French Quarter

Along the verge of the river

Jackson Square 2017

Only 52 Days Until Mardi Gras 2018!

I often wonder after 26 years of photographing Mardi Gras if I do not have my full measure of drunken people exposing themselves on Bourbon street, and then I find one of these, its a street ballet of sorts, it all comes together as Cartier Bresson says for just a moment.

Mardi Gras 2017

Along the Mississippi River,

Along the flood wall, Lower 9th ward

Holt Cemetery

Algiers Point

10,000 negative file milestone reached

We all have those random milestones in our work and I reached one today. In 1978 after 6 years of the most chaotic film numbering and filing system, I decided it was time to bring order to it all and said from this roll on, it would be a straight numeric system. So on that day in 1978 I developed roll #1 and so on. Today, some 39 years later I developed negative page #10,000, its a portrait of I did of my friend Katie at my Tyson studio with my 5x7 camera in August. Its taken me this long to get around to processing the 60+ sheets of 5x7 from the summers work.

It's just another sheet of film, but it is one of those marks along your career path you don't think so much about when you start. If you do the math, it works out to about 5 rolls of film shot every week for 39 years, and that does not count the 500,000+ individual digital files either. The numbering system for the digital files, well thats another matter.

Tyson studio in shut down mode

Yes, its for real, inside temperature at the Tyson studio was 52° today and its just not reasonable to run the heaters any more. Shut the place down for the winter months, covered the soft boxes and unplugged the strobes and rolled up the backdrops to prevent the mice from making a mess of them. I'll miss the studio!

Only 98 days until Fat Tuesday!

Already thinking about Mardi Gras 2018. Too soon? This will be Mardi Gras #27 for me, I started in 1990 and only missed one year (the year I went to Italy to photograph it there). This upcoming year Aimee and I have vowed to re-think how we photograph this event.

New Printer for the Digital Den

I replaced my older Epson 4900 after three years of service. It was starting to show its age and was requiring more and more TLC to keep it happy. The new P-5000 Epson, which I purchased from Jim Doyle at Shades of Paper, is an improvement. First is the noise, its a quieter printer although still not wake a sleeping baby quiet. The biggest difference I am seeing is that as suggested by Jim, the blacks are noticeably richer with a stronger D-MAX. On the negative side, the menu has changed just enough to make you pay attention and relearn the new selections and menu on the printer.
Still, when you think of it, this $1700 printer (less the $300 Epson rebate) will last me 3-4 years at best before a replacement is needed. In 1978, after settling in after graduate school, I purchased a Beseler 45MX enlarger for a little less than that and its still in service at the WU darkrooms. Just saying.

Photo shoot with Rachel at the Tyson studio

This time, I think this will be the last shoot of the season out at the Tyson studio, at least the last nude shoot out at the studio. When I got there it was 65° inside and after two hours of all the heating roaring I got it up to 70°. My first time working with Rachel and it was a productive shoot.

Along I-55 and old Rt. 66 Illinois

Nothing beats the pure photographic enjoyment of just driving around a new landscape and looking for photographs with a good friend. On the way to the MW SPE conference with Becky Nolan we did just that. Jogging up I-55 and old route 66 we stopped in small towns along the way to photograph. None of these photographs will end up in any larger portfolio but the point was more to explore and work without the "burden" of keeping on task for the larger project.

Along old Route 66 in Illinois

Nova Scotia

More work from the last Body/Text shoot

Last Body/Text shoot

Donna, Tyson studio 2017

Karla-from the "Three Graces" session

Studio session with Shelli

"Three Graces" photo shoot at Tyson Studio today

"Eclipse"

This is my version of the eclipse on the day everyone is so excited about. I'm not nearly as interested in the actual sun/moon thing as to how people are reacting to it.

Photo session with Belle

Studio session with Kendra

It's always an interesting session with Kendra, she and I have worked together as photographer and model since 2009. She knows how to bring the dramatic into any session and has a great quality of self awareness and confidence during the shoots.

Kate-Expecting

Beavertail Point

Beach landscape

Scarborough beach

Peggy's Cove, N.S.

My first Nikon

In honor of world camera day, I thought it might be fun to post about my first "real" 35mm camera. My first 35mm was a Yashica ElectroX and in my sophomore year at URI I found this very tired nearly worn out used Nikon F with a F36 motor drive hung off of it. It sounded like a Singer Sewing machine that grandma had when it went off and had more than a little brassing on the body and the mirror slap was something you could hear a block away. I flogged that camera all over the place and ran my share of film thru it as only an intro photo student could who owned a bulk loader. It was a heavy piece of work and even with a 50mm lens on it, its weight was daunting. Loading it in the field required some level of dexterity too as the back slid off along with the drive.

That summer I worked in an all you could eat seafood joint and earned enough money to buy a new Nikon, an F2 Photomic, it was a thing of beauty and I had that camera all thru grad school and into my first teaching job, but that old F was my first Nikon.

Back to the book work

Donna, Tyson studio 2017-6

Stephanie, Tyson Studio 2017

New Body/Text work

six muses part 2

Six Muses

Studio shoot-new lighting set up

Tyson photo shoot 2017-5

New figure/book work from 2017

Rita

Rita, Tyson studio 2012

Studio nude with new Fuji 50mm f2 lens

I was able to get into the studio and do some more work with the new Fuji 50mm f2 lens on my XPRO2 camera this week, the results were excellent, very responsive AF. This was shot at ISO 200 and I used Profoto strobes to light it.

New Gear Test Fuji 50mm f2 lens

I recently acquired one of the new Fuji 50mm f2 lenses for to use with my Xpro2 camera. I have tested the 60mm Fuji Macro and the Zeiss 50mm Macro for that camera and was very disappointed in the AF speed and that it often failed to "lock". Both where plenty sharp enough, especially the Zeiss. So when the new 50mm was announced I took a shot at it and have been very happy with the early results. I've only used it for a limited shoot in the studio but I did get out and did these of my grand daughter in the front yard.

The AF was quick and on lock and the lens seems sharp enough, these where shot at f4-f2.8 and there is plenty of resolution for my taste. This particular image was shot in the ACROS film simulation mode and there has been very little post production done to it. I think this lens would be an excellent addition to anyones camera bag doing portrait work. More reporting on this lens in the studio with strobes to follow.

Whitney Plantation Tour

Slave Quarters, with sculpture.

Slave Quarters

A very interesting tour based entirely on the perspective of the slave. Very moving memorials but with not such great photographic potential. It was a pretty gray day and that did not help either, but the Xpro2 did its job.

My Workflow Back Up from Mardi Gras 2017 experience

Since 1990 I have photographed what some have called the Worlds Greatest Free Party, Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It’s a daunting event and often misunderstood, as someone from the Mid-West I assumed it was one big parade that went thru the French Quarter and there were a bunch of drunken naked people throwing beads. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s actually something like 50 parades and events happening though out the three Parish area surrounding New Orleans. In the city itself there are more than a dozen events in the days before Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday the end of the carnival season.

For a photographer this is an all day shoot, day parades, night parades, the scene in the French Quarter, there is no lack of things to make images of. In the pre-digital days I would shoot for 5 or 6 days pretty much all day and end up with 40 or 50 rolls of film. Now, in the digital age, shooting both a Fuji Xpro 2 and a Nikon D810, I am coming home with 6,000 individual files and close to 350 gigs worth of data.

These events I’m photographing happen once a year, if I loose any of that data it’s all over until next year, and believe it or not, Mardi Gras is different every year. Parades have themes and the mix of weather and location make a big difference in how the images are made.

My workflow part of this is to do two downloads every day, usually after the daytime shoots and later at the end of the evening. I usually work with a 15” MacBook Pro and spread my work out over 2 or 3 external drives. I then make sure these drives are stored in different locations in the apartment I stay in in the event of break in or loss, you can’t be too paranoid about your files and drive failures are a real thing.

This year I brought with me two new external solutions. I used two CRU ToughTech externals, one an older ToughTech Duo 3SR with two 1 TB drives inside and the other a new ToughTech Duo C model also with two 1TB drives in it. These drives are a terrific solution to any photographers needs while on the road and shooting a lot of images. Each external is a 2 drive RAID 1 and shows up on the desktop as one drive. The drives also pop in and out of the enclosure allowing easy exchanges of the drives if you want to go that route. In my case the older Duo 3SR connects to my laptop via a Firewire 800 port and I use a Lightning dongle to adapt the Firewire to the  Lighting port on the  MacBook Pro model I have. It is bus powered and no external power is required. The other back up to my backup (did I mention I am very paranoid about loosing data?), it’s the newer Duo C model that has a new USB 3.1 Type C interface. For this drive I have a USB type C to an older USB 3.0 cord. This drive does require an external power supply but the advantage is that transfer speeds are about a third faster. I’ll leave it to the real tech guys to tell you the exact transfer speeds. Both externals are very robust and have a solid no nonsense build quality. Both power up quickly and are as some say, user friendly and the RAID configuration inspires a lot of confidence in keeping your files safe. Both drives can also be configured as a RAID 1, JBOD or a RAID 0 depending on how risk averse you are. You can purchase the enclosures with drives supplied from CRU or buy your own 2.5” drives and install them yourself, mounting the drives to the sleds is a simple task and CRU even supplies you with a screw driver. As I mentioned earlier you can also purchase extra sleds to allow you to buy one enclose and swap out the drives as needed, the drives pop in and out without the need for tools.

No question these enclosures are a bit more expense than some of the options, but if you put a high value on the safety of your files while on the road and expect to be moving around a lot, these are some of the best options I’ve ever found. My next big photo outing is spending two weeks on the dunes of Cape Cod photographing the landscape of the National Sea Shore and you can be sure in my computer bag will be a pair of these.

French Quarter-Fat Tuesday

Orpheus Parade