Get off my LAWN! "Grumpy Old Farts"

[jim nolte]

Nice. Got a Zenith table radio w/tubes. Still works.

 

[Jeff Scott]

I have done lots of 6x7 work, but I usually only shot 9 frames as the 10th frame does not fit a 8x10 contact sheet. In fact, of all the various medium formats I have used over the years (6x4.5, 6x6, 6x7, 6x8, 6x9, 6x12, and 6x17) it is the only one like that!

I too, very much loved the "one man band" of photography, when I made the negatives, processed them, and printed them, myself. No one to blame but me if I placed a shadow in wrong sone and did not do the right N- to N+ development of the film. Of course, with modern multigrade papers there was a whole lot more control than back when Fred Archer and Ansel Adams created the Zone System.

 

[Jeff Scott]

I have a couple of mid '80s era Gitzo tripods (226 and 224) but I always preferred my Ries J100/J250, well worth the extra weight IMO. Several friends of mine have CF Gitzos, but they always seemed too top heavy, to me, with a camera mounted to them.

 

[jim nolte]

I have done lots of 6x7 work, but I usually only shot 9 frames as the 10th frame does not fit a 8x10 contact sheet. In fact, of all the various medium formats I have used over the years (6x4.5, 6x6, 6x7, 6x8, 6x9, 6x12, and 6x17) it is the only one like that!

I too, very much loved the "one man band" of photography, when I made the negatives, processed them, and printed them, myself. No one to blame but me if I placed a shadow in wrong sone and did not do the right N- to N+ development of the film. Of course, with modern multigrade papers there was a whole lot more control than back when Fred Archer and Ansel Adams created the Zone System.

I always appreciated Ansel starting off as a classical pianist and then switching gears and becoming the master photographer/print master he became. I never got a chance to meet him, he had already passed when I started working at the store, but my boss knew him well. I asked him about that one day and he said Ansel never liked the social life that came with being a classical musician and he didn't like working with other musicians that much. Many times when I would be at a practice session and things were starting to bog down for whatever reasons, disagreements amongst the other players and me and the drummer just standing around waiting for things to get sorted out, I would think about that

 

[Jeff Scott]

I moved to Los Angeles just a couple months after he had died.

I did get to know a childhood friend of his son, Michael, who lived in Fish Camp, just south of the south entrance to Yosemite. Leroy had a full color darkroom ( with 54" Kreonite paper processors!) in his basement as he did lots of the weddings at the chapel in the valley, and also made large prints for Marriott Hotel. I have been to Yosemite 15 or 16 times from 1984 through 1999 (I am very much overdue for a trip there), have thousands of 35mm Kodachrome slides (made with Canon FTbn and F1n bodies and an assortment of prime lenses from 17mm to 300mm), and 100s of b&w and E6 4x5s, plus several rolls of Konica IR820 that I used my old Rollei 3.5E (Planar) for.

I did get to meet Matthew Adams and speak with him on a couple of occasions when he ran the gallery that was on Cannery Row in Monterey in the mid '00s, very interesting too!

Another very memorable time for me was going with a friend of mine to the very last Owens Valley Workshop, in April 1990, with Ray McSavaney, Bruce Barnbaum and John Sexton, a great week spent in Yosemite with them. The orientation get-together was in Ansel's old family house which is behind the gallery, and we spent an afternoon in his darkroom, too!

 

[jim nolte]

I have a couple of mid '80s era Gitzo tripods (226 and 224) but I always preferred my Ries J100/J250, well worth the extra weight IMO. Several friends of mine have CF Gitzos, but they always seemed too top heavy, to me, with a camera mounted to them.

Yeah but just like I appreciate lighter basses now, my 12lbs. SR5 is in the local CL, I appreciate lighter tripods also. And I switched to digital 2 years ago, no more heavy cameras for me. I have a Nikon D810 and I love it. With almost 14 stops of latitude/dynamic range, and I know this is heresy, I prefer it over medium format film, for color at least. The first time I used a carbon tripod it seemed a little top heavy, but not bad. And every time I folded it up and carried it, it felt like I was carrying a couple of sticks! Sweet

 

[Jeff Scott]

These3 days I use a Canon 6D with 17-40/4L, 24-105/4L IS USM, and 70-200/4L IS USM lenses, so I still have total control, although am a hack still with Photoshop. Some day I would love to own all of the Canon EOS TS lenses, that would bring back a smidgen of my love for the process involved using a fully adjustable view camera.

Re: the top heaviness of the CF tripods, keep in mind we were using anything from 4x5 up to 16x20(!) view cameras on them. At the first camera shop I worked at in the mid '80s we kept a Minox GT mounted onto a very large Majestic tripod!

 

[jim nolte]

I moved to Los Angeles just a couple months after he had died.

I did get to know a childhood friend of his son, Michael, who lived in Fish Camp, just south of the south entrance to Yosemite. Leroy had a full color darkroom ( with 54" Kreonite paper processors!) in his basement as he did lots of the weddings at the chapel in the valley, and also made large prints for Marriott Hotel. I have been to Yosemite 15 or 16 times from 1984 through 1999 (I am very much overdue for a trip there), have thousands of 35mm Kodachrome slides (made with Canon FTbn and F1n bodies and an assortment of prime lenses from 17mm to 300mm), and 100s of b&w and E6 4x5s, plus several rolls of Konica IR820 that I used my old Rollei 3.5E (Planar) for.

I did get to meet Matthew Adams and speak with him on a couple of occasions when he ran the gallery that was on Cannery Row in Monterey in the mid '00s, very interesting too!

Another very memorable time for me was going with a friend of mine to the very last Owens Valley Workshop, in April 1990, with Ray McSavaney, Bruce Barnbaum and John Sexton, a great week spent in Yosemite with them. The orientation get-together was in Ansel's old family house which is behind the gallery, and we spent an afternoon in his darkroom, too!

Isn't John Sexton cool. I know him fairly well, he was a regular at Myricks, we would order 50lbs. bags of fixer for him when he would being doing his classes. Ran into him just 2 weeks ago at Point Lobos at Weston Beach. He and his wife a student/friend ,shooting 35mm, and I were the only people at the beach, one of those windy foggy days at the Point. Just a great low key guy and arguably the best large format B&W photographer around IMHO

 

[agedhorse]

When I studied photography in school (I spent a little time in the design/communications departments because the girls were cuter than in engineering ), I studied the zone system quite a bit because there is an electronic analogy based on dynamic range (between the noise floor or cut-off and saturation) where you have linear resolution of amplitude (or light gradation). Video has exactly the same limitations.

What has changed, of course, is that the dynamic range of all mediums has improved (lower noise floor, greater saturation point) due to the improvements in every technology.

 

[jim nolte]

All I had was aluminum so this one sent me back in the house (that was from my back yard looking over the next door neighbor's roofs)!

View attachment 685407

Are your neighbors still with us? Yikes, we just don't really get that type of lightening out here that much, with the bolts, just what my dad use to call "heat lighting" where the whole sky lights up.

 

[B-string]

Are your neighbors still with us? Yikes, we just don't really get that type of lightening out here that much, with the bolts, just what my dad use to call "heat lighting" where the whole sky lights up.

Even though all the hair on my body was standing up, the bolts hit in a wash less than a block away. We get some pretty crazy stuff during Monsoons. I was (flash) blind for about 10-15 minutes, it was pitch black that night with an exposure of 13 seconds and f stop of 3.2 (one nice thing about cheater digital is file info). The power was out for about 45 minutes (summer night temp of about 98, 5 minutes before was 104). Fun stuff

 

[Jeff Scott]

John, as well as the other three photographers are/were (R.I.P Ray) great people who were very down to Earth and generous to everyone. I last saw John at the Cannery Row Ansel Adams Gallery. We had dropped in that afternoon in 2007 and saw him there, so we started talking (he actually remembered me from back in 1990), he told me to come back later that evening as he was going to present a talk. We did go back, after dinner, and his talk was superb, as always (I had been to a couple of previous lectures he had given back in the '80s in L.A.), and he can be so fun with his example of photographs he shows to illustrate a point, such as his own series of Moonrise, Hernandez that he er, modified! Have you seen those, they are a hoot!!!

We got to meet and hear from another celebrity, David Gardner, of Gardner Lithographics, who made Ansel's books. That was a treat.

 

[Jeff Scott]

...an exposure of 13 seconds and f stop of 3.2 (one nice thing about cheater digital is file info)...

I may be getting old(er) but I can recall much of the technical info from my photographs. Many things were somewhat standardized with me and other things can be determined by looking at the photographs themselves. f32 was a very common aperture I would use, and adjust shutter speed to suit. All the 4x5 b&w film I used was T-Max 100 which had a very nice and predictable reciprocity characteristic response; John Sexton gave me an very accurate chart to base adjusted exposures from after making some readings with my Pentax Digital Spot Meter (I still have both!)

 

[B-string]

I'm usually a little tighter at 5.6, but I was playing with some field depth. That bolt said I had played enough for the night.

 

[jim nolte]

Even though all the hair on my body was standing up, the bolts hit in a wash less than a block away. We get some pretty crazy stuff during Monsoons. I was (flash) blind for about 10-15 minutes, it was pitch black that night with an exposure of 13 seconds and f stop of 3.2 (one nice thing about cheater digital is file info). The power was out for about 45 minutes (summer night temp of about 98, 5 minutes before was 104). Fun stuff

The loudest natural sound I ever heard was many years ago when lighting struck a telephone poll down the street about the same distance from yours, just a block down the street. One freak cloud was in the sky, I remember it was Memorial Day, and it only produced that one strike. I remember the lighting and the thunder happened at exactly the same time, not a couple of seconds apart, and I could hear the thunder echoing AWAY from my house not toward it. All the electricity went out, people starting screaming and car alarms starting going off. I couldn't believe how loud it was. I had my bass strap around my neck, drinking a beer getting primed to do a little practicing, and looking through my back windows at just this one weird looking dark cloud in the sky approaching, no rain no other clouds in the sky, just this one when it struck. Like I said we don't get that much out here, it was front page news in our local papers!

 

[B-string]

The loudest natural sound I ever heard was many years ago when lighting struck a telephone poll down the street about the same distance from yours, just a block down the street. One freak cloud was in the sky, I remember it was Memorial Day, and it only produced that one strike. I remember the lighting and the thunder happened at exactly the same time, not a couple of seconds apart, and I could hear the thunder echoing AWAY from my house not toward it. All the electricity went out, people starting screaming and car alarms starting going off. I couldn't believe how loud it was. I had my bass strap around my neck, drinking a beer getting primed to do a little practicing, and looking through my back windows at just this one weird looking dark cloud in the sky approaching, no rain no other clouds in the sky, just this one when it struck. Like I said we don't get that much out here, it was front page news in our local papers!

I'm not sure if it was the house lighting up like daylight, the noise or both that sent the wife outside to collect me. I was glad I had someone to guide me though. The first wife and I lived in an upstairs apartment in Montecito when one bolt hit just above the complex. The balcony shook and rolled like an earthquake. Ah......old farts and stories .

 

[jim nolte]

John, as well as the other three photographers are/were (R.I.P Ray) great people who were very down to Earth and generous to everyone. I last saw John at the Cannery Row Ansel Adams Gallery. We had dropped in that afternoon in 2007 and saw him there, so we started talking (he actually remembered me from back in 1990), he told me to come back later that evening as he was going to present a talk. We did go back, after dinner, and his talk was superb, as always (I had been to a couple of previous lectures he had given back in the '80s in L.A.), and he can be so fun with his example of photographs he shows to illustrate a point, such as his own series of Moonrise, Hernandez that he er, modified! Have you seen those, they are a hoot!!!

We got to meet and hear from another celebrity, David Gardner, of Gardner Lithographics, who made Ansel's books. That was a treat.

No but Steven Myrick, the owner of the store has seen the actual original neg of Moonrise, apparently it is very underexposed as Ansel was only able the get the one exposure before the moonlight was no longer on the tombstones in front. A real difficult negative to print, just quickly having to make an educated guess at the time of capture. Of course nowadays people would just photoshop a moon shot they took on vacation into the image. Don't get me started about modern landscape photography!

 

[B-string]

Best friend's son can't take a picture without photoshopping the life out of it. He's making good money doing it, but I grit my teeth when anyone calls him a photographer, photo HACK is more fitting. I'll crop digitals, obvious special effects, but after that it is what the shot is.
He did a wedding and decided over color saturation was "neat". Blew the pictures out and made me ill to even view them.

 

[Ajapses]

I took that as a pic prompt:

Like a Pbass, only the essentials - tuning, volume, tone. Needs to be plumbed through the GK to put the growl to it.

The tuner is very scratchy. Anybody out there know the best thing to use to clean the plates?

 

[Jeff Scott]

No but Steven Myrick, the owner of the store has seen the actual original neg of Moonrise, apparently it is very underexposed as Ansel was only able the get the one exposure before the moonlight was no longer on the tombstones in front. A real difficult negative to print, just quickly having to make an educated guess at the time of capture. Of course nowadays people would just photoshop a moon shot they took on vacation into the image. Don't get me started about modern landscape photography!

Ansel had to rely on his knowledge of the brightness of the moon at 250 foot candles IIRC. I have a great video with Ansel making a print of Moonrise where he discusses and shows the issues at hand with the negative. If you run into JS sometime ask him about those special Moonrise photos of his!

Modern landscape photography? Do you mean like that stuff post George Fiske or Timothy H. O'Sullivan, for example?

Or stuff like this:

Photograph Copyright © Jeffrey P. Scott 2000 All rights reserved