Sunday, April 6, 2008

Autoportrait Sunday

Cruising either of my two external hard drives is a sure way of stumbling upon some interesting pieces of my past. Here are two that I don't think I have too much to be embarrassed about...



The picture above was made sometime in the summer of 1985, probably on a Saturday afternoon, with my camera on a nearby shelf. I was posing with my arm draped over the lensboard of a Robertson process camera. This was the camera that I learned color on, where I spent three years making four-color screenings, building up my arms opening, loading and closing the eighty-pound cast iron vacuum film back.

At the far right you can see a part of one of the four xenon arc lamps that were the light source. These were positioned behind the copyboard, seen in the center, the iron frame with frosted glass where each of the four separation negatives would be mounted facing the lens. The backlit image would be projected through the lens onto film, and broken up with a halftone screen.

The distance between the copy
board and the lens could be adjusted to change the size of the final image as well; the set of rails they rode on ran nineteen feet from the outer wall of the darkroom. (This is the picture with the embarrassing detail, by the way, and no, it's not the pen clipped to my shirt.)



This next shot was made in the fall of 1985, and there ain't nothing embarrassing about it, 'cause dammit, I look cool. Leather bomber jacket, pink shirt, tight jeans, mirror shades, and that slouch. I haven't looked this cool since...since...well, since then.

That's the Long Island Sound behind me, and the sands of a Rocky Point beach under my feet. Squint with your imagination and you'll see Connecticut on the horizon. Camera was placed on the retaining wall of the bluff facing the water.

4 comments:

Sharon Kugler said...

Those are some impressively big-a** machines in that first picture; ya needed MUSCLES to 'shop photos back in tha day...so what could be the embarrassing detail? Eyeglass lenses big enough to install in the Hubble telescope? We all had those...
The T-shirt is a little streched-out...but you were still unmarried.
So what is it????

Steve Rogg said...

Hey my eyeglasses are still that big! When I'm not wearing my contacts. I can not spot the embarrassing detail either.

Steve Rogg said...

Unless you are talking about low quantity of chest hair. But your Irish so that's a given, plus in a few years you will have more hair growing out of your ears than you can shake a stick at. It happens to all of us. Reminds me of that episode of "Married with Children" when Al's barber died and all the guys didn't have anyone to trim their nose hair.
But I digress. I still don't see it.

Neil J Murphy said...

It's the glasses, folks. Although the mustache wasn't much to speak of, either.