Website is Overhauled

My website is now completely redesigned, with a new look and new galleries.
At the top level you can see sample images from many of my galleries by clicking the Favorites or Sampler links. Other galleries are now separated into Series vs. Landscape instead of B&W vs. Color.
There are lots of new images, and more galleries will be up within a couple of weeks.
Three of my photos are now in the August issue of Black and White Magazine, the Special 2010 Portfolio Issue, on pages 176 and 177.

Iceland 1974

I started teaching at Suffolk University in Boston in 1970. As a struggling young college professor I soon suspected that I would never be able to afford trip to Europe. So when a chance came to join a hiking club tour of Iceland, my wife and I jumped on it. At that time I knew nothing about Iceland except that it was somewhere east of Greenland. We signed up for the tour, which took place for two weeks in late June in 1974. Since the tour took place only in southern Iceland, we decided to add a week in the north, car camping.

The tour was organized by George Ehrenfried for the Genessee Valley Hiking Club. He had made several previous trips to Iceland and chose his favorite spectacular hiking and photography locations for the tour. This was an ideal time of year in the far north with almost 24 hours of daylight for photography and a huge variety of migrating and nesting birds.

Highlights of the trip included waterfalls, intense green growth near the coast contrasting with black lava farther inland, glaciers (including the largest in Europe, Vatnajökull), volcanoes, the North Atlantic Rift (where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet and where Iceland’s parliament first met in 930 C.E.), craggy mountains, and a variety of geysers and other forms of thermal activity.

I brought with me two Pentax 35mm SLRs, one for black-and-white film and one for Kodachromes, and a 4x5" Calumet view camera for more leisurely black-and-white work. The latter I used only in the north, where we had more control over our own schedule.

On returning home I made one serious error which led to a near photographic catastrophe. I sent twenty-one rolls of Kodachrome to one Kodak processing lab all in one day. Of course the day they processed my films was the one very rare day when something went wrong and many slides in every single box arrived covered with some kind of crud. After a series of correspondence with Kodak, I sent the worst of them back so they could clean them as best they could. They also sent me several rolls of replacement film. The good news is that the worst of the crud was on less interesting slides, and almost all of the best images either were unaffected or cleaned up well. Since that time I never sent more than one roll to any lab on any one day (back when there were eight or so labs across the country, I often sent one roll to each lab on one day, and then waited a couple of days before sending more).

Recently I started selecting slides from old trips to scan so that I could preserve them from further fading and post the best ones on my website. I made selections from several trips, but for Iceland I was only able to find the rejects and near-duplicates. This puzzled me greatly, since I knew I had three carousel trays somewhere that I had used for at least three different public slide show talks about the trip. After much searching, I gave up and chose the best slides I could find from the rejects. But just before I started scanning, I discovered the missing slides in a file box in my basement.

I have selected 59 of these that appeal to me the most, and they are now up in a new color gallery on my website, under the title Iceland 1974.

Exhibit at New TV Studios

Photographs by Ellen Fisher and myself are now showing at New TV Studios in Newton through the end of August. Included are several from my recent trip to Utah as well as other recent work, and response has been very positive so far.

The opening reception last Saturday was somewhat unusual: besides the exhibit and refreshments there was live music by Shir Madness klezmer band, in which I play flute. This was taped by the studio, providing them with material for an educational show and giving us a nice DVD that we can use for demos. Once we get a copy of the DVD, I expect we will put some tracks up on the band's website (http://shirmadness.org) to replace the older material that is now up.

If you are in the Newton area during the summer, do stop by the exhibit. The New TV Studios are at the end of Easy Street, off Needham Street, just west of the National Lumber sign. Hours are:
Mon-Thurs10am to 9:30 pm
Friday 10am to 6pm
Sat-Sun 12 to 6pm

Back from Utah

I've been too busy to blog lately. Anyway, I had a great two weeks in southern Utah, with visits to Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Capitol Reef National Parks, and Escalante/Grand Staircase and Pipe Spring National Monuments.

My Print of the Month for May is a black-and-white photo of storm clouds over Long Canyon on the Burr Trail in Escalante/GS National Monument. I expect to have a gallery or two of Utah photos up within a couple more weeks.

All of these places were stunning, but my favorite was Capitol Reef, which provided great opportunities for abstract images. I have heard many people rave about Zion, but the photos and descriptions I had seen didn't move me. Being there, just as the Cottonwood trees were beginning to leaf out, made a huge difference. Zion was truly inspiring. The next time I am there I will rent a bike, take the shuttle bus (with bike) to the top of the scenic park road, and use the bike to wander back down, stopping often for photographs.

Bryce was much more as I had imagined it: quite stunning. We took the Navaho trail to get down into the rock pillars, and it was worth it. We weren't able to do the Bristlecone trail because it was snowed in, as were most roads to the north. Thus, we couldn't get to Powell Point or drive the Hell's Backbone road.

We did get caught in a blizzard driving from Boulder to Torrey, but made it through OK. I now understand why Minor White spent several summers at Capitol Reef National Park. On our last day there we took a guided jeep tour of spectacular Cathedral Valley. Do look for photos from some of these places, as well as Devil's Garden and other locations in Escalante/Grand Staircase in a couple of weeks.

The photo with this entry is of Lower Calf Creek Falls in Escalante/Grand Staircase National Monument.

Utah in April

In April I will be making my first ever photographic trip to southern Utah, visiting Zion, Bryce, and Capitol Reef National Parks as well as interesting canyons in the Escalante-Grand Staircase region. In planning this trip I had invaluable assistance from photographer Harvey Halpern, who has explored, hiked, and photographed in the most remote parts of Utah every year for a great many years. You can see some of his work at his website, Endangered Canyons of Utah.

It was a delight to make the acquaintance recently of Harvey and of his friend and fellow photographer Karin Rosenthal, who does remarkable abstract nude images. You can check out her work here.

In other news, after attending the Epson Print Academy in Boston recently (a very valuable event), I decided it was time to retire my aging Epson 2200 inkjet printer in favor of a new Epson 3800. I am quite pleased with the new printer, which should give me additional flexibility and image quality, especially in black-and-white, as well as enabling me to make prints up to 17x25". All my photos from the upcoming Utah trip will be printed on this machine.

The Blanket

My website has been updated (improved, I hope), and I have added a page called "Blanket" that gives some of the history of the image I use for an icon on each page.

Also, my new "Print of the Month" for February 2009 is now up on the home page and the "Print of the Month" page.

I think I am done fiddling with the site for a while, and I expect to get back to making more photographs so I can add new galleries and expand the existing ones.

My Website is Renovated

One day ahead of my personal deadline I have just uploaded the new version of my photography website (click the title of this post to go there.) The new version gets rid of frames and uses CSS to format almost everything, which should make navigation and usability better. I have also added several new galleries, and the home page photo is a new "Print of the Month" for January, 2009. There is more new content in other areas as well, and more will be added soon.