My personal preference in natural-looking photography is to search out beautiful lighting instead of trying to create it. It has a habit of surprising you with beautiful colors and glows and shading. Plus, it's cheaper and I'm stingy. So I picked up the Sunpack Digital Flash.

A set of pointers on how to get a good long-exposure night shot using film cameras without wasting tons of film.

From Aug 6, 2006, to Aug 10, 2006, six pieces were on display at: the cATacLySmIc mEgAshEaR rAnCh

One thing I've noticed that happens when you approach photography from an engineering background is that you tend to loathe black and white photography. I know that, starting out, I did. I was talking to another photographer and she said that one of her friends was an engineer like me and he also had a similar problem with black and white photography, always preferring color. It's throwing information out and we just don't like that.

I was talking with a photographer at one point and he asked why I bother with models. See, it is a huge time sink for me to find models to work with. My lightpaintings are often limited by exactly how long I can get a model to stay still, so sometimes I get back film from a shoot and find that the model is very blurry. And sometimes, I set up a shoot and the model never shows up at that appointed time and place which really wastes my time.

Often times, I hear people talk about their cameras as if they are classes in one's college education. They don't want to get a newer camera until they are comfortable that they've figured out their current digital. I find that, as somebody who takes his photography very seriously, that I have a mental model for photography that I simply try to fit as well as possible into the camera that currently is in my hands, so this idea becomes foreign to me.

I visited one of my old art teachers last month, just to say hi and show him some of my recent work. He asked how Mr. Foo and Kiki were doing and I told him about one of Mr. Foo's projects... making a neon version of a certain famous disturbing image on the Internet.

While there's still ample availability of cameras, film, and people to develop it, everybody should give crossprocessing a shot at least once! I've written about it before; it's a great way to force yourself to not shoot completely realistic pictures.

The problem with film reviews is that they get stale over time as things change and don't get updated.

Some thoughts on taking film through the airports

Today, even though they are distinctly technologically obsolete, you can buy oak barrels, hand-forged iron items, hand-spun fabrics, biplanes, heirloom plants, and a variety of painting processes that Acrylic paints were supposed to replace.

Night landscape photography is astonishingly peaceful and meditative.

There's a certain amount of standard advice for shooting night photography. One of them is to shoot either Fujichrome 64T or Kodak Ektachrome 160T for film. Both films are well-behaved and well-characterized tungsten balanced slide film. With slide film, you don't need to worry about automatic machine corrections like you do with print films, so that's easy to understand. Both films have about as reasonable figures for long-exposure reciprocity as you'll find in a manufacturer datasheet.
But, tungsten color balance? Why do most night photographers shoot using tungsten color balanced film, or the tungsten setting on their digital SLRs?

Nicolai Grossman and I got into a debate lately about his weblog entry asking why we film-based photographers still shoot slide film.

A few observations about working with models.