In the Summer of 1993, the USS Guam (LPH-9) was invited to join the festivities in Boston, MA, for the 4th of July. Continue reading
Boston
31 Monday Aug 2009
Posted Environments, Favorite, Friends, People, Urban
in31 Monday Aug 2009
Posted Environments, Favorite, Friends, People, Urban
inIn the Summer of 1993, the USS Guam (LPH-9) was invited to join the festivities in Boston, MA, for the 4th of July. Continue reading
28 Friday Aug 2009
Posted Environments, Natural, People
inI was 20 and in Basic Electronics and Electrical School at the Naval Training Center in Orlando, FL. There was a Recruit Training Command on the base that was the only Basic Training for women in the Navy at the time. We were all really just a bunch of kids, most of us away from home for the very first time. I was lonely and young with time and money and I met a girl at church just like me. Continue reading
19 Wednesday Aug 2009
There are people you work with, and you build a sort of a friendship with them because you’re all together in the same place all day. But these kinds of friends don’t always mean that you have anything more than a good working relationship. Rodney is purposely different from that.
Rodney is just something that’s really hard to quantify. He’s one of those unpredictable things that will do or say just about anything just to be the one that said or did it, and lots of times it’s something really strange, or sick, or just plain inexplicable. I guess that that’s some kind of charm, but it never fails to make you want to turn around and walk away without saying anything. From a lot of people, myself included, that would usually turn people off; but with Rodney it just sort of makes you like and respect him more.
The secret to Rodney is that he isn’t really what he sounds or acts like. No matter how outrageous, you are always aware of his deep-rooted sense of integrity and you can almost feel the struggle to free himself from something long ago and that kind of earns him the right to be much freer than the people around him. I strive to be like that, to break free from the bonds of expectation and to always speak freely and to be known honestly, but I haven’t managed to master it the way Rodney has. He’s definitely something different.
17 Monday Aug 2009
Posted Environments, Natural, People, Strangers
inI don’t get out to many places. With the price of gas and the terrible traffic conditions here, I just don’t seem to be able to motivate myself to get out. Thus, apart from some of my co-workers at the office or my wife at home or at whatever restaurant or shopping mall we happen to be at, I very rarely get any other subjects or settings. One of the few exceptions that is also something of a cliche in my photography is the beach. We live about 20 minutes from the shore near Seal Beach, CA, and we go out there from time to time and I make some photos.
16 Sunday Aug 2009
Posted People
inMy mother lives in an assisted-living home on the outskirts of Los Angeles. My dad’s gone now and my mom has a lot of medical conditions that make it where she really can’t live on her own. It’s a really messed up situation, because we don’t like that she can’t live in her own house, the house she built with my father and where he spent his final days with her. It wasn’t any kind of easy decision, but she is better than she’s been in a very very long time.
One of the hardest things about her situation is that she’s still a relatively young woman to be in one of these places. She’s only 60-years old. Just last week we joined her and the rest of the ladies (it’s a ladies only home) for the 96th birthday celebration of her roommate. She’s surrounded by old, tired, sometimes mentally unstable women. My mom can’t be alone, but she’s a very alert and very alive individual. It’s that part that makes it so hard to haveĀ to have her living there.
At the same time, the place makes me think of my own old age to come. I look at these old women, quietly passing the hours with nothing but some aides and each other to keep them company. Family comes and goes but never for long enough. I don’t even manage to make more than a weekly trip of a couple of hours to see my own mom. Sometimes some of the ladies go without a visit for weeks on end. I begin to wonder if that is all that we all have to look forward to. I begin to wonder if you just go as hard and as far as you can to just get to a day where all you can do is just wait for the inevitable to take you. I see my mother, so young compared to all these women and I feel such guilt that she’s stuck watching them wait out the end that won’t come for a long long time for her. And then, when one of those women does pass from this world to the next, I hurt for her loss – as if losing my father and being made to live away from her home wasn’t already enough, now she has to watch the people she spends every lonely day with leave her as well.
I pray my end either comes early or quickly or both if this is all there is to look forward to.
14 Friday Aug 2009
Posted Environments, Family, Favorite, Natural, People
inI intended to fill the week here posting photos from the disposable Quickshot cameras from the dollar store. Unfortunately for my plan I don’t have anymore really good images from the Quickshots to share. But, to stay on the topic of 35mm film, I am presenting here another of my restoration efforts with old family photos. This time I have an undated photo of my mother at a park made by my father.
While I don’t remember the details surrounding this photo, I do remember that when it was processed my mother jokingly chided my dad for capturing an image of her yawning. My dad liked to catch her in natural, unposed, and sometimes awkward moments. This particularly infuriated my mom because these were the days when all photos were processed at some kind of lab and the lab workers would see everything you photographed. My dad would have many of his pictures developed at a local Fotomat.
If you’re not old enough, or didn’t live in an area with a Fotomat, these were little drive-thru shacks in shopping mall parking lots where you would drop off your film and have it developed. Fotomat provided next-day service, a real advantage in the days before photo-processing machines that get your photo to you in an hour. The service was convenient, processing was good, and the shacks were popular for developing snapshots. I have actually seen many of the old shacks still in various lots often re-purposed as other kinds of drive-thru businesses like coffee on-the-go places. But, I still remember riding with my father to either drop off a roll or pick up some prints, paying close attention to the receipt that told us what time the finished prints would be ready on the pickup day. And I remember my mother’s agitation over what might be in the prints envelope this time.
You can find out more about Fotomats here.
The restoration process for this photo included a scan from the original print as the negative is not available to me at this time. Then I did a basic auto color adjustment in Photoshop followed by an extensive clean up with the various healing tools to remove dust and other garbage from the image. The paper the photo is printed on has a screen embossing all over which comes through when scanned giving the image a sort of moire look. I did a pass with Noise Ninja in Photoshop that seems to have reduced it a fair amount, then I applied a very careful high-pass soft light layer for sharpening while trying not to re-introduce the screening. I corrected levels, vibrance, and saturation, and then I used a layer mask and a re-balanced levels layer to reduce the darkness in the shadows over my mom’s face and right arm. Lastly, a slight crop after a subtle vignette was applied before saving to JPEG and posting.
13 Thursday Aug 2009
Continuing with the Quickshot photos, this shot is from the same session as the image of Naomi I posted a couple of days ago.
This time around, the image has received no post-processing whatsoever. This is the scan directly from the negative without any retouching or color correction. In all fairness, I would have wanted to do a basic color correction as scanners can sometimes be inaccurate in that respect. This way, however, you can truly see and come to appreciate all the characteristics that make these cameras such a fascinating tool.
I have to say that I wish my Holga 135 would perform like this. The ability to do really low-fidelity imagery with the added convenience of a re-loadable camera would make for a very convenient tool. And, of course, there is the added benefit of being able to shoot 24 exposures instead of just 15 per total roll would be nice as well.
12 Wednesday Aug 2009
I want to break away from the Quickshot photos to present a special project I’m working on. This is a military portrait of my father, Emilio Ramirez Espinosa, Jr., taken when he was in the US Army.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the standard photo taken of all service members during the latter part of their basic training. I recall him telling me that he was wearing his working fatigues under the jacket, shirt, and tie. This would have made him the rank of Private and the year 1962 as he was 17 when he enlisted (with a special permission written for him by my grandparents).
I do not have the original photo in my possession. The original is badly damaged and the only copy I have is a photographic copy (made by taking a photo of the original photo) that I scanned and have presented here on the left. On the right, quite clearly, is the current state of the restoration that I have done in Photoshop. While some of the damage is still discernible in the restoration and the levels are a bit too heavy on the blacks, the current state is by far a great improvement over the print that is currently the only copy of this image in my hands. I plan to continue working on this image until I am satisfied with it, but this is the first time that I have felt that I have a copy worthy of sharing. My goal is to restore the print substantially so that it can be printed on proper photographic paper at a print lab and then to frame it to present it to my mother.
11 Tuesday Aug 2009
Posted Environments, Friends, People, Urban
inThis example of photography with the Quickshot camera from the 99-cent store underwent a much more rigorous edit versus the other two examples I’ve presented here. To begin with, I used a lens correction filter to fix some serious lens distortion. The little plastic lens on these cameras really bends the edges of the image when you are shooting in close quarters like in the space imaged here. Secondly, I cropped the image as the camera is very difficult to sight properly and is mostly a trial-and-error guesstimation at best. There is no focus adjustment, so you guess at a suggested focal distance of 4 to 10 feet with serious blurring at the edges of the image and a very narrow depth of field. I adjusted the colors to be truer to reality, but they aren’t really that bad to begin with, mostly a bit faded. In this image, I first did a high-pass and soft light layer to sharpen things up followed by a pass with a quality noise filter to clear up some of the grain.
In the end, this image doesn’t really reflect the true output from the camera. However, the generally abysmal quality of the film and the camera still really manage to show themselves in spite of the re-touching and editing.
In this photo is Candace. You can see her elsewhere on the site in a much better digital photo from this same afternoon. That image should also give you a better idea of how much the Quickshot “ruins” the shot (“ruining” being a very very good thing here).
10 Monday Aug 2009
Posted Environments, Friends, Natural, People, Urban
inContinuing with the Quickshot project, this is a photo of the much-featured Naomi.
This time around, I did some minor post-processing to the scan from the original negative. It was minimal, but it did a lot for the picture. First, I sharpened the image with a high-pass filter and soft light layer. Second, I re-balanced the colors with a simple auto-color pass. Lastly, I created a simple vignette with a soft light black layer. I think it makes the photo look more like it’s “supposed” to and reveals the expressive potential in these silly little cameras.
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