James Cockroft

Danny Lyon – ‘Message to the Future’

I stumbled across Message to the Future thanks, once again, to the #believeinfilm community on Twitter. Really, social media isn’t all bad. Mostly, sure, and it’s led me to spend more money on photobooks than I might otherwise, and for that I’ll forever be grateful.

Anyway. Message to the Future is a rather impressive exhibition catalog from the 2016 retrospective of Danny Lyon’s photographs at the Whitney Museum and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with selections from his classic 1960s photobooks, most of which have been in more or less continuous production since, plus his films, later photo series, and collage works.

A quick walk

Many weeks ago, I bought a grab bag of photo gear from my dad. I did a little unbagging on Twitter, if you’re interested, and in short, wound up with a complete Olympus OM10 kit: OM10, with the manual adapter; 28mm G.Zuiko, 50mm F.Zuiko, 75-150 f/4 Zuiko; Olympus T20 flash, plus cables and brackets and things for taking it off camera; a bunch of filters and other random stuff.

One of these days, I’ll do a full review of it, but not today…

Raymond Meeks – ‘Halfstory Halflife’

Halfstory Halflife was Charcoal Book Club’s photobook-of-the-month for September 2018… I’m sorta ashamed that it took me this long to get around to looking at it, but, well, here we are: it’s November 2020, and I’m finally getting around to a review…

Parting Shots

Up until about a week ago, I had a For Sale page with a bunch of cameras and whatnot on it. It was up for about two years, and in that time I think I sold two things off of it, the Cosina CX-2 and, most recently, my step-dad’s Ricoh 35 ZF. Everything else sat on a sort of window seat thing gathering dust.

Last Saturday, I stuffed most of them into a falling-apart camera bag and dropped it in a Goodwill dropbox and took the page down.

‘Provoke: Between Protest and Performance’

It’s been almost three years since I unboxed Provoke, and I just finished reading all the text. It sat on the side table next to where I stare blankly at the television night after night, sometimes covered by some other book undergoing one of my casual reviews, sometimes by whatever recent-ish issue of Aperture that I probably didn’t read, sometimes taunting me, most often completely mute. A strip of color negative leader slowly, imperceptibly, glacially, moved from top to bottom, front to back, and every time it caught my attention, I felt a small twinge of shame that sometimes led to a flurry of study, but most often got shunted off to wherever such feelings go.

Is it that dense, that full of mind boggling information and history? Am I just lazy?

FilmLab, part 4: random

So… FilmLab. Honestly, it’s still early days for me with this software. Already, I’ve gone from “this is world-changing!” to “eh… I like my old process better” to… well, I don’t really know. FilmLab (version 2.0.1, anyway) is good for many things and not so good at some other things.

What do I mean? Well, let’s throw some random images at it and see how it fares.

FilmLab, part 3: exposure, shmexposure

In my first experiences with FilmLab for MacOS, I noted that it tends to absolutely crush shadow areas in some situations. It also likes to blow out highlights, but with much less regularity than it crushes the shadows.

I assumed this was due to my raw exposures and/or the negatives themselves. My historical set up has returned best results at about 1-2 stops overexposed, which compensates somewhat for overexposure (dark negatives) and helps overcome some base fog, without making things hard on my conversion process. I figured these two stops were causing the issue, and that FilmLab was just giving back what I gave it.