A Year in Pictures – 12 Frames in 12 Months

It’s been one year since I unexpectedly came into custody of a Hasselblad 500CM and a Leica M2.  This opened up a whole new creative outlet for me and has become a very absorbing hobby/passion.  In honor of this anniversary, I’m picking one photo per month over the last 12 months to share here.    While I wanted to choose good photos for this post, I’m not trying to single out the ‘best’ or my favorite shot from any given month.  My hope is to try to find photos that have some interesting context or meaning for me as a beginning photographer as well as for readers/viewers.  As you will see, I am fairly eclectic in choice of subject matter, technique, equipment and even film stocks.  Maybe some day I’ll settle into a particular genre or style and find a true ‘voice’ as a photographer, but for now I’m happy to shoot whatever is in front of me and try to figure out how to make better pictures.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a few shots I wasn’t ashamed to share at every stage of my development.  Even when I didn’t know what I was doing I managed to get some decent photos, if only by the sheer volume that I took!   My upward learning curve over that one year span becomes more apparent when I look through my Lightroom library and see all the duds during the first couple of months — shots that are either bland with little of interest and/or technically flawed.  I still get duds all the time and always will — you aren’t growing if you aren’t taking risks — but the ratio of marginally useable shots to total misfires has steadily improved.

So without further ado, let’s start one year ago with my very first roll of medium format film…

This was from my first outing with the Hasselblad, taken on June 9, 2024 one year to the day before this post is to be published on 35mmc.  After bringing the cameras home on Friday, my son Graham and I spent Saturday cleaning and organizing everything.  We were chomping at the bit to try out the Hasselblads, which felt very exotic and are built like no other camera we had tried before.  On Sunday we drove to the Sleepy Hollow Lighthouse which we found by googling “Best Photowalks in Westchester, NY.”  For this shot I was using the 150mm to get as close as I could to the lighthouse and a red filter to get some contrast between sky and the clouds, something I remembered liking from my student film days.

Perhaps it’s a bit of beginner’s luck, but this shot is technically one of the best black & white shots I took in the first couple of months of shooting.  I think focus & exposure are pretty solid, and the grain structure & contrast on the Tri-X look great, the 50+ year old German-made Zeiss lens is very impressive, as is the level of detail in the 6×6 frame.  Composing for a square frame was something new for me, but I immediately loved the big bright Hasselblad viewfinder even through a red filter, despite getting a little queasy trying to compose due to the reverse motion of the mirror image frame.   It’s nothing earth-shattering in terms of having something to say by or about me as a photographer — it reminds me of the kind of photo you’d see in a corporate furnished apartment or in a plastic wrapped picture frame at a discount store.  But it was enough to hook me on shooting medium format film!

Early after my arrival in Calgary, a friend told me about the annual Tsuut’ina Pow Wow, an hour’s drive out of the city in the foothills of the Rockies.  I had to go!  I thought it would be a great opportunity to use the M2 and attempt some documentary style shooting (also the Hasselblad was getting its CLA at that time, so wasn’t available.)  The Pow Wow was amazing, and I had such a good time the first day I went back for a second full day of shooting.  I was having some technical issues with the Leica which needed its own CLA.  When everything came back from the lab, I would discover that the shutter wasn’t reliable and most of what I shot was underexposed and very grainy, even though I was rounding up by about a stop from my meter readings.  Worse, the rewind button fell off somewhere on the dusty fairground.  It was impossible to find, and I would later learn, very difficult to replace.  Unable to rewind or unload I thought I was out of business, but as a workaround I borrowed a safety pin from a very nice fellow who was also a photographer and a member of the Blackfeet Nation from Minnesota.  That pin is still on the camera strap, and triggers rewind mode when you insert it into the empty shaft where the button fell off.  Despite these challenges, I love the timeless look of this photo, it feels like it could have been taken in the late 19th Century.  Beyond an exciting shooting opportunity, it was inspiring to experience the pride and dignity of the Tsuut’ina people at their annual gathering.

Just about every weekend, I would take the cameras out shooting, most frequently into the Canadian Rockies.  Looking online, I got a lot of ideas for cool places to shoot, including this special vantage point to see Canmore’s signature mountains, “The Three Sisters” reflected in a small pool.  I spent about 4 hours there one Sunday afternoon, watching the changing light on the mountains.  The idea was inspired by Monet’s famous series of “Haystack” paintings that recorded the changing light on a single haystack over the course of a summer day.  This is one of my best shots as the peak late afternoon light is hitting the Sisters just before the sun started to disappear behind the next mountain.  The colors and texture of this shot remind me of a 1950’s Western movie landscape.  I texted it to a friend and his one word response was “VistaVision!”  I think the distinctive look is probably due to some combination of the vintage lens and the Cinestill film stock, which is repurposed cinema film.  Looking closely, there is a subtle touch of ‘diffusion’ that makes the granite peaks a tiny bit soft, not from any kind of camera issue, but from the rampant wildfires that were raging a few hours north around Jasper that summer.  Getting a shot like this from time to time in those early months is what kept me going and trying to learn and improve!

There is a highway pull-off on Trans Canada Route 1 just north of Banff that is always a tempting stop on the way home from some photo expedition into the wilderness. I have many shots of this view of Mount Rundle in a variety of seasons and times of day.  This was taken the first time I dropped by, and I spent about 30 minutes shooting the mountain with the Hasselblad in color and black and white until I ran out of film.  I had packed up the Hasselblad kit when the setting sun kissed the top of Mount Rundle and turned it a gorgeous glowing pink.  Hastily, I grabbed the Leica which was loaded with some Ektar 100 — thankfully a color stock — and took a couple of snaps during the very brief magic moment before the light faded to granite grey.  This is far from clinical perfection — it’s a bit soft, probably from shooting handheld in the fading light with a relatively low ISO film and there is a giant black hole of underexposed shadow in the center of the frame.  As I recall I used the spot meter on the pink highlights, and didn’t anticipate the amount of drop off into the shadows below.  But I felt something kind of special about the moment I caught, including the lone paddle boarder tiny in the frame reflected on the mirror surface of the lake, and spent a lot of time on Lightroom trying to make this shot ‘perfect’.  But the more I fiddled around the worse it looked — raising the exposure at the base of the mountain meant washing out the glowing colors of the peak, and my efforts to isolate parts of the frame for fine-tuning were an awful downward spiral.   Over time I’ve come to appreciate this image more or less how it came back from the lab, and enjoying how it reveals only the most interesting and beautiful parts of the image — more glowing pink & shadow black poetry than more evenly balanced prose.

From time to time when it wasn’t in the cards to drive out to the Rockies, I did my photo walking in Calgary.  I was trying out a newly acquired 1958  Super Angulon 21mm f4 that day as well as doing a bit of shopping for things like winter gear before the coldest Canadian winter weather set in.  I stopped by one of my favorite Calgary shops, Knifewear, a small, boutique “hipster” Japanese knife store.  They have amazing and beautiful Japanese cooking knives and a very cool staff who are happy to tell you about the celebrated blacksmiths who handcrafted each blade.  There was something cool about the person sharpening a knife in a small corner against the window, so I grabbed this shot, catching a moment when a pedestrian was crossing the doorway and throwing a long bent shadow on the wall of the store.  I was very happy with the shot and the Super Angulon, which has become my favorite lens when I want to shoot extra wide.  I was also very happy with the “Nakiri” knife I bought there, with a rectangular blade designed for cutting vegetables, which has become my favorite knife.

This was shot in Calgary in late November, just before the US Thanksgiving holiday.  This is a ‘day at the office’ from my job up in Canada.  I love the hive of activity framed by the tunnel of tree branches covered in snow.  In New York we rarely get that kind of snow clinging to the branches and it reliably melts or blows off the same day it falls.  But in Alberta it stayed that way for a couple of weeks and I have many shots of trees from that period in late November/early December and especially of that pretty tree-lined street where we were shooting for over a week.  In the middle of the vortex is my dear friend, the very talented director Anne Sewitsky awhirl in her element, moving in one direction as we make the final preparations for a shot, while passing along a last bit of guidance over her shoulder.

This shot is from a somewhat ill-fated expedition to Drumheller, a ‘badlands’ area about 90 minutes northeast of Calgary in the opposite direction of the Rockies.  I had my M3 and a Leica Monochrom that a friend had loaned me, and planned to try out my lenses on the Monochrom and some of his lenses on the M3.  The expedition was ill-fated on a number of counts.  First, I discovered that the most interesting aspects of badlands terrain, the eroded features at ground level and below, are not particularly visible when covered with snow, so the Canadian midwinter is not the ideal time to visit.  Second, with two cameras and seven or eight lenses to try out, the ratio of time spent fiddling with gear to making photos was inverse of what would be ideal.  And finally, because of the profusion of gear, I lost track of one of my friend’s lenses.  I ended up buying him a replacement when I couldn’t find it after scouring the car, digging through all of my camera bags, and spending about four hours the next day going all the way back to Drumheller to retrace my steps in a driving wind that swept across the prairie and covered the highway with icy drifting snow.

The lens, a mid 80’s Elmarit 21mm f2.8 turned up a month or so later when I was looking for something else in the house; I guess I stashed it on a shelf on a side table last minute before setting out when I was trying to make everything fit into two bags.  It’s all good, now Graham has a nice 21mm for his M2, but I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at the shots I took that day — perhaps I was suffering from a very low grade case of photographer’s PTSD.  But as I was scanning everything I shot in December, this one caught my eye.  I like the layers of diagonals, triangles and verticals in the composition and the unusual geology of the harsh foreboding landscape blanketed in snow.  For me it has an odd mix of the very familiar with the mythic — sure it’s a nice Canadian family trying to get out of the house on a wintry weekend day, but with a bit of imagination you could re-envision this composition as a Wagnerian Viking Queen rising over the bluff before ascending to Valhalla,  or perhaps a team of Marvel super heroes reuniting after some cosmic battle, or even a Jedi Warrior Princess being greeted by a rebel soldier.  Okay, I might be over-egging the pudding, but it was kind of fun to re-discover this from my library putting together this post.

This is another ‘day at the office’ photo, and is one of my favorite portraits.  I thought the frame looked really good through the viewfinder.  But I told Luke, a talented lighting technician and writer, I wasn’t confident how sharp it would be after I took it as I was shooting wide open at f1.4.  I think the Summilux ASPH, my first contemporary 21st Century Leica lens, is capable of gorgeous results but the depth of field at that aperture is punishingly narrow.  Indeed, coming out of the lab it is a bit soft, whether from just missing focus or having some handheld motion blur, or some combination of both.  But I still love the look of this photo; for me, it has a bit of a “Dutch Painting” feel, both in terms of the soft winter window side lighting and Luke’s overall demeanor, despite his modern clothing.  So not only do I forgive myself the small imperfections I think they are part of what makes the shot work for me.

This is from my first photowalk with my son Graham after getting home after eight months in the Canadian Rockies.  We took our cameras out into Prospect Park, not far from his Brooklyn apartment.  I had my M3, Graham had his Hasselblad, and his girlfriend had his Leica R6.2.  We wandered around the Park looking for interesting things to shoot on a somewhat chilly winter’s day — you can see some ice on the surface of the lake and the bleakness of February in NYC.  We came across some swans in a small inlet, and I perched on a rock on the edge of the lake to grab a handful of shots while Graham and his girlfriend stood by ready to move on.  I was trying to catch a good moment as the swans, nonplussed by our presence, went through their various activities.  This shot of a swan landing from a very brief flight is my favorite, with the rippling reflections mirroring the graceful curves of the bird touching down on the icy water.

I am endlessly fascinated by Red Hook, Brooklyn, which is a mix of decaying industrial waterfront, encroaching newly built Amazon warehouses, and residential neighborhoods that working people, hipsters and creatives of a wide range of ages and styles call home.  While now it’s a good spot for a nice meal or an artisanal beverage, it has a hard-nosed history as a rough neighborhood and was the setting for “On the Waterfront” as well as one of the early battles of the American Revolution.  The American rebel cannons at Fort Defiance held off the British Navy just long enough so that George Washington and Continental Army could make their escape after the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn and keep the War for Independence alive.  (Sorry to bring up a possible sore point for Hamish and any of our UK readers…)  It also has wonderful vantage points of the Statue of Liberty, including this one quite close to the location of the original Fort Defiance.  This shot was the first time I tried the Hasselblad’s legendary 250mm “Earthrise” lens to get the Statue as big as I could in the frame.  That evening it was a bit overcast and foreboding, perhaps reflecting my feelings upon returning to my home country and facing an unknown future.  I love that Lady Liberty still stands out in the gloaming and perhaps there is a little spark from her torch pointing to a more hopeful future.  Arguably, things were darker for George Washington in August, 1776, and that worked out in the long run, so no need to give up the fight for freedom and democracy prematurely!

In my ongoing search for interesting locations to shoot, I came across the Untermyer  Gardens in Yonkers, the former estate of Samuel Untermyer, a ‘muckraker’ lawyer who managed to do very well for himself while representing Progressive causes in the era of the late 19th/early 20th Century Robber Barons.  The Walled Garden, which features decorative architectural structures inspired by ancient Greek and Persian ruins, is well known to locals but new to me, despite living in NYC for close to 40 years.  This young woman is posing for a very nice professional photographer to commemorate her Quinceanera, an important rite of passage for young Latin women in their mid teens.  He had a very nice Nikon DSLR with an impressive looking zoom lens that was synched up to some portable lighting.  There was a group of friends and family to move the lights and to help the young woman maneuver in her elaborate gown.  I like the formality of her pose in her finery that feels a bit ‘ancien regime’ next to her ‘entourage’ casually chatting amongst themselves in their street clothes against the still wintry looking garden.  The photographer, who was off just to the left of frame showed me one of his portraits and it looked great.

Speaking of portraits, this was taken late one afternoon in our back yard.  I was padding around the garden with my Hasselblad taking photos of flowers and trees and noticed my wife Beth sitting thoughtfully at our picnic table after a swim.  I was in the midst of a somewhat lengthy photographic ‘project’ trying out a variety of b&w film stocks and was shooting Kentmere Pan 400, a budget stock I had never tried before.  It’s interesting how many of my favorite photos have been taken when I had planned on shooting something else that day, but was lucky enough to have a loaded camera when something caught my eye.  I thought Beth looked beautiful with the late light hitting her through the trees and I took three shots on the same lens as I walked toward her, one quite wide, another in the mid ground, and this was the closest.  If I had planned on doing a portrait ‘session’ I would never have loaded a low cost stock I’d never tried before, I don’t think I would have chosen that outdoor table we rarely use as the setting, and I doubt I would have caught such a subtle thoughtful expression. I think this is one of my best portraits, with good contrast, some nice textures of wood, skin, hair, fabric and greenery, a pleasing depth of field with some interesting bokeh in the deep background with light coming through the trees. But most of all, I like the mood that memorably catches a quiet moment between Beth and me enjoying a beautiful spring day together.

Cover Image, ICE WALL, JANUARY 2025.  This photo of the Ice Castle on Lake Louise was taken with the Hasselblad 500CM with a 645 back, Zeiss Planar 80mm, f2.8 on Kodak Ektar in January.  It was actually the second Ice Castle built this season, after the first one collapsed into Lake Louise on an unexpectedly warm day.  This is the first photograph that I’ve shown publicly, at a fundraising auction held at a Manhattan gallery in April.  It’s also my first photograph that sold!  (All proceeds going to the non-profit, one of my son’s schools.)

It’s been an amazing year in photographs!  Thanks for having a look.

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