Followers of my blog may remember that I wrote in April of a photographic outing with my friend Terrell (Big T) Neasley and his Las Vegas Art Models Group. (Click here to flash back to it.) Terrell had asked me to come along to give advice and pointers on photography to those who were looking for such things, and I readily agreed. I told Terrell that I wasn’t planning to do any shooting myself - both to lighten my own load and to not get in the way of the other photographers – but he twisted my arm so painfully (figuratively speaking, of course) that I was forced to relent and cry “Uncle!”

Well, I finally developed the three rolls of film that I shot that day of Lydia and scanned some of those negatives yesterday. I’m presenting some of them here today for the world and especially for Terrell to see, as I know that he’s been waiting to see them. It’s not easy photographing in a group with one model so I don’t know how he’ll rate these compared to my other work, but I guess I’ll just have to wait now to find out.

In other film news, I’ve also developed some of the rolls from my recent trip to Colorado. I’m sure that the models are looking forward to seeing some of the images from the workshop, so I thought I’d give them a chance to see some of my work sooner rather than later. It’ll also give me a chance to show some images to other people involved in the workshop, as well as to the readers of my blog. Expect to see some of these photos soon.

I am planning to take a break from film developing for a little while to catch up on my filing. As I wrote recently, I’m still working on finishing the filing of most of my Tibet photos from last year. When I do get back to developing, it will once again be in sequential order – first with the photos from Southeast Asia, then the figure work that I’ve not gotten to yet.
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I received a nice e-mail recently from Jeff M. in Auburn, California. He wrote:

“I wanted to thank you for creating and writing such an entertaining and usefull blog. I really enjoy your work and insights. It's a vast improvement over the inane material on the rest of the web.”

Once again, Jeff, I thank you very much for your kind words. I’m sure I’m not the only blogger who wonders if anybody ever bothers to read what we write, so your comment is greatly appreciated. I hope that my answer to your question about scanning negatives was useful.
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I also added another book to my photo book collection. I have a large collection, but as I’m running out of room, I need to carefully consider what else to get. On a recent visit to the Strand Book Store – a venerable New York City institution with the slogan “18 miles of books” – I picked up a copy of American Photographs 1900/2000. It’s a very heavy tome with a double fold-out front cover, and the pages include over 200 mostly B&W images from the worlds of fine art, photojournalism and fashion. It has a lot of iconic images from the 20th Century, so I’m looking forward to sitting down and going through this book in greater detail.
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Finally, yesterday was a nice day here, so I decided to take a long walk after I scanned the photos you see here. I decided to walk to Coney Island and back – a stroll of close to five miles. I grew up down the block from Astroland, the amusement park that is scheduled to close forever at the end of this summer season due to redevelopment, so I took a slow walk through the place for what will likely be the last time.

Before going to Astroland, I walked on the boardwalk as far as the Parachute Jump and the Coney Island Pier. It was near that point that I saw a woman photographing another woman sitting on a bench. She was taking a lot of pictures, using a flash, and she was very close to her subject, so I figure that she had to have been using a wide angle lens. She was a middle aged woman wearing eyeglasses, and with dark hair braided in the back. She wore a press card around her neck. Around her were several younger people holding clipboards with papers on them. I guessed that these papers were model releases, so I assumed that these photos were being done for some serious purpose.

The photographer looked familiar to me, so I went over to a couple of the young people and I asked, “Is that Mary Ellen Mark?” The answer was “Yes.” I thought that maybe her next project was on Coney Island, but they told me that it was something for the USA Network (hence the model releases) photographing people in New York City. So, it just goes to show you:

You never know who – or what – you’ll come across in New York.