So much of my adult life, every year could be neatly summarized by "did my job, cooked dinner, raised babies". I don't think there was much value in summarizing that life. But this year, in all of the freedom of not working a 9-5 job I feel detached from time. When reading Rek's year in review I found myself wondering "Gosh, what did happen this year?". I was surprised! It's been a…
A member of the photography club I’m a part of said the other day that they were looking for a digital camera in order to iterate faster so they could become a better photographer. Which, seems like reasonable thinking, but what if it’s backward? What if in order to gain mastery we need to go slower? To consider each frame on its own merits, to make careful decisions and then observe the outcomes…
Do you own a Mamiya Press that looks like this? Then there's a good chance that if you've used it, you've noticed a light leak that looks like this: The cause is a bit of foam in the lens release lever degrading causing the light trap to fail. It seems to be common amoung all the Press bodies I've seen and luckily it is easy to fix and I'll walk through how here. The first…
I recently modded a Polaroid 120 camera to shoot 4x5 sheet film. The mod included a 4x5 ground glass holder for adjusting focus. The instruction suggest using a frosted piece of acrylic but I wanted to try grinding my own glass. What I found was that making your own ground glass was cheap, effective, and easy. I figured I would share my process and results. Materials Glass cut to size (I'm…
Black and white film development can be daunting to beginners, and while it does require a bunch of tools and new items, the actual process is not any more difficult than baking bread. Further black and white film is enormously flexible and while you can really dial in the process to get precisely the results you want, even with a lot of variation you're likely to get useable results. As an…
The family and I spent a week in New York City this month. Our last big vacation as a family we went to Guadalajara and completely failed to make it any fun for the kids. So with that in mind we set out to try to ensure that every day there was something that was going to be fun for the kids. We spent a bit of time in New York back when Matia was a baby (she took her first steps in the Etsy…