In a recent post by Adrian Vila, he encourages photographers to go out and find images that only you can make. Sounded like a good suggestion, since I tend to think that there’s just not that much interesting stuff that surrounds me. So, for an hour or so, I wandered around our community and found enough interesting things to further my process of learning. And I met and chatted (from a distance, outside) with a neighbor I’d only heard about through email last summer. She’d had skunks under her deck and let others in the community know about the new residents.

I am discovering how much fun high contrast subjects can be. Here are some that caught my eye. These were all shot on a digital camera.

In the next one, I liked how the lower steps were so crooked and the colors were high contrast (when turned into black and white).

These pots looked interesting because of their arrangement and the many colors. I used it to experiment with how colors convert to gray, and how to manipulate the color sliders in Lightroom to adjust the colors to the density I liked.

A long-exposure experiment.

There used to be a nuclear power plant near Portland. After years of trying to keep it up to regulations, PGE finally shut it down and tore it down. It’s now a park with lakes where Whistling Swans reside.

My foray into film photography began with a rented Mamiya RB67 from The Film Objective. That was after spending an hour or so with Arthur at Blue Moon Camera. BMC is a used mostly analog camera store with film and processing, too. I spent a day at a couple wildlife refuges trying out the camera and getting my feet into the process of shoot, develop, and scan.

The above image actually looks pretty awesome printed on canvas.

I have since also stepped into large format with a 4×5 view camera.