Week 10

Assignment:

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Well this is going to be a weak one. I have several ideas, but all of them would take more than a week to put together and I’m overdue (again)! So this is a short and (hopefully) sweet post.

In several of the previous posts, I have talked about one of our favorite places to escape to: Walker Pit. A rather nondescript Corps of Engineers beach on the Snake river. At this site is a huge culvert that connects the river with a lagoon located on the other side of a double set of train tracks. The patterns of light playing across the corrugated metal of the culvert fascinated me. I had taken several shots of the culvert in the past, but this time I had film cameras along. I’ve been on a film photography kick lately so I am having fun trying to get usable photos from film cameras. Here is a photo from a Leica IIIf camera and a Leitz 5cm Summar f2.0 lens and Kentmere 100 film:

This camera is 70 years old and the lens is even older, from the early 1940’s! But here it is still making pictures, pretty cool!

I also took a picture with my Nikon F2 and a Nikkor 35mm lens also on Kentmere:

This camera and lens is considerably newer, made in 1972, but is much heavier and larger than the petite Leica.

Anyway as I was moving about and playing with different compositions, I spotted my shadow on the opposite wall of the culvert. This reminded me of a well known ‘self portrait’ photograph of Ansel Adams:

Ansel was in Monument Valley on an assignment for Kodak to take ‘Colorama’ photographs to be used for their advertising campaigns when he took this ‘selfie’. These Coloramas where amazing objects. They were displayed up high in the Grand Central Station of New York, and were the worlds largest photographs, they were 18 feet high and 60 feet long, and had over a mile of fluorescent light tubes lighting them from behind. Here is one of his Colorama photos taken in Pendleton Oregon of all places:

I think those grain silos are the ones near Adams Oregon.

So now here is my ‘shadow selfie’ thanks to an afternoon sun and a large culvert:

Please notice that my photos displayed here all have prominent shadows, that is my story and I’m sticking to it.