I guess the above and below photos do say a lot about me as a photographer, but it’s more in the philosophical realm that these images speak. Aesthetically, they’re snapshots. Technically, they’re trainwrecks. But they have a good story:

I was out in West Lafayette, IN for Christmas this year, and my sister-in-law, who is Slovakian, offer to show me her father’s camera, which he had given her some time ago, and which had not been used since maybe the early or mid-80′s. It was a Weltaflex Twin Lens Reflex camera (made in East Germany) in a very nice leather carrying case. And the big surprise was that there was film in the camera. Fomapan film that had been loaded into the camera when the country was still Czechoslovakia and the war was still cold. I got kinda excited.

Disappointingly, it turns out that it was a “newly” loaded roll of film, and that no exposures had been taken on it. I had some Ilford Delta 3200 120 film with me, so I loaded that up and started chasing the kids around the house, finding very quickly that, if I had to sit down and write ad copy for the Weltaflex, I’d probably just leave the subject of viewfinder brightness out of the conversation altogether. I couldn’t see a thing, and by the time I had fiddled the focus knob into something within a good chuckle of sharp focus, the two-year-old I had been hunting would be far gone. Even when I had my brother’s family sitting immobile on the stairs, I still couldn’t really tell if that thing was in focus. I knew that I really liked the prism viewfinder on my Bronica and how it made sharp focus child’s play, but shooting with the Weltaflex drove that point home.

What I love about TLRs is the sounds their shutter makes. It’s sort of like one of my former students sucking his or her teeth. Subtle. Quiet. My Bronica sounds like two sheets of plywood falling off a truck on the highway when I press the shutter release…so much so that my daughter refers to taking a picture with it as “clomping the camera.” The TLR, on the other hand, is so unintrusive; it is so much easier to forget that pictures are being made, and that is good for both the photographer and the subject.

I don’t know how old the camera actually is. Forty years? Fifty? Maybe sixty? It still works perfectly well, and since film doesn’t functionally change that much over time, it is still a fully functioning camera. I’m sending prints–silver gelatin prints–to my brother’s family, and some of those will hopefully find their way back to Slovakia, where my sister-in-law’s family still lives (her father, unfortunately, has passed away). I like the thought of how far that camera has travelled and the different cultures and settings that have passed through its lens. I like the idea of sending pictures of the grandkids taken on the grandfather’s camera halfway around the world. I like what using this camera says about photography: it’s still about exposure and the moment, no matter what the technology used. And I guess that says something about me as a photographer.

The D800, however, leaves me scratching my head a bit. At $3,000, it’s not as if it is a crazy-expensive piece of gear. It’s the 36 megapixels that I don’t understand. Half of that would have been just fine by all standards. Undoubtedly, some will get very excited about the megapixel count, and assume that this, therefore, is a great camera. I’m sure it will prove to be a formidable piece of gear, but for a very specialized type of photographer who has very specific needs.

Which brings me to my periodic reminder about the tenuous link between good cameras and good photos:

99% of what makes you love a photograph is unrelated to the technical specs of the camera used to take it. No one ever hung a picture on their wall because it had a lot of pixels. A great expression, a perfect moment, an important place, yes. Megapixels and ISO? No.

This blog post gets into how to handle equipment queries, and I second his opinion. You probably don’t need a DSLR. If you do feel you need one, you should get an entry-level model and spend the money on a good, fast prime lens. What I really recommend is either the Nikon P7100, or the Canon G12, which I think has just been replaced with the G1X. Compact, self-contained, more features than most will care to use, flexible and relatively fast glass. Did I mention compact? And affordable.

Even for me, I’m having a hard time seeing how the D800 will make sense. I guess I’ll wait to see what the D400 has to offer, and then decide how tech-happy I am.

One of my favorite short stories is Donald Barthelme’s “A Flight of Pigeons From the Palace,” and this flight of geese had nothing to do with it.

Part III will wrap it up.

If you guess the right final score, I’ll give you my five-hour shooting fee–a $795 value–for free! Use it by itself, or use it as a discount toward a full day of shooting.

With the five hours of shooting, you get 400 images in an online gallery from which you and your guests can purchase over 60 products. The discount does not apply to albums or image discs.

Head on over to my website for more information about my wedding photography and pricing.

Good luck!

They're all smiling in this one because I'm balanced precariously on a fence, and they are mulling over the chances that I'll end up in the drink.

I’ll have a few more from this wedding in a couple days. Until then, keep printing!

Earlier in my life, before either there were people who objected to the fumes of it, or before I was able to take their objections into consideration, I painted quite a bit, and I found myself gradually increasing the sizes of the canvases I worked on, until I finally got to the point where I was making paintings that were physically larger than my body. Large images engage a viewer differently than small images; I fell that large images are harder to get away from, and confront the viewer more directly and on their own terms. Smaller images, because they must be approached, are more intimate, and are viewed more on the audience’s terms. There’s a value in each, but I find that in my more idea-drive images, I am drawn to print big, whereas in my casual photography, prints 8×10 and smaller seem better.

When it comes to printing large, resolution can become something you might want to talk about. There are those who will argue that you need a certain number of megapixels in order to enlarge beyond a certain size. In general, this size in the pixel dimension of your camera, divided by the dots per inch you are printing at (probably either 240 or 300). Do if you take my D40, which shoots a frame 2008 x 3000 pixels, and divided those measurements by 240 dpi, you reach the conclusion that anything much larger than 8 x 12 is going to start to come apart.

I haven’t pushed the boundaries of printing from a 6MP camera, but I can tell you that, at 11 x 16, the D40 still produces images that are crystal clear and without pixelation. I feel that a lot of the techno-talk of pixels and resolution happens well below the scale of human perception, and is really a matter of academic analysis. It doesn’t really matter what a formula says if the eye can’t see it. Most people don’t look at pictures to analyze pixels or to find technical flaws; they are looking at the picture to see a story or connect with an emotion, and even if it is a bit pixelated under a magnifying glass, or if the focus is a bit soft, it really rarely matters.

And this is all with a 6MP camera, which no one makes anymore…even most cell phones carry more resolution (although the sensors and lenses are much smaller, and that has a greater impact on image quality than pixel count). Most DSLRs, as well as compact cameras, out there now are 10, 12, 16, even 18 MP, so enlarge to your heart’s content, because your images are fine.

Epson Ultra Premium Photo Paper Lustre (A3 size, or 11.7 x 16.5)

HP Everyday Photo Paper, Glossy (size 5 x 7)

The Epson is one of the best photo papers that company makes. In contrast, the HP paper is rated three out of five stars. What’s the difference, and should you care?

Well…how do you want to define “quality”? The ultra premium paper is, not surprisingly, a higher quality paper. First off, it is thicker and heavier, and feels much more substantial in the hands. I would say that, at small sizes like 4 x 6 and 5 x 7, this difference in weight doesn’t matter so much, but as the prints get larger, I like the heavier paper.

There’s also the matter of glossy v. luster/satin/semi-gloss/soft gloss v. matte papers. I can definitively say that I have not seen a matte paper that I’m happy with, although I also can’t say I’ve searched too far and wide. As for glossy v. lustre…eh…My preference is for the lustre. the glossy just has too much sheen to it, and lustre paper has a bit of texture to it that I find appealing. I will accept as valid, however, your preference for glossy, if you must be that way. And by the way, the glossier the paper, the less ink your printer uses. So there’s that.

I’m going to have to come back to the topic of color, because (1) it is a complex subject that is of the highest importance, and (2) as I look back through my stack of prints, I realize that I just made my first color print today. For the record, it was on the HP Everyday Glossy. It’s a snowy scene, so there are many types of white on it, plus an orange carrot and some brown leaves. It looks good, maybe a bit too blue. Knowing what I know of my printer and paper, I can say that the Ultra Premium Lustre can makes colors that will just melt your heart. Not colors that are okay, not colors that will do, but colors that have made other photographers remark on the quality of the color. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that on an everyday paper.

Which is fine–there is clearly, in the manufacture of the paper, a different purpose for each. All of the prints I’ve made on the everyday paper have been everyday, lifestyle kind of shots. Candids and domestic scenes and my kid bopping around. The images I’ve chosen for the premium paper have been very  much the cream of the crop, images that, as I print them, I say to myself that I want to see how good I can make them look.

By the way: if you are new to making your own inkjet prints, did you know that your printer has different settings to print on different types of paper? Make sure you select the right finish and quality of paper, because your printer does make changes. This is one step in a process called color management that I will be coming back to over and over.

That’s all for now…happy printing!

This troubles me not as a photographer who, after all, deals mostly in the digital realm. It troubles me as a person who thinks a lot about personal history and artifact, and how following generations will come to know about their ancestors. My mother-in-law tells a story about relatives of hers who found that old shoe box in the attic, stuffed not just with detailed letters, but also with short, quippy, newsy postcards of just a sentence or two, sent back and forth between friends, neighbors, and family. We can thank a forward-thinking person for saving all of those in a box and never getting around to discarding them. We can thank their tangibility for what these notes taught the current generation about those who came before them.

Today, these little notes would have been on Facebook and Twitter, and sure, there’s an archive there that is sworn to be permanent. But I don’t know. The shoebox seems safer to me, and it will never turn up in an obsolete file format, and even if it has a little mold on it, or some water stains, it won’t suffer from catastrophic failure the way files can.

We’re probably never going back, or at least not soon, to the days of the lengthy personal letter that ruminates on an item in a directly personal way; such reflection seems to be the domain of the face-to-face meeting today. That is a sign that we are moving away from literary forms of storytelling as a way of processing our personal lives, and are moving instead to both oral and visual formats. We are less likely today to write a letter to one person when we get home than we are to shoot a camera phone shot and post it, for all our contacts, on instagram, while we are still out.

There are two issues this raises: the permanence and accessibility of digital media for legacy or heirloom purposes, and the ultimate decipherability of images as precise historical and storytelling artifacts.

Sure, photographs fade (although you should really check out the technical data on inkjet print permanence…quite encouraging) and paper dissolves underwater. But files get corrupted, memory formats change, cameras and memory cards get lost, cellphones get dropped off piers. A photographic print, well-taken care of, can be passed along and along and along.

As for the specific ability of images to tell stories exactly, I don’t think they ever can…that’s what socializing and sharing is all about. An image is an image, a moment, and stories unfold in words over a period of time. The purpose of a photograph in a family history is to be held and passed around while someone who was there or heard the story informs the moments before and after the image. Then the image becomes complete.

So my project is this: every day this year, I am going to make a print. Some will be large, some will be small, some new captures, some old, some black and white, some color, some digital, some film, maybe even a polaroid or two thrown in for fun. The back of each will be notated with the print date, the capture date, the location of the image and the names of anyone known in the picture, the camera and technical info (I am, after all, a knob-turner of a photographer), and the sequence number of the project. At the end of the year, I’ll have 366 pieces of paper that someone else can use to tell stories about me and my family.

I think you should join me in this project. Make a print a day. Or a print a week. Whatever it is, make prints. On your own, through a lab, even at the local drugstore or retail store. Show them around, tell the stories, and keep them safe, because they are important.

Happy 2012!

Eat your heart out, Nikon. The D4? Humbug. Here’s my new camera. No megapixels, no battery, no video…heck, no lens. It’s loaded right now with very very expired Kodak Gold 200. If I were really cool, I would have built it truly from scratch, but the kit was $20 and came with a book, so I don’t feel too bad about it.

Of the images in this series, I think this one best conveys the aesthetic I was going for, a combination of August Bradley and Gregory Crewdson, with traces of others. And, I think more than any other image in the series, this one really transformed from the original captures into something that is not directly representational. One could argue that that is not the point of photography, but then again, one could argue that this kind of image is not so much a photograph as it is a digitally imaged work; that’s semantics, and if you would like to debate that, remember that I used to be an English teacher, and still have a strong interest in linguistics, so you’d better bring something tasty to eat and drink ‘cuz we’ll be discussing for a right long while.