Yesterday morning I received my Private Pilot license at Cable airport in Upland.  It took 2 years for me to complete my training (mostly because the summers have kept me too busy to find time for flying), which was MUCH longer than I thought when I naively picked up the phone one day and called a random flight school.  You legally only need 40 hours of flight time to get your license.  I had 63.7.  If I could have done the training without huge breaks in-between flights, I probably could have done it in close to 40, but you build up rust pretty fast as a student pilot when you aren’t in the air for a couple months.

The examination was one of the more difficult things I’ve done in recent memory.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a proper “boss,” and there aren’t many people in my life that could make me feel 2 inches tall.  However, when you have just barely begun to master something, and you are asked to demonstrate it to someone who’s been literally doing it full time their entire adult life, you’re bound to feel like a putz.  That was me.  My examiner had been flying since 16, an airline captain (yes, full captain on a 737) since 30, and had over 22,000 hours of flight time.  It was the aviation equivalent of having Kelly Slater judge my surfing or having Neil Peart judge my drumming.

So while most of the exam went fine, my examiner pounced on any weaknesses he sensed, and drilled deep down like a festering cavity on a tooth.  Like water leaking into a boat through a small hole, he’d slowly start sinking the whole ship, a drop at a time, with questions that made me feel like 2 years of flying had prepared me no better than a casual glance through a magazine.  We spent 20 minutes discussing True Airspeed because I had used the wrong scale on my little flight computer.  I told him I understood the concept.  He defiantly stated “prove it.”  He wanted to make sure I actually knew, but mostly, he wanted to see me sweat.  He wanted to see whether I was the kind of person who would crack and give up, or who had enough confidence and resolve to keep going.  In the air, these things matter.

And that was before we even got into the damned plane.  The engine gave me a hard time when starting it.  He told me that what I was doing to get it going was “a good way to start an engine fire.”  We taxied to the runway, and while en-route I set some avionics.  He said that was “very dangerous.”  We took off and turned crosswind.  I didn’t apply enough rudder in the turn and he said it was “a good way to get the aircraft into a spin.”  By doing what I normally did, I had, apparently, nearly killed us three times before we had climbed 500 feet above the ground.  It went on, and on, and on.  Too fast.  Too slow.  Don’t turn that way.  Don’t read that checklist now.  Don’t use flaps.  Why are you slipping the airplane now?  About half of what I did brought strong words of consternation, and dire warnings of fiery crashes and dead family members.

But at the end of the day, it’s his job to evaluate my performance by the FAA’s standards, not his own, and after a nearly 5 hour exam, he shook my hand, gave me my license, shot a couple polaroids at my request, and sent me on my way.  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.  I was literally afraid that the next thing I did would be the thing that sent him running after me, saying “what the hell do you think you’re doing?!?”, and that he’d tear up my license and call me a cab.

I learned a lot yesterday – about flying, and about myself.  I’m certainly grateful that the examiner was hard on me, because it will make me a better pilot.  But I’ll also get a sinking feeling in my stomach every time I fly over Cable airport that I’m doing it all wrong, and that somewhere, an old grizzled pilot is watching me and shaking his head in dismay.

Glanced down at my desk and thought it made a nice little time capsule still life thing.  Baby monitor, post-its with development notes about the LR presets, a Hasselblad battery, more pages of notes, a sharpie, some CF cards, a lunchbox with homemade bourbon in it, a PS3 game that I still haven’t had time to sink my teeth into, a moleskine journal filled with ideas for shoots, a pocket knife, a 30″ Dell display with Lightroom open, a book on critical theory specific to photography, the ipod shuffle that I sometimes take surfing, and a flip video camera for documenting our growing boy at a moment’s notice.

I recently read a quote from the guy that heads up vehicle design at Ford, from a recent issue of Esquire, as I recall.  Paraphrasing: “If you look inside someone’s home, you’ll see who they are.  If you look at their car, you’ll see who they want to be.”  My desk, at a glance, gives you a pretty big clue as to what occupies my time nowadays (if my piano or surfboard fit on there, the picture would be near complete).  I wonder how true this rings for other people as well…

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.

All that is prologue, however, to actually SEEING what I’m talking about, so if you are still reading this far, go ahead and check out this little preview of what Dirty Pictures is all about (and apologies for the somewhat annoying mic popping…):

[See post to watch Flash video]

Update – It’s ALIVE! Head on over to Dirty Pictures at the Totally Rad Store and pick it up!

The best thing to happen to the Totally Rad Actions in nearly a year just went online at www.trarecipes.com.  We’ve showcased over 160 awesome ways to use the Totally Rad Actions (and counting!) with before and after examples, step-by-step recipes and instructions.  Browse recipes by the actions used, by genre, or by the action set required.  Vote on your favorites and discuss the recipes with your fellow rad photographers.  Whether you shoot portraits, weddings, landscapes, or fine art, you’ll find tons of inspiring examples for how to transform your images using the Totally Rad Actions.  Best of all, it’s 100% free!

Check it out at www.trarecipes.com!

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…