Category: Photo gallery

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I don’t know which is more depressing: the fact that about half the buildings I passed downtown on my way home from Mass today had been vandalized this weekend, or that the vandals did such a perfunctory job. Don’t they take any pride in their work?

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Lycoris radiata.

You can expect to see more botanical pictures than usual for the next few weeks. We’re probably about a month away from the first hard freeze of the winter here, and after that it will be around March before there is good reason to take my camera to a garden again.

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My well-used 4×5 Crown Graphic. I think I paid $125 for the body and $75 for the lens. Cheap though the outfit is, it is capable of superb results. For sheer quality, nothing beats large format:

An old $200 Crown Graphic will completely eclipse any Nikon, Hasselblad or Leica camera for technical quality because of the huge film size and movements.

For some kinds of photography, this is absolutely true, and if I were primarily a landscape photographer, my principal tool would be the Graphic or perhaps a 4×5 field camera with more movements. The large negative also makes contact-printing processes such as cyanotypes possible. The downside is that large format photography is slow in every way. If you want to catch dancers in mid-air during rehearsal, you need fast film in a quick-focusing camera with a fast lens (or a digital SLR that performs well at high ISOs), and you need to take a lot of pictures quickly. Even so, I have taken good studio shots of dancers with the Crown Graphic.