This suite of three photographs was taken during the 90% solar eclipse that visited Montauk NY last year. The isolated stretch of beach faces Block Island Sound, two miles west of Montauk Point.
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This picture was taken on a trip to California in 1994. As was the case with the others, a square format image captured on film with a Hasselblad fixed-lens wide angle camera. What has pleased me most about these medium format resurrections is the smooth mid-range grayscale I’m finding when converting 30 year old color negatives; a result of that camera’s legendary optic.
The three districts of Canyonlands National Park protect over 330,000 acres of the Colorado Plateau; much of it designated as wilderness. I first visited this place with two companions in the summer of 1978. Memories of that remote backcountry and its extraordinary isolation have stayed with me all these years. This photo was from a later trip in ’93. Full frame image with film border to the left.
This photo was taken the same day as the picture from my previous post; a warm March sunset six weeks before these cactuses typically bloom. In those days, I’d have to pick up a cooler and bags of ice to keep the film from getting ruined on hot days. And there was a second ritual of asking to have my film passed around the x-ray machine at the airport. When 120 film cameras became scarce in the 2000’s, the airport ordeal moved up to a higher level of complexity.
The well-loved Saguaro cactus occupies a relatively small range in the Sonoran Desert (in southwest Arizona and also in Mexico along the east side of the Gulf of California). On this trip, we took a train from NYC to Albuquerque and drove into Arizona where this shot was taken. (I’m pretty sure this was also the trip when we saw a Gila Monster.) The image was captured with the Hasselblad “superwide” aka 903 SWC. Full-frame image with film border to the left.
This is the first of a group of scans I’m working on from unpublished film images taken around thirty years ago. This scene was just outside Capitol Reef National Park. I’ve included a file here to show the original border of the film, and on the left hand side you can make out the code notches from the Hasselblad film holder. The image was captured with a 903 SWC on 120 color negative film, and converted to black and white.
This -14°c view of a Salina UT truck stop was taken in January 2018. The reddish glow in the sky is the lamp in my hotel room reflecting in the window.
Homebound for a week, I’ll be posting some images from a few years ago that I’ve been wanting to revisit. I like thinking of image files (or negatives etc) as the score. You have the music and you can play it however the spirit moves you.
Branches and moon are seen vertically here. The picture is from my walk in the village this past Tuesday evening. The glow center bottom… a street lamp situated just below.
Moonrise on monday evening: The Lady’s Village Improvement Society seen from the edge of the tennis courts.
Last night found me on Main Street; a windless evening with a gibbous moon. For this image, I braced the phone for a few seconds on a nearby fence post. Many of the trees here have yet to lose their leaves. The hazy glow is from street lamps.
I love the look of empty ballfields. Here, the nocturnal profile of a soccer goal looks almost sculptural. Behind: a row of residential trees and a dark sky with a few stars peeking out. On the upper right: the flare from another overhead light. Off to the left: the goal post photographed in my previous image.
Once I moved into a darker setting last night, I realized I might’ve been overstating my phone’s ability to render shadowy areas consistently. It becomes more difficult in low light to stitch a nocturne together without some artifacts. I remember this happening with my older phone as well. To some extent, this can be mitigated by finding a stable platform for the phone, but I’m trying to keep the gear bag empty. Last night’s “moonwalk” resulted in patchy sharpness so I decided to have some fun with treatment to see if there were some interesting directions to take the files. As some of you know, I collect inexpensive antique photographs, so those hundred year old patinas are itching to find a way into pictures I’m working on.
November brings on short day length and so it’s a good time to see if we can make something interesting happen with darkness. With the set I posted in December ’22 in mind, I’m taking evening walks around town looking for photographs. Most current cell phones have a night mode feature which can, with a little practice, permit you to capture sharp, hand-held images. So, for this set, my camera stays home.
There’s an argument to shoot night photographs in monochrome, but I’m starting off in color to see what happens where nature meets artificial light. This first piece combines some of that light with the distortion of the phones ultra-wide angle.
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JOHN TODARO 