I’m Such an ID10T

My wife had the Ohio Association of School Nurses conference this past weekend in Huron, Ohio, near Lake Erie. She just got back from a week long trip to attend school nurses conferences in St. Louis and Portland, Oregon. It was a long week for her with lots of time spent in airports and day-long meetings. I volunteered to pick her up from the airport and drive her to the meeting in Huron. I also wanted to spend my time shooting photos on Kelleys Island and Marblehead, OH. Which I did.

Saturday morning dawned bright with puffy white clouds and morning sunshine. It was a 40-minute drive from our hotel to the Miller’s Ferry in Marblehead to take me to the island. They morning was cold and windy, with gusts of wind out of Canada at about 10-20 mph, so the water on the lake was pretty choppy.

I got to the ferry landing at about 7:45 for an 8:00am departure. I was in the first lane waiting for the ferry and ahead of me was a very large cement truck heading to the island for a job. Behind me was a second cement truck. The ferry boat was not that big, but I figured that they had done tons of these runs and we weren’t going to sink to the bottom of the lake.

Let me explain that I’m not a seafaring man. I did ride on a ferry from the state of Washington to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington. I’ve been on a couple of Caribbean cruises. Those were all big boats. This was a pretty small ferry boat, and did I mention the water was a little choppy?

My spot on the ferry was first in line on the far right side up near the bow. Now, if you have read my blog entries, you know that I’m always looking for the irony or silliness in the situation, so, as I’m sitting in my truck I needed a good song to set the stage for my ferry ride. There’s really only one song that was fitting to this event–Gordon Lightfoot’s song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I mean, really, what other song would you have played?

Despite my whistling through the graveyard, I made it to the island without the main hatch caving in and the cook telling me, “fellas it’s been nice to know you.”

I spend the next four hours touring the island and taking photos. I brought my Pentax 645NII medium format camera for the day. I really love shooting with that camera.

You’re probably asking, but how are you an ID10T? I’m getting to that.

So I shoot two rolls of film, the first is Kodak Portra 400 120mm, the second is Fujifilm Velvia 100. I really like Portra for the color it renders in it’s images. I’ve shot Velvia before and I love the rich colors it provides. Because this is April there really aren’t any tourists there, so I’m pretty much by myself (continuing my theme from Albuquerque, NM). I got what I think are some amazing images. Just unique slices of life on the island.

We got home today about 2:30pm, so I go set up to develop the Portra. I have a sous vide heater that I use to stabilize the temperature of the chemistry and the developing tank. I recently bought two stainless steel 120mm reels and a stainless developing tank. Note to anyone developing their own 120mm film–the plastic reels that you can use to load the film just don’t work for me. Once I got the stainless steel reels, getting the film onto the reel is so much easier.

Everything is ready to go, I get into the dark and load the bottom reel with the exposed film, seal it up and I’m ready to develop. I take it down to the basement darkroom and get ready to go. I go to pop the cap off of the lid to start with a water rinse, and I realize that instead of taking off the cap, I pulled the entire lid off of the developing tank. I had let my attention wander for a moment checking to make sure that the chemistry was at the exact temperature I needed for development. The developing tank was directly under the light that sits above the sink. And after a second, I realize my mistake! I slapped the lid back on. I tell myself, “Self, the reel with the film is on the bottom of the tank. There weren’t that many photons that got down that far, right? It won’t be fogged?”

So I stepped out of my body and looked at myself and said, “You are an ID10T. You just ruined one of the rolls of film you shot, and it had such amazing images on it. People from all over the world would be marveling at the profound and utterly glorious images that you had on that roll.” That part of myself is a little pompous and full of himself.

I decided to go ahead and develop the film. What did I have to loose, right? Maybe those photons didn’t make it to the bottom of the tank. Maybe they all decided to go watch HGTV with the rest of my family (they like Home Town and Beach House Bargain Hunters). But, unfortunately, the film was totally fogged and ruined. I still have the Velvia to process, but I need to get an E6 developing kit for that.

The moral of this story is always stay in the moment when you are processing your film because if your mind strays just a little bit, you can ruin the next award-winning National Geographic quality images that you shot that day.

So have you every had a ID10T accident? What did you do and were you able to recover from it?

Pensive

I feel bad that I haven’t posted anything in a long time.  This Project 365 is harder than I expected.  And being really busy with work and other activities doesn’t help much.

Last Friday, I got to take some portraits for a friend who is a talented dancer and actor.  She’s working on a play that is being done in April and needed some photos for the playbill.  After we did the standard headshots for the program, we started playing around with some silly poses.  This was one of them and it just cracks me up.  It’s fun working with actors and dancers because they are so easy to pose and are comfortable doing silly things in front of people.

We were talking about how the famous photographers from the 30’s and 40’s made some really amazing portraits of the actors and actresses in Hollywood.  The standard pose was to have the eyeline looking out of the frame and not looking into the camera.  They also had really hard shadows with soft lighting.  I think that they also use the fresnel lenses on the lights they used for the portrait which gives you a much different kind of light than what we have today with our strobes and flashes.

I still have a few of Linda’s images to finish, but this one was so much fun, I had to put it up for the blog.

Tornado Alley

Ohio is right in the path of most of the spring storms and tornadoes frequently touch down across the state.

Ohio is typically right in the line of storms that blow across the country. The past few days, we’ve seen lines of severe thunderstorms sweep across the state. Once when my family was on our way to visit the Neil Armstrong museum, we watched a tornado blow across the road in front of us. At that time, we didn’t have the advanced warning devices we have today.

Driving up to Cleveland to spend the weekend with my Mother-in-law, we drove through the most intense rainstorm. There were times when you really couldn’t see. The Tractor Trailers were splashing up water and the rain was coming in sideways. The only way to tell where you were was by watching for the yellow stripe on the road. Then, when we hit the outskirts of Cleveland, the sun started to break through the clouds. This has to be one of the oddest winters on record.  We have tornadoes in March and spring-like temps in February.