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I want to thank you all for coming I see some familiar faces and that's that's always nice to see I want to thank being H Debra Jody Matt and Dave for asking me to come down I'm honored to be here on this particular day because Ansel Adams was definitely the major inspiration for my quest to do photography well and I am hope I hope I'm doing it well I started out as a still life photographer in New York City had a studio there for about 23 years and to me it was a fantastic way of learning the craft photography because in still life photography everything is at your disposal in terms of control lighting props whatever is in that shot you had everything to do with so that was a great foundation and I was able to bring that knowledge out into the field and I started doing my own black and white work I had run a studio for three or four years in Manhattan doing still-life and I said it's time for a vacation so I decided to go to New Zealand for a couple of months and shoot just black and white landscape so I took a crash course in Ansel Adams techniques on the plane a 22-hour flight 15 whatever it was was forever that's what we're going around the world again and again but it gave me time to read and it was a real turning point in my life to see how photographic expression could be so well done and that's what Ansel Adams was about he felt that in order to fully express yourself you have to approach photography with a certain level or a good level of craft just like a fine violinist you give them a crappy violin it's hard to make it sound good so craft in any art form to me I think is essential a good foundation craft and that's what Ansel Adams was all about in his own system there are different levels of practice in his own system I didn't get incredibly deep into it or carried away with it but I knew enough of it to allow me to produce a negative with detail in the highlights in detail in the shadows and that's what it was all about if you want to blow out the details creative reasons you can do that but if there's no detail there nothing including Photoshop a fantastic tool we'll put it there so craft to me was always important but it never didn't wanted it to get in the way of expression so I tried to keep that in balance the aesthetics in the craft so came back from New Zealand with a bunch of negatives or a bunch of rolls of film processed them and I was off and running shooting backlight landscape I was fortunate to have one of those pictures chosen for the cover of Communication Arts and that told me that this is something I really want to pursue in the commercial world so I got hired to do commercial assignments in black and white landscape which was wonderful that kind of coincided with the digital revolution and me wanting to move out of the city with my family now that I was doing landscape outdoor work there was no great need we need to have a studio in the city anymore so everything kind of coincided for me we moved to Pennsylvania where we live today and I enjoy coming into the city now more than I did when I was living here so it's it's open good I'm going to show three bodies of work the first one is just basic portfolio of personal images that I'm going to show you the before and afters which is something I always wanted to see in the few workshops I took they always showed final prints which are always stunning Bruce barnbaum John Sexton I took a workshop of Michael Kenna which was very fortunate to get in they all showed final prints and I was wondering what did this look like before you got to it nobody showed you no tip the before prints I have no hesitation to do that and that's what I'm going to show today and hopefully you'll learn how far you can go or how far you don't have to go with certain images you'll see a range of darkroom technique it's all done in Photoshop which I love it now allows me to do things I couldn't do in the darkroom I spent many many years in the darkroom and it was great always wanting to get really fine burns in the sky without interrupting the horizon and there's all kinds of elaborate ways of doing into the darkroom I didn't want to get involved with any of that but now Photoshop gives us too much control you know when do you stop that's that's one of the big problems with the software but it does allow you to do any thing you want to do with an image which i think is fantastic so we'll look at my personal body of work a group of images than the before and afters then I'll show you the power of Photoshop in a collection of images I'm doing for a collector of landscape photography in northern Africa from the from the 1900s and it's a restoration project and the original prints are in terrible shape but they're of great value in the collector wanted them scanned reworked in Photoshop and then prints pristine prints made for exhibition and sets of these principles three or four children which is a wonderful project be involved with and it's really great for me to be able to show you this because I've never been taken Photoshop for the level I've taken it restoring this group of images also help hope you enjoyed it I have five prints for my personal collection here they're printed on Hanna Mule photo rag 308 gram paper which is my paper of choice for a matte paper why Hanna mule is making paper since 300 BC they've been around a long time and it's an extraordinarily beautiful paper and the paper matches the mat board that I've used for many years for my exhibitions and it's important for me to have that consistency of matte color and print color for me let's see a paper it's it's a photo rag 308 this is the paper yeah this is a matte surface they make a photo rag Purita ba ry ta which is the semi gloss surface which if you guys are familiar with the Ilford multi grade paper it's like the same texture really nice and it has pretty much the same color as this so I can use the same matte board with either the semi-gloss paper or this matte paper so it's all as a consistency photo rag Morita ba ryt a no the one you use best photo rag 308 gram hanim you'll photo rag right now that's rising white re is ing white it's a standard white it's not they're super white because that's too white okay sometimes clients of mine wanna this is just a slightly warm white which I like if I want a pure white Epson makes an exhibition fiber which is a stunning paper and they're hot press bright is the matte version of that so that if you want a gloss in a very white paper look at Epson they're exhibition fiber and they're hot press bright okay yeah do you like this better than nobody engenders I haven't experimented with it but there are so many good papers yeah it's a beautiful paper I think my wife was grounded yeah um I want you guys to chime in with questions at any time okay we want to move along but I when you don't have a chance to answer to ask a question sometimes you lose your thought and if it's relevant to what I'm talking about I want you to ask it on the spot okay I have a couple of books here these were published through blurb and Deborah was telling me there's a another online on-demand book publisher that I should look into I forget the name of it yes yeah yeah sounds good i nee I need to compare it to blurb I did these a while going on about to print a new order but these are for sale forty bucks this cost me 100 bucks to produce it's the top of the line so I'd sell us for just over $100 to make a few bucks on it I know it's a lot of money but this is the same book in big and small version you guys should look at this just to see what you could do with online publishing it's really it's really a wonderful tool there's no better way to show a portfolio to a museum or gallery or anybody who's interested in you work than a little book that cost you $25 to make that's a deal okay what else hopefully you'll have you'll had a chance to take a look at these prints and you'll see the quality of the paper and how it matches the mat board and this is the classic presentation I know there's a lot of new ways of presenting work and galleries on plywood bleed and varnished and all this other stuff and it's all wonderful if it works for you this is the classic gallery presentation for a photography it's an over matte window mat that's corner mounted or just taped with linen tape to the top and this is a bevel cut with a little more room at the bottom for the signature okay it might not be appropriate for your work but whatever works for your just letting you know this has been the standard speaking of Ansel Adams this is the way he did it anybody whose work I really respect it presents their work this way okay I shoot the Hasselblad so my image is a square I still shoot film because I know it real well and they still make it I hope they keep making it film especially Tmax 100 enables me to shoot in super high contrast I love night photography and contrast is always an issue with to max 100 film I can develop that in a way to get all detail on the highlights and shadows no matter how dark the shadows are I'll just let that film expose a long time and I know how to process it to keep the highlights from getting too bright so I'm familiar with it that's why I shoot film I'll scan my film at very high resolution and then it's all digital from there and I love every step of the process again Photoshop is just a fantastic tool yeah I use pyro it's a two-part developer for other special development procedures I use d76 note Emacs RS developer for the special development alright let's look at some work that's the book cover this is a view from a covered bridge I like the scene outside the window and had my camera set up on the windowsill nice looking stream but I wanted something else so I backed up and what happened there was a natural frame the window in the side of the cover bridge so I included that it's really it's a nice level of interest to texture in the kind of frames the image I was originally interested in I like long exposures this might be a one or two second exposure so the water has motion to it this was really high contrast this was very deep in shadow and this was really bright in with film special development I'm able to get all the detail and again crafts this is craft it's knowing your tools these are rain slickers opens a big sliding barn door in California and the breeze blew in these rain slickers came to life and that's a probably a half second exposure it's kind of surreal they look like ghosts of spirits to me I love running across stuff like this you wonder how old this this card is you even see the nails protruding from the top in this one this was shot four by five with film the rectangular images are four by five whether the vertical horizontal the square images are all Hasselblad I love the serenity of this scene I was able to capture motion in the Ford in the horse's head in this tail the same time these are all adjusted tonally local Durning burning and dodging contrast adjustments and such when you see the before and after of this image it's going to be very telling how far you can go and how your original emotional reaction the reason why you took the picture with the help of Photoshop or darkroom work can bring back that vision because the film doesn't see what you felt and it's your job to bring that back in Photoshop or in the darkroom and this is one of the best examples of that expression and you'll see the before and after later on can any questions just let me know as we go through these the locations are on them so that's that's the question people usually ask first where is that what what is there what is a reasonable number for a limited edition and isn't it a reason is a limited edition is it mean like this is an 8 by 10 we have 25 of those I have 25 16 by 20s legally we're talking about limited editions you can limit you can have a limited edition of one print size and a new edition in a different print size okay a different paper also in different paper but what you run the risk of doing is getting the collectors of your work upset the more you get your work out there in terms of numbers the more they feel it devalues what they have so you kind of have to tread carefully when you start launching editions of the same image in different print sizes different techniques different processes following everybody got that okay yes the question is when you print a limited edition do you print them on demand I guess it's up to the photography if you have results you really like in the darkroom or whatever and you're ready to do 50 in one day do the 50 and your Edition is printed but I have a question for you what happens if next the next year or so you feel you'd like to interpret that image differently what do you do then you know one of the pitfalls of limiting your Editions my vision has changed on somebody the zipper not affect some of the stuff I'm going to show you a little while I'm going to be printing them differently I'm even going to be cropping them a little differently but if I printed limited editions my late my latest interpretation of my work would not be represented by the prints I'm selling because my Edition has been printed already so you could print them all at once in which case you run the risk of your vision changing and you not being happy with them anymore or you can print them on demand but if somebody saw an earlier print and you're printing it a new way they can say this is not what I expected so it's a can of worms so you have to be careful when you limit the your editions there are legal implications too when you limit editions I decided not to and I'm glad because I don't want anybody to tell me you can't sell any more of your prints that to me kind of offends me deep down inside I'd like to be able to sell my prints as long as I'm a especially if I'm interpreting them in different ways as I as I grow older okay if your interpretations are evolving mm-hmm howdy how do you record your technique on earlier interpretations or do you just evolve and not worry about I don't worry about it when I was in the darkroom I I would take notes I'd have different dodging tools and cutouts down to the distance that is to the paper when I'm doing it so that I would minimize that time in the darkroom nothing I like less than spending unnecessary time in the darkroom especially when I started having children you know knocking around the darkroom door and it's it's like after a while I'm so tired of working in the darkroom it was some of the best education I could have gotten but after a while it I'm glad I ran its course and I have a new tool in Photoshop so and answer your question when I interpret something differently now I'll rework it in Photoshop I'll go back to the original file the master 16-bit file rework it and then the work is done if I want to rework it again I just work from that master there's really not a need to take notes like I did when I was in the darkroom this is a one second exposure I was attracted to the receding waves you know I waited till the wave was up close and then one second the white water would just recede this was four by five and his sailboat came by just at the right time so sometimes it works yeah must have been sweet to be out there huh but I was fortunate to get up on a high bluff and see out onto the onto the sea I'm going to go a little quicker through these because the number of these are in the before and after us and we'll be able to talk more about what happened there did who saw Andrea's presentation about Ansel Adams I thought that was fantastic I was really really I loved every minute of it and she talked about how careful Ansel was where he put his tripod do you think I was careful about where my tripod was on this one yes we can see why right I mean you could easily go this is so beautiful plant your tripod and take the picture and then later on I say wow I could have gotten that tree right that sweet spot if I moved a foot to it you know so yeah where that tripod is is really important not only left or right here but I was on a big slope off the lake up and down made a difference - this is a five second exposure real high winds across the river it was blowing foam or whatever it is and they streaked very few very few times can i pre visualize an image in other words I know what that's going to look like when I print it because the type of subject matter I work with a lot of motion a lot of unpredictability I'm never really sure I know I like the scene and I'm hoping that what I do with it later elevates it even more and this is an example of beginning something that was a little unexpected this is a long exposure it's an abandoned outdoor pool which is surreal I just like this kind of stuff the clouds are streaking across the sky might have been a 15 minute exposure and I can I can do people say well how come you don't exposure over exposure film it's because I use neutral density filters in front of the lens to let that light creep in slowly some of my workshop students here have tried that technique on my workshops and it's always fun oh I don't remember I probably had a yellow filter for that long and exposure it could have been eight or so plus a yellow filter to deepen the blue in the sky and that adds to it also this is down in Biloxi Mississippi just a long exposure again streaking the sky the Gulf of Mexico just smoothed out all that wave action just becomes homogeneous tones of light which so it's nice about this I'm still working with time and light I'm not doing anything other than working with the tools photographers have always worked with I'm just changing the proportion very little light and a lot of time same tools just adjusted differently same thing here a long exposure from the building high-rise we used to live in this is one of the prints here this is probably I think it was a 16 minute exposure this is pure moonlight a big big bright moon on the metallic roofs of the upper of the barn Unisphere in Flushing Meadow Park you can see the geometry I was attracted to here that was with four by five that was easily a half hour at night I probably had the bat tilted a little to get good depth of field for view camera uses you'll know what I'm talking about I'll always try to shoot a backup negative yeah when I'm shooting four by five especially at night with long exposures and there was a there was a gang a gang over on this side they're like spray painting the walls of the Queens Museum and they were they were just drinking and stuff and I'm hiding in the bushes with my new camera so I think two negatives is as far as I wanted to go that night yeah I'm glad my car was parked nearby I just threw everything in the car and split but I always knew I wanted a photograph of this I just was waiting for the right conditions I'm so glad to have the displays on the side the image quality is really nice on those yeah sometimes I think you guys aren't paying attention now I see you're looking at the worse I'm sorry okay yeah it's better over there I should be pointing at these this this was a people sometimes ask me you often ask me what do you photograph and I was talking about this with somebody earlier I have no idea what I photograph but I do know one thing they all my photographs share in common is something intrigues me something pushes an emotional button and this was just a surreal foggy night somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania before I moved there if you're outside on a foggy night really humid night if there's a bright light and some of physical object is blocking that light you'll see a shadow shoot into the air you know what cause go by you'll see the dark shadows that's exactly what this is this is the shadow of a one inch wide metal strip in that light and the shadow actually goes through the air and comes down on the ground this one little one inch white piece of metal creates that and there's four of them there's one going out this way one going back one going to the left and it looks like an alien visitation of something I'm sure so it's just so surreal to me and I love the texture and the graphics on the ground so it'll worked that was four by five that was a long exposure to of course the state trooper pulls into the lot with his headlights on say no no anyone does one of them what I'm doing and I explained to him that basically friendly when they say you have no ulterior motives other than just photography that they're totally unfamiliar with people photographing at night he was totally into it this was out in Jones Beach it's like a moonscape you know how many people created these footprints during the day thousands of people were out there and now look at it I mean I love that that paradox the way the poles go one way the tracks go the other way so I never would I never know what I'm going to photograph here's more footprints up near my place I often wonder what happened here either was it not either was an argument whether or they decided to get married I'm not sure I'm sure which one but I love the way they go right across the the lake here that looks like soft spot I'm not sure if they made it this is Daytona Beach you can drive on the beach so they have traffic control signs on the beach and the water was coming in and going out coming so I did a long exposure not knowing what to expect but I love the surreal feeling of just time and light that's Jones Beach again that's behind me when I was shooting the other one with the footprints and the white posts this was 180 degrees right behind me Ansel often said when you're done photographing what you're photographing look behind you and I took his advice that night maybe else this is New Zealand this is a 90 second exposure crashing waves breaking waves and it all just gets this beautiful homogeneous tunnel tonal range going on that's pretty much an instantaneous exposure which is not common for me it's just a quick exposure that's not a bad guess most if it's bright enough yeah I have to cut the light now some are standard exposures just like this one I just love the mystery of got a point of this one the peaking trees in the background it adds a veil of mystery and intrigue to me I love fog especially at night no no it's probably spring foliage with a lot of light coming through them to the leaves this is in West Virginia no if I had a house in Italy that would be yet but you'll see what I did to this one there's a before and after of this that's the cover of the book and this is one shot this is the barbed wire in front of the tall grasses and the sunrise coming up behind the tree and that's an instinct that's not a long exposure that's just what I saw I like the mailbox and when the pickup came by it just kind of completed the composition this is up in Canada it's a float on this pristine Lake it's kind of surreal it's like a door you can almost open to another dimension that's in Italy and that's also framing diagonals down put me tell me about how you think about framing diagonals down don't justify and I don't think about it you know I even I know they're there I love diagonal it's a very strong line a graphic element and I just innately balance stuff out I know if that answers your question but I'm not conscious of it being anywhere then I then I feel like it should be there I hope that's a fair answer to your question I think that's the collection of that now we'll look at some before and afters okay the first image you'll see is a straight image now the second one is the final and then you'll see them side by side okay so I love this abandoned quarry these print these delicate grasses coming out of this rock-hard environment and I can still hear the frogs echoing off the walls but I wanted these grasses to stand out more okay now there's two ways of doing it you can darken the grasses or who wants to take a guess at what the alternative approach to making those grasses stand out morning well you guys are great not seriously just lighting what's around them okay now it simplifies it it communicates what I wanted it to what's the name of that future abandoned quarry thank you I just made that up no no no I'm okay that's the name of it that's them I thank you that in your I think so but you know you you guys got that and it surprises people that you can darken something by lightning what's near it and that is such a powerful tool in darkroom work how many times I don't have to touch the thing I want to appear darker or lighter I just adjust what's around it it's relative everything in life is relative you also darken the greatest I might have but I didn't have to darken it much you know maybe tweaked it up a little bit right the major problem was this it just kind of muddies everything a film scanner dedicated film scanner and then I have an emic on film scanner 8:48 scanner which is a pretty good one but I'll also send stuff to California for drum scans which are even minutely better so if we want to get picky I'll send out for the drum skin and spend the money but I've been doing a lot of my own scans and I'm really really happy with them this is in Italy one thing Ansel did John Sexton does and other people whose work ever they go for a lower contrast and I'm talking film this is even probably true in the digital world I don't know if you can control it digitally but to go with a slightly lower contrast original so you know you have detail throughout and it's always easy to bump up the contrast when you're working on the image you go in the other way is often a problem if you have too much contrast to begin with you might have lost detail to begin with it okay so you'll see lower contrast originals and the final will be bumped up in contrast you'll treat you'll pretty much see that in general now I can walk into the I can walk into the scene now one light was out so I did restore it in Photoshop I didn't have a light bulb with me that matched that socket this is called birdhouse condos I got to tell you this story while I was taking the picture the old gent I was on the road I wasn't on his property comes out of his house and these old guys from the country loved to talk and I love to talk to them too he comes out he says taking a picture of the birdhouse as I see it I said yeah I guess you made him and he said yep every one of them and I hear this buzzing humming sound and I don't know I can't account for it and I'm saying what is that humming sound I hear you said you see that box on the end there I said yeah you guys know it huh no no you're getting close I said well what's going on here says well that's connected to a wire to all my birdhouses squirrel control is is that something there was like a few fried squirrels and not Molly kid there wasn't but they have solutions to their problems I thought though it's not just one of the things I love about getting out there and photographing you hear these stories that's the after I forgot I was doing it before and after here so you can see the difference I wanted these birdhouses to stand out the light tones kind of compete and I just wanted a gentle tonality so that they really really stand out also these are uncropped you'll see with the actual edge of the film is and these are appear a little larger only because they're cropped and I tried to match the size you won't see much of a difference here this is four by five camera okay and that's after you see slight enhancement in here when I worked in the darkroom the only way to lighten these you can't do it with a little wand right preventing the light from hitting the paper the only way you can do that is bleaching which I hated you actually apply bleach to the wet print after it's printed and gently apply the bleach to areas you want lighter you got to make sure it doesn't affect any of the part it was nightmare so now I can do the same thing in Photoshop how how easily right so that's all I wanted to do is bump up the trail of the water never no adjustment layers is what I do almost everything in curves levels first curves and so I teach all the stuff in my workshop I have a what I call a boot camp approach to workshop very lean I use maybe four percent of what workshop of what Photoshop does mainly with adjustment layers if you're going to take anything home regarding Photoshop from this seminar is adjustment layers they don't destroy your image they're editable anytime you want and you can always you don't destroy your image if you use a dodge and burn tool or any other tool you're affecting image data that you're going to you're going to lose you won't lose it with adjustment layers because they're all separate layers and they take a very little room in the file okay not just the curves adjustment layer and there's automatically uh it automatically produces a selection when you do that that's after you see the difference the blossoms I accentuated brightened darken the foreground a little bit so you have a feeling of going into it this is going to take a while today what we have two hours in okay you'll see a before and after all this is the before and after we this is New Zealand you saw the finished print before I wanted up consistent foundation tonally for this image so that's what I did this volcanic saw sand is really something it's like silica glass in the sand itself and it's really shiny a high contrast burn will keep all those brights bright a lower contrast burn will deaden the whites that's not what I wanted right here's a horsey friend yeah that's true in this one this one I had to do some actual cobbles I this a masonry repaid the masonry tool in Photoshop I had to fit a somebody poured cement in here or something I don't know what happened but a company wanted to use this so I had to fix this area so you can see I replicated with the cobblestone and that was a big job this was a balancing act I felt I wanted a symmetry tonally left to right and I didn't sense it I felt this should be brighter and I felt this was like a fairly dead area so I took the liberty of playing with it and you see the difference I'm a Libra I guess the little balance balance there you go helps put me always trying to get into balance oh yeah and that's achieved in a number of ways okay also I use the litter tool in Photoshop there's a lot of stuff on me Photoshop has a lot of tools you don't know about cleaned it up and also the fog ended kind of abruptly i smoothed it out and I extended the rails you know I was able to sense the rails here but you couldn't see it in so the sky was all there was low and no skies are usually too bright I wanted it square to match the other work I was showing with it so that's the difference see how distracting this is I burned that way down I couldn't get closer to this in New Zealand I was a fence knowing I wanted to crop into it which I did I just like the geometry of that go back I can go back okay now I'm looking at this this has a softness I kind of like I don't know if it's because it's reduced in size so next time I print this I might revisit this and maybe print this a little softer I don't know you know I it's okay if it evolves over time you know it's it's called artistic expression which can change okay here we go this is a good example of feeling something and not getting it in the negative this was full of sunlight that were blowing around in the Sun and it doesn't translate you know I didn't I don't really see what I felt and there's a lot of distracting tones all these light tones distracted me from this being the center of interest so knowing that this is the center of interest I had to downplay the bottom make it less important and make this more important okay in the darkroom that would have been real tough but in Photoshop it's easy what did I do I reduce the contrast I darkened the lights enlighten the docks here I made I made this a lower contrast area you see the difference and I highlighted all the individual Tufts they were light already but I pushed them in photo shop with a curves adjustment layer now where's the importance it's full of light it's it reaiiy feel like the way I felt when I took the picture and that's what it's all about getting that at that emotional reaction back here's another example I love you know this why I drew this is up in the Bronx somewhere up in here I forget word was north of City Island and the way this fire hydrant is in this beautiful pastoral setting of leaves and grasses you don't see them there often but I knew this needed some balancing out to do I like the way this stands out and I knew I wanted to get some more of that going on that's talking about balance now I feel like I can move around there without getting stuck in one spot and brightening the back made it feel like there was a big bright background back there so a part of this was pre visual with pre-visualization I knew I wanted to brighten certain leaves but I didn't know I'd want the background brighter just kind of evolves as I'm working on it I felt an imbalance here right I wanted to bridge the standout there's a number of ways of interpreting this one now this one again skies are usually too blown out that's been the classic problem in landscape photography you got to darken the skies they were mechanical flaws and development the film that would have been tough to fix in the darkroom with bleach I wouldn't want to have to do that but this is a dramatic interpretation which I like there was a kid selling fish at the end of this pier here so I set up the photograph which was his sign so he came up to me and said what's up - I said I'm photographing I guess it's your sign he said yeah I said I really liked it and I says you want to buy some fish he's selling raw fish I'm travelling on assignment for Kodak I said well if I had a barbecue to cook him on right now I'd consider it but I'm travelling in a car so I knew the kid wanted to make a few bucks so I said you want to sell me your sign so I said yeah I can make another one tonight so I gave him 10 bucks a night so I still have the sign in my garage good I know an idea when you're going to run across stuff like this this is the Golden Gate Bridge I took this pre 9/11 if you try to take this picture these days I was laying down on the sidewalk with a 4x5 camera with the on the side with the cloth over my head and nobody stopped me you probably can't get on that bridge with a point-and-shoot now but I love the tower for obvious reasons it's an incredible design deco and I shot eight negatives of this us me how many yeah clouds were moving so yeah I don't bracket for exposure I bracket for motion okay that's another good reason to know technique okay Ansel never bracketed for exposure he shot a backup sheet of film and if he was shooting motion he'd probably shoot a couple of sheets and that's what I do the clouds were in different positions in this one it was pointing right to a hole in the sky that's my interpretation you know some of you guys might not agree with it but that's beside the point it's just showing you what the possibilities are in my interpretation of what I'd like it to be yeah now I take a little digital snap shooter but I use a Hasselblad and I have a second Hasselblad body which is like a little view camera hold the Flex body that I can tilt the back and adjust the depth of field view the plane to the depth field which is really good for lots of stuff I do so that I do have a backup camera and I travel with four lenses and Polaroid back I still shoot instant film to preview sometimes so 40 60 100 and 180 and then thirty five-millimeter that those sizes don't match that's different okay okay big change Yeah right this was the first photograph I took in black and white when I was still in high school down in Florida so it has emotional meaning to me that a pretty cool what's that bird called crane crane Egret the same family he flew back and forth I'd approached him this way he'd fly over the waves and come back the other way I'd approach you to go back down three or four times and I finally I got close enough to him and I liked where the water was in relation to his legs wires there were subtle clouds in the sky and I wanted these to come out more so like in the other shot with the post and those grasses with the sunlight I was talking about I needed to emphasize this and D emphasize other areas okay see the tones in the sky I darken this so that these feel brighter now right and I like that information in the sky I introduced the gradation in the sky and I needed that reflected in the water so I introduced the same gradation in the water okay it gives a little more depth and dimension this is the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art I was teaching a workshop at ICP and I brought my students into the park and it was like raining ivy that's what I just like raining he was coming down everything was covered in ivy it was it was kind of amazing and the sunlight was just glancing across the back of the museum so it's full of light to me that's what I felt and that's my interpretation I filled the tree with light this is Lake Pontchartrain and Louisiana here's an image on liking this old cropping this is what I did with it but I might revisit this and get it maybe closer to that I've been playing with the idea of maybe revisiting that but you can see what I did here it's obvious right the fountain summer in South Carolina you can see low contrast the high contrast fairly consistently here's our basketball setting what's so much better on those I should have one of those up here right hey Peter he's got it yeah yeah yeah I came up I there was too much area I like this parking lot line closer to the edge of the frame so I intentionally cropped up higher this is Monterey Bay I felt this was distracting so I just boarded down totally I felt this boom arm was distracting now you'll see the barn move because one of the negatives I can't find so I just scanned one that was close to it and the skies like real similar so you can see the difference between there that's a major major change that's somewhere in Normandy in France the small change on this one just feathered down a little bit totally darkened it a little bit trying to contain it I'm looking up through a frond Sun lights on the other side I just love the geometry a little bit yeah in general you'll see a contrast Buddhist lines and this one also this is a rock formation next to a river somewhere in Alberta Canada there were hundreds of these pockets with little stones in the my biggest task was to find the one I wanted to photograph this was a the longest exposure I did during the days 45 minutes I remember 13 stops at nd on the camera I had a lounge chair in a book that's part of my toolkit yeah but what you'll see in the after all the tones are they're just a matter of darkening and lightening to bring them out I intentionally darken this because I wanted to count the center of illumination to be here there's those rain slickers and cropped the felt this was distracting on unnecessary I needed more information it was all there but it was just kind of washed out okay this is a small town in Italy I taught a workshop in in most most of the young people leave the towns to go to college or you know there's not much of them to do in these small towns when they reach a certain age so the seniors are the ones that are left and they go shopping at the bottom of the hill and the carrying the bags up the hill so they have rest stops you'll see the old lady's just sitting there with their with their grocery bags and then he continued but I like the the light here and I felt I wanted to give it the feeling of Wilda more light up here and subduing everything else it's a pretty big change a little bit of a change that's New Zealand little areas like in here want to make sure all the little tones appear this is somewhere in along the Mediterranean coast of Italy it's just sand I don't know how Daisy's grown sand I don't okay but you can see my objective here I wanted the daisies to stand out I wanted this little richer and contrast here this is a sandstone formation in Utah might as well be Mars but these wave these things are like is thinnest and thinner than a dime how delicate that you could just snap them and the lights coming over the top of this Sun the Sun is over there it's bouncing off a canyon wall on the left and bouncing back in it's like the strangest lighting situation but I love the form delightful little grouping of seedlings growing through this moss makes do the difference kind of subdued the back a little bit and brought out the front balance the nettle I wanted to concentrate on this little tree here what do you think I did who wants to take a crack at this the little tree doctor for ground or ground decreased contrast top in let's see there you go right I also felt a little dead area here I just brighten this little area now I see this I'm forcing the viewer to see what I want them to see okay you can do it totally just with tones this was total preview pre victim I can't say that word you know what I'm talking about thank you every time I need to say can you help I knew what I wanted I knew I wanted all this visible this beautiful spiraling centers of the youngest part of this leaf in here a frond and I knew I wanted this balanced out later on okay it's silver I feel silver thank you very much thank you you see you see this area up here again maybe it's the Liebherr in me I wanted dark corners to kind of like flank the two leaves coming out on the side so you see what I did just all four corners have a the lower level is darker so that the upper leaves stand out more big change here you see that I almost reversed it from light to dark to dark to light there's another good example of course I wanted the cobweb to be emphasized tonally although this is nice I felt it was pulling the eye away all that little contrasts contrast is what's going to pull your eye no matter where it is bright bright against dark dark is going to command your eyes attention okay so I had to downplay this and I needed to uh play this it's all tonal changes there's nothing else going on there and I didn't go in each individual strand here you know the way it's just a matter of picking the right contrast level and an adjustment layer and brushing it in and it'll affect only certain tones if you set the curve up right all right but you can see it's more subdued in here I like left some of the highlights but its downplayed so that the cobweb has a chance to stand out more not somebody dropped that look this is my best-selling image this is a Lake Michigan I thought I wanted a big sky in this image ended up I cropped it differently in the end there were major problems there are flaws in the negative because the negative the filter inside the camera buckle that's a long story anyway I had these defects and the negative I used to try to correct these in the darkroom before I work digitally and it was I might have gotten two fairly good prints out of it my whole life was a nightmare nightmare and was my best selling image I had to find a solution for this in the digital world Camelot and I did it in a couple hours I shot two negatives of this on one of them this line does not appear what created this as a wave broke over this hump of sand and wet the sand into that sensuous line I have that on one negative and it was the good one because the other negative had moved during the exposure that's a double image and I'm so glad that that wave happened on the good negative but this is a long exposure the clouds you know just windy windy day moving across the sky this is a New Zealand tide pool rock kind of who knows who Jerry oldsman is not quite Gary Oldman but some people think the rock is like floating it again classic problem you got to burn this guy down the little stray vine in there which I like this is in Italy I softened everything else so that that stands out this is New Zealand long exposure these breakers rolling in okay again increase in contrast from the original to the final this is a suited point main it's part of a Katy National Park this is the center of interest without a doubt now see this competed for it did really eyes didn't go to the the important area and this is all sea foam that after ninety seconds it just kind of has that Taff and there's an island out here on the horizon which was kind of serendipitous that's a night shot it's actually three trees I like this kind of ambiguity it it's actually three trees that look like one that's the after you see I'll take I have no hesitant headed sittin see about taking great liberties with tones I'll darken the ground as much as I want to to me it's still believable and that's what's important to me as long as it's believable something could've easily created this shadow so as long as this within that realm it works for me yeah yeah this is on the Columbia River kind of strange but I liked it when I was working on this image my middle son who was five at the time looks over my shoulder and he says daddy where is that log going yeah hey looks like it's okay all the tones are there they're just beefing up the contrast brings them out more it's easy and satisfying to build up contrast it's very difficult to backpedal with contrast to get where you want to go it'll always feel like it's not enough contrast if you have to reduce it psychologically it's much easy to beef up the contrast all right you creep up to it there's one problem I see consistently with students work is that printing too heavily to contrasting maybe they all have cataracts but that was part of the last talk to remember that who was here for that yeah that makes sense right the cataract will would reduce the contrast and make you want to print heavier and that's exactly what was happening to Ansel Adams Ansel Adams printed darker and darker later late in his career and I asked Andrea about it and she said well that's the reason why I stopped working for him I said what she had to finally comment once that these prints are getting so dark and he got angry with her for the first time so I'm the artist I know what I'm doing and he finally after that relented and started asking other people's opinion about whether the prints of too dark he finally got checked by a good eye doctor and they found that he had cataracts which was totally affecting the way he saw his work this is a dramatic change this is also a good selling image the light was coming in from all over I just beefed up wherever it was coming in again small changing this one you just see look at the mid right it stands out just a little more no subtle change right and I did the opposite in the foreground here I actually increase the contrast to give it more interest compared to some of the other images where I downplay the contrast for a very very particular reason yeah it's a little richer a little more more informative with more detail up there is the straight image of the Unisphere you can see the way I can made the shadows more continuous I lightened up in here because I wanted all this filigree branch branch work to to appear yeah exactly this is in Venice some people shoot gondolas eyes--you old industrial ships which is yellow in contrast that was compared to the original this is a night shot and all this detail is retained even in the highlights which is a really contrasting situation but shooting film and the particular kind of development I'm able to get all that information and this is a major change okay in the difference so this is a series of photographs the prints are either about nine by ten and a half or about eleven by 22 panoramix and they're from the early 1900's by professional photographers and it's called Orientalist is the tradition of photography it's landscape photography of north and africa and their landscapes their shots of the culture and I'm sure the photographers posed people but they're doing what these people do but he posed them so that he got nice balanced compositions this is the before I'll go to the after and I don't think this is side by side on these but but you'll see the difference animals and this is designed to show you capable as a Photoshop I mean for a retoucher to do this pre Photoshop I don't I don't know how they'd fix this kind of stuff all right and I'm able to output images with as much detail as the originals because we had really high quality scans and watching the detail in the high and the low end all through Photoshop I'm able to print it with that same Amit you could argue the details enhanced because a slight bit of sharpening makes it feel even more detailed okay what's that reasons its northern Africa trying to think forward begins with an a what country in northern Africa begins with a Algeria Algeria yep it's just turn-of-the-century early early 1900s yeah that's the after and these are laid perfectly on top of windows so you can see the difference that's before and after you can see eternal change on the side of course the mechanical flaws have to be taken out yep my objective was to retain as much integrity in the image as possible interpret as little as possible there are certain parts parts of certain images which are gone whereas a landscape photographer I'm taking the liberty of saying well this is probably what was there or this might be what the landscape photographer wanted to see there somebody's got to make these decisions to restore them so you'll see in ones that are severely damaged I actually had to go much further and interpret what was probably there this is not one of those in each one they're flat because they're aged there's a levels adjustment which increases the contrast again without losing detail right and this is the color of the original prints they're kind of reddish yellowish you can see major problem up in there I find this work enjoyable too it's it's real challenge but I find it a lot of fun I'm happy to have a project like this it's beautiful isn't it and we're outputting prints of these of that are pretty bad they're going to be pretty impressive there were glass plates yeah who knows where they are now there were deal with contact printers so the glass plates will either 9 but 9 by 11 and a half or 12 by 22 there were real photographers back there let me tell you Karen but can you imagine carrying a long glass plate like that to the desert and they processed them out there and a camel huh on a camel right this one was tough there are areas that I can't regain what was there because the data is so damaged that I had to recreate some footsteps these were not that difficult you often along the edges it's faded or discolored and the edges often need work is that from the original plate fading or is that that's the print that's probably faded yeah it's my guess you see the tower something happened in the tower see the difference Algeria downtown I'll do yes look at the camels reflection his heads up there but you see his clear reflection there this is one of the women of the night the old deal the only ones that could afford to weigh that kind of jewelry yes she's smoking yeah who knows what this was this was two days of work you see the staining that was a major major job an area like this had to be replicated and brought down continuously again and again and again and then to avoid the feeling of repetition each had to be brushed in and out and adjusted so it was a continuous part of the dune which was a lot of work here's another one this was this was a nightmare too um as far as the purpose they were taken they were sold as greeting cards believe it or not in shops but they were shot on these large glass plates and I don't know if they were exhibited back then or what the collector has most of the history on this and I'm sewing you know engulfed in the restoration of it I'm not really up on the all the history of the of the of the collection itself you see the cloud is actually gone up here as is most of this this here was major whoops the none of this was usable I couldn't clean this up so I actually had to duplicate this flop it and bring it down this was a major interpret not interpretive change but a logical way of dealing with this you know you can see the difference this is a little bit of work also see all the fading with discoloration up in here is actually a mountain range back here that's hard to see another ridge of mountains but it's there not too much on that one just mainly contrast range but the photographer dealt with a really high contrast situation here and he's got detail all over they knew their craft glass plates aren't they wonderful thoroughly enjoyed working in them because they did them so well the compositions the tonal range is all there was it was very sad fun but that's really really well composed that's a professional yeah I think so I think there was a he had a hand in putting people where he wanted them but you know still they're exhibiting their cultures and their customs or whatever they were doing but he just did it in a visually pleasing way any idea lightly exposure times you see people who see some motions so they you know couple could have been a half second or second or so Oh more what me could have been yeah but I know some of them he must oppose but like I agree some of these he probably just were grabbed shots but you know this was a view camera how do you do a grab shot with a view camera come to think of it you set up and wait yeah this was really major to this I couldn't use any I couldn't just lighten this and keep what was there there was really nothing there to work with so I had to actually restore that this was not a major change that is just so rich with information I'll look at that there's detail way down in the shadows here these are all two working girls again we get the eyes on this one she's totally mystifying so this has been fun it's 70 images in the collection I did about 23 of them and so it's an ongoing it's an ongoing process thank you thank you for more information please visit us online give us a call or stop by our new york city superstore you can also connect with us on the web