Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

 

Why follow the straight path, when the crooked way beckons? Why contemplate things by daylight, when things hidden and dark can be glimpsed? Why do the easy thing, when something difficult can be under taken?

So go my thoughts these days…

Raking leaves this weekend, I thought it would be fun to take some shots of individual leaves in the pelting wintery snow. I wanted black and white shots, and I wanted a steely, high contrast look. I could have just shot things with a digital camera, converted to mono, and adjusted the contrast. But that would be too easy. I could of just shot the images on standard B&W film. But that would be easy. So instead I decided to shoot the leaves on lithographic film.

Lith film is meat for ultra high contrast images. High contrast means all black, all white, and no shades of gray. For my purposes I wanted pictorial images – the full spectrum of black to white. Up till now my only experience with lithographic film was part of one roll of Kodalith that I shot a year or two ago, and processed as a high contrast, lith film.

For this exercise I shot out the rest of that roll of Kodalith, and then switched over to Kodak Ektagraphic HC Slide film. The latter is reputed to be identical to Kodalith (I’m not entirely sure of that.) It is a ‘slide film” in that its intended purpose is for title slides for old fashioned projected slide presentations.

I shot out the remnant of the Kodalith roll on Saturday. I should explain that I when I shoot out only half a roll of film or so, I will often just put the camera in the changing bag, extract and cut off the exposed part of the film, and leave the remaining, unexposed, bits for later. I had done this with the first part of the Kodalith, and so it only took about a dozen shots before the partial roll was used up.

I rated the film and ISO 6, figuring that would result in a well exposed negative. I then developed it in HC110, Dilution G (1:119) at 20 c for 22 minutes, agitating every three minutes. This was just a wild guess on development , and produced a contrasty but scannable negative. The vertical photo at the start of this post is the one decent composition from this roll. 

The results weren’t great, but were encouraging. I shot the next roll – this time Kodak Ektagraphic HC – also at ISO 6. This time I went with HC110 at a 1:200 dilution, leaving the time at 22 minutes, with the same agitation scheme.

One problem emerged. The film did not clear and fix properly. Shadow and midtone areas cleared fine, but the most dense areas of the film, the highlights, did not clear well. Emulsion remained in place, and despite a few successive baths in fresh fixer, the film did not clear. I should comment that while the Ektagraphic HC is nominally a slide film, the development directions call for development with D-19 and fixing in standard fixers. So I assume this film is somehow damaged.

No matter. Once the film was dry I dropped it on the light table and took a close look. The unfixed areas were transparent, and seemed to have decent tonality, even if they were a tinted emulsion color and not just oxidized silver. So I stuck them in the scanner. The results are not bad – the second, hoirzonal shot, is from this roll. The highlights – in this case the leaf – were made up with the un-fixed emulsion on the film. Ultimatley the light from the scanner did not care, and while these negatives are surely not archival, I don’t really care either.

I have another 4 or 5 rolls of the Ektagraphic HC in the freezer, and will do some experiments with other developers. Someday – but for now, I think I’m going ot take the easy route, and shoot some regular film, if not digital.

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It was ten years ago today that I first put up a photo website. Not the current domain – that wouldn’t come for another five years – but rather I used the 5 megabytes of space provided by my old webhost, netlink. The old website was www.net-link.net/~cassino – it’s long gone, but some editions of it can sometimes be found on the Internet Wayback machine.

I first picked up a camera in July, 1997, so putting up a photo website three months later was probably a bit premature. But one photo from that original site still lingers in the current site – the bee shown here. This shot was taken in October, 1997, as I pulled up the bedding plants after the first frost. The shot was taken on print film with a Pentax Pz-70, Takumar-F 70-200 zoom, and close up diopter. It would no way meet current standards or sharpness and clarity, but bees have forever since been a favorite subject, and the composition is still pleasing to my eye.

A lot has changed on the internet in ten years. This site has grown, but has not changed all that much. It’s still basic HTML - the original site was hand coded in Windows Notepad. It was later prepped in MS FrontPage and currently with Namo Webeditor. But the essential design has remained the same. The image stream is a change towards less-edited, more chronological presentation of work. In large part that’s for my own convenience – I use the website to organize my stuff, and wanted to see it more from a chronological . seasonal perspective than subject oriented. The blog is new, of course, and someday Calarti will probably take over the whole site.

Since I can’t thing of much to say about this anniversary, I consulted the Oracles – in my case the I Ching and Morgan’s Tarot. (I wonder is the spirits of these oracles hang out together in oracle world. It probably is a small world and you gotta take the neighbors your get…)

For years now, I ask only one question – “Where to now?” All the other stuff is best left unsaid, to avoid confusion.

The I Ching returned the 48th Hexagram – The Well. All lines young. Interesting figure, and it’s uncommon to have no lines changing. But considering all the lines in the figure, I realized that most describe a well that does not work, and only two describe one that is really functional. So the old book is pointing out what could be, but also noting what is. I should figure out how to get a fish to swim across the screen here…

Morgan was more to the point, as I pulled up the BOO! Card. No fear – lets have some surprises…

So much for anniversaries – I’ll think of something better to say ten years from now.

Late autumn. The sun hangs in Scorpio for a few last days. The trees are bare, and each passing day is shorter and darker than the last.

Just a few days ago the trees still held their leaves, and autumn colors in the bright clear light of autumn sunshine. Here are a few final shots from the last couple of weeks of autumn – since these were taken, the trees have dropped all their leaves and the cloudy days of late autumn have taken hold.

My favorite of these shots are the two “Frosty Morning” images. These were take on one of the first cold mornings of the season. These were shot in the Allegan Forest, of course, and I wandered into a low land area where the frost was particularly thick. The morning sun was rising in the clear air, and its rays were hitting the higher branches of the nearby trees, resulting in a steady patter of water drops, as the frost high up melted.

With only a few minutes to take a few shots, I grabbed what I could and was amazed at how swiftly the frost passed. Well – a few moments were frozen in time.

These shots make the end of my 6 x 7 medium format color work for this fall – though winter scenes no doubt will call for some B&W work with this camera.

Two weeks since my last post – I’ve been down in the basement workroom much of that time, cutting out mats and mounting photos. All this in preparation for the Art Etc art fair last week – which seems to have gone pretty well based on the conversations had with visitors to my booth.

I guess I should talk about art fairs before they happen so people know about them. Someday I’ll work on the commercial side of all this…

Anyhow – in a totally non-commercial spirit, while shooting fall colors last week I stuck the Vivitar IC 101 Panoramic camera into my pocket, loaded with some rather stale Fuji NPS 35mm film. The ISO 150 NPS seemed ideal for most in the sun shooting situations (good thing since the camera has no exposure controls) and as I schlepped around with the Pentax 6x7 medium format rig, I used the Vivitar to take a few other than standard shots of the autumn foliage.

The camera did not always cooperate. It seems to be getting fussy about when to respond to shutter button – and whether to respond at all. And each roll is missing a few sprockets where there wind / drive mechanism jammed while advancing the film. But for a $2 camera it’s holding up pretty well.

Most of my favorite spots in the Allegan Forest are featured here. We have the Olf Farmstead, the Coreopsis Field, Laughing Bird Woods, and other select locations.

Not that you’ll find those names on a map. If a place doesn’t have a name, I give it one and use it. That may seem pointless, since I’m only the only person who knows the name, but then Adam was the only person who knew the names of things before Eve, and naming things is a birthright we inherit from him. So these names aren’t so much points of reference as they are, well, you know, names. 

Shooting with the Vivitar 101 IC Panoramic camera got me thinking in panoramic terms. And so while in the Coreopsis Field I shot a few frames with the Pentax 6x7, composed with the intent that they be cropped to the same aspect ratio as the Vivitar. The result is this last image - the negative is about the size of two 35mm exposures, side by side, and the detail on an large print is exquisite. I was experimenting (I.e. using for the first time) with Kodak UC 400 – 120 format, of course. Grain is not much of an issue with the 6x7 format, and the colors really snap with this film.

So ultimately Vivitar IC 1010 toy camera not only kicked out a few good shots by its own right, but go me thinking outside the box a bit to put the 6x7 to different.

Well, at least thinking in terms of a different sized box…

And in what has to be a little bit of a milestone - I hit over 1,000 film scans this year while scanning this latest bast of film. Film may be waning - but over 1,000 images scanned in the last 10 months or so tells me its still an important medium - at least to me. 

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Ah, autumn… What a wonderful season.

The sweetness of autumn lies in the great brevity of this season. For weeks after the autumnal equinox, the days roll on in summer-like splendor. Then for a few brief weeks (or days) the trees turn, and paint the world with the vibrant colors of autumn foliage. And then the sun slips into Scorpio and everything changes – the winds howl, the leaves fly, and stark trees stand like dark skeletons under low skies.

Summer and winter are something – the twin poles of life and death, splendor and scarcity, light and dark. Spring grows into something – namely summer – and the line when spring moves into summer is so fine, in can scarcely be drawn or discerned.

But autumn dissolves into something. It holds up its head till it is overwhelmed, and then sinks into something. It is like a river bank, undermined by the swift current, that seems whole one second and then suddenly collapses as the current undermines it.

Well, like I always say – it’s easy to see when things are starting, but so hard to tell when they end.

So here are some autumn foliage photos. Tonight as I write this snow spits in the sky, a wind howls in from the west, and leaves just now starting to turn rip off the trees and fly carelessly away.

These shots are from last week, and from the Allegan Forest. The area has been subject to a couple days of sustained 40 mph winds as a cold front rolls on through. I suspect that when next I return to Allegan, the trees will be bare.

No matter – my last trip to the forest resulted in 10 rolls of 120 film shot – enough to keep the scanner busy for a while. Shot on Friday – I’ll pick it up from the lab tomorrow. Firearm deer hunting season starts in a few days – plenty of reason for me to keep out of the forest for a while.

So one more autumn blast is in store – a blast of photos that is – and that should be it for while.