Via Flickr:
Inspired by the amazing efforts of one Cary Norton, who constructed a working large-format camera out of legos and snapped one incredible picture of some woman named Ashley, I attempted to replicate the effect I loved so much in his picture with my own equipment.

The fine fellows in the medium format forum at Photo.net clued me in tremendously on how to get started, and here’s (sort of) where I’ve ended up so far.

They generously shared so much new information and new ideas that I just had to do some tinkering, so yesterday morning I attempted to incorporate some of what they said into a test shoot with my favorite subject — my endlessly patient wife.

Since one fellow clued me in further to the magic of diffuse sidelight, and because on this rainy North Carolina morning we had just about the right kind of effect, it seemed, I decided to take full advantage of "garage door light" in a literal sense. Our garage faces more or less east, and we do indeed get some great morning/early-afternoon light through the frosted panels toward the top of both doors.

So after moving aside some bikes and strollers and the like, I took another guy up on the suggestion of the 180mm, and numerous others’ urging to use slow film and a tripod. As for a subject "lit well," I wasn’t quite able to accomplish that, as I’m still acclimating to my flash and relied here on just the natural light and a white foamcore panel leaning up against a kayak at camera right. (Couldn’t find my reflector disc.)

Looking at the results, though, I think it’s apparent that they all gave great advice on lighting and composition (the dark background was supplied by a deflated blow-up mattress thrown over some stacks of storage bins, by the way).

Still, at least looking at this Polaroid test shot, I’m thinking I agree with one John A, who said camera characteristics were awfully meaningful in the shot I loved from the the Legotron. The light leaks just aren’t there, though I may be able to try faking them digitally I suppose.

One chap astutely opined that what I was liking (perhaps) about the Ashley shot was that it had that fine-grained look of big-negative imagery, but combined with an imperfectness that’s quite appealing. I think this shot, even on Polaroid, is still coming off comparatively "perfect and technical-looking." Maybe some of the other suggestions I got — vaseline, condensation, camera shake, filters, etc — will help in future experiments.

Oh, one funny thing: One fellow joked about Large Format’s benefits — mainly camera movements like tilt and shift — being offset by the fact of those photographs taking longer to set up. In my case, what Lope and I pulled off in the garage may have been a *little* quicker than futzing around under a dark cloth, but with my amateur antics and tentative technique, not much! I already felt I was taxing my subject by asking her to hold still for a full second… (Opening the garage doors brought it down to only a 1/4-sec. exposure, which isn’t such a challenge.)

As to the "long tonal range film" suggestion I heard, what you’re seeing here doesn’t quite qualify — it’s just the Fuji FP100B I had loaded in the Polaroid back for the RB. But this was just the test shot, and I followed it up with a (7×6, rather than square) exposure on real film afterward (Provia 100, actually). Looking forward to seeing how it comes out.

The whole process has been educational and fun so far, definitely. I wish I’d undertaken this process of trying to replicate an inspiring shot a long time ago.

Just found this again on my Flickr page. Man… that kid. As my cousin Patrick says in the 2011 video, she is “something else.”

Note: At the beginning of this, my friend Amy is holding a kaleidoscope as I’m holding the camera, and she asks, “Sit still, or move?”

It ended up being the question of the year, as our little family decided *not* to sit still, but to move from the tiny village of Winona Lake, Indiana to the bustling metropolis of Raleigh, North Carolina. About 38 seconds in, you can see where we drove through the Appalachian mountains to get here.

Somebody once gave me an old Brownie Holiday Flash camera, which sat on my shelf as decoration for years. One day, though, it occurred to me that the local camera shop had a bin of expired film, including some 127, and my film-developing tank at home could adjust to fit that film too. And hey, what do you know? Veda and I just happened to be planning our first outing to the North Carolina Zoo! I was on it like a duck on a junebug.

Things that surprised me:
• There are only 8 frames available on a roll of 127 film (9 if you’re sneaky).

• The format is pretty wide… I guess I was expecting it to be square like the camera itself. Shows what I know.

• An old Brownie camera’s fixed aperture and shutter speed are really only suited to bright, bright sunlight. At least with 100-speed film.

• Efke film deserves applause for even being available (nobody has made a camera that takes 127 film for years and years), but it does curl badly when you’re trying to get it on the reel to develop it, and again when you want to scan it, and it turns the developer liquid bright hot pink, and the instructions are in Croatian.

• The images you get are pretty much instant antiques. I like them a lot.

You’ve filled those moments with more joy, amazement and goodness than I would have ever imagined. Even now, as you bust out your occasional toddler attitude or throw a little tantrum (or stall during bedtime, at which you’re becoming Olympic-caliber), I remain pretty much crazy about you.

In fact, while we’re doing calculations, I figured this out the other day while holding your preschool tuition bill: Whenever we’re not with you, we have to pay someone, whether it’s a teacher or a babysitter, between 8 and 15 dollars per hour to hang out with you. 24 hours a day, whether you’re asleep or awake, that’s the going rate. If for some reason we had farmed it all out from the very beginning, the tab now would be about $300,000.

And you know what I thought as I wrote that (much, much smaller) check to the school? “They should be paying us.” When I go pick you up from there on your two mornings a week, and I see the smiling, smitten faces of your teachers, I can see they think so too.

Sorry to do financial calculations on your birthday. Let me just get back to the original idea and say this: Happy Birthday, little one. Can’t wait for another amazing year with you.

So much changes in two and a half years.

The story goes that I went for pages and pages, surprising the kindly woman who tested me, even though to me it was just a simple game. “Colin, can you make any more things out of another two little lines?” “You bet I can!”

It’s funny, since that’s still kind of what I do. Only now, instead of putting me in the gifted class, they pay me.

There’s what they call a Creative Brief, which in the advertising business outlines the basic assignment. Structures and formats vary from agency to agency, but it basically comes down to:

1. What do people currently think about this thing?
2. What do we hope they’ll be thinking after we’re done talking?

Two little lines. And an infinite number of ways to fill them.

What it looks like when your eyes burn off!

Hide and seek with art you can touch at the NCMA.

Back before the holidays, Mom and Katie and Penny and Veda and I all went to Cancun for a week.

Awesome, right? Mom pushed for it to happen, since she had so much fun on our beach vacation *last* year, and of course we were all happy to spend some time together now that we don’t live so close anymore.

There are so many stories to tell from that trip. But rather than go through all of them here, I thought I’d let you pick.

So here you go: Browse through these couple dozen photos and tell me which one you’d like to hear the story behind. I promise I’ll tell it.

Deal?