My Harshest Critic (Me)

Dad in San Pedro, in front of the
Korean Friendship Bell - Christmas, 2010

It has come to my attention that I am a bit rusty with taking pictures. The fact that it took over a month to finish the roll I started in North Carolina (early November 2010) and ended with Dad's vacation in LA proves that. But I still printed two pictures because I as on vacation and I didn't know when I would be able to again. Since some people are wondering how I actually take my pictures, this will give me a change to show you what I do and some of the mistakes I made this time around.

The first picture, above, is of Dad in San Pedro. He is standing in front of the Korean Friendship Bell. The picture was taken on Ilford Delta 100 speed film. Film speed is one of the factors that determines how much light you need. 100 is a slow-speed film. This means that it will take plenty of light, but the picture will be very sharp and crisp. Likewise, a fast film will need much less light, but will be more grainy. I prefer to shoot with slow film.

With plenty of light from the sun, I was able to use a small aperture. In other words, the hole of the lens was very small (the pinhole effect). This allows me to keep subjects that are close and far all in focus. As you can see, the exposure is very good. My two big mistakes where the easiest to avoid. First, I did not clean the lens. This caused there to be a lot of small white dots when I eventually printed the picture. This really ruins many of my pictures, and I must get better at it.

The second mistake I made was not using a flash. As you can see from the picture, the sun was on my left, illuminating Dad's camera-left side. The other side is dark, naturally. Had I used a flash, it would have lit the other side of his face and would have revealed all of Dad's facial features. Amateur mistake.

Portrait of Nimuae Carmona
November 2010 - Black Mountain, NC

The picture above is of my niece Nimuae. She was the only one of the kids willing to have her picture taken by me. This turned out to be a wonderful portrait. Same film stock as before, but I used a long lens instead. This blurs out the background and draws more attention to the subject. Once again, I didn't keep the lens clean, so I had tons of spots. The other problems were more difficult to solve.

When I made the actual print in my darkroom, I did get good exposure and contrast on Nim's face by using a filter (this adds more contrast). However, despite printing the paper for almost a minute, and putting another forty seconds of light on the background (this is called burning), I could not get the background to the right of Nim's face to show up. I could have made another print, but I had already made a few bad ones and I was too aggravated.

I used spot toning to get rid of some of the biggest white spots. This is a really annoying process; it involves using a tiny paint brush and black ink to fill them in one at a time. These pictures had hundreds of them, so I was only willing to do it on the worst of them. I'm really not very good at it, but I did a much better job on the picture of Nim.

Now that it is scanned, I will use Adobe PhotoShop to fix everything. Soon it will be perfect, and next time I will do better.

Pops Visit and The Petersen Auto Museum

The Laurel and Hardy Car.
Hell yeah!

Hey Folks,

First off, sorry. I know I've been worse than ever about keeping this thing current. Almost four months since my last post; sorry. I finally got some time off from Columbia to take a nice staycation. Pops visited, and unfortunately it rained almost the entire time he was here. But we made the most of it.

Professor Fate's Hannibal 8 from
The Great Race!

We ate VERY well when Pops was here. First we ate lunch at Ernie’s House of Tacos for lunch, but we were so stuffed we never needed to eat dinner. Later we did the fondue thing at our apartment, and ate breakfast in my neighborhood.

Dad, most of you know, works at Caterpillar, so I knew he’d be someone who would appreciate cars. This gave us a reason to finally go the Petersen Auto Museum. Located in the Miracle Mile across from the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Petersen is truly one of a kind. Some of the cars where so rare I hadn’t even herd of the makers.

1989 Batmobile. Assembled in Gotham City.

This place has every kind of car ever made, from steam engine models to muscle cars, classic models to Electronic and proto-type vehicles. You name it, they got it (though not all of them are always on display). The place is also well-known because the Notorious B.I.G. was killed outside after a party here.

Especially memorable for me were the movie cars. They had the Green Hornet Car that Bruce Lee rode in, Doc Brown’s DeLorean from Back to the Future, the Batmobile, and perhaps the best: Professor Fate’s Hannibal 8 from the Great Race. They also had some models owned by Steve McQueen.

Jen at the Hot Wheels Exhibit
at the Petersen Auto Museum

The place definitely proves once again that cars today are SOOOO boring. Give me a big boat of a car. Yes, they were gas guzzles and parallel parking was a pain, but there’s a price to be paid for cool. I really missed my Cadillac after I went here. Maybe I’ll buy one w/ my tax

return.

The rain finally let up toward the end of Dad’s visit. We took advantage of it to go up to the Griffith Observatory. After that we took Jen to Masa for a Chicago Pizza (the only one in the city worthy). Delicious, and I think I might have eaten the best desert I’ve ever had in my life. Unbelievable.

The last day we went to San Pedro to see the ocean. After that we went to Long Beach to visit Rene. We watched movie later that night, and then I took Dad to the airport the next morning. For the rest of the break, I mostly stayed at home. Great vacation, just what I needed.

The Big Pimpin' Barber Car.
Hopefully only one of these
was ever built.