Photos & Projects

Mom's house from the back

A Repository for Memories: My Mother’s House

When growing up, it’s often common to think of your parents’ house as “Home.” Somewhere you can always go back to, somewhere that should always be a safe place. My mother’s house was that for me as much as I was able to have that, and over the years I’ve been in and out of that house so many times, living there as well as just visiting. And through it all I’ve had my camera(s) with me, documenting the process.  When I was young I remember looking through picture albums with one of my parents and them telling me stories or just reminiscing about certain events. I find that in my own life, the more I photograph something the better I can remember it later, whether it’s a space, a time, or an event: my friends’ houses, getting together for barbeques and whisky tastings, my bedrooms over the years, birthday parties, my times in COVID quarantine, and yes, my mother and her house. Over the years these all provided good fodder for my cameras.

Photographing a Butterfly Conservatory – Black and White, What Can’t It Do?

My wife and I usually spend some time somewhere in the warm sunny south over the course of our too long winters in Ontario Canada.  Not so this year.  We were however looking for some respite in late February so we booked a short overnight stay in Niagara Falls.  One of the less sensational attractions …

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Shooting f/8 Until Sunrise – My Experiences and Methods

I absolutely love long exposure night time photography, for me its a far more spiritual mindful time to shoot and that element of doubt and anticipation of just what you are going to get is heightened. To me that’s film photography in a nutshell, that nagging doubt and anticipation then reward rather than instant gratification and certainty that comes with digital. 

Hokkaido Barns glue prints from 8x10

Age or Beauty? – 2: Hokkaido Barns, Glue Prints

Hokkaido is the northernmost and second largest island in Japan. Just off the Siberian peninsula winters are long, cold and harsh. The main industries are fishing, timber products and farming. With a short growing and cropping season, from May to September vegetable farmers can generally manage just one crop a year instead of three in some areas of the rest of Japan. So many farmers opt instead for livestock farms – primarily cattle (Hokkaido is often termed ‘milkland’) and to a lesser extent pigs. Traditionally farms were family businesses, small with simple equipment and wooden buildings to house and feed a relatively small number of cattle. Over time the successful farmers grew their businesses. And infrastructures, and the others continued until retirement but children took to other professions – often moving to the cities. As a consequence the countryside contains scatted remains of these old small cattle farms, disintegrating silos, milking sheds, grain and equipment stores, rapidly collapsing and becoming scarce now as the weather and large-scale farmers wipe the slate clean.

Fujifilm Professional TX-2 – Seeing Panoramic

The Fujifilm Professional TX-2 (its sister Hasselblad XPan I/II or the older Fuji TX)  is one of those cameras which you lust after, and when you get it, open the packaging and have it in your hands at last, you marvel at the build quality, the heft and solidity, the beauty of the workmanship and the lens as you handle the jewel like thing and attach it to the body. You then oooh and aaaah as you lift it and put it to your eye and are blown away by the clear bright finder which is very wide and large indeed! You then want to go out and shoot with it so you insert the batteries and then the film – which is as easy to load as a point and shoot

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