I moved to the Phoenix valley in the fall of 2015, and went to TechShop because a relative said they thought they heard I might be able to learn how to weld there. Maybe they had a woodshop I could use, not sure. I walked in the door and was immediately greeted by friendly people […]
When I recently had to renew my license plate I decided to have some fun with it. This weekend I finally made a fitting photo to share. For those not in the know: tintype images are, by nature, upside down and laterally reversed, which is why my license plate, Ford, and everything else is backwards. […]
A friend of mine in Los Angeles recently bought one of my tintype photographs, and rather than entrust it to the postal system, I decided I needed to hand deliver it. (To be clear, in case my tone doesn’t come through, I used it as an excuse for a road trip.) I’ve been itching to […]
I recently decided I needed a wider wide-angle lens to take in the vastness of some of the vistas out here in the west. So I found a little 65mm lens from my peeps at Midwest Photo, for a price I could rationalize. “Little” turns out to be apt: the lens requires a mounting hole […]
I recently drove from Arizona to Minnesota, by way of Ohio. Long story as to why I drove, but the point of this part of the story is that I stopped along the way in Memphis, Tennessee, to visit my grad-school classmates Andrea Morales and Brad Vest. They introduced me to Bryant’s, and I gave […]
[EDIT: I am currently NOT ABLE to make ground glass covers.] I am now making and selling custom ground glass protective covers for large format cameras! I have a few different options to start with, as well as some fun customization possibilities. Basic Design The covers are designed to slide over and protect both sides […]
The latest trip in my quest to photograph The West in tintype, as it might have been done as the region was first photographed in the mid-1800s, took me on a loop through southern Utah at the end of November. Wrong time of year to make tintypes in southern Utah, pretty much. (It could be […]
I have wanted to learn how to weld for years, decades maybe. Never got around to it. Looked into taking classes at a tech school back in Ohio, but it was several thousand dollars (no doubt very thorough and professional). When I moved to the Phoenix area and found out about TechShop, I figured I’d […]
Now that my 8×10 camera is getting heavy usage (Kari is out in the field with it as I type) I have been working on either repairing pinholes, making parts so it can be used (such as these new lensboards) or making things to protect it. The latest product: a custom ground glass protective cover. […]
I’ve had my Arca-Swiss 4×5 view camera for several years now, and more recently bought an 8×10 camera from my friend / mentor / boss Brenton Hamilton. It didn’t come with any lens boards, though, and rather than buying them off eBay or having somebody else make them, I decided to use my new skills […]
Within a few months of learning how to make tintypes in the Haas Lab (thanks, as always, to Kari Wehrs and Brenton Hamilton) I enjoyed some quality father-son time making a darkbox in the woodshop where Dad lived. It is a very sturdy (i.e., too heavy and large) box, and, worse, the shroud that I […]
I’ve spent the most of the past two weeks doing some one DAM thing or another. No, not cussin’, but rather Digital Asset Management – it’s a fancy way of saying I’ve been organizing my photos. Considering I have been doing this photography thing to varying degrees for the past 25+ years, and have been […]
I started this project about exactly five years ago, back in graduate school. I was in a class on “Small Systems Lighting”, learning to use small on-camera strobes in our photography. One assignment was to “stop motion” using flash. Somebody running by, frozen by the strobe, something like that. Naturally I took it to an […]
Yes, despite the recent posts about electronics hacking and hard drives and data organization, I do still have interest in photography and making photos. To that end, over the past couple of months I’ve had my friend Niles fabricate a couple of lens boards so I can mount two lenses to my large format cameras. […]
Every year the Maine Media Workshops teams up with Zeiss lenses to hold a photo competition. The only requirement is that the images be made with a Zeiss lens. And this year, apparently, seasonal staff are eligible to enter. I know, I know, if you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. Well, I didn’t […]
This past Christmas Kari got me an old box camera. I’ve made a few tintypes with it, and it’s a lot of fun; the simplicity of a Holga with the clarity of a glass lens. The only real drawback is that this particular model didn’t have a tripod mount in it. No matter how firm […]
The original Haas Photo Lab, in which I first learned to make prints using the old photographic processes, is no more. In its place is the New Haas Lab, a super clean and modern space created specifically for the alternative processes that Brenton Hamilton teaches there. I wanted to photograph it, and I figured that […]
I had thought I was perfectly happy with my 4×5 – seemed like the negatives were plenty large – and once I got into historical process printing I could make my (digital) negatives any size I wanted to anyhow. One small problem: you can’t enlarge a tintype. So I “needed” a bigger camera if I […]
This past Christmas Kari gave me an old black box camera – turns out to be an Agfa Ansco 2A Antar, I believe, which seems to be a circa 1930s camera. I guess they liked having the letter A in their product names back then – added 2A just for good measure. Funny story: Kari […]
On March 5th the Plastic Camera exhibition opens at the RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco. Ann Jastrab, the director of the gallery there, was the juror. One of my images – one I’m calling, for various reasons, “Headless Anny” – was selected for inclusion. Headless Anny was the third wet plate image I made […]
Ducktrap River Bridge on Rt. 1 at Howe Point, Maine. My friend Joe needed a subject for his multimedia workshop project and I needed an excuse to get out and make tintypes in the wild, so we headed up the coast to Howe Point and set up shop. I was working inside my cramped darkbox, […]