Spring Trees, Long View

Woodbury, Connecticut

For years I've loved to photograph the onset of the Spring season. There are wonderful contrasts between the delicate new foliage and flowers against the stark, bare, trunks and branches of the trees that bloom later.

This is one of the rare times that I use longer than normal lenses. It's not so much that the trees are difficult to approach closely, but that the effect I want comes from backing away and using a long lens for a compressed perspective. I have a Lumix 35-100 Varifocal II (this is for Micro 4/3s and so roughly equivalent to 70-200 in traditional 35mm format) which is a stunning performer and produced most of the spring trees pictures I've been posting here. But I've wanted to push the compression effect farther.

I also have an older Lumix 45-200 (~equivalent 90-400), a relatively inexpensive lens that punches far above its weight class with some subjects. However, when I've tried to use it for the spring trees, it doesn't pan out. The whole point of these pictures is the picky detail, and that's where it fails. The tight pattern of detail looks totally "digitized" and shows almost a paisley pattern. I think the problem is that the lens has all sorts of aberrations which are automatically "fixed" in software. This just doesn't work for picky detail.

Some weeks ago, thinking about Spring, it occured to me that my 180mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens, bought in the early 80s, would be an e~360mm f/2.8 used on 4/3s format. A visit to the B&H website showed that I could get an adapter for $35. I'd never gotten adapters for my M-4/3s cameras to use my Leitz and Nikkor lenses before this, because almost all the time I want a normal or shorter focal length. The converted short lenses would be no use to me with their focal length effectively doubled. I'm happy with this small investment. The 180's resolution is right up there with the pro 35-100, and the bokeh beyond the point of focus is smooth. This is one of my test shots with it.

Cadillac, Subaru, Kia

Thomaston, Connecticut

Yesterday, hoping to get the last of the vicious ice-melting chemicals off the undercarriage of my car, I went to the least expensive but well-equipped car wash in the area, which happens to be in Thomaston. Then I spent an hour and a half wandering around the town in quite interesting bright overcast light, looking for things to photograph. I kept noticing cars. Of course cars are everywhere all the time, and I see them all the time but for some reason yesterday I kept noticing them, as in noticing they were worth trying a picture.

Something else was happening though. As in my last few shooting sessions, a couple features of my Panasonic Lumix G9 were "acting up" or not functioning at all.

I know a lot of people don’t like the eye sensor feature in digital cameras—maybe the same people who insist that “real photographers shoot manual.” But I really like both the auto-switching between LCD and EVF, and the actuation of AF when the eye sensor is triggered. I had my GX7 set up that way and did the same with the G9 when I got it about ten weeks ago. Yesterday these features cut out again, and since I was in no hurry about anything, I interrupted my walkabout several times to sit on park benches and try to figure out what was wrong with the camera. I worked through the menus to find the settings that control the eye sensor functions, and to deal with the Fn3 button which switches—is supposed to switch in sequence—LCD/EVF/AutoSelect. I thought I got it working again, then it cut out.

Finally I was looking one last time, with the LCD in place (I usually keep it folded) and noticed that the hole in the eyecup that serves as a window for the eye sensor (the soft rubber cup is an incredible dust and lint magnet) appeared to be blocked by a layer of white crud. As soon as I rubbed at it to try to clean it out, the eye sensor actuated the switch from LCD to EVF. And continued to work exactly as it's supposed to. Using these computers-that-take-pictures, it's easy to leap to the conclusion that something about the computer is going wrong.

Doh. Not software, not programming, nothing to find in the menus, just a pure physical blockage of the eye sensor’s function…

Plus I like the car shots.

They Don't Owe Me Anything

Woodbury, Connecticut

When I first began to use digital cameras that took SD cards instead of the larger CF cards, the dainty little cards proved quite unreliable. Not in a computer/electonic/data way, but mechanically. The thin plastic body of the cards tended to crack and split (even though I treated them carefully and wouldn't be caught dead doing something like dropping a card loose into my pocket) and worse, the write-protect tab would break off, also rendering the card useless. At least this left the cards readable, so no pictures were lost. This happened, repeatedly, with several different brands.

Sometime late 2010, I needed cards again, and bought a pair of 16 GB, 163x Delkin Devices cards. I chose them simply because they were on sale, and I hadn't tried that brand before. They have performed flawlessly ever since. I have no idea how many times they have been removed from a camera, inserted in a reader or computer card slot, then returned to the camera and formatted. Something over five years, 365 days in a year, and if I shoot I always download the cards at the end of the day, and I shoot at least something nearly every day. Most everything that found its way to this blog in the past 5-6 years was recorded by that pair of cards. Finally, earlier this week when I replaced "card 1" in a Lumix GX7 camera, it wouldn't seat properly. I got it out, and with close examination found that a bit of the housing plastic between two of the gold contacts had come loose. I managed to remove the sliver, and out of curiosity put it back in the camera, where it proved to work just fine.

But the handwriting was now on the wall. So, a quick trip to the B&H site, where I searched for SD cards, Delkin only. I found that 32 GB, 633x-speed cards were on sale for the ludicrous price of $15.99. Twice the capacity, and nearly four times the speed. I got a pair, and had to order a couple of other little accessory items to get the order up over $49 for free shipping.

When the cards arrived this afternoon, the first thing I did was put one in a GX7 and format it. Sure enough (I didn't use a stopwatch) but the format operation for the 32 Gig card took about half as long as the 16 Gig cards had taken. Downloading the several snaps of the old cards, using the Adobe DNG Converter, also went obviously faster than with the 163x cards. So the venerable cards are now put out to pasture, in a hard case for extra cards, where they will have a peaceful existence because I've never come near filling them, and now have twice the storage in-camera.

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.

Scanning Large Negatives

Yesterday afternoon I scanned nine pictures made in 2004 and 2005, some of my, "Southern Mountains" series, shot along the Blue Ridge Parkway and in West Virginia. It turned out I had never done high res scans from the negatives; the gallery on my web site was scanned from prints. They're 7x17-inch negatives, made with my Korona Panoramic View. In the past I used a troublesome Microtek tabloid scanner which got (almost) the whole negative in one pass, but needed lots of care and feeding to handle the range of a black and white negative. It also broke down, was badly "repaired," and then got orphaned for driver support. Almost typical of digital equipment, buy it, use it as much as you can, because within five years it won't work any longer, for one reason or another.

So I'm scanning the negatives with an Epson V750 Pro, which has a transparency scan area of just 8x10 inches. However, whether by sheer accident or plan, the scanner lid doesn't "bite" a negative that's longer than the bed. So you can safely scan the negative in two passes. Which is really tedious.

But it works quite well. It's the first scanner I've had, and I've been using them for 25 years, that has software that can understand a black and white negative. Previous scanners have all thought black and white film was just color negative film without color, which is totally wrong. Color negatives are soft mushy dye clouds with a heavy orange mask, all of which was perfect to work in projection printing onto color print paper. But it drove early scanners crazy. At the same time, when flatbed and slide scanners got to be reasonably useful, they did color slides pretty well, color negatives OK if there was a preset for the specific film type, but couldn't do black and white negs worth a damn. I always figured it was because the designers had no idea what a black and white negative is. It's silver deposited in gelatin, and has a density range much more like a color transparency than a dye cloud negative. So you had to tell the scanning software that you were scanning a transparency. Use the preview/prescan tools to make it look like a good negative. After acquisition, you inverted the file in Photoshop to make it a positive. Scanners that made horrible scans when set to "black and white negative" delivered perfectly usable scans, if you lied to them. The V750 can be set correctly and take in the full range of black and white negative with room to spare at both ends of the histogram.

Another point is that scanner previews are never accurate. If you work hard to make the preview perfect, you will usually get a bad scan with clipped shadows and highlights. This is still true with the V750. I set the prescan controls so there is plenty of headroom and footroom. Nothing below Level 20 and nothing above Level 235. This delivers a file that is delightfully like what David Vestal said about Walker Evans's prints—"Pale, but all there." Since the acquired data is in 16-bit grayscale, there's lots of room to use a Curves Adjustment Layer in Photoshop to bring the tone up to a good dynamic range.

I place the film on the scanner glass emulsion side down, the wrong way, because the emulsion side is much less likely to suffer Newton Rings than the shiny back side of the film in contact with the glass. Little tabs of tape, six of them, pull the neg tight which helps scan quality and also reduces risk of Sir Isaac interfering. This is a drag, but I keep reminding myself how much less trouble it is than wet mounting on a drum scanner.

Along with having to scan each picture twice, the pieces have to be oriented and assembled. Each scan gets rotated 90° clockwise or counter, then rotated Flip Horizontal, then saved. Then I select the pair in Bridge and call up Photoshop and Photomerge. It's important then to select the last option, Position Only. Otherwise PS will imagine all sorts of stuff that it thinks should be perspective corrected, with disastrous, and sometimes hilarious, results.

Here's the assembled scan in a screen capture from Photoshop, edges cropped away, and given its initial tonal adjustment using a Curves Layer. "Dawn, Bean's Farm, Birch River, West Virginia, 2005."

UPDATE: Just a note to say that comments have somehow been getting routed to an "awaiting moderation" folder at Blogger instead of showing up in my email, so several have just been posted and I'm not sure how long they've been sitting around.

Unusual Clouds, and Scanning Old Negatives

Middlebury, Connecticut

Tuesday I wrote, talking about West Texas, that here in southern New England, we don't see clouds that hang as a thin dark strip above the horizon...so of course Wednesday on my way to Waterbury to get supplies for the cats, I saw this. Really, I don't think this happens a lot around here, but there it is. The helicopter in the sky is a nice touch at a large enough display size.

Scanning all yesterday afternoon, once again from pictures made 25 years ago. This time, the series was with a traveling carnival in the spring and summer of 1990. Today, remembering something Bill Pierce told me a few years ago, I decided to forget about the pesky film holder for the Epson V750—it might be useful for batch scanning twenty negatives at once but it just gets in the way doing one high res scan at a time. So I taped each neg directly to the scanner glass, just as I do with large format negatives, and used 4800 ppi, four times what I need for 8x10 and 7x17 negatives. The tabs of tape with folded ends along the outside edge of the scanner are for those big negatives.

I think the scans are better than I got years ago from a Minolta dedicated slide scanner. And better than with the film holder. The scanner adjusts for holder or glass (film area guide, see first option under Original in the basic Epson scan window, below) and I suspect the focus at the glass is better. One great feature of that old Minolta scanner was that it focused for each scan. No focusing the Epson, we're stuck with the way it came from the factory. Scanning with the emulsion side down, then flipping in Photoshop, helps prevent Newton Rings since the emulsion isn't as shiny as the back of the film, and in fact of 15 scans only two got attacked by Sir Isaac, and had to be redone.

Here's a snap (not screen cap, mind the moiré), of the zoomed prescan. As with any scan I've left it quite flat with plenty of detail in the shadows and highlights. Once the scan is made I snap it up as needed with a Curves Adjustment Layer in PSCC. Another advantage, one that I wanted with this particular set which I think I will print in direct digital monochrome rather than Pt/Pd, is to retain the black edge, film border, just as I used to do using a filed-out film carrier in the enlarger for silver printing.

Don't know how well this will read, but here's a screen capture of a Bridge window with the afternoon's scanning. Click on any of the images in the post to see them all more clearly.

Pictures in the Windshield

Waterbury, Connecticut

When I tried the very first versions of Lightroom as it was first introduced, I seriously disliked the interface and the whole approach. However, the current version is so much improved that I wish I'd taken a look sooner. I'll continue to use Bridge>ACR>PS for some work but I think I'll transition to working in LR for most digital capture. Haven't yet experimented with printing directly from LR.

Meanwhile, one of the new tools in ACR/LR is "dehaze" which is meant for helping pictures shot in hazy conditions, but it also works like a charm for reducing window reflections. I didn't want to eliminate the reflections here, but wanted to see into the interior better than the unmodified file. It's a little like being able to apply a polarizing filter after the fact, in post.

As always, you can click the picture to get a larger more legible view.

Any Papermakers Out There?

Woodbury, Connecticut

Arches Platine's basic parent sheet is nominally 22x30, but is actually at least a quarter of an inch oversize on the short dimension because of the feathery deckle there. Shipping supplies however, are precision cut to 11x14 inches, if that's the item you order from Uline. So, as I work on the TOP Platinum Print Offer orders, I can't simply cut the sheets into quarters. I have to quarter them in a way that ends up with printing sheets that are exactly 11x14, and that leaves a certain amount of wastage.

I've never done any handmade papermaking, but I've seen it demonstrated and have had contact with folks who do it as part of the Artist Book milieu. You can also make your own paper for Pt/Pd printing though that's not a place I'm interested to go. I know that for many, making your own artisanal paper begins with finding scraps of "rag" paper (meaning cotton, not wood pulp) to sort of melt down and begin the home brew. Well, these scraps are from about the most primo all-cotton paper imaginable (25 sheets ships in at just short of $200) so if anyone reading here has something better to do with this than throw it in the recycle with the cardboard, let me know.

Tech details for anyone interested. Cutting down paper for Pt/Pd printing is very picky. If you use a knife and metal straightedge, or the superb RolaTrim cutter I use with the roll paper output of my big HP-Z3200, or scissors, all these tools have a metal-on-metal action that is apt to scatter microscopic particles of metal. What does Pt/Pd-coated paper and developer think of those particles? Yum! Attack! Dense black spots in the print.

Tearing it doesn't work either with Platine, though it's OK with some other papers. With this stuff, torn sheets seem to bleed tons of cellulose into the developer, which I don't need to deal with. To get a clean cut, I simply use my matt cutter, with the flat blade intended for cutting down parent sheets of matt board before you cut the windows. The blade floats about an eighth of an inch from the guide rail, held by the slot in the tool. So it touches nothing but the paper, can't make contamination, and is easy to use.

Motorcyclist, Moving Through

Naugatuck, Connecticut

(For Markus.)

Yesterday afternoon the light was a fabulous stormy overcast that never actually turned into storm. It was a great time to spend a couple hours on a bit of an experiment I've wanted to begin. On my walkabout shooting, the kind of pictures I post on this blog, I've been thinking that I wanted to tighten up and intensify the procedure. Eschewing halfway measures, for a while on these walkabouts I'm going to shoot just one frame of each situation. Slow down, decide exactly what I want, and do just one shot. Worked really well yesterday.

Loading Shot...Sorta

Torrington, Connecticut

Back in the days of 35mm film, we often got "loading shots" that were kind of interesting. Extra frames at the beginning of the roll that you'd crank off when reloading in a hurry to make sure the first frame you shot would be on unexposed film. This afternoon I lowered the camera to check the histogram on a shot with extremely bright clouds, to make sure I'd compensated enough to keep the clouds from blowing out. The view on the LCD, when I turned off the review, looked just like one of those 35mm loading shots. So I shot it.

Ex

Waterbury, Connecticut

I remain a dyed-in-the-wool eye level viewfinder user, but having other options can prove useful. This truck is in a large fenced-in field, part of which is used by the city police to store impounded vehicles. I've done some shots using the chain link fence as part of the picture, but that didn't work in this case. Using the LCD of my Lumix GX7 tilted down 45° let me hold the camera above the the links and between the strands of barbed wire at the top of the fence. Even viewing against a bright sunny summer sky I was able to get a really decent idea of framing the picture, with the camera held eight feet above the ground.

Fixing Park Avenue

New York, NY

Last weekend I didn't get in as much off-topic (non-workshop) shooting as usual because of the seasonal short days and because it was too damn cold and windy to stay outside early Saturday and Sunday mornings—the workshop runs on "New York time," 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. I'm always up at 6:00, but it doesn't get light until 7:00 and it's pitch dark by the time the session ends.

I thought of an experiment to try. Except for my drive-in theater series, I've never been happy with monochrome conversions from digital captures. It's not a technical issue, it's a perceptual one. When I use a digital camera, I know the camera is making color captures, so I shoot color pictures. I may know I can convert the color pictures to mono, but I don't shoot them that way, it just doesn't work. So Sunday morning I changed the camera from RAW capture to RAW+JPEG, then set the JPEG file to monochrome. The idea was to have a visual aid. The LCD and EVF both show a mono picture when set this way, a constant reminder that I was trying to make b&w pictures. Also, when I looked at the take on Monday, I began by editing the jpg folder, so I was looking only at monochrome pictures. When I'd found a few that looked promising, I switched to the folder of RAW files to work on their twins in ACR.

With the temperature about 26°F at 8:00 Sunday morning, I walked around the block and came on this work crew, paving a lane of Park Avenue South. They were backlit by harsh morning sunlight, but brilliant light was also reflecting off the windows of a building on the west side of the street. I reminded myself to "shoot black and white," and made some captures.

New York, NY

The Tower Drive-in/Texas Sky

Rule, Texas

It's been a frustrating week. Back last weekend I was doing some tests to zero in on exactly how I want to make digital prints of the theater pictures (Epson Hot Press Natural paper with a neutral setting of the Advanced Black and White driver looks promising) when a heat wave rolled in and stopped everything. It isn't just hot, the humidity is sub-tropical. There's no way the modest air conditioning we have in our old house can begin to reach proper heat/humidity operating conditions for the printer. Also, Tuesday a package of Fixxons® Waterproof Silk Screen Positive Film—which I found superior to Pictorico® OHP film in earlier tests—arrived, but I don't dare unseal the package at 78° Rh. I'd been hoping to make a final round of digital-negative-Pt/Pd-tests, but it's also impossible to get the darkroom where I do the platinum printing down to the necessary heat and humidity levels. Even if I could output a negative I can't make finals. It's meaningless to do "tests" without proper operating conditions.

This digital capture of the Tower theater was one of the pictures I worked with before the monsoon rolled in. Looking at the test print yesterday, I realized that before last year's travels, if I'd come across this print my reaction to the sky would be to think someone had gone way overboard on post processing. Skies "don't look like that." Well, they never do back east where I've always lived. But in fact this, and even more so the print, is a really accurate portrayal of what the back-lit clouds above the vast Texas high plateau actually looked like in mid-morning on June 4. The sky was an extremely pale blue, but in places the clouds were were so thin the blue showed right through them. The clouds overhead were much heavier. The whole scene was both delicate and storm-threatening at the same time.

No aggressive processing is needed, either. I'd used -.66 exposure compensation to make sure there was no clipping of the cloud values. This left the gravel field a little too dark, as expected, easily fixed in ACR with the Exposure slider. To get the sense of the transparent clouds near the horizon transiting to the heavier tone at the top of the frame, a combination of some pull back of blue in the grayscale mix combined with minor pulls of the White and Highlight sliders back in the Basic panel made a convincing result.

It may not be easy to see in the online display, but the stuff near the center of the frame, left of the screen, is a tank farm. I'll have to review the pictures to get a count, but a remarkable number of theaters I visited were directly adjacent to, or even surrounded by, oil or gas tank farms. But it really isn't that surprising. The fastest way to put a drive-in theater out of business is for the land it's on to rise in value, or become a desirable location for a WalMart. An undesirable location—like next to a tank farm—can keep property values and taxes low enough for a drive-in operation to thrive.

Skyline Drive-in Theater (the 7x17s)

 Barstow, California

I posted from the road about the Skyline at Barstow before on WP, almost exactly a year ago—how I'd seen snapshots of it on the web back around 2001. It was one of the things that gave me the idea of shooting theaters in all of the distinctive regional landscapes of the US. I would have been quite happy with this panoramic view from the parking field in afternoon light, except that I knew there was another very different angle that would only work in morning light.

 Barstow, California

I've been scanning the most interesting of the 7x17 pictures, acquiring the negatives at a resolution that will print at 36" wide. Scanning, especially panoramas that need to be scanned in two sections and then merged, is my least favorite aspect of photography. But the final results can be pretty rewarding.

The Graham, and Last Picture Show, Drive-in Theaters

Graham, Texas

I spent most of yesterday scanning. I avoided working from the negatives made on the Western Loop of the Giant Road Trip last year, scanning only the few that I needed for the upper-level Kickstarter Rewards choices, because of the mold in the scanner. With the scanner cleaned up, I've been working on all my 8x10 inch film from the trip.

The Screen at the Graham theater is heavily corrugated metal and has a rather severe ripple in the surface, which drove my digital cameras nuts. Oddly, seeming defects like this don't show up at all in projection. It's amazing what our vision tolerates viewing a projected moving picture. But something about the surface of this screen and the distance between it and the best camera positions made for monster moiré in almost every frame. Rainbow color arcs across the screen—something I've never seen before or since. If the distance had been greater or less, if the cameras had 12 or 24 megapixels instead of 16, the perfectly matched interference problem between the corrugations and the sensor pixels would have been mitigated, but that wasn't to be. It was after this I began using intentionally induced diffraction to minimize moiré without losing too much definition when working with expanses of corrugated metal. I'm glad to have several 8x10 film negatives. The .jpg file displayed here may appear to have moiré, depending on viewing size, but the scanned file itself shows nothing but clearly resolved subject matter.

Gatesville, Texas

This drive-in is about as simple as it gets, although in fact it is paired with an indoor theater and also a rare indoor seating area with a picture window view to the outdoor screen. Something about it also really says, "Texas," to me. Plus, I had a wonderful interview with the owner and got some nice portraits of him. The digital captures from here are fine, but there's something about all these broad expanses of smooth tone that will benefit from all the data taken in by large format film.

While continuing to develop one set of negatives from The Southern Loop early every morning, the next task is to work on the 7x17 negatives from The Western Loop. Not looking forward to that. My tabloid-size scanner is out of commission. Interesting how the wonderful tools that introduce us to the joys of digital imaging have service lives a fraction the length our old tools allowed us. The panoramas from the Korona camera have to be scanned in two pieces (making sure all scanner settings are identical for the two halves), then flipped and rotated all over the place before being joined with Photomerge. Nothing difficult about any of it, but it takes a good, and boring, 15-20 minutes just to come up with a basic merged acquire for each picture, even at a modest resolution capable of just slightly enlarged prints. I may use an old trick, and instead of stalwartly doing this for each of the scores of negatives, put each one on a 24" slide-viewing lightbox and snap them with a digital camera. Acquire time becomes about thirty seconds. Invert, do a quick Levels or Curves, and the result builds more or less a digital contact sheet that is adequately legible to decide which pictures actually deserve the salute of printing-resolution acquisition.

More from Behind the Scenes

Kanopolis, Kansas

In comments, Scott asked about tracking and indexing the material from The Giant Road Trip, and I thought it might be of interest to expand a bit on the subject. The system I use centers on something I learned from an Adobe Tips 'n Tricks video I saw way back in 2004 when I first began to do commercial assignments with digital capture. The two parts of last year's drive-in theater expedition accumulated something like 18,000 captures (weirdly close to the number of miles traveled) and the approach served well.

The system centers around filenames. At the end of each day, I download the SD cards from both digital cameras into a newly created folder inside the DI Expedition folder on the Captures external hard drive. Then I navigate to the new folder in Bridge (other browsers will have similar abilities), select the full set of files and then go to View-->Sort-->by Date. This actually sorts not just by date but by time down to the second, so if the two cameras' internal clocks agree, you have a perfect chronological sort. Then I go to Tools-->Batch Rename and set things up so that the new name will be in the format yymmdd_0001. Make sure to check the "preserve original file name in exif" button.

So, now the file name of the picture above is 120526_0384. This does a couple of things. First, any files, in any selection or grouping, in either the finder or a browser that sorts on date, will automatically arrange themselves in chronological order. So will any groups of derivative files like JPEGs for this blog, or .psd files prepared for printing. Also, I know immediately that this was the 384th file shot on May 26, 2012.

Kanopolis, Kansas

That's 120526_0285, shot in the evening on my way from the hotel room I'd secured in Wilson, KS, back down to the Kanopolis Drive-in. When I finish shooting at a location, as soon as I'm back in the car I make a note either by hand or with a voice recorder, with any relevant data about the location, plus the last digits of the last file number for each camera. Just noting the exact time works pretty well too. As soon as these notes are typed up I can quickly look up information about any picture by picking up the date from the file name and then jumping to that date in the text file.

Also, as soon as the information is available (which may be from memory, right away) I select all the shots from a specific location, hit Command-I to bring up the file info dialog, then type the name of the town, along with other things like a theater name, in the Description box. From then on, any time I look at a picture in the browser, again including any derivative files, a quick Command-I shows me the identification info. If there's some confusion about, say, some pictures made from the side of the road out in the middle of nowhere, in Bridge I can look at the File Properties pane and see the Preserved Filename as the second item. A quick search in the notes document will turn it right up. Since for more than forty years I've always titled my pictures with the place name where they were made, nowadays I just hit a couple buttons on the GPS unit in the car to come up with the info to record. One thing I like about this is that I don't need any additional tools or programs. I'd imagine any decent browser will have some sort of batch rename function and of course any word processor will do for the notes. A final touch is that my little Olympus voice recorder shows the date and time of each MP3 recording on the LCD panel, so even if I haven't typed up the notes I can quickly locate the relevant recording based on the date in the filename.

For the large format negatives, I've always used a simple indexing system, so that 12.717.043 is the 43rd 7x17" negative made in 2012. How to keep track when accumulating scores of negatives on a long road trip? I keep an older digital camera in the 7x17 case. Each time I finish a shot, I get that camera and shoot a few frames of the setup, including from behind the camera so I can see which format I used, then record the last digits of the final capture of that setup, along with any other relevant notes. Once again, after the notes are typed up they can quickly be correlated to the date/time-stamped digital captures.

Choices

Shelby, North Carolina

There have been some questions about some of what went on behind the scenes on The Giant Drive-in Theater Road Trip, dealing with both technical and aesthetic choices. I managed to reach a total of 107 theaters, more than I'd expected, but I knew from the outset that I wouldn't be able to photograph all of them with large format. Aside from direct expense, I'd never finish developing that much film—simply not feasible. Back in 2002 I made a smaller though still substantial trip hunting drive-ins across the upper tier of the country as far as Montana and Idaho. I'd guess I only photographed about half of the theaters I found on that trip. The others were either cookie-cutter dull, or simply didn't offer any unique aspects in either structure or setting. In retrospect, I wish I had photographed them for purely documentary purposes using 35mm film, but it wasn't on my radar.

detail

On last year's trip I was again looking for unique combinations of structure and landscape, but this time when I decided to do an 8x10 or 7x17 inch shot, I backed it up with similar framing using digital capture, then went on to document any other interesting aspects of the place. If I decided a theater wasn't distinctive enough to get large format film coverage, I still shot the most interesting views I could find using "free film." In a few cases, the theater's appearance was so "about color" that I shot only digital capture for that reason. Above you can see my  sunrise setup at The Sunset theater with a 7x17" Korona on a big Ries tripod and a mirrorless 4/3s camera on a very sturdy series No. 4 Gitzo.

Abilene, Texas

The Town and Country Drive-in has an enormous field with three screens. Along with pictures with both big cameras I shot a lot of other angles digital only. There were several oil wells on the site, but sadly they don't belong to the theater owner. "If I owned the mineral rights here, I wouldn't be worrying about the cost of converting to digital projection."

detail

The vast majority of digital captures at the theaters were made with a Lumix 7-14mm Varifocal, a lens with stunning optical quality that I bought specifically for this project. You can see a two-axis bubble level in the accessory shoe of the Lumix G3—I wanted the digital captures to reflect the same architectural/documentary style as the view camera work, which among other things meant keeping the camera perfectly plumb and level. Harder to do hand-held than you might expect, because at a drive-in most of the subject matter is not level. Screens lean forward, the ground is plowed into semi-circular ramps, concession stand roofs are often slanted. It's a lot easier to use a tripod and a level. This also meant I could work at optimum aperture and base ISO no matter what the light level. That's a compact quick release mount between the tripod platform and the camera.

The constant process of deciding whether each theater was going to get large format treatment was the hardest aesthetic judgement of the project. Also, I found it was important to do that first—begin by finding the ideal 8x10 and/or 7x17 shot, if there was one. Only after doing the large format work, or deciding not to, was it safe to do the digital capture coverage. I discovered that if I began with capture, it threw me off finding the perfect position for a large format shot. I know some people use digital capture as a kind of sketchbook to explore or scout a location, even using the captures to help decide what the best spot is to set up a large format shot, but that approach totally backfires for me.

Aside from structure and setting, two other things influenced the format choice. A few times, the moment I looked at a place I could see the platinum print in the back of my mind. Or, as I found the perfect place to stand, I realized that I would really love to see this as a big print. I've never been drawn to gargantuan prints, and of course I've done a great deal of my work using very large cameras to make rather small contact prints in platinum. But the drive-in theater subject in particular lends itself to prints larger than I normally make. Partly it's that the pictures often combine a broad landscape view with highly detailed structures that invite close examination. A scan of a 7x17" negative allows a very large panoramic print with exquisite detail and tone. A few years ago I had an exhibit of some of the earlier project material, showing prints with a 13x32" image area. (Less than a 2X enlargement.) While doing the scans and prints, I repeatedly found picture elements—a tractor mowing a hay field in the background, captured in a half-second exposure exactly as it rounds a corner of the field, for example—that I had been hyper aware of as I made the shot, but forgot about afterwards and didn't notice in the contact prints. Most of the time I'm happy with prints in the 11x14 to 16x20 range, but with this special subject, sometimes the best presentation is a much larger print with quality only available from large format film.

Structures

Ruskin, Florida

Ruskin, Florida

This is a bit of a mystery, I haven't figured out what the building was originally. The construction is robust and includes some fancy touches, but I don't know what the ruin was originally for. It's the only structure, or ruin, for quite some distance, in an area along the Little Manatee River.

As a technical side note, this didn't get into the recent "walk in the woods" post because there was unacceptable sensor fringing in the branches against the bright overcast sky. But today I was experimenting with the new and vastly improved "defringe" tools in ACR version 7.x (part of PSCS6). It occurred to me to go look up this file. The new tools easily changed false-color branches into believable-looking bright highlight areas.

Wind!

Greensburg, Kansas

I've never encountered anything like the Kansas wind. I've been through a couple of hurricanes that made it up to the mid-Atlantic and New England states, and many years ago, southern India in Monsoon season, but those encounters were brief incidents. This wind is constant, but swirling and buffeting. Not a steady gale but a constant pounding from different directions, quartering from the south and west. It took me several hours to figure out how to keep the car on course without constant effort—you have to let it rock and roll with a light hold on the wheel allowing a little bit of course deflection. The alternative is continuous fighting to hold track. Gas mileage is down over 15% from the effort of fighting to move through.

Holding a camera steady is a problem. Even at high shutter speeds I'm cranking off multiple frames to be sure of some crisp ones. Working with a view camera is utterly out of the question. The only way would be to have a sturdy three-sided portable shelter to work from.

Greensburg, Kansas

Greensburg, Kansas

Last evening the wind seemed even worse than the past two days, but I wanted to try some work with the slightly rolling agricultural land here. I finally worked out a system, of sorts. I decided to use the car as a shelter, then dug out the Lumix 45-200 lens, which has the narrow angle of view needed to work from the confines of the car. It also has image stabilization. When I first tried it for a moment I thought something was wrong, the car was idling incredibly rough...oh, of course I'd shut the engine off. The jumping and bumping was just the wind jostling the car. Sitting in the hatch with the back up provides some shelter, and a good field of view. Sitting in the driver's seat and looking out the window provides more shelter, but limited framing options unless you want to park sideways in the road. Today I'll experiment with the big Gitzo tripod.