Photo Album

Over the past years I have had the good fortune to visit many places across the United States and Canada. Fancying myself an amateur landscape photographer, my camera usually accompanies me to the middle of nowhere, or at least to stops on the side of the road. This collection presents scanned versions of the negatives organized by trip. I tend to average about five pictures per trip that I consider good photographs to hang on the wall but have included what I consider 'discards' in this collection as someone may like them better than me.

The Trips

I've organized my pictures chronologically based upon when and where I've travelled. The available sections are:

Equipment

My equipment has varied with time. Prior to late 2003, I used a Miranda 35mm manual camera (now discontinued) with natural lighting and a Sekonic lightmeter as it had no built-in lightmeter. I had a single standard lens. The shutter started sticking, however, and it ate a roll of film on me in El Malpais and I got rid of it. Now I have a Minolta SRT 101 system with a plethora of lenses. It's fun having that variety and flexibility, but it's definitely made my camera heavier to bring along!

My film tastes have also changed with time. I used to shoot mostly print film, but now have moved more to slide film. I've found the films are a lot sharper and I really appreciate being able to see the colors directly on the film. They also scan better and I've gotten much better quality prints.

I've got a big fetish for Kodachrome. Kodachrome has some of the best colors I've ever seen. It really is the only film I've ever seen where I can look at a picture (if it's been exposed properly...) and say that the colors look like the original landscape. Unfortunately I have yet to figure out proper color matching techniques, so my scans don't have the same warmth as the film. I tend to use the PKR 64...the film itself isn't different from the consumer Kodachromes, but the color balance is much nicer. I had one roll of the consumer film that had a very gnarly greenish tint. I was saddened by the discontinuing of the 25 speed film and worry that Kodak, given its current financial situation, may consider discontinuing Kodachrome altogether. I hope that they keep it around at least as a professional film.

Aside from Kodachrome, I also use Fuji Velvia. It's incredibly sharp, but its colors are very rich. This can make it troublesome sometimes, particuarly at sunrises and sunsets where it just enhances the orange-red colors immensely. On the flip side, it's nifty to have a film that has that much color enhancement (saturation?). I tend to enjoy it at sunrises and sunsets for precisely that reason...it mcan make the land look like it's on fire!

For black and white I've started experimenting Agfa Scala. It's got almost a silver hue. I still tend to favor Kodak Plus-X 125. Plus-X was the first film I ever used in a manual camera, and I still think it produces some of the best black and whites. I haven't really found a substitute for it yet.

Previously I was a big fan of Kodak TMAX 400 for black and white shots. My old color shots were print film, primarily with Kodak Royal Gold 100 or other speeds in the same family.

Scanning for the photo is performed from slides or negatives with a Polaroid SprintScan 4000 and cleaned up in Photoshop.

Most of the pictures here are 500 pixels large, but I can make much higher resolution scans of specific pictures from the negatives if you've got a request.

Vacation "Fun" Photos

I do occasionally fall into the standard mode of taking some fun vacation photos with my digital camera. Digitals really are nice for vacation photos since you can use them as many times as you want. A lot of times if there are digital vacation shots I'll link to them off the trip page, but sometimes I do trips where I'm not doing photography and wind up with pure vacation photos. Here they are: