Words and pictures from Silicon Valley by Chris Gulker
From the monthly archives:
Our Portfolio photo show shipped yesterday, including a print of the image, above. God and UPS willing, it should be in Hudson, Ohio next Monday, at which time Linda and I will have shipped ourselves to Ameugny, France. The blog officially moves to Ameugny May 1…
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We arose this morning, did our customary 100 quick crunches, then dressed in walking clothes and headed out for Stanford’s Academic Preserve, the home of the Big Dish. It’s been more than two years since I’ve been able to walk, much less jog the ‘Dish run,’ something Linda and I did together once or twice a week before the brain tumor and radiation therapy knocked out my left side.
The route includes one fairly steep approach on a set of lazy switchbacks that ascend to the dish itself, a 46-meter parabolic reflector built more than 30 years ago. Another route descends to the plain below before crossing a sharp rise and descending again. GMAPS Pedometer put my route today at 3.8 miles, which I walked, paced by Linda, in an hour and 53 minutes. That last hill was a challenge… the rehab (and my Scott and Lily walks) is really starting to kick in… 2:28:31 PM
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We’ve narrowed the hunt for 20 definitive newspaper-era Gulker portfolio images down to 23 or so. Friend Gary Fong, former photo editor at the nemesis San Francisco Chronicle, offered advice this evening that brought my selection down to the final 20. Here’s the set he chose from. The photo above didn’t make the cut…please feel free to offer your picks for the 3 to disinclude…
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That oh-so-essential wardrobe item: you’ve got one in your closet, right? Here’s mine, a photo I made with a then state-of-the-art Balcar strobe in the early 80s. The camera I used was a 1950’s vintage Graphic View 4×5 camera that I discovered languishing in then-employer Los Angeles Herald Examiner’s gear locker.
Retro look, high-tech light, seriously retro camera… you can see we used to have a lot of fun at the Herex, even if no one was getting rich on the paper’s notoriously lousy wages. We sent the last five scans for our portfolio show off to the lab… catalog is next…
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We’re having fun today, once again at the controls of a Nikon Coolscan 9000 film scanner. Today we’re scanning old, big (6×6 cm) negatives I shot with a Hasselblad in the 80s. The quality is amazing… that’s the late Norman Mailer, pictured above. The scans are headed to a high-end HP printer that will turn them into 16×20-inch prints.
This is all for a show of my work that will be mounted in the Moos Gallery of the Knight Fine Arts Center in Hudson, Ohio in June. It’s hard not to get lost in memories of the heady moments of being a ‘Hollywood’ photog…
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Linda and I both awoke Sunday with sore throats and a tired, achy feeling. My symptoms began to reside recede this morning, but Linda’s got worse. So we’ve been mostly off line… minimal or missing blog posts, MIA on Twitter, friendfeed, Facebook ( and LinkedIn, Plaxo et al.). Maybe not a bad thing? We’ve got a bug, here, Houston…
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Linda and I headed back out to Arastradero Preserve this morning, where we walked together for the first time in two years, on a path from which you can see what remains of an oak that fell not long after we arrived in the Bay Area twenty years ago. Said once-mighty oak is now reduced to the weathered limbs seen above, pictured against a background of Bay fog and East Bay mountains. As previously mentioned, Arastradero’s slopes and uneven ground are a challenge for my still-in-rehab left side, and I’m feeling the rigors of our 3-mile uphill efforts as I write this evening. I keep reminding myself that this stuff is good for me…
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So, the great thing about digital processing of scanned film, we learned early in the digital ‘revolution,’ was that the file retained all the photographer’s manipulation of the original source negative. That wasn’t the case with making prints from negs. It could take a half-hour under the enlarger to dodge, burn, sponge, flash and otherwise coax a print out of a given negative. At that point, if another print was required, the photographer started over from scratch.
A digital file, however, captures all that information, and a second print is easy, and will match the first (not necessarily the case in the old, analog world). As of Photoshop 4 or so, the file recorded that information in a fashion that allowed one to undo previous moves – you could go back and reverse things if you decided you didn’t like something.
So we’re heads down, trying to do just that with a group of our ‘best friends’ – portfolio negs that we’ve printed, analog and at various stages of digital tech, hundreds of times. At my side is a stack of prints that I made more or less contemporaneously with the events pictured. I find myself wanting to do things differently 30 years later…
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We have decided that it’s time to get serious about digitizing the work we did as a photographer, especially from the 1970s and 1980s, when we worked for a daily newspaper. So we dug into our garage, where a dozen or more boxes of old negatives and prints reside, along with a mothballed Nikon film scanner.
We have engineered a workflow not unlike the one I helped set up at the (then Hearst-owned) San Francisco Examiner, one of the country’s first ‘all digital’ photo operations. After sorting negatives on a light table (which is of the same vintage as my photos), the selects go into the Nikon scanner, and thence to files on my Mac. It’s a photographer’s version of ‘digitally remastering’ his/her work.
The photos bring back memories of those days in Los Angeles, especially in the late 70s, when I raced L.A.’s freeways, with a police- and fire-frequency scanner crackling loudly over a background of rock and roll from the likes of radio station KROQ. Anyway, 15 hi-res scans so far…
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We’re not sure if it was the big tree that went down over on Valparaiso Avenue in yesterday’s high winds, or some other problem, but power hereabouts went off shortly after 4:30 P.M. and stayed off until sometime in the night.
Linda and I were both struck by the disconnectedness: except for our cellphones (and my Kindle), we were off the Net, and the Grid for that matter. Neither one of us had work or personal affairs sitting on our (laptop) hard drives – it was all in the cloud – email attachments, Google docs, URLs and links to things. We couldn’t work, play, blog, tweet or update Facebook or friendfeed.
It wasn’t a complete disaster, however. Relieved of these obligations, I made a simple dinner, pollo con arroz on the gas stove and we moved to the bedroom, got under the covers (it was chilly and the heat was out, too) and read and sipped wine by lantern light. I downloaded a sci-fi novel to my Kindle over Whispernet, while Linda was content reading the latest Sunset. A pretty good evening, actually… 7:48:16 AM
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