thedude.com

Welcome! You certainly picked a gorgeous day to fly in to Oakland.

Thanks, Bob for the very cool shots!

A few years ago, my best man Steve and I split the cost of a Nikon film scanner. I figured I’d spend a few days scanning the best of the thousands of slides and negatives I have scattered around. Well, this little project has grown into a monster. I’ve been scanning on and off for the better part of three years, and I’m no where near done.

The main reason my project has grown so time-consuming is the amount time it takes to get a good scan. Initially, I cut corners and scanned at lower resolutions or lower bit-depth or even skipped a preview scan. Now I know that attempting to save time in this way a very bad idea. There is no way around the fact that every image must be preview scanned and adjusted individually. Also, there are several scanning options which must be enabled to get the best results. Doing this causes the amount of time per scan to increase dramatically. A single 35 mm slide now takes about 15-20 minutes to scan. My 6 x 7 cm images will take three or four times that. And that’s before they even get opened in PhotoShop, which can easily add another hour or two to the process.

So now, in addition to the slides and negatives that have not yet been scanned, I have to go back and re-scan a buttload of images. This may not be as bad as it sounds though. It turns out that the scanner is perfectly happy scanning in the background. Even on my lowly pee see, I can color-correct and dust-spot an image in PhotoShop, and make an entry on my blog while the scanner hums away on another decades-old image.

You never know what you’ll find. I had a few spare moments this rainy Saturday afternoon, and decided to take up my scanning project again. It didn’t take long to find something fun and timely. These old slides were in the first box I opened. I’m sure Jim will love these! Ha!

Food has always played a big role in our lives. Jim’s annual pig roast was one of the best-tasting events of the Wisconsin summer. What fun. Thanks for the memories, Jim!

I’ve been too busy to post anything in such a long time. Then, my pal Dave sent these images from Wisconsin. Seems the snow on his truck either slid or was blown into this amazing magic snow carpet. How cool is that?!?

I didn’t think I was taking enough pictures on my recent short trip to the Midwest - probably because I was so busy consuming everything from a deep-fried “onion brick” at The Hub to Wendy’s amazingly decadent molten truffle dessert. Oh. My. God. Most people probably don’t think of a trip to Wisconsin as a culinary treat. These people don’t know my friends.

I didn’t take a single picture of the fall colors, and for that I have no good excuse. I guess I was feeling lazy. Sorry. But I did get to see some things I had never seen before - like the stunning Milwaukee Art Museum (beautiful!) and the Miller Brewery. (Miller Lite does NOT taste this good.)

A huge thanks to my fabulous hosts, Uncle Steve and Caesar, Jim, Wendy Rowe and the dogs, Mark, Ann and Lexy, Nancy and Cindy. Thanks for all the great food and memories. I had a wonderful time. Check out a few more shots from my week-long binge here.

You gotta love the Internet. This week it helped bring me back together with my roommate from 27 years ago. We exchanged a few e-mails and I learned that my old friend Rob Espinosa would be performing today at the Novato Art and Wine Festival.

Kelly and I watched Rob play with the David LaFlamme band - formerly It’s a Beautiful Day. Those of you who remember Rob from the days that we lived together on Conkey street would instantly recognize him - especially when he’s on stage clowning around and flashing that trademark grin. Oh - and he still plays his guitar fabulously. Rob is leaving soon for the east coast performing with a Summer of Love 40 Year Reunion Tour where he’ll be playing with the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company! Awesome!

Rob, it’s really great to hook up with with you again and to meet your wife Nancy! It’s especially cool to discover that you live just an hour away in Santa Cruz! Let’s fire up that hot tub and barbecue grill when you get home. We’ll bring the wine!

My best guess is that this image of best friends Bruce Hagen, Jim Davidson and Scott Wolbers was made in 1971 or 1972, when I would have been 15 or 16 years old. I borrowed a Yashica 124 twin-lens-reflex from my high school, and shot this image at the top of the hill near Church Street in Burlington. (Looks like I made a perfect exposure. :) I probably developed the film in the darkroom at my high school, but I do not remember ever printing this wonderful shot.

I’m positively thrilled to find these old negatives in such good shape. You can imagine that to me, a shot like this is absolutely priceless.

I know my posting has been rather sporadic lately. My excuse is that while doing a bit of spring cleaning in the garage, I discovered a huge cache of negatives from the distant past.

You know by now that I’ve had a life-long passion for photography, and years ago, made the fateful decision to purchase a beautiful, lightly used Pentax 6 x 7 at the local drug store for a mere 450 bucks. More importantly, I made a commitment to myself to actually use it, and I did.

So now, I have more than 1,000 2-1/4″ x 2-3/4″ negatives. They are of excellent quality, and mostly in color. There are also many black and white images like this one - shot against a roll of white paper in the dining room. I have pictures of a couple dozen bands I knew in the late seventies and early eighties. I don’t even know some of the people in these photos, but I am so happy to have them. I have wedding pictures, graduation photos, pictures of ex-girlfriends, family photos and much more. The pictures capture a time and a place in my life like nothing else could. Memories flood over me.

Scanning these images is time-consuming. The negatives were developed in a sink in my basement, so they weren’t very clean to begin with. Add to that decades of less-than-optimal storage, and you wind up with a scan that requires a LOT of retouching. My Nikon film scanner has awesome features that work only with color negative and transparency film. It’s capabilities with black and white are more limited, so scans of black and white negatives are “pure” - I can’t just click an option in the scanning software and have the scanner clean up all of the dust and scratches. It takes two to three hours to get an image like this in shape. To me the results are worth it.

I’ve been scanning one or two images a day and sending them to a mailing list of friends from the past. They comment on the images, and revive other memories. It takes time away from my blogging, but the whole scanning/retouching/e-mailing process s a labor of love.

One of the first things you may encounter when traveling through Chicago’s O’hare International Airport is the wacky walkway under the tarmac between the terminals and baggage claim. I’m usually too busy to stop and photograph this spot, but this time I was able to spare a few seconds to shoot two quick images with my D2X on a monopod. I used Panorama Tools to create this quick-and-dirty stitch.

I can count on at least one visit a year from my good friend James. Welcome, dude. If tonight’s indicative of what’s to come, this visit will be a good one!

Just to be sure we’d had our fill of MEAT on our trip, Steve prepared a huge slab of bison for dinner with Jim and Wendy Rowe on Friday. He paired the meat with a few rare and delightful reds. Yum!