Galleries

Flowers and Bees

A few minutes in the garden with a macro lens.

I got this old manual focus macro lens pretty cheap when the pandemic lockdowns hit last spring thinking it’d help pass the time. I ended up ‘essentially’ working through the past year though so it didn’t get the play i thought it would. I Stepped out the front door the other morning and saw the bumblebees on the coneflowers and took the opportunity.

All shot hand held – Nikon D700 with a Nikkor 105 f/2.8 AIS Micro

Come To The Promised Land

Took some time this summer to go camping at Promised Land State Park in north east Pa. This part of the world has seen more than one boom come and go. The timber was clear cut in the 19th century ( the forests we see today are second and third growth), the coal and steel are gone and with them the railways. Once industry had extracted all the profits from the ground, the land was turned over to the state and the ‘taxpayers’ (that’s us) for ‘rehabilitation’.

For a hot moment there was money to made here as a mountain resort town but those glory days are long gone. Now we are left with the lake and hiking trails, the WPA built dams and campground, struggling working class communities getting squeezed by  New York City developers…. and a lot of empty space.

 

Color pics Nikon D300. Black and white images Nikon FE2 on Kodak TriX and Ilford HP5 film – developed and scanned by hand. Minimal processing in Adobe LightRoom.

Lenses used: Nikon 24mm f/2.8 AF-D, 50mm f/1.4 AF-D, 50mm f/1.4 AIS, 105mm f/2.5

Inside The Philly MAGA March

Make America Great Again?

March 25th 2017 Philly MAGA March.

Philly area Trumpers show their stuff in Center City. I’m usually on the other side of the line but went inside to look and listen. About halfway through the event most of the mainstream Trump supporters left and hard right took control. When was the last time you saw organized white supremacists marching down Market St?

Here’s a few frames.

Shot on Ilford HP5 – Nikon FE2 (35 f/2, 50 f/1.4 & 105 f/2.5) – Developed and scanned at home.

Fun With A Russian

IMG_0913WTF is a Zorki?

After World War 2 the Soviets took material, tooling, dies, and in some cases entire factories and the skilled workers to run them, from occupied Germany back to the USSR as war reparations. All of Germany’s patents were also released into the public domain by the allied governments. The Soviets (and others) began manufacturing Leica and Contax clones for internal and export markets – this was also the basis of Japans post war camera industry- and so we get this  Zorki  35mm Rangefinder, a Soviet derivative of the Leica 3.

This one has commemorative markings celebrating the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution so I’m assuming a manufacture date of about 1967. It’s a bit clunky, the film registration is slightly off, there’s no batteries or exposure meter, but it fits in my coat pocket and is actually a lovely small camera to carry around.  Here’s a few frames from some test rolls. The color negatives were developed and scanned by a local lab, the b&w shots were hand developed and scanned at home.

Zorki 4 35mm rangefinder w/50mm f/3.5 lens  – Fomopan100, Kodak Tri X, and Portra 160