Drive-in Theater Photography Presentation in Two Weeks

"The Pike, Montgomery, Pennsylvania, 2001"

Drive-in Theaters in the Regional American Landscape

Sponsored by Flanders Nature Center

Tuesday, October 16 at 7:00 PM

Woodbury Public Library, 269 Main Street South, Woodbury, CT 06798.

The presentation will feature pictures from about 100 of the 250+ drive-in theaters in 44 states that I’ve photographed over the past twenty years. The talk will give a brief history and timeline of the drive-in, along with stories and anecdotes collected from the scores of theater owners I’ve interviewed in the course of the project. There will be a Q&A session afterwards.

The drive-in theater is an iconic feature of the American landscape. Once there were over 4,000 of them, but now fewer than 400 remain in operation. No two theaters are alike—vernacular architecture on a colossal scale—but they all share common elements and I find it fascinating to see how these elements relate to the different regional landscapes across the country.

Admission is free, but please click here to register so we know how many to expect.

Back at It, More Prints this Morning

This pretty much finishes up my "first look" Pt/Pd prints I wanted to make from pictures made last October on a short trip to Virginia and West Virginia. Prints are made with a palladium and traditional platinum mix, no contrast agent, on Hahnemühle Platinm Rag paper.

Coated sheet and digital negative on Fixxons film, set up in the vac frame (the stick supports the glass/frame top because the pneumatic lifts have long since worn out).

Vac frame pad is drawn up tight, ready to flip up against the light unit for exposure.

Four minute exposure under way.

"Palomino, Birch River, West Virginia," (there's a horse at the top of the hill on right) . 7x17 Korona Panoramic View with 305mm G-Claron.

"Goshen, Virginia." Evening view along the railroad tracks looking north up the valley, 8x10 Deardorff with 240mm Apo-Sironar S.

"Goodwill Baptist Church, Bland County, Virginia." Along Route 42, a little white church in brilliant midday sunlight, hilly pasture land in back. 8x10 Deardorff with 240mm Apo-Sironar S.

Printing this Morning

More prints this morning. Platinum/palladium on Hahnemühle Platinum Rag. One early morning landscape from the Blue Ridge Parkway near Buena Vista, VA. Two street scenes from Princeton, WV. All shot with a Korona 7x17-inch camera and 305 G-Claron lens, on HP5-Plus, developed in PMK pyro.

Back in the Darkroom

Back in the lab making platinum/palladium prints yesterday and today after a few months of enforced layoff. Here are some in-progress snaps from this morning.

Exposed sheet of Hahnemühle Platinum Rag, coated with a Pt/Pd mix containing 10% traditional platinum solution. 11" wide image area on 11x15. The ghost print-out image looks just about right for this paper, with very pale border areas.

After developer pour-on. Something unusual about HPR paper is that if you do a bunch of printing on it, without any other papers used in the meantime, the developer turns a light greenish color, almost clear compared to the dark brown it turns with all other papers I've used.

Same print in the second clearing bath.

Next two prints clearing. The first two were from digital captures, the last from an 8x10" negative scan.

Hanging to drain before transfer to drying screens.

Goodwill Baptist Church

Ceres, Virginia, 10/23/16

Scanning, too

Birch River, West Virginia

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway, Overlooking Buena Vista, Virginia

Behind the Scenes

Birch River, West Virginia

This farm in WV is a place I've returned to for pictures many times, though not for over ten years now. At the beginning of my recent expedition to VA/WV this was the first place I visited. The fields showed the effect of a summer-long drought, as did the desaturated fall colors, but I think the b&w negative is promising. This is a snapshot of the setup after I'd made the exposure. The horse turned up at the crest of the right hand hill just on cue. I've been developing my film from the trip over the past couple days.

This is a "digiproof"—a quick 'n dirty positive file of the picture made by copying the sleeved negative resting on a lightbox, using a digital camera. It's not supposed to look like a good print—its purpose is simply to give me a positive rendering of the negative; one I can refer to as often as I like without repeatedly handling the negatives, and of course there's no materials expense to create it.

Setups

Princeton, West Virginia

Normally, clear sky and bright sun is not my favorite shooting situation, but after days on end of extremely dull overcast and landscapes that are obviously, visually, blighted by drought, yesterday was a relief to have bright light and plenty of subjects to respond to it. These are a few of the large format shots from the day. Lots of digital capture as well. Heading out again today for a last shoot of the expedition with freshly loaded film holders.

Bluefield, West Virginia

Ceres, Virginia

Simple Solutions

Woodbury, Connecticut

That's a snap from January in one of the ultra-modern, clean-room level work spaces, at the Working Pictures World Headquarters. What's happening here is making a "digital proof" of a 12x20 inch negative.

The problem with a big archive of large (and ultra-large) format negatives is getting a look at the pictures in positive form. David Vestal many years ago said something close to, "when it comes to judging a picture by looking at the negative, there are two camps; those who think they can, and those who know they can't." To make silver proof prints would cost a fortune and take forever. Scanning the negs costs nothing if you've already got a scanner, but even at low, screen-viewing resolution, it takes forever. Plus, my scanner can't handle my biggest negatives, at all. The simple answer is to put the negs on my old Logan 24" slide viewer with some loose chipboard masks and copy them with a semi-retired digital camera, one of my Lumix G3s. Smaller negs get shot with a 45mm, big ones with a 25.

Compared to scanning, this is lightening fast. I found I could capture a batch of negatives—remove the last neg from the unit, position the next one, actuate the camera, adjust the live histogram, expose. Repeat, at well under one minute each. Then, after downloading to the computer, use the Edit feature in Bridge, select the new files and use a custom setting to invert and convert them to rgb grayscale. Boom, a whole folder of legible positive transcriptions of the negatives. I began doing this at least fifteen years ago, with an early Fuji digicam before I had a "real" digital camera, and the results were acceptable enough to be useful. With a modern camera and RAW capture, the result is not only good enough to make a preliminary evaluation of the picture, I can easily pop the digiproof into ACR and make quick adjustments to see a useful approximation of how I might work with the picture using a real scan. Even some hints of how I might approach making a Pt/Pd print directly from the in-camera negative with the unscannable 12x20s.

New project: Tina wants to choose from her vast archive of 20-up slide pages—her reference shooting for painting material for the forty or so years she shot slides for reference. So, this weekend we did some tests with my Epson V-750 and its never before used, 12-up, slide holder. The idea was we'd scan the selects and make them into .jpg files to load onto her iPad for easy reference. The  750's performance in this mode with the EpsonScan software is, ahem, underwhelming, which could be another post. When I tried to actuate the included SilverFast software on this 3.5 year old scanner (with earlier printers I'd found SilverFast better than manufacturers' software for color work, although I hated the interface) what transpired could be another post, about wasting half of this morning.

So, over the weekend we tried to light up the ol' lightbox for Tina to look at the sheets, examine individual slides with a loupe, and pull them for scanning.

It wouldn't light up. A little flicker, a dull glow. I'm not an electrician, but I know enough that I don't know whether it's the tubes, the ballast, or the switch. What to do? The simplest answer would be to replace the tubes since the switch seemed to work and ballasts tend to fail completely, not partially.

Let's go to, "the catalog"—the B&H website. Tina pointed out, "haven't you owned this for, like, forty years?" which was all too true. The manufacturer, Logan, still makes a few lightbox models, but none of them even resemble this one, or could possibly use the same tubes, making it unlikely I can order replacements. They have other models, as do a few other manufacturers, with  much higher specifications and utterly stunning prices. Not going there for what we want to do with this tool.

So I took the thing apart. The tubes revealed a nomenclature claiming excellent, CR90,  color correction (way back then!), and a brand name that Google can't find.

This is where simple comes in again. Tina doesn't want to evaluate the color balance of her moldy 40 year old slides, she wants to decide which of them she wants to get into a form that she can put into a reasonable and somewhat zoomable view on her iPad, as reminders of the original place. I need to be able to make rough digital proofs of future ULF negatives, which will be converted to grayscale. Down at Ken's Ace Hardware, I found that 20 watt 24" brand name tubes cost 12 bucks, and off-brand ones cost 8. Parting with $16 plus tax, I came back and found that it had been the tubes; these new ones lit right up. With the box put back together, I immediately saw that the color was yukky compared to what the unit had presented with the dedicated tubes, and also quite a bit too bright. Thing is, neither of those means anything for what either Tina or I want to do with it. A simple solution is perfectly adequate.

Canyon Spring: Picture and Setting Series, #9

Little River Canyon, Alabama

From Spring of 2005, down under the cliffs, by the Little River near the southern base of the canyon. I'd been to the National Preserve in February, (see post Jan. 12) and decided to return for Spring flowering. I managed to get in touch with the resident Ranger, who was enthusiastic about the idea and began sending me progress reports in March, complete with digital snapshots. I headed down in early April. This is one of many 8x10 and 717 pictures I made trying to capture the sense of the first burst of Spring.

Record snapshot made with a pocket Fuji digicam.

This is copied from a palladium print I made last week, working from a digital negative, printed on Fabriano Artistico Natural White.

Picture and Setting Series, #1

Sunrise, Point Pleasant, West Virginia

Beginning in early 2000, years before I had any "serious" digital cameras, I began to use a pocket FujiFilm camera as a large format photography accessory. I was holding off as long as I could on an expensive digital camera because I suspected that any professional digicam I bought at that point would be obsolete right about the minute it was amortized by assignment work.

I'd shoot each LF setup, including the camera, so I could see which format I'd been using. This proved a great help in tracking sheet film from road trips, which of course ends up as loose negatives with no sequence built in. The digital snap also carried a time stamp, so it could be closely matched to my shooting logs. I could use the browser window of digisnaps to sequence and number my large format negatives (5x7, 8x10, 7x17, 12x20). I also found it useful to make other identifying shots, like road signs, the local post office which always has the town name, roadside historical markers, or anything else that would help with context for the pictures.

Printing again this Morning

Woodbury, Connecticut

Just about perfect lab conditions for the current incarnation of Arches Platine and palladium prints.

Another California desert theater, this one at Twenty-nine Palms.

At the 99W in Oregon, there was nowhere to park my car without getting it into the picture, except at a Burger King lot up the highway. Also almost no room at the shoulder of the road to set up an 8x10 camera, so I shot digital capture, which holds up remarkably well in a 10" palladium print.

After I'd done several large format shots at this theater in Milton-Freewater, Oregon, I was leaving when this wonderful storm sky came racing in from the west. I grabbed a digital camera and shot it, then it was gone before I could even get out the tripod.

Printing: Film, Through Digital, to Palladium

Some snaps from the darkroom. This week I've been working with pictures from my American Drive-in Theater project. As mentioned here a couple days ago, some of my 7x17 panoramic shots with expansive western skies benefit greatly from some corrective work in Photoshop/ACR. Yesterday, I made palladium prints from digital negatives, a bit larger than the originals.

Woodbury, Connecticut

I've found that Arches Platine, currently the most reliable paper available for Pt/Pd printing, won't work correctly without using the additive Tween20 in the solution. The combination, however, refuses to accept a perfectly even brush coating. The problem is subtle and doesn't show in most pictures, but 17.5" of perfectly clear California desert sky will show up the tiniest imperfections. So, for the first time in ten years or more, I've switched back to coating the paper with glass tubes or acrylic rods. This presents other problems because Tween makes the solution so runny that it's difficult to keep track of, I'm basically having to learn to coat with a tube all over again.

Prepared sheet and negative placed in the vacuum frame, waiting for the pressure to come up.

Starting the six minute exposure with the vac frame flipped up against the 20x24" UV exposure unit.

The Skyline Drive-in,  Barstow, California, in the first clearing bath.

The Comanche, Buena Vista, Colorado, and the Skyline, draining after final wash, before transfer to drying screens.

Working with Scans of Panoramic Negatives

Barstow, California

These are three pivotal pictures from the West and Southwest sections of my American Drive-in Theater project. All done with my 7x17-inch Korona camera with my standard 305mm G-Claron lens. I've had a lot of trouble getting scans of these negatives to do what I want. There's considerable illumination falloff with this lens on this format (vignette) which usually isn't a problem with New England woodland scenes or moody, stormy landscapes. But the enormous skies filled with clean pure light that you see out west made a whole different situation, with the falloff definitely not contributing to the pictures. This was compounded by the fact that, despite the drought, there were usually a few faint wisps of cloud, and because of the drought in the summer of 2012, there were always some pale patches of smoke-haze from the wildfires raging everywhere around. These slight tonal variations interacted badly with the darkening of the picture corners. (Do click on one of pictures to get the larger, isolated view of the pictures.)

Abilene, Texas

Fixing the problem in Photoshop proved annoying, because the effect varied depending on lens aperture and various camera adjustments, making a routine fix impossible. Then I thought about the elliptical gradient tool in Adobe Camera Raw. You can custom shape the ellipse in real time using vector-drawing handles, drawing it custom for each image in just a few seconds. You can change the feather, specify the effect inside or outside the ellipse, and for the effect you have nearly the whole suite of ACR tonal adjustment tools.

Globe, Arizona

So, the procedure is to scan the negative in two sections, orient and merge the two files in Photoshop, then throw the switch to make TIFF files open in ACR instead of PS. Open the file into ACR and fix the falloff along with other basic tonal adjustments, then save the result as a .psd file. Then open the .psd directly into PS to take care of the inevitable dust cleanup (worst part of scanning), then use a Curves adjustment layer and a burn&dodge layer if needed to do the final tonal tweaking. At last, the results I've been looking for from these negatives.

Spare Negatives—What a Concept!

Woodbury, Connecticut

The platinum/palladium print offer continues over at TOP (link in sidebar at right). Along with the print offer there's a series, only one up so far, of articles describing the printing process which I hope will be of interest generally, not just to purchasers of the prints. One question that has already come up is whether I expect the digital negatives to be more durable than traditional in-camera film negatives. The answer is no, but thank goodness they don't have to be! The point is that, once the file is established and tested successfully, the negatives themselves can be cloned endlessly. Any individual negative is expendable. If it gets damaged or begins to fade, just pull a second negative out of its folder and keep on printing.

Documentary Photography, Emotion, and Projection

The Sunset, Shinnston, West Virginia, 2002

Doing some online research recently, I tripped over a discussion at a photography board that began with a mention of some of my drive-in theater pictures from my website. The discussion took place more than four years ago and I was not aware of it. A fairly long thread developed, which consisted mostly of people recounting fond memories of DI theaters. That’s what usually happens when people see some of these pictures. One individual then went on at some slightly pedantic length about the socio-economic background of the drive-in theater industry, ending with a critique that my pictures were too emotional: histrionically nostalgic.

The Winner, Winner, South Dakota, 2002

That’s quite a bit of projection, there. I literally can’t be nostalgic about the DI because it wasn’t part of my past. I’m the right age, but grew up in the wrong place (they were never, even in the 1950s, thick on the ground twenty miles west of Manhattan) plus, my family almost never went to movies anyway. My experience began when I became interested in them as a subject for documentary photography, starting about 15 years ago. My connection to them is entirely in that extended present tense. I suppose I could manage to come up with some metaphorical nostalgia based on all that I’ve learned about the subject, but it’s not a conscious goal.

Documentary photography for me is observational, but never objective, neutral, or unbiased. No art form is objective. I think good documentary photographs result when the photographer makes prints (including now online, eBook, iPad, etc. presentations) that work as a bridge, that facilitate a perceptive viewer to move through the print to an emotional connection with the subject. Good photographs build that bridge, but the actual emotion comes from the viewer, and the viewer’s relation to the subject matter.

The Jesup, Jesup, Georgia, 2012

Let’s say someone looking at these pictures, “grew up at the drive-in,” (a phrase I hear a lot) or simply has fond memories of childhood family outings, or teenage dating with an unaccustomed degree of privacy. If there’s an emotional reaction, the emotion may well be nostalgic. She might decide that I’m intentionally making sentimental or nostalgic pictures.

I can imagine another possible viewer, let’s say a Fundamentalist preacher, who was raised believing that the drive-in theater was a terrible blot on society, an immoral “passion pit,” leading youth so astray that the saloon and the pool hall look like garden parties in comparison. If he looks closely at the pictures, he might establish an emotional connection, but it may be one of revulsion and opprobrium. He might accuse me of immorally promoting these dens of iniquity with my pictures.

The Starlite, Christianburg, Virginia, 2003

In a related vein, I’ve never referred to this project as being about “Abandoned Drive-in Theaters,” (or Dead, or Derelict, or Dark, etc). Yet, people almost always use one of those terms to refer to it. In fact, at least 75% of the theaters shown in my older web gallery presentation, and more like 90% of the 107 theaters shot in 2012, are fully operational, or at least were at the time I shot them. Seems like projection again, overlaying the viewer’s personal experience on the pictures. The things is, 90% of the theaters scattered across the country at the heyday, around 1960, are gone. Hundreds are still operating, but, out of sight, out of mind. Despite the fact that quite a few pictures in the project show evening activities, and that a lot of the theaters shown in their daytime landscape settings are gleaming white and in perfect repair, a lot of viewers just skip over those—maybe, "they don’t fit in”—and say something like, “I used to love the drive-in, too bad they’re all gone.”

The Boulevard, Kansas City, Kansas, 2012

As I design the book layout, a couple things I’m planning are that each plate will be identified with the name and location of the theater, along with the date the picture was shot. Also, endnotes will, wherever possible give brief, historical stats on each theater, including whether it’s still operational at the time of publication.