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City Methodist, a grand old church brought low by the slow march of time. Opened in 1925, four one million dollars, most of that being fund-raised by Reverend William Seaman, and US Steel footing some of the bills. Constructed in the English Gothic style, the sanctuary alone stands nine stories tall and could house 950 people. But the church was more than just the sanctuary. The whole complex had a school and theatre for traditional plays and films. It also had space for storefronts. At its peak, there were 3,000 members on the church roll. But when the steel industry crashed…the people moved away fromRead More →

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Comrades! May 1st (well the whole week apparently) was International Commie Camera Day. Of course to the average person wouldn’t know a communist camera from a regular one. So what makes a camera communist? Last time I checked Cameras don’t hold to political ideologies (or do they?), but rather what makes a camera communist is where it was made and when. For the most part a camera is communist when it it well made in a communist country (so yes, those Chinese cameras that are still produced today, yep, communist). But for the most part a “Commie Camera” was one that was produced in theRead More →

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Back in April, at the FPP Walking Workshop I had the chance to work with some studio lights. One of the things to come out of the first round with the studio light was the Polaroid Portraits that I was very proud of. But on Sunday, before the Large Format workshop kicked off, I again hooked up one of my cameras to the same light and, with the help of Professor Jeff, got all the settings landed and began to pull people in attendance into my studio for a quick shot. Loaded into my camera was a single roll of Kodak Portra 160NC (one ofRead More →

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This past weekend at the Film Photography Project’s Walking Workshop in lovely downtown Findlay, Ohio, at the Polaroid Party at the University, they had a couple of stations set up for portrait work. I had used by trusty Auto 250 (Polaroid Model 250 Automatic Land Camera) at Milton’s Help-Portrait event a couple of years back now, which was a hit, but I never thought to hook it up to a studio light. The camera is equipped with a PC socket which allows you to hook up an electronic flash mounted on a bracket, or a radio trigger. Mat’s massive Sinar P2 8×10 camera took theRead More →

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So after Friday’s winter storm, Saturday dawned bright and clear, so I loaded up three cameras and went to Hamilton. I slowed down my shooting for these shots, one, maybe two, each place I stopped with the Rolleiflex. I carefully looked at each area and pre-visualized what I’d want the final print to look like. Using a Pentax Spotmeter V, I metered for shadows I wanted the most details in, then underexposed by a stop (Putting the shadows in Zone IV), focused, and shot. Then make notes on the exposure. It was like shooting large format (I saw a guy with a 4×5 out andRead More →

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This is what it’s all been leading up to. A print, there’s something unique about holding a print in your hand, looking down at the patterns of light and shadow being brought out in blacks, whites, and grays, it’s magic. Well actually its science, the perfect blend of art and science. Creating the print is a rather neat process from start to end and when you sit down and think about the sheer amount of control you have over the whole process is fantastic. You get to pick the camera (and in some cases the lens), film stock. Then you can meter it the wayRead More →

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Negotiations to bring a higher-education campus to the small town of Germantown began in 1885, initially to be a satellite campus of the Cincinnati Wesleyan College. However, that did not end up being the case, and the town council found themselves in the office of Orvon Graff Brown, who at the time was the president of the Ohio Conservatory of Music and the School of Oratory. Brown agreed to build a branch of his College in Germantown. But by 1886, Brown was set on establishing a whole new college in the town, and by 1888 the Twin Valley College was established by charter and byRead More →

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I was bitten by the toy camera bug a while back after getting a Holga, which has served me well, but recently on the Film Photography Podcast they were pushing this odd “new” camera that Michael Raso had discovered on “The Bay” named The Debonair, it looked like a cross between a Diana and a Holga. He had managed to stumble upon a lot of 2000 of these cameras sitting in a warehouse in Rochester, New York. I didn’t need another toy camera, but after seeing some of the shots out of the camera I needed to get one, and at twenty bucks, it wasn’tRead More →

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I was bit by the instant photography bug back when Polaroid stopped making film and when Impossible re-invented it (Film for Polaroid Cameras that is). And over the course of the years they have stuggled long and hard, and have taken a great deal of my money (I say that not in a bad way) to build up something that can only be described as pure magic in eight frames. Back at the end of October I had a chance to revisit New York City and take a trip to the Impossible Project Store/Gallery on Broadway to pick up and shoot some of their newRead More →

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One Hundred years earlier, a US Ship on the Canadian Shoreline was not a good thing, but in 1913, the crew of the US Coast Guard Light Vessel 82 (LV-82) was the only thing keeping sailors on Lake Erie and their demise. In November of 1913, nature unleashed her fury. A storm known as the White Hurricane swept through the great lakes region, causing a level of destruction on the lakes not seen in recent memory, yet the crew of LV-82 stayed. Their station, Point Abino, was known for its shallow shoals and dangerous waters. Standing at their station facing 80 miles per hour windsRead More →