most probably that hold involves memories but don't discount the fact that I hang on to some things just because I like the way they look.

Another reason is simply because, of late, there seems to have been little interest in discussing Art. Maybe there has been interest in 'reading' (my page loads and visits are inching upward) what I have written on the subject, but there has been little response in the way of comments.

So, I have decided to keep it 'light' for a while. I refuse to indulge in pixel peeping, gear talk, and techno babble, as many other blogs do, in order to generate more comments. Who amongst you wants read comments about Canon vs Nikon vs Pentax vs Olympus, noise numbers, pixel counts, etc., especially when those comments are based on little more than personal likes and dislikes. Boring.

In any event, today's picture is an illustration for a magazine article about 'rebuilding the rust belt'. It's a Polaroid image transfer, hand-colored with Marshall oils and pencils, on Arches (ARCHES - Le choix des artistes depuis 1492) watercolor paper.

Polaroid image transfers (and emulsion transfers) are, of course, about to become a 'lost art'. I'm really having a hard time accepting the fact that an entire genre with so many creative possibilities is about to disappear, especially one that was so handmade intensive. I fully embrace digital and all of its creative possibilities but I am really jonesing to get involved in a photo process that requires touching something other than on/off buttons and a keyboard.

And, maybe that's related to memory as well. I would think that, if you've never done any handmade photography - wet darkroom, alternate processes, peeling apart polaroids, etc. - and therefore have no memory of it, you certainly can't miss it. You would also probably have no desire to do so.

What a pity.

Self promotion pieces • click to embiggenI was the first photographer in Pittsburgh to dive into the digital darkroom with a Mac/Apple IIci and Photoshop 2.5.

The IIci has a 25mhz processor and a 40mb hard drive. It maxed out at 128mb of RAM. FYI, at the time, 1 Mb of RAM cost around $50 so my IIci maxed out at 32mb of RAM. Processing speed was a tad slower than a snail on downers.

Photoshop 2.5 didn't even qualify as a pale imitation of its present self - the first stab at layers, limited masking, no image previews, (to see the effect of a filter, you had to apply it and then wait - sometimes wait and wait and wait - up to 10 minutes or more with some filters. If you didn't like the result, undo it and start again.), and, BTW, only one undo ... Even back then PS had powerful, pre-press capable color editing tools but I also used Painter because it had superior brushes, masking and layer blending capabilities and files could be moved back and forth into Photoshop.

In any event, making photo-based illustrations like Waist Knot and Cafe Society was a long and tedious process which was why, after a long day of photo editing, I turned off the work software and got lost (on occasion, until the sun came up) in the world of MYST.

Dancing and leaping • click to embiggenBack in the days before Photoshop, creating pictures like 'dancing and leaping' was a long and demanding process. In this case, our intrepid subjects, Rod Woodson of the Pittsburgh Steelers and a dancer from the Pittsburgh Ballet, were required to leap, jump, twist, turn and generally contort their bodies every which way over and over and over again.

In today's PS universe, a photographer can work with each subject individually in order to capture the 'perfect' body language and then paste the 2 separate images together in PS. Back in the stone ages of the analog photography world, it was necessary to keep shooting and shooting until the photographer felt he 'had it' in the can. Notice, I said "felt he had it", because there was no way of knowing for certain that you 'had it' until the film came out of the soup.

The difficulty / challenge of getting 2 subjects to get the right body language at the same instant is, well, difficult and a challenge. In this case, a series of pictures for a Pittsburgh tourism campaign, the degree of difficulty was mitigated by the fact that I was able to photograph a professional athlete and a professional dancer who were, in a sense, just 'doing their thing(s)'. I can't even imagine what it would have been like if I had to use models who would have had to fake it.

Just thought you might like a glimpse at life before faking it has become the way to go.