Shooting the Blues

A lot of the personal images I have been making during the past few of weeks have been of blues musicians.

I wouldn't call West Michigan a Mecca for the blues, but we have had some pretty good music around the last few years. Some of it local and a number of acts outside the area.








For quite a number of years now a local classic rock station has put on what they call "Blues on the Mall" in downtown Grand Rapids on Wednesdays.




I love the music but I really have a great time shooting people in the crowd. It is an eclectic group of folks to say the least.

The 4th of July

The 4th of July was a day of photography for me this year. I started in the morning shooting black and white film with my view camera and ended the day shooting fireworks at night.

I did spend a bit of time mowing the lawn in the afternoon. Then I went to Rockford MI, a small town a few miles east of my house. They had a blues band playing until just before the fire works started.

Here are a few shots of Cherri and the Violaters for you to look at.

Michigan's Upper Peninsula

Two weeks ago my wife, our youngest daughter and I traveled to the Upper Peninsula . It was mainly a family trip but I did manage to fit in some personal photography between the shopping expeditions and visits to the tourist traps.

CTS

My daughter Emily attends Chicago Theological Seminary. Like most grad students she works doing various things to make the rent each month.

One of the things she does is to work at school doing custodial kinds of things. She called me a while back and invited me down to photograph inside some of the interesting parts of the building.

" I have keys" was what she told me.

I asked my good friend Steve if he was interested in going along and he went with me. He brought a 4x5 and I brought a medium format camera plus we both brought DSLRs. I think we both got some interesting shots.

Thanks for the invite Em.

Flickr

Every now and again I look through the newest Flickr up loads. http://www.flickr.com/photos/

It always tells you how many images were uploaded in the last minute. This is what it said the last time I looked. (There were 4,974 uploads in the last minute)

I would call this a holy shit amount!

Most of the time I look it's anywere from 2000 to almost 6000 once and if I had to guess it is usually in the 3000 image range on average.

If you take 3000 x 60 minutes that gives you 180000 phots per hour. Damn.

Then if you take those 180000 image x 24 hours you'd get 4320000 image a day.

You can do the math if you want to for a week, a month or a year. It makes my head swim.

All I can say is who the hell is shooting all these pictures?

What do you shoot and what do you shoot it with?

I really like to listen to and read what Brooks Jensen has to say. Brooks Jensen is the publisher of Lens Work magazine and also has a pod cast that I find very interesting. I just finished reading the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Lens Work and it started me thinking.

What you shoot and what you shoot it with says a lot about you as a photographer. I should also say how you shoot what you shoot is also telling.

I shoot a diverse range of subjects.

I also shoot with a number of different cameras, formats, film, digital, etc. I love working in the studio for the control it gives me.

But when it comes right down to it I love to photograph old weathered wooden things with black and white film using large or medium format equipment.

I guess that says a few things about me.

You be the judge...

David Hume Kennerly

Last night I attended a talk given by David Hume Kennerly a former White House photographer about his new book of photographs taken during the Ford Administration.

It was very informitive and entertaining, he is a great speaker.


I even bought the book!

Projects

In my last post I put up some images from a near by grain elevator. When I showed some of the images to my wife and she thought a series of images of grain elevators might be interesting.

So a project was born.

I did some research on the net and compiled a list of nearby grain elevators. I have been to a lot of these places and don't ever recall seeing elevators in some of these places. I guess I just wasn't paying much attention.

I am generally not a project driven photographer, at least not consciously. Sure I am involved in photograpic projects at work or if I shoot stuff for other people, because these things are really project based.

But I am talking about my personal work. Most times I shoot with a subject or destination in mind, but not really as a project with a specific theme. It is very different to go out and create images for a definite reason and not shoot anything that doesn't relate to the project. That's not to say if the mother ship landed on 1st and Main while I was photographing for the project I would completely ignore it and not take an expsoure or two. I hear that The World Weekly News pays big time for those pictures.

I'm seeing big advantages in shooting with a project in mind. When I look through my older images of the same subject they sort of seem like they could be a project, but most times there is something missing that keeps that body of work from being a true project. When I do a project I'm forced to come up with some kind of a plan for what, when and where I'll shoot. It should make a more cohesive group of images that way.