Sean Duggan Blog

The Gears

The Gears [ZeroImage 6x9 Pinhole camera]
October 10, 2008  Snake River Canyon, Southwest Idaho
(click in the image for a larger version)

This is a new image from my ongoing series Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin. It was made nearly two months ago when my brother and I made a trip to southwest Idaho. You can see a photo of the camera in action taking this image in a previous post (the gears are in place in that photo, but the camera is blocking the view of them). As I mentioned in that other post, I had first envisioned this location, an area where I had spent a fair amount of time in my youth,  as a "stage set" for one of my Artifacts photographs a few months before I knew that a family trip would take me here. It was creatively quite satisfying to be able to make the pilgrimage to this special place and finally create the image that I had imagined (though I envisioned this particular view of the landscape, I had not decided on the gears as the main players in the tableau until shortly before leaving for Idaho) .

Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin 2009 calendar

View the Artifacts gallery (though this image has not yet been added)

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Coming January & February in Sacramento, California:

Photoshop for Photographers I: The Basics
January 17 - 18, 2009
More information about this class

Photoshop for Photographers II: Beyond the Basics
February 7 - 8, 2009
More information about this class

Coming this February in southern New Mexico

The Art of the Photographic Collage
Mesilla Digital Imaging Workshops – Mesilla, New Mexico
February 19 - 22, 2009
More information about this class

New Calendar for 2009

(Click in the image for a larger version)

This is the third year that I have put together a calendar featuring my photographs. The previous two years featured photographs from Diana and Holga toy cameras. For 2009 I decided to gather together twelve of my favorites from the ongoing series Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin. These photographs are not digital collages, but are full frame views from a wooden pinhole camera with no viewfinder.

I have been working on this series since August of 2006 and as I write this I have 24 images in the group with ideas for several more. I cannot say when I will be finished, as the creative muse still speaks to me through this channel. And when the creative muse is ringing your doorbell, it's always a good idea to keep inviting her in!

You can find more information, including an ordering link and a preview gallery of all twelve calendar images by following this link.

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Next Workshops

Monterey Workshop in Mid December

It's looking likely that there will be a workshop held in Monterey, California in mid December. This has not been officially scheduled yet, but when it is, I will post it here and on my main web site Workshops Schedule. The class title and dates are:

Photoshop Essentials for Photographers
December 13 - 14, 2008

Sacramento Workshops in January & February

My first workshops of 2009 will be held at the Viewpoint Photographic Art Center in Sacramento, California. They will cover two levels of Photoshop for Photographers. Here are the pertinent details:

Photoshop for Photographers: The Basics
January 17 - 18, 2009
More information about this class

Photoshop for Photographers: Beyond the Basics
February 7 - 8, 2009
More information about this class

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Newsletter News

The November issue of my newsletter was sent out last night. The next newsletter should go out in mid December.

Zero Visits the Canyon

ZeroImage Pinhole Camera on Location [Canon 5D]
Snake River Canyon, Southwest Idaho  Oct. 10, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

Taken last Friday at the Snake River canyon in southwest Idaho. Some months prior to this visit, I had envisioned this particular landscape, one that played a significant role in my younger years, as a location for an image in the Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin series of pinhole photographs. When a family visit took me up to Idaho last week, it was a great opportunity to realize the image I had imagined (the artifact is not visible in this shot of the camera in action). The atmosphere cooperated with cool, dramatic weather (and cool it was, too; quite chilly on the edge of the canyon and the clouds alternated between rain and snow flurries).

This is a blend of color and black and white interpretations of the original raw file. For those interested, I'll be teaching a workshop in early November on techniques for making the most of your black and white photography. See the link below for all the details.

Creative Digital Black and White
Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging
November 3 – 7, 2008
Los Osos, California

And Coming Up This Weekend...

Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop CS3
Viewpoint Photographic Art Center, Sacramento, California
October 18 - 19. 2008

At the Island's Edge

Waikiki 26  [ZeroImage Pinhole Camera]
Honolulu, Hawai'i   April 17, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

Waikiki Beach,
a ZeroImage pinhole camera,
loaded with Kodacolor II negative film that expired in 1983.
Exposure time: Approximately 30 seconds
More details.

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Newsletter

The June issue of my free newsletter, Creative Digital Darkroom News, will be coming out sometime towards the end of next week. You can sign up using the subscription form on the left, or on the newsletter page on my web site.

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Upcoming Workshops

My next major workshop takes place in mid-August along the New England coast at the world renown Maine Photographic Workshops. Real World Digital Photography I is the perfect class if you want to get a jump start on truly understanding the controls on your digital SLR, learning good exposure technique, shooting in raw, special exposure situations and making the most of your exposures back in the digital darkroom using Lightroom and Photoshop CS3. Click the class title to learn more about this class. A second level version of this class will be offered at the Maine Photographic Workshops Oct 5-11.

I checked the enrollment for the August RWDP 1 class yesterday and it already has several people signed up, which  is a good sign this early on. So, if you're interested in taking this class, don't wait until the last minute to sign up!

Also coming up this September in northern California:

Creative Camera Raw
Sept 20, 21 Berkeley, California

Secrets of the Mask: Selections & Masking in Photoshop CS3
Sept. 26, 27  Santa Cruz, California

25 Years of Darkness, 30 Seconds of Light

Waikiki 22 [ZeroImage Pinhole Camera]
Honolulu, Hawai'i  April 16, 2008
(click in the image for a larger view)

Here's another photo from the Waikiki series. Photographed with a wooden pinhole camera using Kodacolor II film that expired 25 years ago (and I have no idea how it was stored for that time). The exposure time was approximately 30 seconds. See the previous post for additional information on this series.

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Upcoming Workshops

My next major workshop takes place in mid-August along the New England coast at the world renown Maine Photographic Workshops. Real World Digital Photography I is the perfect class if you want to get a jump start on truly understanding the controls on your digital SLR, learning good exposure technique, shooting in raw, special exposure situations and making the most of your exposures back in the digital darkroom using Lightroom and Photoshop CS3. Click the class title to learn more about this class. A second level version of this class will be offered at the Maine Photographic Workshops Oct 5-11.

I checked the enrollment for the August RWDP 1 class yesterday and it already has several people signed up, which  is a good sign this early on. So, if you're interested in taking this class, don't wait until the last minute to sign up!

Also coming up this September in northern California:

Creative Camera Raw
Sept 20, 21 Berkeley, California

Secrets of the Mask: Selections & Masking in Photoshop CS3
Sept. 26, 27  Santa Cruz, California

30 Seconds with 25 Year Old Film

Waikiki 19  [ZeroImage Pinhole Camera]
Honolulu, Hawai'i  April 16, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

Last year I traded some expired film with photographer Brett Harrington. Although most of my images are created with a digital SLR, I still use medium format film in a variety of pinhole cameras, as well as plastic "toy cameras" such as the Diana and the Holga.

So, I sent Brett three rolls of medium format black and white infrared film that had expired in the early 1990s and he sent me three rolls of medium format Kodacolor II that had expired in early 1983, making them 25 years out of date!

I hung onto these three rolls for over a year. Most of the time they stayed in my film cabinet, but they also accompanied me on trips to Hawaii, Maine (twice), New Mexico, San Francisco, and other locations in California. It was not until a second trip to Hawaii a month ago, however, that I finally used the film. I chose to expose it in my ZeroImage pinhole camera since that wonderfully low-tech, low-fidelity method of image making seemed a good fit for film that was a quarter century past its sell by date. When film is long expired, it tends to "slow" down quite a bit, meaning it loses some of its sensitivity to light. Plus, I had no idea how it had been stored during the passing years. To compensate for this expected loss in sensitivity, I rated the normally 100 ISO film at 25. This loss of film speed was another factor that made me shoot the rolls in Hawaii: lots of bright daylight. But even with plenty of light, my shortest exposure times in the bright sun were still 30 seconds. Under overcast skies, or for images of darker subjects, the exposure times stretched out to 45 seconds to over a minute.

There was a 1-hour photo lab a couple of blocks from the beach, so I was able to shoot one roll and then inspect the negatives to see how my exposure calculations were faring. I was pleased to see that they were right on and I was getting good density in the negs. This freed me up to use the remaining two rolls with confidence that my exposure times were good. Given the dominance of digital in the consumer photography market today, I was somewhat surprised to find that 1-hour lab, but I'm glad it was there!

Over the course of three days I shot the three rolls of 25 year old film on and around Waikiki Beach and I've been very pleased with the results. As you can see from the image above, the "ancient" film yielded very good photographs. The shots taken in the shade or under overcast skies had a distinct cyan/blue color cast, but the ones taken in full, bright sunlight required remarkably little in the way of Photoshop color correction. And there are some images where the slight color cast is actually an interesting part of the photo. I will be posting a few of the shots here in the next several days and the entire short series of about twenty images will appear in the Galleries section of my web site sometime time in the next few weeks.

Now, these images may raise the question of why I shoot with pinhole cameras, or why I would even waste my time on long expired film that many people would just toss out. Both fair questions, which I will address here in the near future. But the (very) short answer is...the Possibilities.

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Upcoming Workshops

My next major workshop takes place in mid-August along the New England coast at the world renown Maine Photographic Workshops. Real World Digital Photography I is the perfect class if you want to get a jump start on truly understanding the controls on your digital SLR, learning good exposure technique, shooting in raw, special exposure situations and making the most of your exposures back in the digital darkroom using Lightroom and Photoshop CS3. Click the class title to learn more about this class. A second level version of this class will be offered at the Maine Photographic Workshops Oct 5-11.

Also coming up this September in northern California:

Creative Camera Raw
Sept 20, 21 Berkeley, California

Secrets of the Mask: Selections & Masking in Photoshop CS3
Sept. 26, 27  Santa Cruz, California

The Clocks

The Clocks  [pinhole photograph]
January 31, 2008
(click in the image for a larger version)

This was taken in a snow storm a little over a week ago (see the previous post). It is part of an on-going series of pinhole photographs I am working on called Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin. I do not have the entire series (15 images at the moment) posted in one place, but you can view several of them in the Pinhole section of this blog. The previous six posts are all from this series, too. I am in the midst of redesigning my main web site and the full series will be posted there once I get that done (hopefully in another week).

The Journey of the Clocks
I purchased these clocks at a garage sale in Maine in late June 2007 and I first photographed them for this series on July 1st at the base of a cliff. They were on rocks and the incoming tide swirled around them.

But I was never really pleased with those photos because I could not get the camera close enough to the clocks. One of the pleasures and compositional strengths of a wide angle pinhole camera is the fact that you can place objects very close to the pinhole to create some interesting foreground/background relationships. In the photos by the sea the clocks were just a bit too far away for my tastes.

So, I brought them back home to California (along with the old letters and the ledger) and put them on a shelf in my studio and waited until the muse would speak to me again. In the week of snow we had at the end of January, the muse rang me up and the clocks went for another journey into the forest around my home. Close to water once again, but this time frozen water in the form of snow. And I finally got the image that I had in my mind's eye when I first worked with them along the rocky Maine coast. Of course, I didn't imagine the snowy setting, but this is the general positioning of the clocks that I was thinking of. The wintry landscape is just an unexpected bonus.

Sometimes, you have to wait for a good photo. Even it is one that you set up, like this arranged still life in nature. For this image, I waited 7 months, but it paid off.

Upcoming Creative Collage Workshop

If you live in California near Monterey, Santa Cruz, or the San Francisco Bay Area, then you may be interested in a new weekend class that has just been added to my schedule. I'll be teaching a 2-day version of my Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop workshop at the Monterey Adult School on March 1st and 2nd.

For a complete listing of other upcoming workshops, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

Pinhole Photo Setup

January 31, 2008 [Canon 5D]
(click in the image to see it larger)

We had a lot of new snow up in the Sierra foothills last week. Of course, this is quite relative and the 18 to 20 inches that we received is nothing compared to what they get in some parts of the country. Still, it was enough to make things interesting and for me it served as a creative muse to get out my ZeroImage 6x9 pinhole camera and work on the Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin series (see the previous 5 posts for images from this series).

In the image above you see the camera setup for photographing two clocks half buried in the snow. It was snowing heavily during this photo session and you can see the layer of snow that has accumulated on top of the camera at left. After an hour and a half out in the snow and freezing temperatures, it was a great relief to come in and warm up in front of a blazing fire.

Yours truly...suffering for my art.

The negatives from this session should be back from the lab sometime this week, but it will take me a couple of weeks before I get time to work with the images. The final version will find its way here eventually.

Upcoming Creative Collage Workshops

If you live in California near Monterey, Santa Cruz, or the San Francisco Bay Area, then you may be interested in a new weekend class that has just been added to my schedule. I'll be teaching a 2-day version of my Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop workshop at the Monterey Adult School on March 1st and 2nd.

For a more in-depth exploration of this subject, with plenty of time to work on your own images, I have a 5-day version of this same workshop that I'll be teaching June 2 - 6 at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging on the central California coast near San Luis Obispo.  These classes tend to fill fast, especially at that time of year, so if you are interested in participating, click the class title for a link to the workshop's page at the Lepp Institute site. The computer lab at the Lepp Institute is really first rate, with fast Windows computers kitted out with dual monitors and Canon 5100 printers (as well as larger format printers adjacent to the main lab area). Tiered stadium seating ensures that everyone has a clear view of the main screen. I've taught there several times over the past five years and I always look forward to going back. It is truly one of the best digital lab facilities I've taught at.

For a complete listing of other upcoming workshops, click on over to the Workshops Page at my web site.

The Valise

The Valise  [pinhole photograph]
early October 2007, Maine
(click in the image for a larger version)

This is the last image (for awhile, anyway) from an ongoing series called Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin. All the images in this series are pinhole photographs made with a ZeroImage 6x9 multi-format camera. The selective sepia toning is all done in Photoshop. Click the Pinhole link on the right in the Categories section to see more from this series. I have photographed a couple of new ones in the past several days but it will be a few weeks at least before the negs are developed and I have time to get to them.

Behind the Scenes

When I was in Maine in late September/early October, I purchased two old valises in a huge, crammed-to-the-rafters three level junk and antique shop with the specific intention of using them for this series. The one in this photo was designated to be the "stunt valise" since it was very musty and dusty. It probably had mold spores hiding in it and was not the place where you'd want to pack anything good. This, and the price ($10) made it a perfect candidate for getting wet which was the idea I had in mind since I knew that I would be heading north to Acadia National Park where picuresque, easily accessible shorelines abound. The second valise that I purchased was much nicer and was never subjected to being submerged in a tide pool or sloshed by the incoming waves of the rising sea.

Once on location in Acadia, I discovered that the valise floated much more readily than I had anticipated (now there's craftsmanship for you!), so to get it to stay put in the tide pool and also to prevent it from being washed away once the more vigorous waves began rushing in, I filled it with about 30 pounds of large rocks. And, to address an obvious question that this image may raise: yes, my feet did get a little wet during this photo session, but the camera was always whisked away just before the surging surf reached it.

When I was done with the photo, my original plan was to throw it out in a dumpster, but it was still in pretty decent shape, in spite of its ocean voyage, and I kept thinking that a stunt valise might just come in handy for future photo projects. You just never know. So I packed it up in a box and had it shipped home to California. I was a little leery of the fact that it had gotten wet and might sprout mold during the cross-country journey in a stuffy truck. When it arrived, my suspicions proved correct and the parts that had been in the water sported the furry coat of an active mold community. Fortunately, it cleaned up well enough and ever since it has been designated as an outdoor valise (with its mold history I'm not about to bring it inside). The dry weather of our autumn and now the freezing temperatures of a snowy winter have kept the mold from returning. One of these days it just may end up in another photograph. Or perhaps play a supporting role in a surreal garden tableau.

Upcoming Creative Collage Workshops

If you live in California near Monterey, Santa Cruz, or the San Francisco Bay Area, then you may be interested in a new weekend class that has just been added to my schedule. I'll be teaching a 2-day version of my Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop workshop at the Monterey Adult School on March 1st and 2nd.

For a more in-depth exploration of this subject, with plenty of time to work on your own images, I have a 5-day version of this same workshop that I'll be teaching June 2 - 6 at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging on the central California coast near San Luis Obispo.  These classes tend to fill fast, especially at that time of year, so if you are interested in participating, click the class title for a link to the workshop's page at the Lepp Institute site. The computer lab at the Lepp Institute is really first rate, with fast Windows computers kitted out with dual monitors and Canon 5100 printers (as well as larger format printers adjacent to the main lab area). Tiered stadium seating ensures that everyone has a clear view of the main screen. I've taught there several times over the past five years and I always look forward to going back. It is truly one of the best digital lab facilities I've taught at.

The Letters in the Forest

The Letters in the Forest  [pinhole photograph]
early October, 2007, Maine
(click in the image for a larger version)

This was photographed in early October in Acadia National Park in Maine, but I just got around to scanning it, as well as others from this series, last week. This is from an ongoing series called Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin. All the images in this series are pinhole photographs made with a ZeroImage 6x9 multi-format camera. The selective sepia toning is all done in Photoshop. Click the Pinhole link on the right in the Categories section to see more from this series.

New Workshop, March 1-2:

If you live in California near Monterey, Santa Cruz, or the San Francisco Bay Area, then you may be interested in a new weekend class that has just been added to my schedule. I'll be teaching a 2-day version of my Creative Collage with Adobe Photoshop workshop at the Monterey Adult School on March 1st and 2nd.

For a more in-depth exploration of this subject, with plenty of time to work on your own images, I have a 5-day version of this same workshop that I'll be teaching June 2 - 6 at the excellent Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging on the central California coast near San Luis Obispo.  These classes tend to fill fast, especially at that time of year, so if you are interested in participating, click the class title for a link to the workshop's page at the Lepp Institute site. The computer lab at the Lepp Institute is really first rate, with fast Windows computers kitted out with dual monitors and Canon 5100 printers (as well as larger format printers adjacent to the main lab area). Tiered stadium seating ensures that everyone has a clear view of the main screen. I've taught there several times over the past five years and I always look forward to going back. It is truly one of the best digital lab facilities I've taught at.

Other upcoming workshops will be offered in Delray Beach, Florida and Honolulu, Hawaii. Check my Workshop page for a full schedule.