Sail Gradients / Rehoboth Beach, 1985

This image from almost 40 years ago was taken with a Yashica Mat-124 G. The camera was a twin lens reflex with the distinction of being the most affordable medium format camera of its day. Pictures were taken hand-held or on a tripod, typically at waist-level with a flip-up viewfinder. For many folks (me included), the just-over-$100 price tag opened the door to 120 film and square format.

home

Badlands / Little Missouri National Grassland, 1999

In June 1999 we took a trip west from Minneapolis to the western half of the Dakotas. I was using a pair of Hasselblads on a tripod for most of my work and there are many images (such as these) which were never printed or scanned.

These pictures were captured at the end of a summer day on Agfa Ultra 50, a slow 120 negative film which I rarely used. The trio was scanned yesterday on the Epson V700.

There are other “newly-minted vintage” items found throughout the galleries I’ve been working on, including more photographs from this trip which you can see here (the three images in the middle).

If you’re not familiar with these badland formations, there’s various spots where they’re found in the western plains, from Texas all the way to Canada. Little Missouri National Grassland is in North Dakota.

home

Pathway

Napeague Harbor’s east shore is noted for a spectacular area of red sands and staining created by groundwater iron deposits seeping out from Hither Woods. The body of water is Long Island’s only remaining harbor never closed to shell fishing. To the east are the Walking Dunes and the several thousand acres of Hither Woods.

Over the years, the majority of red sand images I’ve posted were taken along this isolated stretch of beach. In this image, the staining is very apparent on the rocks.

Other images from this beach can be seen here.

home

Facing Sand

I shot this group late in the day yesterday on the bay beach of Hither Hills State Park. The sand is partially frozen and tiny pedestals have formed under the pebbles where the wind has blown across. It struck me how viewing these pictures vertically brought to mind the sandstone canyon walls of the American southwest.

home

Cedar Island Light c.1990

Despite living a few miles from the lighthouse, yesterday was my first visit in five years. A mid-winter hike with a northwest wind can be a bit of a challenge and “desolate” hardly does the peninsula justice.

Since the light has been removed for restoration and the premises are now fenced in to protect the keeper’s house, I was curious about my older images of the building and spent an hour today converting a film negative from thirty years ago. That’s the picture up above.

More about the history of the 1839 lighthouse (and its restoration process) can be found at this link.

Another restoration process has been the one occupying my website for the last six weeks. Many of you are already fluent with CSS and the nooks and crannies of block editor. It’s been a learning process for me, and I’d be happy to answer any questions if I can be of help.

About my galleries: there’s over fifty up and running at my site now, and the effort has evolved slightly as the weeks have gone by. I began in more of a traditional mode, grouping images according to subject, abstractions etc. But that changed early on into a process which looks at how small groups of pictures tend to create something new. By opening up to the unexpected, a point has emerged: many photographs take on new life in a neighborhood.

Here’s a link, if you’d like to visit.

home

Dora

Image was restored in Photoshop.

Some of you are aware of my interest in 19th century photography and that I’ve been collecting prints for a while. A percentage of those are portraits on cabinet cards, like this one. What could be so interesting about a picture that looks like it belongs in a box in an attic? For me, it’s a way of making connections, and in this case they’ve lead to subject, print type and photographer.

The woman in the photograph was named Dora, and she was around 19 years old when she walked into the Robinson Studio at 2320 3rd Avenue in Manhattan in her puff-sleeved jacket. The studio’s owner was Mrs. W. A. Robinson, one of only a handful of female photographers who owned a portrait studio in the city in the 1890’s. For both the photographer and her subject, the right to vote was still thirty years distant. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find out what Mrs. Robinson’s first name was.

“Mrs. R” had moved to New York from Chicago in the early 1880’s with her husband William and his business partner Alfred Roe (both of whom were also photographers). She worked for them for a time, but left in 1889 to open her own studio, followed by a second a few years later. In 1890, she displayed her work at the American Institute winning an award for her prints. Running a photography business at that time meant being confident with a large camera, indoor lighting, glass plate development, ordering equipment, making prints and staying on top of technology that was changing quickly. And of course, there was also a staff to supervise.

To print the cabinet card images for her client, Mrs. Robinson opted for collodion printing-out paper, nowadays an archaic process which peaked in popularity in the 1890’s. The paper was comprised of three layers, had superb detail and tonal range and resisted fading to a far greater extent than earlier albumen prints. But the collodion emulsion scratched easily and that’s the damage you see in the original. Printing-out papers weren’t put into the developer tray after exposure, they were chemically prepared beforehand, placed in a frame with the negative and exposed to sunlight to develop the latent image. After that, there was a bit of fixing and washing. The restored picture you see here is the result of my Photoshop clean-up which did take a few hours.

A few years after this portrait was made, Dora married Joseph Cook, the son of English and German immigrants. They settled into a tenement in Manhattan, and over the next few decades she had fifteen children, five of whom died before the age of five. Joseph struggled early on with alcoholism, eventually being unable to work, and the large family felt the crush of poverty. Over the next fifty years, Dora welcomed fifteen of her sixteen grandchildren, before passing away in 1953 out on Long Island.

The only one of those grandchildren she never met was born the following year. That was me.

___

Cabinet cards are photographs mounted on 4 1/4″ x 6 1/2″ card stock. Peak popularity was from 1870-1910.

For more info on collodion printing-out prints there’s a good discussion at the Image Permanence Institute, and another at The Getty Center.

For more information about Mrs. Robinson, her husband William and his partner Alfred Roe, visit this site.

Special thanks to Brad Purinton and E. Lee Eltzroth, whose historic photography sites provide lots of inspiration.

Cloudcraft

It’s a new year. Best wishes to everyone.

Here at my site, there’s a new theme and home page and I’m rebuilding galleries and creating a page devoted to recent work and other projects. There will also be occasional posts this year relating to my interests in historic photography. Overall, less blogging in ’24, but more going on at the rest of the site. As always, thanks for visiting.

Waves of Grain

I’m working on some close-ups of breaking waves taken over the last few weeks. The color tone is reminiscent of some of the earliest photographic processes, especially tintypes and ambrotypes. The grain is produced by salt spray and from shooting into the sun.  I didn’t want much in focus in the pictures, mainly the plane where the break is unfolding.

Pond Angle / Chromatic

I generally don’t post work with color and BW variations, but since I had no preference with this picture, I thought it would be fun.  The color in this version reflects where I was at when I was working on it, as opposed to where I was when I took it.  (I’ve got colors in mind that have a past.)  As Ule noted in her comment yesterday, the leaves in the black and white version had an interesting etched effect. I reduced the contrast in color, but it’s still visible.  The BW can be seen here: https://johntodaro.wordpress.com/2023/11/12/pond-angle/