On the Tarmac

Olympus XA, Kodak Tri-X 400 pushed to 800

We flew out of JFK airport on Delta.  To get to our gate, we were directed to a shuttle bus that went across the tarmac, crossing paths with luggage carts zipping back and forth and planes taxiing for takeoff and landing.  I'd never been out there before.  I thought being this close to ground level was only for presidents and rappers.

I figured I'd try out the XA's metering -- there was a lot of inside/outside stuff, and I was wondering how the exposure would come out, since I was pushing the film, which would mean some loss of dynamic range.  However, it caught some of everything!  I was expecting everything in the foreground to be a complete silhouette, but it still managed to keep plenty of shadow detail.

Pretty good for a pocket film camera.

Dragon Boat

Oh hey wait I do have something to write about!  I don't think I've mentioned it in the past, but in addition to photography, I am also interested in dragon boat racing.

It's basically a giant, heavy canoe operated manned by 10 to 20 paddlers, a steerer, and a drummer. It's called a dragon boat because on race day, a decorative dragon's head and tail are fixed to the ends of each boat.  During the off-season, they're detached and stored for safety.

There are races all over the country and all over the world wherever there is a calm body of water.  The one in New York takes place every August in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.  The races range in distance from 200 meters and 500 meters to the 2000 meter.  Most of the ones we get into are 500 meters long, but my favorite is the 200 meter, a balls-to-the-wall sprint that is usually (ideally) over in just under a minute.

As I mentioned before, the last race was in Puerto Rico, at Embalse Cerillo.  The drive from Ponce was about 30 minutes of winding mountain road until the trees gave way to a jawdropping basin, dotted with a start line and a finish line.  It was easily the most beautiful venue we'd ever raced at.  The air was fresh and each team had their own little gazebo to hang out in between races.  Our gazebo had a fantastic view of the finish line.

Of course, the best view of the finish line is from inside the boat.  This was why I brought the Holga.  I brought it with me and kept it on the floor of the boat, which usually has some bilge sloshing around in it -- not a good place for nice cameras.  Plus, in the case that we capsized, I could probably have shaken the water out, loaded another roll, and continued shooting.

Also, the sun was blazing out, which meant it would be a perfect day for some Kodak Ektar (100 ISO) in the Holga.  Dragon boat is a colorful sport, and Ektar is a colorful film, so I always make sure to have some on hand for a race.

There was a lot of downtime between races, which was perfectly fine.  I spent a lot of it sitting around in the sun, listening to the sounds of salsa and merengue drifting over from the festival area.

Puerto Rico

I fled the NYC winter this weekend and went to Puerto Rico for a dragon boat race.  I took the Olympus XA and Holga 120 along.  I do have better cameras that take sharper photos, but there would be stretches of time where my stuff would be either unattended or just an outright burden, so I took my smallest, lightest cameras.

I don't think I'll be doing the usual travel photography blogging, as I didn't really do too much in the way of anything of much documentary value.  I considered myself completely off the clock for this trip, but I did manage to grab a few shots along the way.  The ones from the Holga are all light leaked because I didn't even feel like dealing with the mess of gaffing tape I need to seal the camera.

I'll be posting the photos from the trip without much commentary.  Hopefully they wont need it.

Snowstorm

Well, we just had our first big snowstorm of 2015.  It started Monday and was supposed to drop two to three feet of snow by Tuesday morning, but we woke up to less than a foot.  Still, it was a significant amount and I spent most of the morning shoveling.  I left work early on Monday afternoon to beat the rush and ended up being part of it; for the first time ever, the Staten Island Ferry managed to run out of seats.

But along the way home, I had my Olympus XA with a roll of Kodak Tri-X.  I shot it at 800 to push in development, but my developer (Kodak XTOL) had apparently gone off.  My negatives were thin and I was worried, but the scans were usable.

As I've said many times already, I love shooting in crappy weather.  The cool thing about snow is that it adds depth.  There are lots of ways to add depth (the third dimension) to a two-dimensional picture, whether it's a painting or photo.  You can use perspective, where close things are big and far things are small, or you can also use depth of field, where your subject is in focus, and everything near or far from it is blurry.  

And then there's atmospheric perspective, where things in the distance become lower in contrast.  Think of shooting in the fog -- as things get farther away, they get lighter as they fade into the mist, and as they get closer, they get darker.  Snow is great for making this happen.

What I also love about snow is the footprints and tire tracks.  Look at the parallel lines and swooping curves left by people and cars as they make their way to where they're going.  Okay, most of it is nasty gray slush, but there's just so much texture in there.  A lot of these photos would not be the same without the snow.  Imagine if the following photo was just black tarmac:

Saul Leiter did a lot of amazing things with snow.  He is a huge factor in why I always make sure to pack a camera when there's a storm coming.  The photos in this post are B&W, but he was known for his color photography work.  People usually associate snow and rain with gray, gray, gray.  The sky is gray, the clouds are gray, the nasty slush is gray.  However, Saul Leiter used it to emphasize what color there was left.  

You should definitely check out his work.  It will make you think differently about crappy weather.

Director's Cut

There are a lot of photos I take that don't get posted.  I'd guess that about 1 in 10 of the photos I take are worth posting and, even within those, there is still competition which who will make it into my audience's eyes.  The rest remain as they are -- whether it's meaningless silver and gelatin on film, or 0's and 1's on my hard drive.

But we all love director's cuts, don't we?  I don't know about you, but my inhibitions fade considerably when I'm drunk, which is the case right now on this Sunday night.

I dug through my old stuff and found the above photo. I remember taking it; it was summer of last year.  I was with my friends and their daughter Abi on Spring Street after a wonderful dinner and some wine and I noticed there was a woman and her dog approaching, walking towards us.

Abi took notice and excitedly yelled, "Dog!" and reached her hand out for it, so I readied my camera.  It would have been a pretty sweet moment if the dog had reciprocated her gesture of friendship.
 However the dog would have none of it, and turned the other way.  With the connection missed, I filed this one away as a failure.  It was really blurry anyway; I was wobbly, shooting with a slow shutter and the sun beneath the horizon.

But now that I look at it again, it's grown a bit on me.  I don't normally deep-dive into my own photos for fear of sounding self-aggrandizing, but I'm drunk, so I'll tell you what made me like this photo again:

In spite of the motion blur, Abi's outstretched hand is pretty well defined and so is the dog.  I'm big on hand gestures in my photos, and Abi's hand has that forlorn look to it as she tried to get the dog's attention and failed.  The motion blur on the pavement adds to the dog's leftward retreat as it evaded her reach.  One of my favorite things in this photo is that vertical seam in the sidewalk that slashes the scene in two, as if to create a wall between them.

Abi's touch would go unrequited, both parties going in their opposite directions, never to meet again.