Chance Meets Skill

On days I wasn’t shooting for clients at my studio I liked to play with Polaroid material. I used my 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras to transfer images to water color paper, usually Arches. The interesting thing was that during the transfer process I never knew exactly what I would get... no matter how hard I tried. It became a matter of negotiating in that space where chance meets skill. Oddly, sometimes chance was more cool than skill. The process was very addicting and 20 shots later the box of Polaroid would be gone and I’d be out more than a hundred dollars. Polaroid transfers had a very romantic look that couldn’t be replicated by any other means that I know of. I saved quite a few of them to dark storage. They haven’t faded, which does surprise me.

Digital photography has a way of making photographers strive for perfection... down to the last pixel because perfection does seem possible. Enter Photoshop. As you work to perfect the photograph it is very easy to kill the spirit of the original image. The polaroid transfer process would not allow that to happen. I have been thinking about these issues for a while now as tech just keeps moving forward.

Clearing Storm

I’m addicted to road trips. I do them a little different as I never have a final destination or set goals. Avoiding travel guides is very important because they structure vision and pre-condition the way you think of a place you haven’t seen before. I want to avoid outside influence. I trust my instincts when it comes to photography. I’ll fly to a city I haven't visited, rent a car and head out on the road with no goal other than returning to the same airport after a certain number of days to fly back home. I hit the road to see what’s out there. Every road trip I've taken has been inspirational and fun. It's also good to be reminded once in awhile how fortunate I was to have been born in the U.S.A.

I like the back roads more than the highways but I had been driving in this storm for a while and it was getting dark so I thought the highway would offer more opportunities to find a room for the night.

To shoot another sunset it has to be something really different and this one was… maybe even for a meteorologist. I pulled into the median of the highway to capture the sun breaking over the mountains. Traffic coming toward me on the other side of the highway had turned on their lights because they were entering the storm. I took this shot handheld. Using a slow shutter speed and a rather wide aperture combined with the rain, put a nice glow on their headlights. This one shot alone made the whole trip worthwhile.

The More Things Change

I was standing in this spot looking at Andy Warhol's silk screen of Marilyn Monroe at the Broad in downtown L.A. I actually visualized this photograph as this woman worked her way along the wall toward me with her cell phone in hand. In a glance I knew she wanted to snap a photo of Marilyn. I turned away as I got my cell phone out of my pocket and made a U-turn behind her. She took a few seconds to carefully center her photo so I had time to take two shots before she moved on. My second shot was best because the image on her cell phone came in much better. It's a cool shot that reminds me 'The more things change, the more they stay the same'.