The Perryton Project
July 17th, 2022
My last big project, The Class of ’69, was cut short by the plague. For a long time I’ve wanted to start another project, but the plague made that impossible for a few years. But I’ve now begun to photograph my home town, Perryton, Ohio. It’s a tiny town. Fewer than 100 residents. It’s not on the way to anywhere. Just a little place out in the country that was pretty much a perfect place to grow up in the 1950s and 60s. And it is little changed today.
The photo above is from the town cemetery. As a kid (and still, I guess) I was always fascinated by that big monument and statue.
That’s the house I grew up in. It has changed quite a bit. It’s been abandoned for years and is in very sad condition. My dad would have hated to see it today. It’s changed hands quite a few times since my parents sold it and moved to a new house they built on a hill above the town. It appears it is for sale after a foreclosure now. My dad built the addition on the left when I was in the 8th grade. It added running water and an indoor bathroom for the first time.
The Methodist Church across the street from the home where I grew up.
The Church of Christ a few houses down the street from my childhood home.
When I was a kid one of our neighbors fixed this place up and opened an antique shop. She hired me to sweep up. My first job. It’s a very attractive private home now.
A couple miles from Perryton was the Perry Elementary School. This is where I went to school until high school. The year I started first grade (there was no kindergarten) the addition to the right of this photo had just been completed adding a gym and, for the first time, indoor restrooms. The outhouses remained throughout my time there and were often used during recess.
Perry Elementary has been closed for many years and is now used by a couple businesses, from what I could tell. I couldn’t resist taking this photo of what I saw in one of the old classroom windows.
More Wildflowers
July 12th, 2022
Just sharing a few more snaps of the wildflowers I’ve got growing on a section of our property. Trying to cut down on mowing and encourage wildlife.
Judging by the way a lot of the long grass is tamped down, I think the local deer population has decided they like this area.
If you take a close look at some of these photos you will likely notice the incredible detail and sharpness of my new Nikon Z7II and 24-120 lens. All of these photos are cropped from full frame…a couple of them pretty extremely cropped, but still the detail on the flowers is quite sharp.
July 4 Holiday Weekend Snaps
July 5th, 2022
Just a few snap shots from our weekend in Vermont for the Fourth of July.
Eden At The Lake
June 29th, 2022
If you are a regular reader you will likely recognize the photo above as my photo from two years ago for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. It’s the one that was also featured in the journal of the Royal Photographic Society in England.
Well, that wasn’t the only photo I took that day. I also did a few photos using a “real” lens. I thought you might like to see a few of those.
The model is the lovely and wonderful Eden who has been doing a lot of great work with me for the past couple years.
Museum Show
June 27th, 2022
The Springfield Museum of Art has chosen this photo of the wonderful model, Carrie Turner, for their annual members’ show. It is, of course, another in my Brigman/White series, a tribute to the pioneering photography of Anne Brigman and Clarence H. White, Sr. from more than a century ago.
The show will run from July 30 to October 2.
Memories of a Tremendous Loss
June 24th, 2022
These are some photos I made with Carrie Turner and Jenny Anne Rose from a shoot in 2021. At the time Carrie had a studio in the Masonic Temple in Zanesville, Ohio. It was a beautiful, majestic old building that was a lovely treasure. I saw was, because not that long after we did this shoot, this happened:
I don’t have the details to credit that photo, which I did not take, but I wanted to show the horror of what happened. The wonderful old building was totally destroyed. The many artists and craftspeople, including Carrie, who had rooms there lost everything. And Zanesville lost an iconic part of its downtown.
Carrie’s neighbor to her studio had a large room that she used for yoga classes. Carrie got us permission to photograph in there, so I have these photos, above and below, that give a little more of a feeling for this great building.
So this post is just a small memorial to what was lost on that fiery night. Saying goodbye and remembering what was lost forever.
“Wonderful” Gallery Show
June 15th, 2022
This photo, which I recently shot on the coast of Maine, has been chosen for a gallery show at the LightBox Photo Gallery in Astoria, Oregon. The model is the amazing Rachel.
Rachel modeled for me 20 years ago at this same location. That was when I had a eureka moment and realized that the figure in nature was my natural subject matter. Last month I returned to Maine to mark that 20th anniversary and Rachel agreed to model for me again. There are many fine photographs from that shoot, but this is the first of them to find its way into a gallery show.
Those of you who have been following me here for a while will certainly recognize that this photo is one that is being added to my Brigman/White Project in homage to the wonderful work a century ago by Anne Brigman and Clarence H. White, Sr.
The jury process for this show was unusual. All the photographers who entered the show were also the jurors. A “jury of your peers” as the gallery said.
Here’s the link for the show on the theme, “Wonderful.”
And at this link you can see all the photographs that were selected for the show.
Looks like a good show to me. If you are out there in the Pacific Northwest it might be worth checking out. The show runs June 15 through July 6.
Dogwood
June 10th, 2022
More flowers. The late-blooming Dogwood in front of our house is in full bloom now.
So, I couldn’t resist pointing the new Nikon Z7II at it for a few snaps.
Wildflowers
June 5th, 2022
I’ve stopped mowing a part of our too-large lawn and planted trees and wildflowers. This is the first year that the wildflowers are showing up.
So I took the new Nikon Z7II out and did a few flower photos.
I’t’s been said that there is no reason for anyone to ever take another photo of a flower. But I did it anyway.
It was really the light from the setting sun that drew me to bring the camera out.
The new Nikon does a pretty good job with whatever I point it at.
Nikon Z7II and 24-120 f/4 lens: Sorry, I was wrong.
June 1st, 2022
I was wrong in my earlier post about diffraction causing unsharp results with the 24-120 lens. The test I did was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I was shooting indoors with limited light. I, of course, needed to change something to keep the exposures consistent as I ran the apertures from f/4 to f/22. I was afraid if I reduced the shutter speed it might introduce unsharpness caused by camera shake. So I elected to allow the ISO (set on auto) to run up to keep the exposures the same. This was a mistake. The Z7II has, to my eye, spectacular performance at high ISOs. But in this case there was enough noise to make the f/16 and f/22 exposures appear to be soft.
So, I did another test. I took a magazine outside and ran through the apertures changing the shutter speed to maintain exposure and holding the ISO at 400. You can see the f/4 shot above and the f22 shot below.
Here’s a closer look:
To my eye there isn’t a significant difference between f/4 and f/22. The remarkable thing about that is that this lens seems to maintain pretty much the same level of sharpness at every aperture, including the largest aperture, f/4. I find that pretty amazing. I hope you can see that in these jpegs, despite the compression. They will enlarge a bit if you click on them.
By the way, that magazine spread from Rider Magazine is from a story my best friend, Ken Frick, wrote about our many years of traveling the country together on our motorcycles. He wrote about and photographed our trips through all those years for various motorcycle magazines. I was often the model, so I ended up in a lot of magazines, including a cover or two. Check out Ken’s website for a bunch of very fine photographs, including many things in addition to motorcycle photos.
