Jake Catlett Photography

Still Alive

I’ve been missing for some time now.  I disappeared.  Poof!

Actually I’ve been spending lots of time in my bedroom, but judging by a few of the emails I’ve gotten recently some of my acquaintances apparently consider me “missing” when I haven’t made a blog post in a long time.

Well, at least somebody out there gives a shit

I was, in fact, gone for quite some time.  I took a 6 week motorbike trip from Saigon to Hue in central Vietnam and then back.  Except for a week or so where the weather was quite grey and raining, conditions were great for photography.  I took dozens and dozens of rolls of medium format film with my new Pentax 67ii, and I just couldn’t wait to get back to the city and get my work processed.  The only problem was that most of it sucked.  I’ve been shell shocked, so to speak, at what a terrible job I did trying to expose slide film on my trip, and for the last couple of weeks have wanted to think of just about anything but photography.  To keep my mind on other things I decided to re-organize all my music and data on my computer, a gargantuan task which claimed weeks of my life, but which I’m also extremely happy that I completed.

I’m rather broke at the moment, and since I sold my digital gear that means that I can’t really shoot for the month of April.  Well, I could, because I have a nice stock of film, but I couldn’t process any of it until May.  I’ll start shooting again in a couple of weeks.  In the mean time I’m going to be spending a lot of time in my bedroom studying Mandarin.  Ni hao.

I actually do have some really nice shots that I will be posting over the next few weeks, and in fact it’s mostly landscape shots that I screwed up.  I got some great 35mm stuff at a Tet flower market in Buon Me Thuot, some really nice black and white work in both 35mm and medium format while I was in Hue, quite a bit of good work during my time in Hoi An, and various other crapola that I shot.  That being said, I was so upset with myself over the shots I screwed up that I didn’t bother optimizing any of the good stuff.

So these shots here on this post are old!  I shot these on the 28th of January and intended to put them up on my blog before I left on my trip, but I was quite busy in those last days before I left and didn’t get it done.  So here’s more now.

On this particular day my buddy Chi and I were just walking around the park shooting some black and white.  I wasn’t there to shoot any one subject in particular, but had the goal of trying to look at things differently and try to get good compositions with interesting shapes and lines, good tonal range and rich texture.  It was high Noon and very sunny, so conditions were a bit difficult, but I think I did pretty good!

What in the hell is that thing??  Hmmm, maybe the next shot will help you.

I’ve really been enjoying working more with black and white.  It makes me look at things completely differently, and I love how the lack of color contrast forces me to think harder about the other elements of the image.  I think that all of the shots I’m posting today are great examples of images that simply would not have worked well in color but came out very interesting in monochrome.  They were all un-colorful subjects, and if they’d been shot in color they would have looked flat and uninteresting.  However, in black and white the tonal range is really highlighted and instead of drab, boring images they have depth and form, and the texture I think is especially highlighted well through the use of black and white.

This last one wasn’t shot in the park, but on a street near my house a little later in the afternoon.

I believe that this was a shot only made possible by black and white as well.  Had it been much later in the aftenoon and the light softer, a color image may have worked, but with as hard and contrasty as the light was I think that at this particular moment color would have failed me.  In black and white, though, the high contrast works out really well, and again I think the texture is highlighted by the lack of color.

So, there’s some stuff folks.  I’ll get to prettying up some of the scans I’ve got from my trip and begin adding them over the next couple of weeks.  I have some really awesome portraits of friends from the trip too, but those will be going up on Facebook.  I usually don’t pictures of my personal friends here on the blog – unless they wear the swan hat, of course…