Connie

Connie

Has it really been almost seven years since you passed ?  So many of our times together seem like they just happened.  I have been channeling you babe, makes me want be better, as if you were still here.  So my resolution for this year is to cook! Yes cook real dinners and shop and cook for myself as if I were cooking for others.  Let me say that it has been a good year food wise.  And the rewards have become apparent gradually.  One big reward, was channeling you,  Connie, when I cook dinner.  I wish only that you were coming over  to sample my latest hot salad or lamb tacos. I have almost tried to call you then stopped myself.  Scrapping the burnt pie juices off the oven floor, I thought of  how you were both organized and free in the kitchen.  How did you do that?  I don’t have any pictures of you cooking. How could I have not taken any?

Just wanted to let you know how I have been feeling….Other things make me stop and think.  I remember you never wasting a morsel and I have become like that too and my food bills, while eating better, have plummeted.  You knew how to cook just enough whether it was for the two of you or for seventeen guests.  So many things I admired about you.  Your amazing style and smile.  Your inner beauty and your outer beauty too.  Your advice.  I can still hear you telling me things, Janet, use your blinkers.  Janet, do not roll up your pants.  Janet, No socks with sandals.  I was a hopeless case and always felt lucky to have you as my friend.  Always showing me the way, another way, your way and they mostly became my way too.  I miss you.  These photographs are from the day we went up the Duwamish river with my brother and his friend in his skiff.  An example of your spontaneous nature.  I called you when they left the Kitsap to come over here and you said of course and off we went.  You were always so much fun.  You inspired me.  You were such a good painter.  The featured image is one of your pieces.  I don’t know if you knew how good you were as both a painter and a person and a cook.  Oh you were a gardener too. And more.  You were damn good.  That’s what I say.

 

 

Some Weddings Shot with the Pinhole Camera:  Thoughts and Images

Some Weddings Shot with the Pinhole Camera: Thoughts and Images

I shoot weddings with my pinhole camera.  Recently I shot three wonderful weddings of people I know well.  These are not typical wedding photographs.  I generally shoot four images on 4 x 5 color negative film;  the exposures vary with the available light but can be as long as 30 minutes. I do not use a flash. For most weddings I shoot the cocktail/greeting time before the wedding (or the party the night before), the ceremony itself, the celebration afterwards and then set a camera up during the meal. I feel the images  turn out to be very personal.  About a year or more ago, I shot John and Meghan’s wedding in Seattle.  It was a very dark venue and a dark evening and I honestly thought none of the images would be okay.  But they were and I was happy and so were Meghan and John.   Last summer I shot a beautiful outdoor wedding for Autumn and Matt.  They were married at Autumn’s parent’s home, and it was absolutely the most wonderful time:  great people, great food and love everywhere.

Recently this past October I shot Isaac and Annie’s wedding in New York City. I have known Isaac his whole life and I was so happy that he and Annie got together.  It was the first time I used my 120mm camera at a wedding and I knew it was right because the camera is so versatile.  I could take more images  and the exposures were shorter. Early in the morning we met in Brooklyn Heights and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge where we did a family photograph with the 4 x 5 pinhole camera.  We continued  to City Hall in Manhattan where the vows were made.  After,  we had a celebratory luncheon in NYC’s Chinatown;  I recorded the luncheon on 120mm color negative film-about an hour and a half exposure.  Annie wore a yellow dress; she was beautiful and the day flowed along. The party that night at a bar in Brooklyn was dark, very dark and very fun.

I have done several weddings now beginning with an old friend, Lucas,  who married Angie in upstate NY several years ago.  It was a great experience and I loved it so much more than I did taking “real” wedding photographs as I had done in the past.  Not to say that real wedding photography is bad. It is just not me these days. I have two more weddings scheduled for this summer.  It is  great way to attend a wedding and be myself. I tell the bride and groom:  if the images turn out, great, if not, I am sorry but I tried.  But so far (fingers crossed), the images have all worked.  Below are photographs from those three most recent weddings.  If you know anyone who might be interested in this manner of wedding photography send them to me.  I reserve the rights to the images but give the bride and groom fine art prints.  I hope you feel the joy that I felt as I made these images. All people that I photograph with the pinhole understand that these will not be “normal”  photographs.  And most hire a “real” wedding photographer to grab the normal shots.  And I am happy there is a real photographer present.

The featured image is from Isaac and Annies Wedding in NYC in October of 2019

Here is a  blog post about Lucas and Angie’s wedding, my first pinhole wedding:  www.janetneuhauser.com/in-honor-of-g-lucas-crane-on-his-wedding-day/

 

First wedding  is Meghan and John’s over a year ago now.  In Seattle.

 

The photographs below are from Autumn and Matt’s wedding last summer in the Pacific NW.

 

These photographs are from Isaac and Annie’s wedding in October in New York City.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed these photographs! Celebrate love! I am grateful to all the brides and grooms who are open to this manner of wedding photography.

Frayed Edges

Frayed Edges

It is an interesting question (to me at least) why I stop where I stop to photograph, why I photograph what I photograph.  After all these years I have realized that I seem to be attracted to a certain type of subject matter.   About fifteen years ago it became clear to me  that I  was attracted to and lived on the Frayed Edges of life both in my actual life and in my mind.  In urban areas (where I have lived more than half my life) I have always lived on the Edges: in NYC I lived in Red Hook before it was groovy and cool and it was literally on the edge of Brooklyn, on the harbor and definitely frayed:  full of run down houses, broken glass and wild dogs, among other things. For the last 13 years, I have lived in the Sodo neighborhood of Seattle, very industrial area in South Sodo with no place to shop or get coffee. My building, in fact, is the only one designated as a legal live/work space in this area.  This subject matter is not about people per se. Instead it is about the what people have discarded and what they live with on a day to day basis.  This detritus contains mostly all the aspects of life both urban and rural.  In the one rural area where I  lived in the nineties, the house was an old hunting cabin up a dirt road. We heard cougars in the ravine in the middle of the nigh and worked hard to keep the woods from encroaching on us. It was seven miles to the nearest store.  It was mostly scary to be outside and I did not photograph outside  much there.

I have been collecting these Edges photographs and lately mulling them over and over in my brain. I have gone through many many folders and picked out some of the best from the past 20 years or so.  I present them to you as both still lifes/landscapes and a visual celebration of the daily walk with a camera. They are a diary, a notebook for me. These images never made it into a final portfolio but have become this a blog post. I may do a portfolio soon called Frayed Edges, done either with the digital camera  or on  film.  There are many more;  I shoot daily. These have endured for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Trailers, Georgetown near Lucille Street, Seattle, WA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Georgetown, Seattle, WA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


My Grandmother’s Attic, South Dakota

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Near Oysterville, Willapa Bay, WA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From my Grandmother’s Attic, South Dakota

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Craig, Alaska

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greenhouse Door, Gig Harbor, WA

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Banner Forest, Near Port Orchard, WA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little Shack Along the Columbia River, WA

 

Featured Image is a detail of a trailer near Westport, WA.

Shooting the Climate Strike March with the Pinhole

Shooting the Climate Strike March with the Pinhole

I decided recently that almost everything I shoot going forward will be with a pinhole camera on film.  In a world where the average photographer will take several hundred images of an event like the recent Climate Strike March in Seattle, it was not really an easy decision.  I thought a lot about how I take so many photographs generally and never use them;  instead storing them away in the depths of my external hard drive and never looking at them again.  So I went to the Climate Strike March in Seattle with my pinhole camera and one roll of 120 color negative film and of course my iphone camera.  I took 15 shots with my pinhole camera.  I took about ten images with my iphone, just because I could not resist and I had to have something to post to Instagram where all my images are from the iphone.  Below are the photographs made in my 120 Zero 2000 pinhole camera.  The images are lined up on the film with no line between them, no separation between the negatives at all.  I fell into this modus operandi quite  by happy accident of course and it turns out that it works well for me.  Of the 15 exposures I got something I can use on almost every negative. I am pretty happy with that and it shows me the validity in slowing down and really looking.  When I got the negatives back from the lab, I realized I could have exposed about half of the time I did and the negatives would have been less dense and less blurred.  I’m not sure if that would have been better or not.  These exposures were about 10 minutes.  I learned a lot at this march.  I learned that being present while making photographs is important.  Taking so few images  helped that and then standing quietly while the images exposed was good too.  I also answered a lot of questions about pinhole photography.  It does not seem to be a common thing.  I feel like this is a new beginning for me.  I have some other images I have made in the same manner.  I will post those soon.

 

Leaving Cal Anderson Park  (Two negatives)

 

Toward Downtown with Smith Tower (Three negatives)

 

Crossing I-5 (four negatives)


At City Hall (two negatives)

Featured image is at Cal Anderson Park:  The Beginning (one negative)

Confessions on Technique

Confessions on Technique

I know this about myself: I often make photographs and then don’t look at the actual images for a year, sometimes more. I can easily ignore whole bodies of work as I shoot them. I am not kind of photographer who shoots, reviews, edits, prints, then shoots more. For me, the best part of photography is in making the photograph in the field;  it is exhilarating and much better than post processing.  I find that when I edit as I work on an idea, the subject  gets stale.  

That said, one problem arises as long as I am hooked on film (and all my images these days are shot on film). It is absolutely necessary to write down the following soon after making the photograph:  location,  the date, the film type, exposure time, ISO, and of course the camera and pinhole size. I quit taking notes and writing down what I did when I got my first digital camera several years ago. Now after shooting film again for the last five years, I find I want to return to certain subjects and find the portals, the little river, the big trees, the end of a road campground, the slough. It is impossible to tell where many images were made. Good images and bad record keeping exists in my life. I vow to do better. I will take concise notes I will.

Of course with digital, one has lots of metadata but without GPS turned on, no location exists. But what is photography about anyway?  Pinhole photography is about pausing for 30 minutes or more and just looking.  Not that I eschew technique in pinhole photography.  I am just not a  technical kind of gal and refuse to pretend that I am.  After all,  the image is about feeling, the light, the moment, the weather and of course it is about the ISO of the film and the size of the pinhole aperture and the exposure times.  I have began a notebook just for keeping film and camera data with little drawings of my photographs at the time I make them. Hopefully, this will help me be able to return to the scene.  The featured image was taken on a road trip to California I think in 2016.  It is a happy accident.  I decided to try an all night long exposure and had a hard time getting up before dawn to close the camera.  I actually closed it sometime after the sun came up. This image is easy to find again.  But the exposure/film combo was not recorded.

The images below have  unrecorded exposure times and location and were based on knowing that a good photograph could be made from what is in front of me.  That is the exciting moment in photography.  These are just a few of the total shot this way. Some can be found again easily, some can not.

 

Chase the Light

Chase the Light

Each year about this time, Photographic Center NW has a fundraising event (https://www.pcnwchasethelight.org/).  In the past it has been called Long Shot.  This year it is called Chase the Light, which is what we photographers do.  Anyone can  shoot during a  48 hour period (last week) and one week later there is a pop up show at the Center where the images which were shot all within the same time period are for sale. This Saturday (June 15th) is the pop up show.  Worth seeing and a great way to get inexpensive work and support the Photographic Center NW at the same time.   I am happy to donate work to the Photo Center, a good place that I have been a part of for years.  For me, the timing on this event is always rough:  the shooting time coincides with the Georgetown Carnival, a wonderful celebration and street fair in my neighborhood.  For the last ten years I have worked the Spin Art booth and for the last three years I shot for the PCNW event while working at the Carnival.  This year, I wanted to make some portraits with my 120 zero 2000 pinhole camera.  I knew they would be a bit blurry since the exposures were about ten minutes long.  But my subjects held still and I set the camera so that it seemed like I was taking a rectangular  image but I advanced the camera as if I were taking a square image.  That meant no lines occurred between the frames on the negatives, a fact my scanner did not like at all.  But a fact that I love.  It made for some interesting combinations with images butted up against each other and I am happy to report that I made some images which are new to me.  Exciting.  So here are four from two rolls of 120 color negative film.  Hope you like them as much as I do.

Self Portrait (from the series, Inside Out)

 

Martin and Roberta, 2019

 

Joanne, 2019

 

Featured image is also a Self Portrait, without an adjacent negative.  The Self Portrait above, with the garden, titled, I Dream of Green, is the one in the pop up show.