301 | Palm Spring

Year 2000 | Death Valley

This was my first trip to Death Valley with a digital camera, a clumsy Nikon 950 which would run for thirty minutes on its four AA cells. I was impressed by its smooth and delicate color rendition, like a palette of traditional watercolor pigments. All my other work there was heavily-exposed Tri-X sheet film with very soft development, so this translation fits in with the other work, even though its 1600-pixel width did not bring it all home.

▹ Technicians might balk at my method; but I’ll offer a rare technical note here: an exposure of this scene with my view camera, with a very light yellow filter, would have been 1/15 at f22, with a tilt to keep the ground plane sharp, and a slight swing to gather the palms and the key stone at left. Development would be 6 minutes in the D-23 formula in a JOBO auto-reversing constant-agitation drum – the small amount of the soft developer would be exhausted quickly in the highlights but continue working up the shadow detail all the way through.

▹▹ Richard Man, who expertly made Imacon X1 scans from the 4x5s for me in 2020, was astounded when he tried the first one – he wrote that he “almost had a heart attack” when he saw how far off-spec they were. But he bore down and got all the data, good or better than my gelatin silver prints made with long exposures under the splendid but unfortunately obsolescent Oriental VC-CLS variable-contrast cold-light head. (The brilliantly accurate and capable design was clobbered by its reliance on an integrated circuit which included the battery needed maintain its user settings and critical functions. After a few very productive years, no chips, no battery, no further use.)

300 | Space

2001 | Insulation

It’s hard for me to make pictures when I am working, or even supervising subcontractors. But I did take a moment to admire this scene, as I looked forward to a vigorously insulated garage (replacing the 1912 original) and the adjoining new studio. Overdoing it was well worth the trouble – with two heavily insulated walls between my workspace and neighbors and southern exposure, my intentional environment was quiet and cool.

▷ As I prepare the 5th “handbook” version of this blog for press (covering posts 241-300), I note that I never posted a 300th. So here it is, backdated to March 31, and it will be included in the Fall 2023 release of Mixed Documents No. 5.

▷▷ This is all I have from this series, a ridiculously low-res thumbnail file. But I hope the viewer will be amused anyway.

298 | Windfall

2023 | Marin County, California

The Bishop pine, P. muricata, was one of my dad’s favorites. They grow quickly, with brittle structure, and I find them in mature stands with few remaining side branches, crowning out with broad, almost flat-topped needle fields high above.

And they seed in cohorts, living only about 100 years, and like bamboos, they seem to come down as a generation, all at once.

297 | Spring Training

1994 | Little League Barbeque, Spring Valley, Callifornia

By the time of this picture, I had not played much baseball since I was in Little League myself, aging out in 1960. Nevertheless, I was assigned the opportunity to serve as deputy assistant coach to my son’s team.

As a boy, I had difficulty judging the trajectory of fly balls to my outfield positions; I was good with the short bloopers and could charge them successfully for an out, but I more often ran right under the long fly balls and had to make a quick turn and chase them down as they evaded me.

By 1994, however, as I worked with the kids in practice, roaming with them on the big open field behind the diamond, Coach Jerry was banging out soaring 300-foot shots to give the boys a thrill. I found that I was able to judge the ball well and bring a lot of them in if the kids weren’t willing (the orbs were dropping down from far above with what seemed like terminal velocity). After feeling surprisingly competent finally, I reasoned that all my intervening years judging distance while driving, sailing, skiing, and flying radio-controlled sailplanes must have given me excellent 3-D training.

A year or two after this picture, my son and I threw the ball around at 10,000-feet on the shoulder of Nevada’s Wheeler Peak, and I had to do some re-learning — through only seventy percent of sea-level atmospheric pressure, Alex’s strong throws had dead-flat trajectories.

295 | Evidence

Year 2000 | Arroyo Salado, Anza-Borrego

Recently, I heard a TV actor playing the part of a man who was playing the part of a judge. He gavelled down an actor playing a prosecutor with, “Art is evidence.”

I wrote that down, and these old pictures remind me that I’ve been working under the converse postulate for decades — “Evidence is art.”

294 | Ides of March

Year 2000 | Death Valley

In Roman times, the Ides of March were the days of the year when debts were paid, accounts settled. Even in 44 BCE.

This picture suggests that geology also plays a zero-sum game, even when human hands might have been involved in a scene.

293 | Historical Photography

1985 | Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico

I’ve noted before that my wife has asked me, "Aren't all photographs historical photographs?"

So when I look at this thirty-eight-year-old picture, I note now that the young woman at right might be a grandmother, and all of the pictures in this photographer’s studio window might have to slide to the right to make room for the toddler at left to be pictured as a mature mother and a number of youthful family members to find places at the left.

If that were indeed the case today, this photographer would need to stand farther away.

292 | Paul in the Bank

2003 | San Diego

I hung a retirement show, OFF CAMPUS, in the spacious gallery owned by the gracious David Zapf in Little Italy. David had arranged for complementary display space in the foyer and street windows of a downtown bank, so I planned a general-audience selection there to drive a few more visitors uptown to the Gallery.

Paul Douda helped me with the installation, and it was good that he was slimmer than I was — access was limited. Like me, Paul had a hands-on fix-it builder father and an artistic mother, and even as a young man, he had developed good measures of both resources.

Setting out his intentions for a project in my “Why People Photograph” seminar, Paul wrote: “Instead of wanting to see what I can do with a camera, I want to see what can be done with a camera.”