If you've been following the posts Maine Vacation 1 and 2 you know that, while this is definitely a good time, I am making pictures while here in Maine too. Photography's hold on me is deep enough that I seldom stop making pictures. After so many years in, it is hard to turn it off. 

For several days I have been a "regular" at the Owl's Head Transportation Museum near Rockland. The second day there I had fog:

Perhaps a little underwhelming, yes? I understand. This definitely is one of those times when I am envisioning the prints I will make from these. This is called "previsualization" in Adam's Zone System terminology and can be a very helpful concept to master when shooting. How will I want these prints to look? Thinking about that when making the pictures is often a very good idea. In this case, large fairly flat and with muted colors. Can't wait to see them as prints.

What's next? More from the Museum but the next couple of shoots I moved indoors to photograph things on display.

More Maine Vacation to come.

Stay tuned.

This one will look at some of the pictures I made last week when I first got to Maine.

I spent two nights in Augusta, a scrappy and sincere town that happens to be the capitol of the state. While it does gear up for summer I think it's mostly for locals and maybe a few tourists. This is nothing like being on the coast.

I spent a couple of extended sessions at a thing called the Kennebec Arsenal, which is old and kind of creepy and sits along the Kennebec River.

From a National Park Service site: http://www.nps.gov/resources/site.htm?id=18980

I was working with the 24 mm PC (perspective control) lens. This is a very demanding but very rewarding lens when used correctly. Odd to be playing the same games with it I used to such great advantage when working with 8 x 10 earlier in my career. It is exactly the same concept, just with smaller controls!

And here's the river part:

and the stone steps that lead up from the river:

And finally, some of the other buildings in the complex:

where the lens creates some havoc with what were, presumably, right angles.

Can you personalize a place? Can you work to identify with it and also to utilize it to your own ends? Can you take something from it and use it for your own? Can you mold it to make your own pictures from it? This is a key point, isn't it? How to avoid the generic and to distinguish what you do with it as yours and apart and different than someone else's. This is partly intuitive and partly thought through, of course. But absolutely essential. Look at the really good photographers in the history. It's what they did. 

From there I headed to Port Clyde, definitely on the water. This is where the boat to Monhegan Island leaves from and it is at the very bottom of a long peninsula.  It is simply the best. 

More to come.

I am in Maine for a 1 1/2 week "vacation" as relief from a relentless schedule of being retired [sic]. The first couple of days were in Augusta staying in a motel, then to a rental cottage on the harbor in Port Clyde with my daughter, my grand daughter and my future son in law. We did stuff like go to the Blue Hill Fair and eat lobster. I really enjoyed having them. My six year old grand daughter Skye lost another tooth which makes corn on the cob not possible until she grows some front teeth.

But they are now gone and I am working again. I worked on a new Guggenheim application this morning and contacted my four outside reviewers bringing them up to date and telling them I am on course to apply later this month. I also proofed a piece sent to me by Chris Benfey, an author and friend, who is writing the introduction to a new book coming out soon of my writings. What? Yes, it is true. We are hard at work on a new book of essays written by me. Stay tuned.

And I went out looking for pictures. It has been foggy all day. This represents a huge opportunity to make pictures, I think. But this part of Maine is hard as it is relentlessly pretty. I ended up at the Owl's Head Transportation Museum near Rockland in the back paved lot which was mostly empty after a Labor Day weekend of crowds gawking at hundreds of motorcycles.

There I made this:

and this:

among others. 

Neither image is essential to the other pictures I was making there, which I am saving for another post. This gets us into the "this one" or "that one" game, which can go on forever. Please don't send me your vote as, believe me, I don't need to know it. 

But know this: fog is good. Make pictures under adverse conditions, particularly if you are interested in using outdoor light. Sunny is good too, but just not all the time.

It's the light that makes our pictures. Use it the best you can and use different light whenever possible.

Stay tuned for Maine Vacation 2.

I don't know about you but the photographs I make need some time to gestate, some looking at and thinking about them to understand what to do with them. Very seldom is the first impression the final outcome.

Where the "rubber meets the  road" is in making decisions as to how to print what I've shot. This will go through perhaps a few experiments. I might try a couple of  different sizes or pushing prints darker or lighter to see what that looks like. Or play with the color palette or tonality, amount of sharpening, type of paper (this is a big consideration for me) or even if I am adding any color to a black and white image. In darkroom days I used Kodak's Rapid Selenium Toner for every print. I did that to remove the slightly olive cast of many papers, particularly Ilford's Miulitgrade paper. In Silver Effex's Pro 2, a plugin I use often to make the conversion of my files to black and white, there is a toning setting for Selenium that I sometimes use.

At any rate, I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a day I had kayaking along the Connecticut River in New Hampshire (River Paddle). I liked very much some of the pictures I made as I walked up stream from the river to sit on a log and have my lunch. The stream was in late summer mode, lazy and with water trickling down it, much of its stream bed exposed. As I tried printing different approaches: conversion to black and white, a mat surface paper,  adding some color back in, I tried to resolve whether I had a full series or not. A series for me is a sequential body of work, usually from as few as 11 to as many as 30 or so. I didn't think that I did, although I could construct a rational around the actual "walk upstream" I took, wading through shallow water holding my camera at shoulder height so as not to get it wet. It wasn't   and presently isn't so much a full series but perhaps a few pictures with a single point: what mankind leaves behind, the detritus I  found on the stream bed. I had tried to contrast these pictures with the real purity of the untouched landscape in front of me but to be truthful this was a place that was not nature untouched at all. This was about as "pure" as it got:

Not so interesting perhaps and certainly a little passive or even generic, never what one wants of one's own pictures.

There is loss and gain, of course. The loss is that most of the pictures I made that day (some of which I like very much) will likely never be seen or printed. Losing 40 or so breaks my heart a little. But what I gain is three photographs that have impact and punch, not diluted or compromised by others that may serve as only support around them. And yes, impact? Ah, what present day digital capture can do. The prints are 37 by 25 inches. One is printing behind me as I write this. 

They will be framed 45 by 34 inches. Hung side by side, the three in a row with the granite wall in the center? Killer. Epic.

A final caveat from someone who frequently prints quite large. When you print big, the print becomes very difficult to look at unless it is pinned up on a wall or framed. Sitting next to your printer, rolled up, is not a good way to determine if you have a good print or not. 

I print at home but will frequently take big prints to my studio to lay them out on a big table to view them.

If you don't have a big printer and are going to have someone else print your files for you, try to work locally, meaning choose a printer that will allow you to print out a few test strips to see how your file will look when printed large. Does it hold? Are you  pushing it too large? Has your sharpening strategy and file management been effective? Or are you just making an image larger with little consideration of how much more you are asking of everything you use: your camera, its ISO, the lens, the aperture and shutter speed, use of a tripod or not, the DOF and so on.

Printing large is like this: 

it's the bottom of the ninth

your team is 2 runs behind

bases are loaded

there are 2 outs

the count is 3 and 2 

Like that.

Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers on the NPR radio show Car Talk have a category called the " Non Automotive Puzzler" that ranges far and wide from anything to do with cars.

For the most part this next post is "non photographic" in that it strays from some deep and heartfelt analysis of photographers' works, or mine, for that matter. Let's  call this a "quasi photographic post" as it does contain photographs, but uses photography descriptively rather than artistically.

It concerns something that's been going on over summers for years at MIT just up the street from where I live. It is the Flea at MIT and it happens every third Sunday from April through October. A geekier, more eclectic group will not be found anywhere else. It is something and I recommend it highly.

I went yesterday. More accurately,, I stumbled across it yesterday while riding my  bike to go work out.

Need a tube for that Heathkit stereo amplifier you built in the 60's? I know just the place.

The poster is for Morning Pro Musica, the WGBH radio show I woke up to for years hosted by Robert LJ. Lurtsema. He would start his classical music show every morning with bird song at 7 am.

All that stuff (above) came out of a Mini.

Need a new (sic) computer? Just the place.

I couldn't help but notice this guy had a parrot on his shoulder. He offered to take a picture of me with his parrot:

Later that same morning  I met up with my friends Liz and Mercedes for brunch in Brookline.

After, we went to my studio to look at work then drove back to my place so I could hand over my 8 x 10 camera to these two. 

Both work in large format film so I decided they should have it instead of it sitting unused in a closet gathering dust. And yes, talk about going back a ways, that is in fact a Zone VI 8 x 10 film holder bag hanging off Liz's shoulder.

Career update on these two friends and TA's: Liz has begun printing for a show she will have next March at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA and Mercedes is about to load up a truck in Brooklyn for the drive to Penland in North Carolina where she will begin a three year artist in residency in September. 

That 8 x 10 Toyo Field camera brought me career-crucial pictures for 25 years. I hope it continues in Liz and Mercedes highly capable hands. I look forward to seeing what they make with it.