Gear
TechShop, a eulogy
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 […]
Tintype license plate
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. […]
Road Trip: Nevada and California National Parks and Monuments
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 […]
DIY Recessed Lens Board: waterjet, powdercoating, and of course lasers
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 […]
Brad and Andrea
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 […]
Custom ground glass covers
[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 […]
Tintype Roadtrip: Southern Utah and Grand Canyon
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 […]
First welding project: bottle drying rack!
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 […]
Ground glass protective cover
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. […]
New lens boards for the big cameras
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 […]
Portable Darkroom Version 2
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 […]
DAM stuff: the big data reorg of 2015
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 […]
Sound trigger revisited
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 […]
New Lens Boards
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. […]
Zeiss Photo Competition – Tintypes
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 […]
Box Camera Tripod Mount
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 […]
New Haas Lab – Tintype
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 […]
8×10 – Newest addition to the arsenal – Brenton Portrait, Tintype
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 […]
New tintype from an old camera
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 […]
RayKo Photo Center – Plastic Camera Exhibition
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 […]
Howe Point, Ducktrap River Bridge – Tintypes
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, […]