Technical Notes
Photographing live oaks has been a growth process for me, technically and personally. When I photographed my first trees in the early 1980s, my only experience with photography was with a hand-held 35mm camera. This popular type of camera is ideal for recording sudden, special moments in human life, but an oak's life moves at a far slower pace. Special moments can stretch into long, almost languid spaces of time that encourage a more contemplative attitude to fully explore and appreciate. Eventually, I was drawn to the 4"x5" view camera, specifically because it forced me to slow down and look at things more carefully. Technically, a view camera is a surprisingly simple tool to use. Nothing is automatic. You set it up fixed to a tripod, focus the lens, meter the light levels, set the lens shutter speed and aperture for the proper exposure, then cock and snap the shutter, exposing one sheet of 4 "x 5" film at a time. Only in processing the film and printing the photographs does the process get increasingly complicated. Producing an expressive print requires a thorough understanding of the mechanics of film exposure and development and the properties and tolerances of films, chemistries and papers. Then, the photographer has to learn, mostly through trial and error, the subtle and exacting skills of printing. Additionally, producing an expressive print requires some depth of emotional experience. One can only say as much in a print as one feels about the thing photographed. For me, the end result of learning technique, or craft, is to be able to internalize it, forget about it, and use it as a means to create images that can communicate abstract personal feelings. For all the photographs in this website, I used either a Calumet wood field or a Zone VI view camera and a combination of four lenses of varying focal lengths including: a Schneider 90mm Angulon; a Nikkor 120mm; a Schneider Symmar 210mm; and a Nikkor-M 300mm lens. The majority of photos were made with the two middle-length lenses. I use Kodak Tri-X professional sheet film or Tri-X 120 roll film almost exclusively, and print on Ilford multigrade papers using a Zone VI coldlight enlarger. Over the years, I have moved to an exposure and development process for photographing the oaks in which I overexpose the film by one or more stops, then develop in Kodak HC-110 developer at 1/2 of the standard dilution B combined with a series of water-baths during the total development time (see Ansel Adams' technical book, The Negative for a detailed explanation of water bath development). This exposure and development process allows me to record a full range of tonal values in the negatives with well-defined details in the shadow areas on the limbs and trunks of the trees. I give this information only for those curious about such details. As Morley Baer once told me, to truly learn the characteristics and values of a camera, lens, film or developer, you simply need to use it for a year or two. It'll teach you.