Fall 2006 Took a day off to photograph in the Japanese Gardens, more experiments with infrared film.

Summer 2006 Started bringing my camera to work on my lunch hour every day, had a photograph on display in an actual gallery, and started this blog.

2006 was a pretty good year. January - March. I enrolled in my first workshop at Newspace Center of Photography with Cherie Hiser, had a photo considered for a book cover and reconnected with a friend from High School who became a great photographer and had his first show.

Favorite Photographs of 2006.

Juniper Tree Smith Rocks Park 1987. I scanned this print and using my newer 6 color printer softened the image a bit and printed on some higher quality photo paper. Not ready to give up my darkroom but for color work I really liked the results.

Christmas card from 1995.

All my Gear.


 

A Winters' Day.

Some of my tree decorations.
Back in the 80's I found this unusual card hanging in a vacant lot in the Lair Hill neighborhood attached to a tall weed. I have no idea who made it or what it means but I took it home with me and have used it every Christmas as a decoration on my tree. It is a similar idea to a Weathergram, an idea I believe was introduced by Lloyd Reynolds who taught calligraphy at Reed College. A Weathergram is a piece of calligraphy done on durable paper usually with india ink that will not wash away and is hung from a tree and allowed to weather, fading and degrading over time. The one illustrated here was done by a friend of mine who had been a student of Reynolds at Reed back in the 70's. I also hang this on my tree at Christmas.

 

"I have a photograph it's all that's left me" This was given to me years ago by a very sweet older friend of mine. Taken by her brother in Hollywood California back in the 1920's. End of the year always starts to make me nostalgic so I'm going through boxes of old photos.

2000 Negatives Last weekend I began the process of organizing the boxes of negatives I've stored over the years going back to 1967. A rough count gave me around 2000 and that was just the black and white. I haven't explored the color negatives that sit in boxes in our attic. I print about 1% of what I take initially. Looking back over the old stuff from high school and college and the years after though I come across negatives I never touched back then but now find interesting. My Kamm house ruin photos were such a case. Though the rotting old mansion fascinated me at the time I took the photos, the images that I took didn't quite capture what I wanted at the time. Thirty years later though I love them and wish I'd taken more. I also have old family negatives some going back to the 1930's that I sometimes work on trying to make higher quality prints of what were once just snap shots. So many negatives so little time.

Handcolored print. My first attempt at this. Glad I picked a subject with just two colors and a black background but it still took most of a day.