Cousins

I didn't really have cousins growing up. I have one cousin that I didn't meet until I was 15 or so and then only saw him a couple of times. I had loads of second cousins, but only saw them on rare occasions. Unfortunately, my kids are in a similar boat. They have cousins, but they all live in different places around the country, so they don't see each other much. The wonderful phenomenon about young people is that they pick up right where they left off like it was yesterday. We recently had an opportunity to get one whole side of the family together. The cousins all jumped right in to playing and harassing each other like, well... like family. It is a lesson we all could learn, not to hold petty grievances and hurts from years past, but just to love and enjoy one another like kids do... like cousins do.
I took this photo with my Graflex Speed Graphic 4x5. This is the first photo I took with this hand-held as opposed to using a tripod. It is heavy and sort of unwieldy, but I had the light metered already and the shutter and aperture were all set. I just had to focus and shoot. I used the built-in range finder, lined up the two images and "click". It is kind of hard to go unnoticed with a monster like the Speed Graphic in front of your face, but in this case only one of my victims er... subjects noticed and looked over. The others were busy being kids, so I got a pretty candid shot of them being themselves. I didn't take enough care sealing up my darkroom (bathroom) when I unloaded the film holders, so it looks like there was a bit of a light leak in the lower corner. I did a little dodging in Photoshop, so it's not quite as noticeable. I will probably crop it out if I decide to print it. That is one of the beautiful things about large format. There are plenty of pixels for cropping before printing. The development was done in Caffenol-CL for 70 minutes. I like the look of Caffenol-CL with a number of different films. Being fairly inexpensive and environmentally friendly makes up for the hassle of weighing and mixing ingredients. I hope you enjoy this photo. Maybe it reminds you of summers with your cousins.

Black Butte Ranch

We had a family reunion of sorts up in Oregon at a place called Black Butte Ranch. It is sort of a typical Northwest resort. It is up in the Cascade range and so there is plenty of mountain air and hiking and glacial run-off. This photo was taken with my '39 Voigtländer Bessa 6x9 folding camera. I thought the corral made a nice compositional element to frame the mountain. One principal of composition I try to keep in mind is framing and frames within frames. This one might have been better composed if I had taken a step to the right and filled the frame with the 'corral frame' a little more. I do like the photo though and the b/w film gives it a classic look.



This resort also happens to have a golf course. I don't golf, but this one offered some nice landscape photo ops, so I took advantage since I had my Speed Graphic with me. I splurged a little and used a sheet of my Portra 160 for this. I was pressing my luck a little with the chemicals I had. It was getting along in development cycles and there was some uneven development in some of the images, but this one came out pretty good. There isn't really anything exciting or earth-shattering in the composition, but it is a 'nice' pastoral kind of scene. It conveys the tranquility of the time we spent there (or at least the tranquility I wish we had experienced). Getting four families together under one roof for 'vacation' is a recipe for chaos, but there are still some quiet times and nice memories to be had and this photo hints at those.