Heavenly Hosts.

My father-in-law had a bunch of these Christmas ornaments in a box of stuff he and his wife let my kids play with. I thought they might be fun to play with as macros.

The Kindness of Strangers.

I’ve found that when I carry a camera around and I ask nicely, people will let me make photographs of whatever I like. In this case, an old Ford Mustang. Richmond’s got lots of old cars around and the neighborhoods around Forest Hill Park seem to have more than their share.

I was driving home from the playground with my infant son in the back seat when I saw the car. The man who owned it was out working on his other car, a more modest, newer Ford. When I asked nicely if I could shoot a couple of quick pictures of his car, he was taken aback. Apparently, he’d restored it and the car was due for a touchup. It looked great to me.

He even opened it up for me. There’s nothing to lose by asking!

Back to School.

And this will mean fewer updates until I get more time to shoot, scan, and post.
A new baby’s due here in the next three weeks or so and I figure there will be all kinds of sleeplessness to work around.

Anyway, check back from time to time. It’s nice having you lurk.

On the Couch.

She kinda looks like that’s where you’d sleep ’cause clearly you’ve crossed her.

But really, what Amber was doing was looking a little angry for Jim. If the owner of that couch had returned to her house to see we’d put it outside, there’s a distinct possibility that we’d have gotten that look, too. But like I said, this one’s fabricated. Jim was making real photographs (with his film camera) and I was loitering in the wings, snapping with my then new Pentax. I didn’t know at the time that I could shoot RAW to have more information to work with in post so this only exists as a high res jpeg.

I was looking through some of the old images in my Flickr stream and found this image, so I found the original jpeg on my hard drive and had another crack at it. I cropped it to a square and changed the levels a bit. I like it better this way; it’s warmer.

Anyway, it’s a good Friday piece. Have a good weekend. Hopefully I’ll have some new stuff to share on Monday.

Down My Street.

I pass this car every day when I bring my daughter home from daycare and think, “Man, it must be cool to ride around in one of those, now that everyone drives something that’s run by a computer and mostly plastic. I should stop and shoot a picture or two of it, just for me.” I never do. Last weekend, I got off my duff and did. I shot half a roll standing around this car.

Again, I’m not thrilled with the scans, but it’s the darkroom potential I’m interested in. My mother-in-law’s got a friend who’s curating a black and white show later this summer and because I have a few prints of my own hanging here in the house, I’ve been nominated. It’s the reason I’ve been working on black and white stuff at all. Well, that and it’s fun to work with an image from start to finish.

In dealing with these scans, I’ve come to realize that the thing about Photoshop I get the least – at least as far as black and white imagery goes – is how to deal with contrast. To be fair, I scanned these using a computer with which I was not completely familiar, but I kinda thought that rescuing the haze that’s in the first image wouldn’t be too hard once I’d dealt with the levels in PS. I’m not sure I’m right.

But since the stuff I post here on the blog is for practice (I have a guy for when I need to actually have stuff scanned for real), it’s not killing me. Anyway, it’s a fun car to look at…