2010 Senior Portrait: Darin in Washington

Here are a couple of favorites from a very fun senior photo session indeed! Darin is multi-faceted: he's gentle and nurturing while strong and self-confident.

2010 Senior Portrait: Zach in Corvallis, Oregon

What a great time working with Zach for his senior portrait session! We got a lot of different looks in our shoot, here are a few of my favorites.



Shots of Zach in his football uniform...



...and we did a portrait with Zach's younger brother, Eli, in his soccer gear. They're a couple of tough-looking customers!

2010 Senior Portraits: Justin in Idaho

While I was traveling in Idaho to visit and take black and white landscape photos, I was hired to do a senior portrait of a young man named Justin. Here's a favorite shot from that very hot day (it was about 100 degrees during our shoot), but doesn't he look "cool!" While we were out driving around looking for locations to shoot, we ran across this random pile of huge cement pieces and beams of wood by the side of the road. It ended up making an interesting background.

2010 Senior Portrait: Logan in Corvallis, Oregon

Here are a few images from my senior portrait session with Logan here in Corvallis.
He's on his high school lacrosse team, and it was a treat to photograph him in his lacrosse gear. I had fun trying out different processes on the lacrosse shots, here are two of my favorites from the session.

Travel Photography: Large Format Trip to Southern Idaho

Here are a couple of shots from my trip to Mackay, Idaho. It was a great time, using my large format camera to capture images from the White Knob Mine area. I hope the film turns out alright! It's always delicious anticipation to have to wait until you develop the film to see if you got the shot!

Baby Portrait: Cailyn in Tacoma, Washington

Last weekend I had the great pleasure to photograph 3-month-old Cailyn and the rest of her family in Tacoma, Washington. What a cutie! She's a lively, vivacious girl and was a real trooper and stayed awake for several different set-ups. So we got a nice variety in her marathon photo session.





Even the strongest of us need a little cat nap along the way, here Cailyn catches a few winks in her beautiful mother's arms.


And of course we had to get some photos of big brother...



I love the delicate little way she held her hands...


And this final shot I've added a bit of grain and color effects to accentuate her delicate features.

PSA Gold Medal Won for Best Monochrome Fine Art Black and White Print!

I'm so excited I just had to share, I just found out I have been awarded a PSA (Photographic Society of America) Gold Medal for Best Monochrome Print in the PSA-sanctioned International Exhibition of Photography at the Oregon State Fair!

The print is titled "La Cigale Homage." It's an homage to one of my favorite photographers, Frank Eugene, based on his photogravure, "La Cigale," made in 1900. Frank Eugene's work is representative of one of my favorite periods in photographic history, the Photo-Secession movement which promoted photography as fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular. I have a detail scan from my print here. Sorry it doesn't show the whole print, I scanned the 11x14 print on a small scanner--I wasn't expecting to post the image but was just sending the scan by e-mail to the model.


I also won an Honorable Mention Award in the same show for the following print, "Uncaged," which is a sister image to the one above. This also shows just part of the whole print.



Both prints can be seen at the International Exhibition of Photography in Salem, Oregon, during the Oregon State Fair, August 28-September 7, 2009, in Cascade Hall.

Update: For those friends and family that are in the area and are interested in attending the awards presentation ceremony, it will be held from 7-8 p.m. on Friday, August 28th, in Cascade Hall.

For those of you who might be curious about technical details for the two prints:
"La Cigale Homage" and "Uncaged" are both silver emulsion prints made on Foma Fomatone MG CLassic 542 Chamois paper--a warm-tone, triple-weight, variable contrast paper on a cream-colored rough-textured, matt, fiber base. They were both developed in Amidol paper developer (mixed from scratch), and toned with a pre-sulphiding sepia method (as outlined by Tim Rudman in his book, "The Photographer's Toning Book: The Definitive Guide.")

Sadly this particular paper has been discontinued, it is no longer available on the rough texture which gives it its charm. It is still being made under the same name, but only on a smooth paper base.