I've been pondering lately what I need to get my lighting gear back together. See, I've been bleeding strobes. First the one 383 super ended up in the bay, then my MS-1 failed, then my other 383 super failed, which leaves me the Sunpak Digital Flash and my Sunpak 144PC. The Digital Flash is OK, albeit low in power and the 144PC is what I use to trigger flashes, so that's just not comfortable.

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.

After I started shooting black and white film and then developing it myself, what was left but to print it myself, too?

I've been spending a lot of time in the past year or so on finding ways to continue to shoot film, but doing it more economically. The first step was getting my own scanner so I didn't need to pay somebody to print or scan my photos. Lately, I decided that my cost of B&W developing was too high, so I set up my own darkroom

I'm going to write a series of articles about photo archiving in the digital age. I'm at an interesting position to talk about these issues. I am professionally a programmer with more than a passing familiarity with imaging algorithms as well as a photographer who has displayed his work in art galleries. My wife is in the process of finishing up her masters degree in Library and Information science and has a degree in History...

We tend to assume that our file formats will be with us forever, often times because many of the commonly seen file formats have been able to stick around for a while. You can still download GIF images that people used to advertise their dial-up BBS systems in the eighties and nineties before everybody was on the Internet.

It's been two years since I last wrote a comprehensive roundup of different types of film. I've shot a lot more film and I have a lot more to say this time around, so this article is going to be correspondingly longer. Several parts, in fact...

After Christmas, I spent a bunch of time getting used to my new setup and building a lot of little bits to get my lighting where I want it to be. I also took a step back and decided I didn't like where my whiteground photos were going at that point; I wanted to do something else...

When I started out doing portraiture, I did only outdoor portraits during the golden hour. If you don't have much gear, it's great. My first portrait shoot was taken on my Canon A95 and came out quite well. And I did my art indoors with lightpainting...

The Quantaray MS-1, backgrounds, umbrellas, and models

One of my friends was digging her film EOS camera out of storage after shooting digital and she wanted to understand what it was doing, so she asked me what happens when you tell her camera to ignore the DX coding on the back and set things manually.

Why film "looks" better at different speeds, super-high-speed films, dynamic range, and other issues necessary to understand film speeds.

I wrote a blog entry 2 years ago in response to Nikolai's post on the subject and I kinda wanted to return to some of the things covered, since I've done a lot more shooting and understand some of the numerical figures much better...

People like to argue about the various archival value of various treatments, with an eye towards being able to know that if you use a specific combination of products, you'll be able to store your images for years to come.

A review of the slide films available in 2008.