Roman Food. Roman Chef.

     The morning market at the Campo di Fiori, Rome, Italy.  


The man in the image above was/is one of the partners who owned a wonderful, little restaurant in Rome called, al Grappolo d' Oro.  If rumor is to be believed, it was at a table there that the famous song, "Volare" was written.  I was led to the restaurant on the recommendation of a native Roman back in 1985 or 1986 and I've returned for a meal on every trip since.  When my friend, Paul, and I shot in Rome in 1995 we ate there twice in one week. And that's says volumes in a "food city" like Rome.   I haven't been in a few years so I can't vouch for much now but I will always remember how fun it was to watch Carlo arrive at the Campo di Fiori market one day and carefully hand select the produce his restaurant would serve later that day.

He was, of course, a regular of the market and knew everyone there by name.

I was walking around the small piazzo with a Mamiya Six in hand.  I recognized him from one of my recent visits to his restaurant.  I took two frames and then walked off to see new things.  I ate at his restaurant again that night.

Walking through the markets in old towns is really nice.  There's a comfortable rhythm that feels organic and right.  The good ones dispay food with style but without too much flash.  I'm hungry.  I think I'll wander into the house and see what's for dinner.

These are medium format color negatives that were scanned at low res with an Epson V500 Photo.  With a little practice it does a good job with color negatives and even black and white negatives.  The images were taken with a Mamiya Six medium format camera and its normal, 75mm lens.  The images are nothing special to anyone but me.  I remember now the cool breeze of a cloudy day, the smell of the fresh fish and the vivid red of the strawberries like the day I took the images.

An Afternoon at the Theater with the Nikon V1.

I was supposed to shoot a dress rehearsal for an incredible musical, last Tues. night.  I had to call in sick.  We missed the chance to do a dress rehearsal shoot during a rehearsal.  Tues. was the last night without an audience in the house.  So, today I attended the afternoon matinee and sat in a seat that sits a little bit away from surrounding seats, on the side of the center section.  I wasn't able to move around the stage the way I usually do but we really needed the marketing images so this was our option.

Not wanting to distract my fellow show-goers I opted to use the Nikon V1.  I turned off the backscreen, put a little smack of black tape over the green status light and set the shutter to its electronic setting.  Once I turned off the sound, that camera was ultra-stealthy.  Silent.  Small (compared to my 5d2 or 1DSx) and unobtrusive.  I brought all three of the civilian lenses but I shot exclusively with the 30-110.

These are mostly shot at ISO 3200, out of necessity, and are SOOC Jpegs.  Shot in Jpeg.

Just put here as a real world thing.  Take em or leave em.

Sometimes we just take a photograph because it feels right.

The intersection of my dining room 

wall and the floor.  

We love to talk about gear so much it's easy to forget how important it is, every once in a while, to just put down the test chart mindset and look around at the world.  I was under the weather last week so when I got bored I puttered around the house and looked at what the insides looked like in the middle of the day.   I like the way the reflections from the sun on the tiles cast cool swirls into the middle tone shadows on the wall.  But I also liked the strong shadows on either side.  

Deep, Rich Color.

    Chair at Marti's in the Mercado, San Antonio. Cloudy day.  Panasonic GH2.  

"THE SQUARE IS EVERYTHING !!!" Wait, that's not what I said......

Even in moments of quiet reading I am still haunted by the square.

I thought, and Michael Johnston thought, that I'd written a pretty clear and straightforward article for his "The Online Photographer" web magazine, yesterday.  If you haven't read it, here's a synopsis:

In the film days photographers had many different aspect ratios to choose from.  When digital destroyed film camera making we had most of our choices removed.  We were mostly relegated to shooting with a 3:2 ratio in professional, 35mm style cameras, and a 4:3 ratio in "amateur" or "point and shoot" cameras.  I made the argument that it's hard for some people to compose in formats they don't enjoy and, I expressed happiness and relief that electronic viewfinders have allowed camera makers to bring back the choice of seeing, framing and shooting in multiple image ratios.  I also professed my personal attraction to the square, or 1:1 ratio while calling on people to experiment and find the ratio that was right for them.

Most people got the basic ideas just fine and either agreed or disagreed.  But there were two camps that mystified me.  And one of the camps highlighted to me how differently people's brains are wired from mine.

One group must have read too quickly or, perhaps had been multi-tasking at the time, but they came away with the idea that the whole of the article was a fierce defense of the square and a damnation of every other combination of geometric borders.  Even though calm and patient editor, Mr. Johnston, posted several comments reminding them that the whole point of the article was, "Freedom of Aspect Ratio Choice."

But the group that disturbed me, and perhaps only because their thoughts seemed industrial, analytic, mathematical and process oriented while mine are not, was the camp that insisted that the whole idea that a camera need have a set aspect ratio was "absurd".   I, we, everyone, should be able to look at a scene, figure out exactly what the future use of the image will be, capture it with sufficient space around it and then unerringly crop it just so in post production.  Done, neat, finished.  No muss, no fuss.

I imagine their universe is one of tight order and high cleanliness. Every decision perfunctory and binary.

I can't imagine that people don't understand the friction and momentum that tools create in a creative process.  No matter what format camera you select there are two forces at work.  One is the way you like to compose (your inertia) and the other is the implicit idea, perhaps very sub-conscious for some but not for others, that perhaps you should take the boundaries of the supplied finder into consideration as you try to decide what to include and what to leave out. (There must be a reason they made the finder this way.  Right?).  Even if you are a square guy and you know you want to crop square in the end, having to include more areas than you want, wrapped in  configurations you're not comfortable with, means having to constantly choose and evaluate more parameters than you need.  It's all wrapped up in the tyranny of choice.

I think artists (and we'll entertain the conceit that photographers count too...) establish formalist restrictions for themselves in order to cut down on an infinite number of choices, to remove paralysis, to help them get started.  An amorphous or "hostile" frame is one that pushes on a photographer an infinite number of choices by dint of having to "float" some intended, future composition, unanchored in a framework that doesn't conform to character of the artist's intention.  It's a fight from the start.  The choice of a camera with a friendly aspect ratio helps one concentrate on timing and what to include.  The form has already been chosen.  It's like making a mathematical equation less complex.  Less time consuming.  Removing variables helps us narrow down with greater speed and certainty.  Then again, it could just be the way my brain works and everyone is wired differently.  

I don't care if you like or don't like squares but I don't understand why people think their choice of tools is meaningless to the empowerment of their best vision.  

I had a funny thought, just now.  People talked about cropping to the subject matter.  But in all the years and years that people experimented and made art with Polaroid SX-70 images I never saw examples of cropped ones.  Never.  Nor have I seen Holga or Diana images cropped.  What to make of that?  

Just a few thoughts after reading the paper and drinking coffe on a bright, Sunday morning.

A nod to the square.

Kitchen Cabinets in the afternoon sun.

Panasonic GH2+Olympus PEN FT 40mm 1.4 lens, ISO 160 or 320,  Daylight white balance.  Manual Exposure. Manual Focus. Handheld.

The Week in Review. Chaos.

Wow.  What a week.  I started getting really sick on Sunday and by Weds. had descended into a bleak underworld of doom and gloom so depressing (as expressed in my column) that world renowned photographers (I had no idea they were even reading my blog) sent me private e-mails asking if I was okay.  I was touched.  And, while the meds my doctor gave me Tues. afternoon have been progressively effective it wasn't quick enough to prevent the staff at VSL from gleefully pushing me out of the way (under the pretense of encouraging me to rest) to make room for that annoyingly gleeful, Charlie Martini to come in and do his mischief, yesterday. 

You know you're really ill if even your collection of original Nick Fury and the Agents of SHIELD comic books doesn't bring you back into balanced contentment.

I know some of you were worried so I though I'd give you an overall update.  I'm back to 92.5% of my usual self and recovering on a geometric trajectory.  I might even make it back to swim practice in the morning, tomorrow.

The world of photography is not imploding.  Everything will be fine.  They just stopped serving the buffets during the shoot.  You know, like in the good old days.  With the iced filled bowls the size of larger beauty dishes, packed high with freshly boiled and peeled jumbo shrimp and the elegant plates with the careful stacks of black caviar grains.  Back when they served Champagne to the cast and crews instead of this cheap Prosecco we're getting now...  But it will all be okay and we'll all adjust.  Just cast that net a little wider and toss it a little harder.

I'm taking tomorrow off from blogging here but sent a scintillating article to Michael Johnston for his blog: the online photographer, that should run tomorrow.  That's providing, of course, that it passes his rigorous editing and high standards.

I know today that it's not the fever so I know I'm really trembling with anticipation as the first copies of our new book:  LED Lighting are being rushed to Amazon.com and other vendors across the United States.  The book has a cover price of $34.95.  The Amazon price is currently so low I don't even want to show it here but it's certainly less than the price of many lunches I've had.  And not really incredible lunches either. 

I can't really think of any big launches or products that hit this week and there's nothing much that I think we all need to run out and buy.  Next week I'm planning to write a bunch of short articles about specific uses of the LED panels and I think that should be fun.  I've used them for all of my assignments so far this year and I'm kinda thinking that I'll persevere through the year just for the hell of it.   I just found out that I paid my lab bill twice last month so now I have enough credit to run through another 20 rolls of MF tri-x.  If you see me out with the Hasselblad and a smile, that's why. 

I'm turning the comments on.  I'm around.  Say hello.  Check in.  Be heard.