Used Cameras

2012-01-30T17:46:00.001-06:00

Well, happy 2012!!! Enjoy the break? I did too. Headquarters are gearing up to move to New Orleans, Louisiana, so the blogs have been neglected. I apologize.

Luckily Brian Lee Whisenhunt over at Manic Thrift Store Shopper has been sending me headlines that you should be aware of. I do enjoy the ability to copy and paste a blog entry when needed. So, thanks, Brian.

For his project Vanishing Cultures, photographer Dennis Manarchy is traveling around the country documenting various cultures and taking pictures of people vanishing from the American experience, such as Native Americans, cowboys and Medal of Honor winners from World War II. You've heard this before, until you get to the part where he's doing it with a camera that he built, a one-of-a-kind, 35-foot-long camera called “Eye of America”. It has to be towed by a truck. Styled like an old fashioned large format camera, it’s so large that a person can work comfortably inside it. The negatives measure 6×4.5 feet. The detail in a portrait subjects’ eyeball alone is a thousand times greater than what you get with the average negative. Resulting portraits will be featured on prints 2 stories tall.

Check out the camera, then visit The Foundation for the Preservation of American Culture website for a published itinerary of the trip, sketches of the exhibit and other information.

Jurying: A Guide for Beginners

2011-08-28T18:16:00.000-05:00

Amy Weh
Two Sheep (detail)
mosaic

Wouldn't you think it's be soooo easy to go in to any art exhibit and pick what you like, to toss out money to artists whose work impresses and moves you? You would be wrong.

Gabrielle Meyer
Red Blossom
yarn and shaped line

In July, I was invited to be the Awards Judge and Guest Artist for the Wisconsin Regional Art Program 2011 conference, and August 9 was my big day, to look at the exhibit and award thousands of dollars in cash to regional non-professional artists. The Wisconsin Regional Art Program began in 1940 under the guidance of John Steuart Curry to encourage the creative growth of rural non-professional artists in Wisconsin. Aaron Bohrod was Curry's successor, so clearly, this is no hillbilly craft fair. (Damn those art history classes. If only I'd have not known these artists, I'd have just sailed through it!! I kid. ) On September 24, I'll speak at the conference, and that afternoon will give out the awards. There's a reception the evening before, so what I'm saying here is that I'll meet these artists. I'll speak to and mingle with them. They might ask me "why didn't you choose my piece?" or "what was it you liked about my work?" Point being, I had to bring my A-game. (And "A" stands for "art".)

Lynn Block
Garden Bouquet
mixed: watercolor, acrylic, bleach, gel pen

I considered many many things in the weeks leading up to my session, mostly having to do with organizing my time, thoughts and criteria. It's a huge show (168 pieces), and it's not all photography. I know with what criteria to judge photography, but sculpture?? Collage?? Art quilts?? I've also been hearing some interesting things lately, specifically on LinkedIn, about juried art shows, if the fees are worth it, and a general WTF skepticism regarding jurors as a whole. I had to do right by these artists.

I decided on the following criteria for getting through the show:

1. Be quick. Rely heavily on first impressions.

2. See all the pieces in the show before beginning to award. Make notes and choose from those notes.

Steve J. Gyarmaty
Blooming Frost #154digital photo

3. Choose pieces based on their artistic merit (i.e: compostion, use of materials, presentation, technical prowess.) DO NOT select based on your emotional reaction to pieces.

Polly Edgar
The Map of a World
watercolor and ink

Every single rule I'd so painstakingly and scientifically created went straight down the drain once I got in there. I spent almost 3 hours in the exhibit, looking at and relooking at work. I began by going through and - in an effort to be neat - instead of writing on my award sheet, I made notes on my list of artists. A * meant I wanted to award something, but wanted to see everything before beginning. A \ meant "not today." Some pieces I would star on my list, but they wouldn't stand up as strongly on my second and third viewings. Others I slashed, then gave large awards to upon second viewing. I went around the Pyle Center probably 10 times. I lost count. At one point I didn't even know which floor I was on. And, when I got to pieces like Amy Weh's Two Sheep I awarded immediately, certain of the fact that the response I had would not be surpassed by anything else that day. Steve J. Gyarmaty's photo Blooming Frost #154 floored me, but because I've made this image, and each of my photographer friends have made this image - BUT NOT THIS BEAUTIFULLY.

Frederick Kuck
Iguana (detail)
recycled stainless steel

Helen Wolk
In Memory of Lucy
ink on Arches

I realized too that trying to leave my emotional side in the car was just stupid. How do we respond to art? Of course, we appreciate the manipulation of material. The mastery of composition. But what stops you? An oil painting on a perfectly stretched canvas, or an image of a boy that looks like your child? To deny one's heart in the evaluation of art is fallacy, and the surest way toward art that moves no one. Polly Edgar's watercolor and ink Map of the World appealed to my whimsy, my fairy tale side, and made me giggle out loud, while Helen Wolk's ink In memory of Lucy and Sandra Belozercovsky's earthenware pieces Going Home made it hard for me to not cry. Lynn Block's Garden Bouquet made of watercolor, acrylic, bleach and gel pen excited me in its execution, in its reuse of everyday objects. Gabrielle Meyer's Red Blossom, a modern yarn and shaped line structure in shape, color and structure, and Frederick Kuck's Iguana, a sparkling realistic scuplture made from spoons that does not in fact look like an iguana made from spoons were pieces that surprised and enchanted me, not just because these are non-professional rural artists, but because these were fabulous works of art.

Tessa Ganser
Keeper
acrylic paint

Christopher Welty
Alien Human
drawing

There were also pieces on display by some extraordinarily talented high school students. Had I been able to give those awards, Tess Ganser, Julia Morgan, Christopher Welty and Julia Rose Bruce would have been my choices, and in that order. The control of media in addition to the depth of composition and maturity of subject made this side show home to some of the best works in the Pyle Center. I'm excited to see really young artists make good - jot those names down - you'll see more from these kids.

It was amazing. I saw some really really great work that, sadly, didn't have price tags. I encourage you to go see this show - it's up until September 24 and will inspire you and move you, surprise and encourage you. I got to judge sculpture, painting, prints, fabric art and, of course, photography and I loved every minute of it...even the $20 parking ticket I got for taking so long.

Great work, artists....I can't wait to meet you.

(all images taken onsite with my iPhone. Please, do not judge these works by these images...)

Shoot First, Focus Later...The Lytro Camera

2011-08-10T11:57:00.001-05:00

image by Eric Cheng
Lytro's light field camera lets a user explore different focus points
after an image is taken, as in this picture.

by Steve Lohr

published June 21 2011
New York Times

With an innovative camera due out later this year from a company called Lytro, photographers will have one less excuse for having missed that perfect shot.

The company’s technology allows a picture’s focus to be adjusted after it is taken. While viewing a picture taken with a Lytro camera on a computer screen, you can, for example, click to bring people in the foreground into sharp relief, or switch the focus to the mountains behind them.

But is Lytro’s technology just a neat feature, or is it the next big thing in cameras?

The founding team of the Silicon Valley start-up and investors who have put in $50 million are betting on the latter. The technology has won praise from computer scientists and raves from early users of its prototype camera.

“We see technology companies all the time, but it’s rare that someone comes along with something that is this much of a breakthrough,” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a major investor in Lytro. “It’s superexciting.”

Lytro’s founder and chief executive is Ren Ng, 31. His achievement, experts say, has been to take research projects of recent years — requiring perhaps 100 digital cameras lashed to a supercomputer — and squeeze that technology into a camera headed for the consumer market later this year.

Mr. Ng explained the concept in 2006 in his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University, which won the worldwide competition for the best doctoral dissertation in computer science that year from the Association for Computing Machinery. Since then Mr. Ng has been trying to translate the idea into a product that can be brought to market — and building a team of people to do it.

The Lytro camera captures far more light data, from many angles, than is possible with a conventional camera. It accomplishes that with a special sensor called a microlens array, which puts the equivalent of many lenses into a small space. “That is the heart of the breakthrough,” said Pat Hanrahan, a Stanford professor, who was Mr. Ng’s thesis adviser but is not involved in Lytro.

image by Fred R. ConradRen Ng, chief executive of Lytro

But the wealth of raw light data comes to life only with sophisticated software that lets a viewer switch points of focus. This allows still photographs to be explored as never before. “They become interactive, living pictures,” Mr. Ng said. He thinks a popular use may be families and friends roaming through different perspectives on pictures of, say, vacations and parties posted on Facebook (Lytro will have a Facebook app).

For a photographer, whether amateur or professional, the Lytro technology means that the headaches of focusing a shot go away. Richard Koci Hernandez, a photojournalist, said that when he tried out a prototype earlier this year, he immediately recognized the potential impact.

“You just concentrate on the image and composition, but there’s no need to worry about focus anymore,” Mr. Hernandez said. “That’s something you do later.”

“That was the aha! moment for me,” said Mr. Hernandez, an assistant professor of new media at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is game-changing.”

Mr. Hernandez, who is not affiliated with Lytro, was one of several photographers who tested prototypes. His model, he said, was sheathed in a black plastic shell, so he did not see its design. But he said it was the size of a standard point-and-shoot camera. The picture resolution, he added, was indistinguishable from that of his other point-and-shoots, a Canon and a Nikon.

Eliminating any loss of resolution in a camera like Lytro’s, which is capturing light data from many angles, is a real advance, said Shree Nayar, a professor at Columbia University and an expert in computer vision. Mr. Nayar is familiar with Mr. Ng’s work, but he said he had not seen anything Lytro has done in more than a year.

“If they have been able to recover most of the lost resolution, then their image refocusing application is a very cool feature,” Mr. Nayar said. “But it is an open question how popular it becomes.”

At Lytro, the view is that the technology, once it gets into people’s hands, opens the door to many possible new features and uses. Among its other advantages, the new camera is much faster than conventional ones because there is no “shutter lag” — waiting for the autofocus device to work and the shot to be taken. Those fractions of a second, of course, are often when the dog darts off or the child’s smile becomes a frown.

Lytro cameras can also capture plenty of data for 3-D images, which can be viewed on a computer screen with 3-D glasses.

Lytro is not saying what the price of its first camera will be, but insists it will be for the consumer market, which suggests a price of a few hundred dollars. The company is also not being more precise about when the camera will ship. It will initially be sold through online retailers like Amazon.com and Lytro’s Web site.

But to gear up, the company is rapidly adding to its 45-person staff in Mountain View, Calif. Its recruits include veterans of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel and Sun Microsystems.

One Lytro convert who caught the attention of the Valley digerati was Kurt Akeley, who joined the company last September from Microsoft Research. Mr. Akeley, 53, was one of the early engineers at Silicon Graphics, a pioneer in computer graphics, and is one of the lead developers of OpenGL, a popular set of graphics programming tools.

Mr. Akeley, a consulting professor at Stanford, was familiar with Mr. Ng’s work and said he was lured by the challenge and technical opportunity. Lytro, Mr. Akeley said, has “a powerful technology with legs — great things can happen.”

Lytro chose to design and market a camera itself, instead of licensing its technology to a camera giant like Canon or Nikon. It will farm out the manufacturing to a company in Taiwan, but it wanted to control the details of the camera itself — much as Apple does.

“We can just make a better product this way, and really show what we can do,” Mr. Ng said. “The big camera makers are mostly polishing existing technology, and we didn’t want to do this in an incremental way.”

You're gonna want to play with this image....and then with this camera. Keep up to date with specifications, release dates and, of course, pricing as they come available at the Lytro blog.

The Hasselblad H4D-200 MS

2011-06-03T11:30:00.000-05:00

Generally when I title a post with the name of a camera, one can expect a love letter to a camera I own and use. This is not one of those posts.

From the hard-hitting journalists at Fox News comes news of the new Hasselblad H4D-200MS, a 200-megapixel digital camera. Honestly, if anyone was going to do it, it was going to be Hasselblad, the Swedish camera company that has been the purveyor of photographer's wet dreams since 1841. Moon landing? World War II Swedish military aerial surveillance? The one name that will make any photographer clutch chest, throw hand to forehead and swoon?? All Hasselblad.

A 40MP photo taken with a Hasselblad H4D-40.
Photo credit Kirsten Visima

The new H4D-200MS is no exception. It captures six shots simultaneously and combines them into an astounding super-resolution picture. The company says the camera was designed for studio photographers, whose work requires the ultimate in resolution, extremely fine details and exacting color reproduction. "The H4D-200MS is ideal for capturing images of stationary items such as cars, jewelry, artwork and other high end products where there is no room for compromise in image quality," Hassleblad stated in a press release announcing the camera. It features extended multi-shot capabilities and all the benefits of the H4D family of cameras such as True Focus, Ultra Focus and Digital Lens Correction, to name just a few.

While F.W. Hasselblad and Co. started as a trading company, in 1877 the founder's son, Arvid Viktor Hasselblad, used his interest in photography to implement the photographic division of the company. Hasselblad's corporate website quotes him as saying "I certainly don’t think that we will earn much money on this, but at least it will allow us to take pictures for free." With their newest baby priced at $45,000 (yes, that's US dollars), nobody's taking pictures for free anymore.

Bell and Howell Dial 35

2011-04-24T14:21:00.001-05:00

http://bluemooncamera.com

Once upon a time, a young girl happened upon a land of magic, beauty and wonder. Actually, I'm not sure how I came across the Blue Moon Camera and Machine website, but I knew I had found something magical the minute I fell down that particular rabbit hole. A place where film is still processed - all kinds of film from far and wide! - and a place where the beauty of the camera is as appreciated as the imagery it creates. They also sell typewriters. The site itself is a doorway to a land (Portland!) where your wildest photographic dreams can come true, without that irritating look from the slag at your local photo lab, and what I found there that moved me the most was the Bell and Howell Dial 35 camera.

It's a half-frame 35mm camera, which means that the shutter exposes one half of the 35mm negative, the film rewinds and then you work your way through the other half of the 35mm negative. Like following breadcrumbs, really. I was immediately mesmerized. I mean, LOOK AT IT! And using each frame of a 36 exposure roll of film means 72 images on one roll!!! And 72 tiny images to boot. Please.

flickr user TimVo

A short tangent at this point in the story to explain to you some of my more interesting personality quirks may be necessary. I can develop a little tunnel vision when there's something I really want, and a lot competitive, well, any other time. Having obsessed over the Bell and Howell 35 for fair amount of time, when one popped up on eBay in September 2007 (yup, I checked my feedback) I needed it. BAD. I emailed the seller and asked about the possibility of doing a Buy It Now but he said he'd prefer to see how the auction played out. I could have told him at that point exactly how the auction would play out and that I would be the victor, but I don;t think that's what he meant. It came down to me and one other bidder, until my competitive nature kicked in, and then all I had to fear was my own instability. I walked away with the camera (not literally, of course, it's eBay) for the bargain price of $127. At the time that was really upsetting, but there are a few others posted on various sites for more than that, so thank you to blogging for making me feel better about that!!

flickr user anavrina

The camera is a dream. So much of it is automatic, and it's the most amazing thing anyone at this party has ever seen. The setup is inspiring to new combinations, nrew setups, new comparisons, and the images are gorgeous enough that a devoted group of followers have created and regularly contribute to a Flickr page of images taken with the Dial 35.

Processing the film is no big whoop, and it'll print the same, just two half images on your piece of 4x6 lab paper. You can choose whether or not to give the photo lab tech a shout out regarding the oddity of the images, but the printer should be running those scans as normal. Of course, if they get their panties in a bunch over it, you can always just ship the film to Portland...and live happily ever after.

And now for something completely different...

2011-03-30T09:43:00.002-05:00

Chris Silas Neal

Yes, I know, this is a photography blog. One that hasn't had many posts lately - I know that, too. There's so much going on in the world, my state, hell, my town and neighborhood, right now, that is acting as a great distraction for me, and this makes posting about my old cameras less than a priority. What is a priority are politics, rights, and changes that would surely hurt more people than they would help, all in the name of fiscal responsibility. As I've been caught up in the back and forth, and the "what the hell?", another new blogger has caught my attention, and he's a historian, so it really kind of fits. Doesn't it?

William Cronon. A Professor of History at UW-Madison, and the president-elect of the American Historical Society, wrote an Op-Ed piece to the NYT, published Monday. That's where it all started. Not being the educated sort, the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed an open records request for his emails - any emails using the terms "rally, recall, collective bargaining" or the name of any Republican politician who has found him or herself embroiled in this bad decision among others.

Cronon responded on his blog, and it's brilliant. Really. Read it. Read everything he's written. He's intelligent, he's somewhat objective, he's cool-headed. And he makes some amazing discoveries.

I'm clearly NOT a political writer. I'm an artist and educator who has been moved by recent events, so much that I'm addressing them on both of my blogs today. I'm trusting you to follow the links provided and make your own decisions. And maybe you'll learn something. I know I did.

I promise, we'll return shortly to our regularly scheduled programming. A post about making work that you don't want to make but have to make seems like a logical jump...

Polaroid, Polaroid, wherefore art thou, Polaroid??

2011-03-03T18:10:00.000-06:00

As you can tell from the title, I love Polaroid cameras. I love Polaroid cameras. I love the design, the shape, the function, the imagery, the technology - all of it. I'm old enough to have been a pre-digital photographer and the magic of an instantaneous image still tugs at my heartstrings in a really strong way.

But it might be a bit of a sickness.

I have eleven Polaroid cameras, some gifts, some finds, but the bottom line is that I never see a Polaroid at a garage sale/swap meet/thrift shop that I've walked away from. This leads to plenty of arguments between myself and the sweet understanding husband, who is so named because, really, how much can you protest against a $2 purchase? I mean, really?

Automatic 100 Land Camera (1963-66) and Automatic 320 Land Camera (1969-71)
These two are gorgeous and immaculate, and I got them when my husband's grandfather passed away. These are the cleanest used cameras I've even found, and they're sturdy enough that sometimes I loan them to very trustworthy students.

SX-70 Folding Land Camera (1972-77)
Brian Lee Whisenhunt, of Manic Thrift Store Shopper, and Mitchell Hurricane Smith, of hurkylees, gave this to me. It looks like a sleek clutch, but just imagine when I whip that thing open to take a photo! A camera for evening and dinner parties.

SuperShooter Land Camera (1975-77) and SX-70 Sonar OneStep (1978)
My friend Julie Sanders was cleaning out her classroom, the gifted program having been drastically reduced, and gave me these cameras. This classroom was the same classroom in which decades earlier, I'd been taught photography for the first time, and I cherish these cameras. I'd always known they'd wanted to come home with me.

One Step (1983)
This is the mystery camera. No price tag, no marks, and it both looks and smells new. I just don't know where this one came from, so it must have been an impulse buy somewhere, but where??

OneStep 600 Express (1997-2002)
The green one. A gift from the fabulous Nicole Gruter for, if I recall correctly, helping her set up a garage sale. She also gave me some earrings.

iZone (1999)
I bought this at a Walgreens, having been really inspired by the prospect of riding on the back of a handsome man's moped and sticking my self-portrait to his helmet. I'm a sucker for advertising.

600 Business Edition (2000)
Bought at the UW SWAP, home to all great Polaroid sales. I bought it specifically because it was the Business Edition for $2.

Spectra 1200 FF (2001)
My boyfriend who I married two years later bought this for my for Christmas in 2001. My only Polaroid that I got brand spankin' new out of the box.

203 MiniPortrait (date unknown)
Another great SWAP find. The metal battery plate on the bottom of the battery compartment door is missing, and I'm in search of a replacement part. Come to think of it, I have been looking for that replacement part for over a year now...

When I began this blog, I knew a Polaroid inventory would be on the docket. The photographing of the Polaroids was fun in its own right, but I also hope for an exchange of information - on how you're using yours, where you're getting film, and how much you love yours too.

Of course, if you're any sort of photographer, nothing will surprise you about these cameras, save maybe some of the really terrible last-ditch marketing efforts the Company made in the 90's (SpiceCam, anyone?) Every time I buy a Polaroid, some helpful bystander gets his cue to ask "whatcha gonna do with that thing? You know they don't even make film for them cameras anymore? snicker snicker." Well, Mr. Helpful, they do.

FujiFilm is the most obvious and most prevalent manufacturer of instant film, stepping in to fill the gap Polaroid left. Of course, even though Polaroid stopped making the film, there's a lot of backstock to get through, and you can still buy it fairly readily all over the Web and at trusted sites like Amazon and even at Polaroid's website. Blue Moon Camera and Machine out of Portland, Oregon is selling instant film, but be warned that if you get into their galleries of cameras, you'll be in big trouble. Start looking for your second job now...

My absolute favorite though is at The Impossible Project. In 2009, the NYT ran an article on a group of scientists who were attempting to reinvent Polaroid's instant film using a lot of Polaroid's assets from closed factories, and their work there has become The Impossible Project. "Producing new instant films for classic Polaroid cameras" is their slogan, but they're doing more than making film, they're celebrating the essence of instant photography. The color, the tone, and marks of the process are what The Impossible Project is all about. They write these astounding tutorials on working with their film, making image transfers, how to push the film and anything else you could possibly want to know. They are an oasis for those of use still loving (and buying and using) Polaroid cameras. Support them if you can, they deserve it.

Polaroid stopped making films so they could
concentrate on digital cameras and printers, decision that, even in 2008, seemed silly. In a world where instant photographs were only a convenience, that decision would make sense, but in this world, where so artists love the LOOK of instant film had the rug pulled out from under them, and, frankly, I'm still a little burnt. It was said, when Polaroid shut it down, that "in a day when nearly every cellphone has a digital camera in it, “instant” photography long ago stopped being instant enough for most people." But what do we think now when almost every camera app, from Instagram to Hipstamatic has a filter that can make your digital photo look like a Polaroid. I can't tell you how many friends have emailed me pictures that look like a Polaroid, and I'm always too quick to tell them that if they wanted a picture that looked like a Polaroid, then why didn't they take a Polaroid picture? (I'm super fun to be friends with, by the way.) And what do we think now that Polaroid is making film cameras again?

We think that, in 2008, Polaroid made yet another in a long line of really bad decisions.

We Were Not Born Women

2011-02-16T15:31:00.000-06:00

hairpins 2010

On my list of things to do today is to complete (and send!) my exhibition proposal for the Sheldon Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana so as to cross the t's and dot the i's. Also on that list is to post today, so why not kill two birds with one stone?? And what a better way to facilitate the writing and organize my thoughts about of a new series than here on my blog in front you, the reader?

Thank you for that by the way.

This is really still very new work for me. I started it last year, and have found that while I'm saving time with the production of the pieces, I am losing time in gathering stories from participants, rounding up objects, and organizing the submissions I have thus far. When you visit my website to see the work (hint, hint) you'll see nine pieces. I have a list of twenty-two to make. Point being, wrapping one's brain around a series that is still being created and still figured out is a bit intimidating, as is the prospect of submitting a letter of intent for a show that looks like this:

Dear Sheldon,

I would love to exhibit my new work at your museum. I have been there and it is fabulous. I love few things more than making my work, but one of those things is exhibiting said work.

Please please please let me show my work at your museum. I love you.

-Jessie

This simply cannot happen.

In 2007 I made a series Object Portraiture that this work directly springs from. That series was the result of a year of therapy and a need to work with (as opposed to against) my mother on something, and was created in the midst of a Memory Culture class taught by Laurie Beth Clark at UW-Madison. In that series, I collected from around my home all of the little objects that I had been sent away from my parents' home with - jewelry, tchotchkes, knick-knacks. I scanned them at first, and began collecting stories from my mother about where they had come from and when, how, why they had been collected then given to me. A member of my graduate committee recommended that scanning was not the way to go since you could see the scanner streaks across the work and so, against my better judgement, I photographed them. I still regret that, and look back on those first scans as footsteps into something really good. In 2008 I saw a student presenter at the Society of Photographic Educators conference who was photographing with a scanner. In 2009, I taught with Ben Stern at the UW-La Crosse who was scanning people! People, I tell you! And Ben was doing it just for fun; it's not even on his website, but it was brilliant. Like anything I've ever turned away from, it's sort of haunted me, and I'm going back now for this work.

alyissa's dress 01 2010

We Were Not Born Women comes from that work by the collection of stories, the scanning and cataloging of objects, and the aesthetic. This time, instead of taking the stories from one woman, I am collecting from friends and strangers and family. I've gathered stories through my website, through Craigslist, and through blogs of strangers that I've never met but who I thought would be a good match. These objects are objects that I've never even seen, but that have had a direct impact on the storyteller. By not being about me, it's about us, as women, as products of a culture, as responses to input.

I've stood in lines at the grocery, at the bank, at the post office so many times listening to women talk about how their sons wanted trucks and their daughters wanted dolls. I always want to turn around and ask "but did you buy the other option? Did you give them the time to explore these other facets of humanity or did you just buy them what they reached for first and considered it done?" With what we know about marketing, color design, product placement and in-store marketing, we as adults are almost helpless against our impulses in shops. Of course our kids are even more susceptible. But we take those impulses as fact, as what they want, and we go with it. I know that once my nieces or nephew says they like something once, that's all we get them for years. Emily liked Hannah Montana, and I've been buying Hannah Montana paraphernalia by the truckload for years, until last month Emily told me she was done with her.

eyelash curler 2010

The point with this series is to look at the construct of gender, because it is a construction. Even the participants who weren't girly girls, but were tomboys, still have a story of that moment, that instant when they discovered their feminine mystique and they felt right. It clicked. It's so odd to me that we had years of feeling wrong, because we didn't love what magazines and store windows told us we should? Even more so is how much of it has to do with power, from a six-year old girl getting her grandfather to buy her an expensive cardigan to a thirty-one year old woman realizing that her eyelashes hold great sway and influence over the men in her life.

It's a simple process for the storyteller - she tells me her story, including a good description of the object. I then find an object that matches and scan it. I clean up the scan, size it, adjust it make it pretty. I pair her story with the object somehow. Right now on my site the stories are typed to the right of the image, though the Swope is talking about printing a catalog so that viewers have the option of seeing the images without the stories first. But they aren't printing anything without me getting this proposal to them first.

pencil 2010

As I'm focusing in on it, it's about gender (pretty typical for me and my work). Brian Lee Whisenhunt, the Director of the Swope, who as a source of creative feedback is beyond one's wildest dreams, has talked to me about the layers of the series: the object and the photograph of the object, the story and the gathering of the story. It's also one of the first series I've ever made that doesn't have to do with me, but with us. And, just a little something for the fellas who may feel left out by this work or disinterested in the subject remember, gender roles are dichotomous. As we are defined, so are you, and as we have more freedom to be unique individuals, so do you.

Let me know, in the comments below, what you think about the work, and the writing about the work. Let me know if there's a glaring theme I'm not seeing yet, and if there's something that I'm talking about that you're not. I love proofreaders.

Megan McCormick

2011-02-09T11:06:00.000-06:00

Every now and again, you get these students that just blow you away. I've been so lucky to have those students at every place I've taught, and as a teacher, you take delight in the drive and talent of these bright spots in your teaching day.

I got an email over winter break from one of these students, Megan McCormick. I taught Megan in my Fall 2010 Intro Photo course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Megan was already shooting a lot of digital photojournalism, and was Associate Photo Editor for the Badger Herald. She'd worked at a photo studio one summer doing senior portraits, and was in the class to learn film and just.....more.

Megan's composition was strong from the get go and she took to film like a fish to water. Her prints were consistently perfect. Her images were strong, and beautiful and sometimes a little bit funny. She has an ongoing personal photo series entitled My Brother Mark, that's oddly hilarious and smart and contemporary. Just like Megan.

I always post photo contests and juried exhibits for my students to enter, and Megan actually entered one, the Photographer's Forum Annual College Photography contest.

And she's a finalist.

And I'm so proud.

Fifth Quarter

Check out Megan's website. And check the Photographer's Forum Winners' Gallery around February 14th to see the winners. They're all extraordinarily talented and hard-working photographers, but I have one picked as a favorite...

Making it Work...

2011-02-02T17:42:00.000-06:00

An ice skating rink in Little Rock

Just the other day, my husband and I were discussing my work. Where he feels that I do lots of things, I feel like I watch a lot of television. I primarily work from home, so can easily pull off a full 9-hour workday in pajamas without ever having to see a real live person. When I was reaching the end of graduate school, I set up two intense projects for that summer. Spurred by the memory of two non-productive years between undergrad and grad school, I knew that it could be easy for me to slow down without something concrete to work towards. I completed those projects, and did stay busy that year and the next, and even turned one of them into a traveling exhibit. But then life set in, and it all, as I had known it could, sloooooowed doooooown. I'm working on one series now, that will open later this year at the Swope Art Museum, but even that big event has me feeling like I'm not shooting as much as I could, and not exhibiting enough to get a job. All in all, failing.

"But you shoot everyday,"

my helpful husband insisted.

"With your iPhone."

And I got knocked over by the fact that I did, in fact, create photographic imagery everyday. But I also questioned, that without a gallery exhibition, concept and overall PURPOSE, was this work worth anything??

Emily and Alayna on the trampoline

I love my iPhone4. It was a gift from my husband, and the jump in image quality between the 3G's 2.0 megapixel camera and the 4's 5.0MP is bonkers. I honestly do love the images I make, and it's so easy, always having a camera in pocket. I get around, when I'm not worrying that I may have agoraphobia, and having a camera always at hand is a miracle. I see more things that I love to shoot, moments of light that catch me just right, awkward family scenes and beautiful human moments. I've told my students so much that I want a robot eye with a little camera in it so I could be equipped to shoot ALL THE TIME that one finally brought me an article about the invention of this very thing. I LOVE and still use Polaroid cameras (yes, they make film for them) and the camera phone is instant and immediate and always handy. My camera phone is always charged, it's always an arm away, and, with apps like Gorillacam, I can shoot rapid fire exposures and edit later - you know, that machine gun shooting that is the mark of a thoughtful and talented photographer. But, see, with my iPhone it doesn't matter! I can be "Aunt Jessie who loves to take pictures" instead of "Jessie Eisner-Kleyle MFA" because I have no gear to give me away, no bag full of complicated zippers. I have the same technology your mom has, and can take my photography as lightly. A huge convenience, and a great disguise, but is it doing more harm than good?

someone's lost belt buckle
outside of a gas station
in Tennessee

Photography as a democratic art form means a million different things. Everyone can afford a photograph and everyone can create a photograph. A photograph can be reproduced to the point that it can become accessible to everyone, and even more so now. Still, there are artists who are using these technologies, not to become lesser artists, but to create their art with cutting edge technology that expands their medium. It's no exaggeration, it takes brawn to be a photographer. In a 2007 Associated Press article, reporter May Wong writes that Patrice Elmi, a photographer who exhibited work from her LG camera phone in Los Angeles gallery Drkrm's first digital print show, "hasn't touched her bulky 35mm camera since last fall." Keep in mind that most professional photographers are using larger format cameras than 35mm, and the idea of a light, handy cell phone camera will make your eyes tear. My years of working with my Mamiya 120 made my right arm stronger than my left. Jacques-Henri Lartigue's mother didn't want him to be a photographer when he was a little boy; she worried he'd be stooped.

Paul Baker Prindle at rest

My friend Paul Baker Prindle carried a 4x5 into rural Wyoming to make images for a 2009 series. I've always wondered what would happen to my work if I got pregnant and couldn't life heavy equipment. But then there's photojournalist Melissa Lyttle, who has actually shot assignments with the camera on her phone. At the Center for Photography at Madison's biannual event PhotoMidwest in 2008 I saw the work of photographer Evan Baden, who doesn't use the camera phone to capture, but uses that and similar technology to light and define his subjects. I read online articles almost monthly idenitfying the top apps for photographers. The technology is being used far and wide.

Convenient, no doubt. Freeing and accessible, absolutely. In the article How Pro Photographers Use Their Cameraphones, it is mentioned that "Anyone who has felt the heft of a Leica rangefinder knows how a well-made camera can inspire your shooting" and that's where I think it all comes down to the gear. All art has a craft component, but with photography it's extreme. The best photogrpahic intentions crumble without being able to process film, focus a lens, read a meter, load the film, set the aperture, set the shutter speed... When I tell people that I'm a photographer, I get one of two responses:

a quick little fox at the
Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center

My cousin's getting married! Do you shoot weddings?

What kind of camera do you use?

My answers are always "Congratulations, but no" and "Why does it matter?" But with all of my bravado, it DOES matter in the same way that I wear high heels out, not for my husband, but for the other women who will look down and say "oooo, good shoes!" We are measured by the gear we know how to use and the gear we can afford. I've worked shoots where I've been a little ashamed of my gear, and I've impressed the "oooo, that's a nice camera, eh?" out of a bartender in Canada...with the same camera. I've created photographic series with my digital point and shoot, others with my 120 film camera, and some with no camera at all. I'm not bound to the technology, I'm married to the output, the print, but I still blush when I pull a smaller camera from my bag. Maybe it's because this has been a male-dominated industry for so long?

my grad school professor
Tom Jones

I think the biggest issue comes with the concept, or the lack of one. I've always been told that it's not the push of the button or the machine, but it's the artist that makes art. When I stumble around, finding things I wasn't necessarily looking for, THAT'S what makes me feel lesser. When I realize I've been photographing for a year with no real direction, that makes me worry. And shouldn't I? For cripes sake, I didn't just fall into this, this isn't my HOBBY. I have training, an education, and a work ethic! I don't make work that's just pretty...I make work that makes you think, that makes me think! Or, at least I mean to. Bottom line, we still create work to print and put in a gallery, even with the proliferation on online galleries. And if you're printing for a gallery, the large print is where it's AT right now. And digital can't take us there...yet.

something I saw one day when
I didn't have a camera with me

The technology is clever and changes everyday. It's up to us to make it work and make it work in a way we need it to, in a creative way. It's up to me to buckle down, and use the iPhone for more than Twitter, and, if I can't get on board with using that technology to make work that makes me proud, then to focus my energies back to where they should be. Chase Jarvis' THE BEST CAMERA IS THE ONE YOU HAVE WITH YOU is brilliant, both photographically and philosophically. I need that phrase tattooed on my palm.

Speaking of Twitter, follow me for updates for new posts, contests (I love a good contest) and links to like-minded Tweeple.

The Canonet

2011-01-31T13:37:00.109-06:00

I bought a new (to me) camera at a flea market in Arkansas earlier this month. I rummaged the shelves in a room so piled with trash and treasure that I couldn't even pivot for fear of sending piles of ukeleles and roller skates crashing to the floor. In this particular room was a huge bookshelf overflowing with dirty cameras: old digitals, film, Polaroids, even Super 8's. I opened every camera case on the shelf and found broken cameras, cameras filthy with the dust of the case's once velvety lining, and cameras that wouldn't focus because their lenses were sticky with goo. And then I opened this one...

Karen Nakamura over at Photoethnography says:

The Canonet 19 is a coupled-rangefinder, leaf-shuttered 35mm camera. It was the first camera to be produced under the "Canonet" sobriquet and came out in January 1961. It featured automatic exposure...It was wildly popular in Japan and the United States. In 2.5 years, over a million Canonets were sold, launching Canon into the major camera scene.

I bought it for a variety of reasons:

It was a Bell & Howell. I have a Bell & Howell Dial 35 that is the foxiest little camera in existence - so foxy that I threw my good eBay sense out the window when it came up, and paid WAY TOO MUCH. Every time I use it, folks stop and say "what IS that?" They don't stick around for a lot of the explanation because I get a bit gushy.

It worked! The back opened, the lens focused, the f-stop dial moved, the shutter opened and closed...all the goods were functional. While I fully admit to having a bit of a HAND THE BABY TO A STRANGER AS YOU WALK AWAY obsession for old cameras, I don't buy them unless I can use them.

It had a T setting. Now, I've been photographing since I was 11, been studying photography since 1993 and have been teaching photography since 2008. One of the questions I put on my midterm exam for my University students is: "What does the T mark on the shutter speed knob stand for and what does it do? What about the B mark?" As we all know, the B setting means BULB and the shutter stays open for as long as you depress the button. I say "as we all know" because you could still be using a camera with a B setting (my students are.) But the T setting question is a little rude, because in all of my years I've never even seen a camera with a T setting. T means TIME and the shutter opens when you press the button, then closes when you press it again. In that time you can have a cup of coffee, a nap, a jog, whatever. Your shutter is open and you're getting a tremendously long shutter speed. Anyone ever see a photograph of the stars tracking across the night sky? T setting. And this camera has it.

It was $19.99. I'm cheap. I love a good bargain, and this was one. I didn't even haggle on it, especially since the nice lady at the desk had just knocked $4 off of a box of slides of someone else's family vacation. (More on that later, I promise.)

This camera looked at me and asked if I was ready. I said "I was born ready!", which is my standard response to that question, but I thought it meant for taking new photos.

I love photography. I learned it in the 5th grade, and was mesmerized immediately. When I got home and told my grandpa what I'd done that day and how cool it was, he put foil up over the kitchen windows and pulled his darkroom gear and chemistry down from the attic. My uncle had a room in his house that we weren't allowed in - turns out it was a darkroom. My Mamma found a 1940 newspaper article about my great-grandpa where he said when he retired he was going to build a darkroom at his house. I knew in that tiny loud school darkroom that I was going to do THIS for the rest of my life, but when I found out I wasn't remotely the only person in my family to have that idea, that made it feel like something more meaningful than a whim. (Justine Kurland told me once that every girl goes through a horse phase. I told her I'd heard that every girl has a photography phase.) But to be the only woman in that family to have an interest made my fascination almost a mission.

My husband and I talked a lot in the car ride home from down South. We'd been away from Wisconsin for almost a month, and were returning back to our home, to chores, to everyday life and work and shoveling snow. Returning back to the job hunt, and to coming up with options for what I can do when I don't get a University teaching job. He mentioned stock photography, which I thought was interesting, and then he said

"You could write a blog."

"I don't have anything to write about," I said.

"All of those blogs I subscribe to, they write on a theme,

they have something to say other than random musings."

He said "No, they don't.

They write about their lives, and everybody's life has a theme more or less."

And then he was really moving...

"Write it about your cameras, and your work,

and your teaching and stock photography

and your work at the gallery and.....and...

...call it Used Cameras."

(thank you, David.)

So here we are. I won't write about technical photography, and when I talk about cameras it will be about their shape, design and history. This will be about the art of photography, living a life as a photographer, teaching, researching, shooting every day. I'll write about how we remain photographers and pay the bills (hopefully) and how we pay the bills and remain artists. I'll interview the occasional artist (which I've been doing as a volunteer committee member for a year over at the Steenbock Gallery blog). I'll show you what my students are doing.

The Canonet 19 launched Canon into the major camera scene. Mine has launched me onto paths I never saw coming.