Carnavale in Italy 2002

 This month I've been posting work from my 29 years of photographing Mardi gras in New Orleans starting in 1990 on my IG page. I have not missed a year (besides this year) but only once, in 2002 I went to Italy to photography carnavale or Mardi gras in Italy, photographing one weekend in Venice and the other in Viareggio.

Piazza San Marco, Venice, Italy 2002

In general I found Viareggio much more authentic and far less touristed than Venice.

It was a trip that I bought my new Nikon P5000 digital camera with me. It was a blazing 5 mp and cost me close to $1,000- in $2002! It was wildly slow in terms of shutter lag (you push the button and wait 5 sec for the shutter to click) which put a damper on anything remotely spontaneous and not especially great AF and only shot jpgs. Ah the bleeding edge of technology.

My First Mardi Gras 1990

So this photo popped in my FB memories today, its from my first Mardi Gras in 1990. I am shown here with Eric Liu, a former student of mine. The story behind the photo was that in the spring of 1990 I had my first sabbatical while teaching at WU. Eric was a BFA photo major, a little older than most of the other majors and on the "five year plan" to put it politely. I had this plan to photograph in the south and southwest in a series of road trips. The woman who was taking over the photo program while I was on leave, Jan Ballard, had Eric in classes before, Jan was already a faculty in photo. Eric only needed his photo major credits to graduate and she remarked to me that she didn't think she could teach him anything so why don't you take him along with you. So I did, Eric's last semester at WU was basically being my assistant and side kick for a series of road trips photographing along the way, the most memorable being Mardi Gras. We loaded up my 1979 Datsun 280Z and hit the road, going to Mardi Gras, and later Santa Fe, N.M. for the national SPE conference. It was an educational experience for both of us.

Scanning work from the "wayback machine" 1973

 

I got into scanning some very early figure work from my undergraduate days at URI. This photo taken of Jane McDonald in the URI Fine Arts Center photo studio was one of the earliest studio works in my career. 

Also taken in October of 1973, this more abstract photo of Robin Andersen, also in the URI lighting studio. Both were shot with a Nikon F and a wide angle lens using "hot" lights in the studio.

Into the 35mm film

The last of the 2020 film was the odd assortment of 35mm films that needed to be processed. I use traditional tanks and reels for this work and unlike the sheet was, was HP-5, FP-4 and even some Delta 100 film types in there. It all got processed without any problems. All of these scenes are thru the plastic Printfile negative pages and scanned on my Epson V700 flatbed.
 

Developing 4x5 film

 

In processing the 4x5's I found some interesting shoots I did last summer. This was with one of my favorite collaborators Carol. I tripped the shutter with an old fashion air release. Interested in doing more of this work in 2021.

Processing the 2020 4x5 film

 

After working with 5x7 and 8x10 the 4x5 film was a breeze to work with, I usually tray process my sheet film and only use tanks and hangers for washing.

Developing and scanning 5x7 film

 

Getting thru 25+ sheets of 8x10 took a while of course and now I'm digging into the 5x7 film. There is a lot more of it but for the most part there are fewer issues with film holder light leaks too. I very much like the format of the 5x7, a little longer than 4x5/8x10 and perhaps closer to 35mm.

Scanning 8x10 negatives

 

I've been processing and scanning the 8x10's this week and there are discoveries to be made there in working with film you shot months ago. One of the unpleasant ones is discovering you were not as careful with the film holders as you thought you were. Arg, light leaks, both big and small.

First post of 2021!

 

I realized I keep putting off posting to this bog and it had become a ghost site. It's been hard enough in a pandemic year to post every day in my Self Portrait blog and this was one more thing. So with good intentions and not much else to do I will try to re-energize this blog. 

I've been without any darkroom facilities since mid summer when WU really locked down for COVID and being "non essential" I was out. It was not until December that I realized I was not going to be allowed back on campus for a while and decided to build a film processing only darkroom in part of my basement.

I started off with a backlog from summer 2020 with the 8x10's and then do rough scans on my Epson V700 flatbed scanner. Here's one of those efforts.