Flat

I have a habit of using tires that I know are going to go flat. I had a tire/rim that was bent and was leaking air pretty badly. I put a can of Slime into the tire thinking that it might stop the leak. It didn't. I ended up trying to drive the truck on it's rim and bent it worse and cut up the tire's sidewall pretty bad. There was a three-inch cut in the sidewall, and no amount of slime would help. I had to fix it on Sunday. No biggie.

Mistake

Mackenzie Martin, one of my sophomores, printed this portrait of her 100-year old grandfather. It was printed on the wrong side of the printing paper and all of the inks ran together. I saw it and wanted to keep it. The ink has not dried, nor will it ever dry (well, it might in 50 years or so...), so I took a photograph of the print to preserve the character of the running ink. I really like this. I might actually do a series of images that are done like this.

Test

This is a photograph of Abigail I shot about 2 months ago. I needed an image that was a .psd file to show my 10th grade class how to flatten and save an image for the web. I figured I ought to at least post it to the blog. Here it is.

Shot with the Hassy, the 100mm lens, some Ilford film in my basement studio with a big softbox.

Bias

Journalism is officially dead.

I wonder why the Washington Post didn't see this trend and report on it several months ago.



And Matthews? He makes me wanna puke. First he gets a tingle up his leg over his candidate, admits it on national TV, then he cries over a speech. Ugh.



It's not surprizing that their outlets continue to perish. Their contributors are cancerous.

Redux

Redux:

/rɪˈdʌks/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ri-duhks]
–adjective
brought back; resurgent: the Victorian era redux.

Origin:
1650–60; < L: returning (as from war or exile), n. deriv. (with pass. sense) of redūcere to bring back; see reduce



Many people have been comparing the upcoming administration to what would have amounted to Jimmy Carter's Second Term. While searching the internet for portraits to use as examples in class, I stumbled upon this image taken by Richard Avedon. He photographed this while working on his last project - Democracy.

I think it is an eerie premonition that Avedon paired these two next to each other.

God help us all.

Love

On the eve of what is bound to be a stressful, anxiety filled election day, I have had this song stuck in my head. I found this video on YouTube and it made me smile.

Effects

My nieghbors wanted me to do something special for their Christmas Cards this year, so two separate families came over on Sunday afternoon for a photo session. Each member of each family dressed up as a Star Wars character and I shot individual shots for each of them. I am going to do a composite complete with special effects that will incorporate each of them into a grand battle out on the west desert of Utah.

I did a test tonight of knocking out a figure, adding a light-saber effect and dropping it into a background I'd shot during the summer. I also did a little reflection just to see how it would turn out.

Not perfect, but I'm pretty happy.

Capitol

I took four of my Junior AP photo students and my daughter up to the Utah State Capitol building to do a little view-camera mini-workshop. Each student is working with a Wista 4x5 and we're shooting paper negatives. I'm using a Toyo 8x10 field camera and doing the camera movement demos with it (it's easier to see how it works with the larger groundglass).

The students shot about 20 sheets of film today, and then each shot 2 sheets of 8x10. Even Abigail jumped under the darkcloth to check things out.

I had to make a little timelapse and set it to music.


Utah State Capitol and Waterford Photo Students from Michael Slade on Vimeo.

Carrots

We planted purple carrots this spring. Today I dug them up.

Zion

This is how you know you're in Zion.



Oh yeah, the shake was pretty good.

Photograph courtesy Pascal Schuback.