We have a few random items leftover from our Canon days.  When you’ve lived with a system for long enough, you start to forget where you’ve stashed all your gear :)  Chenin posted most of our old gear up for sale last month, but missed these things, which you can pick up from us here :)

• SOLD! 24-70mm f/2.8 L | $925 – Small scratch on the rear element.   Front is reasonably clean.  Missing front lens cap (I think… Chenin says she knows where it is, but I’ll believe it when I see it:).  Has hood and rear cap.  Normal exterior condition from 4+ years of regular use.  FWIW, I tested this lens last year against the Canon 24mm 1.4 L, 24mm T/S, 35mm 1.4 L, 28mm 1.8, and the Leica 35mm 1.4 (as  I recall) R-Mount, plus the 50mm 2.5 macro, 45mm T/S, and 24-105mm f/4 L.  I thought the 24-70 was good enough to skip the Canon and Leica primes and just use the 24-70 as a wide.  It’s pretty darned good.  Dunno if it was just our sample, or whether all 24-70s are this good, but our copy was great.
• SOLD! 50mm f/1.4 USM | $35 – AF is broken.  Just like all the other 50mm f/1.4’s we’ve owned.  Focuses manually just fine, and you can probably send it into Canon and get it fixed.  Front and rear caps plus lens hood (which, last I checked, you had to purchase separately, which is another rant entirely)  Glass is clean.   Optically, I think it’s the best 50mm in the Canon line once you stop down (the L beats it at wider apertures.)  At f/8-f/11, this was sharper than our 50mm f/1.2 L, at least in my reasonably controlled, subjective tests.  Don’t flame me for saying it.
• SOLD! 85mm f/1.8 | $275 – I always liked this lens better than the 85mm f/1.2 L (either version), because it focuses so much faster.  Sharp, light, quick.  It’s a good 85.  Comes with front and rear caps and the lens hood.  Wear marks on the front element from being tossed into camera bags over the years (reasonably minor, though).  Rear element’s clean.  If you were buying it from KEH, they’d call it Bargain condition.
• SOLD! 550EX flash | $250 – A bit scuffed on the exterior.  Works.
• SOLD! ST-E2 Wireless E-TTL Transmitter | $150 / $100 – We have two.  One is in missing the little red cover on the bottom part (it’s the one on the right in the picture below.)  As I recall, that doesn’t affect it’s ability to transmit a signal, but does mean that if you use it for focus assist, you get a bright white light instead of a muted red one.  I could be pulling that out my ass, but I think it’s accurate, based on what I remember.  I don’t have a Canon body around anymore to test it.  That one is $100.  The other one is complete, and comes with the original genuine synthetic leather case provided by the manufacturer.  It’s $150.
• SOLD! Off-Camera Shoe Cord 2 | $30 – Cord to let you use your flash off-camera while maintaining TTL metering.
• SOLD! Remote Switch RS-80N3 | $20 – Basically an electronic shutter release cable for Canon EOS cameras.
• SOLD! Canon Shutter Release Cable For Pocket Wizards | $30 – Allows you to trigger the shutter on your camera from a pocket wizard.  Great for remote camera setups, photo booths, self-portraits, etc, etc.

Add $10 for shipping to the lower 48 via UPS ground.

Most of the other things people had left behind didn’t fare as well.  They were preserved or decomposed in ways that were, at least to me, visually uninteresting.  Styrofoam and plastic just look like dirty, discarded versions of their pristine forms.  Clothes were more or less completely decomposed into masses of torn thread and dirt.  Electronics and machines just looked broken.  But the shoes!  The shoes had, like the juice of grapes in the hands of a master vinter, become wine, instead of vinegar or fertilizer.  They had aged beautifully, and often looked more poetic 10 years after being heaped into a pile than they ever did adorning someone’s feet.

Beautiful decay.  The tension between what something was created to look like, and what nature is incessantly transforming it into.  And the irony that something could become beautiful precisely because someone had so unceremoniously heaped it outside their condemned apartment building.

So I spent a whole day wandering through abandoned properties and snatching up all the shoes I could find.  I picked up some other odds and ends – a weathered paintbrush (above), a completely skinless baseball, a headless Barbie torso – but came home with literally a closet full of nasty old shoes.  And I’ve been working on shooting them, in my spare time, since early ‘09 (not that I’ve had much to devote).

I’m not a full-time photographer any more, but I also shot professionally long enough to have been completely spoiled when it comes to the technical side of making images.  I have a hard time going out and just making pictures, and just letting them be “okay.”  If I’m going to press the shutter down on a personal project, I want the result to be as good as I’m capable of making (within reason, I suppose).  So I started shooting this project on 8×10.  I want these prints, if and when they’re ever exhibited, to own some wallspace, because part of their charm is in the tiny details you can get lost in.  I like big prints, but I hate when I get close to them and they fall apart.  It’s a little disappointing.

But 8×10 is a bitch to work with.  I was tray-developing my own film, scanning and dusting it, and though I didn’t mind the process, per se, it just came to be that I didn’t have the time to work with it.  Again, this is spare-time personal work, and with an infant crawling around the house, that time has been severely squeezed.  So last month I finally sprang for a H3DII-39.  I had tested the Hassy earlier last year, and it was the first digital camera system I’ve ever used where I was just blown away by the quality.  Pixel peepers will say it’s as good at 4×5.  I’ll say it’s plain good enough for anything I plan on doing, and if it’s not, I can easily stitch.  For the stuff I’ve been doing, and the stuff I would do if I had more time, it’s a pretty ideal system.

All of these images were shot on the new Hassy over the last couple days.  The upside is that I have a direct digital capture, and once I press the shutter I can run upstairs and start working on the post-production.  I also have a more practical way to use several captures, with different lighting or focus distances, to extend dynamic range or depth of field.  For shot #3 in this post (the twisted boot with the zipper) I shot 9 frames, and used 5 in the final composite.  Doing that with 8×10 would mean that I could only do one shot per day, since that’s about all the film holders I have.  Losing camera movements sucks, but if it turns out to be a huge deal, I’ll just man up and buy the HTS 1.5 tilt-shift adapter.  It’s a nice camera system.

It’s been nice to shoot inanimate objects, on my own schedule, and I enjoy the challenge of composing, lighting, and printing something to give it presence on paper.  It’s hard.  I have a new respect for product photographers.  But I also miss having people in front of the lens.  It’s lonely shooting the things people leave behind.

Hopefully I have more time to finish this project and start some new ones in 2010, and hopefully some of these images finally find their way onto a gallery wall somewhere.  The web is a shitty place to view a photo.

Lost Sole #3

Lost Sole #5

Lost Sole #6

Lost Sole #4

Lost Sole #7

Just the images this time…

Lost Soles #2

Haven’t had much time to work on this over the last couple days, because I’ve been busy helping Chenin move her office.  Hopefully this weekend I’ll have more time to shoot, and things will start clicking again.

Edited later that day to add:

I’m never at a loss for amazement at how much detail an 8×10 negative holds… here’s a different lighting setup for the same shot, along with a 100% crop

Full Size

100% detail @ 1200 ppi

At 1200ppi, we’re not even really getting all that is there in the neg, but the full file size is already 12000px on the long end, so it just seems overkill to take up HDD space with anything higher res.  This scan will go 30″x40″ without even breaking a sweat.  In fact, you could stick your nose in that 30×40 and still see tons of detail.

I’m still working out some of the technical details for how to shoot this stuff.  I had a semi-alcohol inspired moment a couple weeks ago that resulted in me basically stealing all the shoes I could find from the Salton Sea and bringing them home in my Element.  Chenin told me to just make sure I was washing my hands regularly.  Without droning on about how I feel about the artistic merit of the project, let me just say that it’s a lot more work to shoot a sheet of film than to make a .CR2 file on a CF card, but I think it’s worth it.  It takes 3600 watt-seconds of light to light up this little shoe to get enough DOF on an 8×10, and I could really still use more.  At f/40 or so, plus losing 1.5-2 stops to the bellows, it takes a helluva lot of light, even with camera movements, to get everything reasonably in focus.  Working with a questionably reconditioned Deardorff, a Fujinon W 250mm f.6.7 lens, and Delta 100 souped in HC-110 at 1:63 in the spare bathroom, then scanned on the new Epson 750.  The few prints I’ve made look pretty killer.  It’s one of those times where the web really doesn’t do it justice at all.

Anyway, now that I’ve got most of the technical stuff figured out, I’ll probably just be posting pics.  I just had a pixel-peeping geek-out moment, though, and had to share.  Even if this stuff never ends up being printed for anyone but me, I’ve still GOT to get a jumbo print made…

Mark's 2nd Time Getting Stuck In Mud In As Many Weeks

Unstuck

You can see the old crane we photographed in the upper right of the image.  Worth the risk to drive out there, but damn it was a close call almost getting stuck in the middle of nowhere with evening approaching.  Making pictures at the Salton Sea can be a dicey proposition.  Maybe I’ll eventually get a real 4WD vehicle…

In the process of getting here and there, we managed to get both a flat tire, AND get stuck in the mud at Bombay Beach.  I had the bright idea to drive out onto the shores of the Salton Sea to get closer to an old crane that had been partially submerged on previous visits.  I figured that my Honda Element had AWD, and we had gotten lucky a couple times previously… but it had been one time too many, it seems, as we ended up spinning our tires in the mud near the flooded shores of Bombay Beach.  Thankfully, we were able to get it unstuck with a combination of digging the tires out, letting out some air, putting some boards under the wheels, and having me push from the back.  I love my Honda Element!

On this trip, we managed to find a way into the abandoned Salton Sea Naval Auxiliary Air Station and Test Base.  Took some doing, even after some extensive research on Google Earth, but it was worth the hassle, I think.  A couple buildings were still standing from the WWII-era naval base, plus the remains of the old seaplane launch ramp, the faint outline of the old runway, and a couple of concrete-reinforced bunkers.

Inside The Bunker

Salton Sea Naval Auxiliary Air Station

Beachfront Property

Lit Street

After exploring the remains of the old Navy base for several hours, it was onward to the far South side of the Salton Sea, where we encountered this fallen tree on the way to a ruined dock.

Recoiling

Changing Hut

School's Out

Unfinished Construction

I still feel like there so much more to see and photograph at the Salton Sea.  It will take several more full days of shooting for me to feel like I’m finished shooting all the weird and wonderful things out there.  I love the way shooting these twisted forms with daylight flash casts a strange, artificial light, and the weird things I find out in the high desert make a perfect subject.

save

save

Still so much to discover… I was driving along a nameless road, toward the old Salton Sea Naval Air Station, which is where they tested the casing for the A-Bomb back in the 40s.  Not sure if there’s anything there to photograph anymore, except some ruined foundations and the remnants of an airstrip, but I thought I’d go see anyway.  Unfortunately, the road was completely covered by sand dunes about 4 miles from the main highway.  I took a couple of them in my Honda Element, but stopped short of a monster 15-foot-high pile of sand lying right across the road… technically the Element is AWD, but with the stock tires and no one there to bail me out, I thought better of taking the gamble… another adventure for another day, I guess…

Right before that dune sat this burned out truck.  Not sure how it ended up there, but there it was.  Still not sure if I like this picture more, or the one looking the other way where you can see the dune.

Stranded

Also found some other new stuff to photograph, and revisited some old…

Save The Sea

Salton Sea Yacht Club (sic)

Sundial

Pants

Sidewinder Golf Course

Sea View

Use Boat Ramp At Your Own Risk

And finally, a little homage to Christopher Griffith – wasn’t thinking of this when I casually snapped the pic, but it works as a treatment for the photo, I think.  Christopher Griffith is a badass, and if you haven’t seen his book States, then you really are missing out.  One of my favorite photo books of all time.  He has a new one out, too, which I have yet to pick up.  Anyway…

Cut Off

Next time, I’m bringing a map…

save

save

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

I was a photo student at the time, and had never really embarked on a trip more than a few miles from home in pursuit of pictures, so when Tim and I got to talking about the wacky stuff he’d heard of at the Salton Sea, I jumped on the idea.  We met at 3am one morning after a long night at the restaurant, and drove the long 3 hours down I-10 to the shores of the Salton Sea.  To a student photographer, looking for anything interesting to put in front of the lens, it was like Christmas and my birthday rolled into one.  We explored both the north and south shores, hitting up the abandoned resort at North Shore and the tracts of collapsing mobile homes at Salton Sea Beach, finally making it all the way to the farm fields on the east side at sundown.  By the time we made it to the flooded waterfront at Bombay Beach, it was night, and after shooting a few long exposures on my Mamiya Super 23, we packed it up and headed home.

For a kid from Orange County, where the shiny veneer of newness is inescapable, and beige stucco boxes pass for architecture, having something dirty and old to photograph was enticing.  The quasi-ghosttowns that lined the Salton Sea’s polluted shores, strewn with the remnants of broken dreams and failed cities, were fascinating both as an art and archaeology.  Hastily abandoned homes, still full of personal posessions and debris, posed a giant question mark that, to me, seemed to loom as large as the ones over Pompeii or an old Inca ruin.  I couldn’t help but think of the Salton Sea as some parallel universe, which gave us a glimpse of what Los Angeles or Palm Springs would have looked like if something had gone terribly wrong at some critical juncture.  On paper, the Salton Sea had most of the ingredients of a thriving resort, except that the only things that had ever taken root there were some ramshackle buildings and a whole bunch of mobile homes.  How we got from its optimistic beginnings, to the state is was in when I first visited in 1999, was a bit of a mystery.

Over the last decade, I’ve been out to the Salton Sea with a camera at least every couple of years.  Each time I discover something new and strange – some new piece of the puzzle, or fastinating, out of place artifact: a playground half-buried in salt, a boat beached among the bushes, or a line of power poles leading through water to nowhere.  Each one provides some evidence of civilization’s struggle against the body of water it created by accident, of the losing battle people have been waging since the 1950s to make their plans work.

It’s also a photographic journey that has consumed way too much of my time and attention, but also one that I’ve approached way too casually.  It’s always been a day trip with a friend, just to show them around and snap some photos.  I’ve never set out to create a serious body of work around the Sea, and never really committed to doing anything but take the occasional photo here and there.  So now I’m going to do just that, and then hopefully I can feel like I’ve shot all there is to shoot there, and I can move on.  After all, it’s a big world, and even I am starting to remind myself of the professor in Art School Confidential, played by John Malkovich, who paints nothing but triangles (great movie, by the way).

All that’s required is a little commitment, so a few weeks ago I decided that I’d head out there at least once a week until I’m done shooting it.  Last Monday, I spent the first of several days shooting the Salton Sea, and hopefully they’ll end with a collection of photos that don’t suck, and I can be done.

Abandoned Home and Tree

Tire Dump

Pink Stove

Power Poles To Nowhere

Our Place Saloon

Burned Out Double Wide

Salty Bones

Tree Boat

SS Valentino Towing

Sea View

I was hoping for clouds, but I’ll live with clear skies.  The idea behind lighting everything was to make it look a little more artificial, and therefore surreal.  The goal is to give a somewhat slick treatment to very imperfect things… to shoot ugly things in a pretty way, if you will.  The abundance of fill light also helps to create a somewhat ambiguous environment, making the time of day and some of the other literal specifics of the scene a little more obscure.  I wanted to make this stuff look like it could have been shot in a studio or a soundstage… not literally like a set for a movie, but I wanted it all to betray a subtle sense that the scene had been manipulated, or at least a little sterilized, visually.

Learned a lot from this shoot, and hopefully I’ll be back at it next week, marching toward some sense of closure on a body of work that began back in art school.