• Hasselblad H3DII camera body
• 39 megapixel back
• HC 80mm f/2.8 lens with hood, front and rear caps
• HC 50mm-110mm f/3.5-f/4.5 lens with hood, front and rear caps, and soft drawstring carrying pouch
• one 13mm extension ring
• one 26mm extension ring
• two H3DII rechargeable batteries
• one “emergency” battery pack that accepts 3xCR123A’s
• battery charger
• Hasselblad camera strap
• A really long FW400 cable for tethering
• Pelican 1550 hard-sided, water-resistant case with inserts to carry and protect the whole kit
• original boxes and manuals for camera and lenses

I’m the 2nd owner of the kit. I’ve babied it, and quite frankly barely used it. The previous owner took amazing care of it as well. Everything is in excellent condition, functions perfectly, and is cosmetically nearly flawless (a couple scuffs on the lens 50-110 lens cap, and a couple wear marks where a tripod quick-release was attached to the camera base. That’s literally all I could find).

Buy it. Baby it. And go make some huge-ass photos. Your spouse will forgive you.

If you’re interested, shoot and email to doug (that’s me!) at dougboutwell.com.

Anyway, I thought they deserved a proper, permanent home on the web :)

This project was inspired by thinking about doing things differently.  There’s nothing inevitable about the way most wedding photographers approach shooting a wedding.  The “bag of tricks” that they use to shoot weddings works, but it’s not the only way.  So my mind has been spinning for years with “what-ifs”.  What if we didn’t shoot 3000+ frames?  What if it was all black and white?  What if we didn’t pose anything or interfere in any way?  What if we posed EVERYTHING?  What if we lit everything?  No flash?  All flash?  What if it was all on Polaroid?  A Leica?  What if we shot it all on 8×10?  The interesting part of asking those questions, of course, isn’t just to ramble about what gear we could find an excuse to buy, or how we could make the job easier.  The point is to think more deeply about WHY we do things the way we do, and whether habits honed over years can be challenged to improve the craft of wedding photography.  It’s a journey to refine the definition of what wedding photography is about, and an attempt to explore the question of what’s useful and important.  That line of questioning can take you many different places, and last weekend, it took me to Anaheim Hills with a vintage Deardorff and an excitement for doing something new.

I’ve always liked the idea of shooting a wedding on 8×10 film – mostly because I just like 8×10.  Sometimes I wonder whether I like the idea of it more than the actual result and process, but nevertheless the view camera is always the devil whispering on my shoulder.  It’s challenging and impractical, but exceptionally rewarding when you can put the medium to use doing what it’s best at.  What view cameras are good at is taking beautiful photos of things that aren’t moving around.  At a wedding, that pretty much means scene-setting shots, and portraits.  So why not just shoot that?  Throw out the documentary aspect altogether.  Anti-documentary.

It seemed like a sensible thing to do.  After all, for the people that were there, years down the road, photos of the people and the places are enough to jog your memory.  The most valuable thing seems to me to create a record of the family at that moment in time.  The candids are nice, but sometimes they seem like superfluous snapshots in their casual haste.  It’s almost crass, in a way, to have 10,000 photos of every last moment of the day, in the same way that unedited video is boring to watch, and wedding video often is much less magical than the photography.  Less is more.  Sometimes just having a few amazing images as mental anchors lets your mind reconstruct the rest.  It allows the viewer to fill in the blanks with the fantasy.

So the idea, then, was see what a wedding would look like if I didn’t shoot anything that actually happened, but rather just shot some formal portraits and took some photos of the surroundings.  Instead of trying to construct some Universal Representation of The Truth™, just shoot a limited set of images and let the viewer’s mind fill in the rest.  As an artist, I liked that idea, because great art always meets the viewer in the middle.

8×10 seemed like a natural medium to use for this project then, because it played to the strengths of large format photography, instead of trying to fight them.  8×10 in particular can be unapologetically romantic in its dreamlike rendition of space (see the work of some of my heroes – Paolo Roversi and Sally Mann).  Focus, detail, and tones can swirl and dance around in mysterious and beautiful ways that no other format does quite as well.  8×10 images can be at once firmly specific and alluringly incomplete in the information they give us, and I’ve always thought it would be a great medium to shoot a wedding…

… except for the fact that it’s not.  Despite hustling around on an unseasonably warm day, I still managed to only shoot a total of 29 frames of B&W and 5 frames of color film.  I own 11 film holders, each of which holds 2 sheets of film.  I loaded 8 with B&W (for the portraits), and 3 with color (for everything else).  That means 16 portraits before having to go reload, which took about 40 minutes using a jumbo changing bag in the back of my car.  I had hoped to shoot many, many more photos of the guests and family, but 8×10 is too damned slow to shoot all that many photos in one day, especially when you’re trying to fit your shooting around an actual wedding, and not take time away from the hired wedding photographer (thanks Hugh!  You’re awesome!)  I was hoping for lots and lots of portraits, but after shooting each of the bridesmaids individually, I realized that was just folly.  And that’s even though I only shot one frame of each of them.

So even though I was only trying to shoot portraits and places, I still managed to do a fraction of the shooting I had hoped.  That’s the fault of the medium.  8×10 is horrifyingly slow when you’re used to 500 raw images on a CF card and 5fps capture rates.

And then there’s the post-production.  Developing large format film is either expensive or time consuming… sometimes both.  I did the developing myself, and in an attempt to get it all done in hours instead of days, ended up scratching the negs a bit.  Good thing we have scanners and Photoshop!  Speaking of – scanning 8×10 is slow, and it’s a pain in the ass as well (dust, newton rings, scratches… bah!)  I’ll take digital any day in terms of post-production.

So, having gone through the process, I can say that I’ve truly gotten that out of my system :)  I have to say that, in terms of the “experiment” I was doing, 8×10 is a beautiful medium for wedding portraits, but I think medium format would have done almost as good a job for a fraction of the hassle (with the added benefit that you can actually shoot things that are moving around).  I can’t say I’d ever do 8×10 at a wedding again, but every time I’ve looked at these images over the last few days, I’m glad I did… just once.  There’s just something special about big film, and I hope photographers continue to find excuses to do things the hard way until they stop making the stuff.  Different can be SO fun.

Thanks Nick and Kate for letting me come to their wedding to make art.  You guys were remarkably cool, your wedding was beautiful, and I hope you have an amazing life together!

Special thanks to Hugh Forte, who was the “real” photographer, for letting me be the worst Uncle Bob ever.  You kick ass, but my camera is still totally bigger than yours :)

PS – I still need to unload the color film and send it off for processing, but I’m pretty sure that these are going to be the most interesting of the group.  I’ll post the color stuff when I get it back, probably in a few weeks.

All of that is prelude to saying that I spent my birthday this week flying to Baker, CA to have a milkshake at the Mad Greek.  It was an awesome time, and served as further proof that the journey is often the whole point, and to hell with the destination.  Baker is a tiny town off I-15, in the middle of the desert, that most people know only from passing it on the way to Vegas.  There’s a giant thermometer that can be read from miles away, and that often reads in the triple digits (Baker is literally hotter than hell most days).

Baker also has a tiny airport, which is a generous word to use.  It would be more accurate to say that Baker has a runway.  3300′ long or so, and 50′ wide, which is basically separated from the neighboring highway by about 100′ and a chainlink fence.  You could literally just drive off the road and onto the runway and nobody would notice or care.  At least there’s a wind sock and some parking.  The runway was also in surprisingly nice shape (compared to, say, SAS at the Salton Sea).  The airport’s call sign even screams out obscurity.  Orange County is SNA (Santa Ana).  Los Angeles International is LAX.  Baker is 002.  Naturally, I’ve wanted to fly there ever since I saw the little blip on the Los Angeles chart:

Baker on an aeronautical chart. No other airports for miles and miles in any direction.

Having only a few hours to fly, it seemed like the right day to finally make the trip, so I took off from Corona and enjoyed a calm, cool, beautiful flight to Baker, a 2 mile walk to town for a milkshake, and an easy flight home.  I also got a chance to finally play with Hipstamatic a bit, and I can see why people are hooked.  It’s not perfect, but it does make photography on the iPhone a bit more casual, and at least gives the images some character (maybe a bit too much, but it’s something).

By the way… it was a peanut butter milkshake.  And it was delicious.

I have several ideas kicking around in my head, and I’d like to let them out.  These are ideas about wedding photography that have been germinating since back when I was shooting professionally.  In 2011, I’d like to make them happen.  I’m looking for a handful of couples getting married in 2011, who will let me create some art on their wedding day.  Here’s the deal:

1. I’ll shoot for free.  I’m not aiming to make money, just to make some images that I can be proud of, and since I don’t know if the ideas will work out, I’m not comfortable charging money anyway.  This is strictly experimental.  So I’ll cover the cost of materials, travel, assistants, etc.
2. You’ll get a digital copy of my final product, with the right to reproduce the images for personal use.  I may or may not actually print anything, but you’ll certainly get a copy of the retouched final images (though there may only be a few).
3. You’ll still need to hire a wedding photographer.  I’m going to be treading down a new path with some of these concepts, and I can’t guarantee that anything good will result at all.  I’m pretty confident I can make the photos I want, but I’m not 100% sure that they’ll be an adequate substitute for real, professional wedding photography.  So you’ll need to have someone there to do the “real” wedding photography.
4. California would be great, but I’ll travel for the right wedding.  In order to make this work, I need the right couples at the right venues.  If that’s in my neighborhood, great!  But I’m more committed to making the best images possible, so if you’re really interested, and you live far away, contact me anyway.

If you’re interested, (see update above) drop me a line with some details about yourself and your wedding.  We’ll talk a bit about what I have in mind, and if we connect, you just might end up with some amazing, unexpected mementos of your wedding.

My Amazing Wife is almost through with her second tour of duty as an expectant mother.  This time, she’s not only is finishing out her wedding season, shooting well into her 8th month, but also watching our rowdy little toddler when she’s not working.  Here she is yesterday, looking radiant in front of a passing storm.  Metaphorically, the storm that just kicked southern California’s ass seems to be clearing just as things get easier for her (her last wedding of the season is this weekend, and she’ll be 37 weeks pregnant with our daughter, Scout), so this portrait of her is a fitting depiction of Chenin at a turning point in her life.

I’m so proud of you, love!  Thanks for being a living example of just how tough women can be!

]]> http://www.dougboutwell.com/scouts-hour-is-nigh-upon-us/feed/ 4 http://www.dougboutwell.com/buy-our-canon-stuff/ http://www.dougboutwell.com/buy-our-canon-stuff/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:45:07 +0000 Doug Boutwell http://dougboutwell.com/?p=385 ***Update – 1-7-10 – All sold!  Thanks for playing!

We have a few random items leftover from our Canon days.  When you’ve lived with a system for long enough, you start to forget where you’ve stashed all your gear :)  Chenin posted most of our old gear up for sale last month, but missed these things, which you can pick up from us here :)

• SOLD! 24-70mm f/2.8 L | $925 – Small scratch on the rear element.   Front is reasonably clean.  Missing front lens cap (I think… Chenin says she knows where it is, but I’ll believe it when I see it:).  Has hood and rear cap.  Normal exterior condition from 4+ years of regular use.  FWIW, I tested this lens last year against the Canon 24mm 1.4 L, 24mm T/S, 35mm 1.4 L, 28mm 1.8, and the Leica 35mm 1.4 (as  I recall) R-Mount, plus the 50mm 2.5 macro, 45mm T/S, and 24-105mm f/4 L.  I thought the 24-70 was good enough to skip the Canon and Leica primes and just use the 24-70 as a wide.  It’s pretty darned good.  Dunno if it was just our sample, or whether all 24-70s are this good, but our copy was great.
• SOLD! 50mm f/1.4 USM | $35 – AF is broken.  Just like all the other 50mm f/1.4′s we’ve owned.  Focuses manually just fine, and you can probably send it into Canon and get it fixed.  Front and rear caps plus lens hood (which, last I checked, you had to purchase separately, which is another rant entirely)  Glass is clean.   Optically, I think it’s the best 50mm in the Canon line once you stop down (the L beats it at wider apertures.)  At f/8-f/11, this was sharper than our 50mm f/1.2 L, at least in my reasonably controlled, subjective tests.  Don’t flame me for saying it.
• SOLD! 85mm f/1.8 | $275 – I always liked this lens better than the 85mm f/1.2 L (either version), because it focuses so much faster.  Sharp, light, quick.  It’s a good 85.  Comes with front and rear caps and the lens hood.  Wear marks on the front element from being tossed into camera bags over the years (reasonably minor, though).  Rear element’s clean.  If you were buying it from KEH, they’d call it Bargain condition.
• SOLD! 550EX flash | $250 – A bit scuffed on the exterior.  Works.
• SOLD! ST-E2 Wireless E-TTL Transmitter | $150 / $100 – We have two.  One is in missing the little red cover on the bottom part (it’s the one on the right in the picture below.)  As I recall, that doesn’t affect it’s ability to transmit a signal, but does mean that if you use it for focus assist, you get a bright white light instead of a muted red one.  I could be pulling that out my ass, but I think it’s accurate, based on what I remember.  I don’t have a Canon body around anymore to test it.  That one is $100.  The other one is complete, and comes with the original genuine synthetic leather case provided by the manufacturer.  It’s $150.
• SOLD! Off-Camera Shoe Cord 2 | $30 – Cord to let you use your flash off-camera while maintaining TTL metering.
• SOLD! Remote Switch RS-80N3 | $20 – Basically an electronic shutter release cable for Canon EOS cameras.
• SOLD! Canon Shutter Release Cable For Pocket Wizards | $30 – Allows you to trigger the shutter on your camera from a pocket wizard.  Great for remote camera setups, photo booths, self-portraits, etc, etc.

Add $10 for shipping to the lower 48 via UPS ground.

Most of the other things people had left behind didn’t fare as well.  They were preserved or decomposed in ways that were, at least to me, visually uninteresting.  Styrofoam and plastic just look like dirty, discarded versions of their pristine forms.  Clothes were more or less completely decomposed into masses of torn thread and dirt.  Electronics and machines just looked broken.  But the shoes!  The shoes had, like the juice of grapes in the hands of a master vinter, become wine, instead of vinegar or fertilizer.  They had aged beautifully, and often looked more poetic 10 years after being heaped into a pile than they ever did adorning someone’s feet.

Beautiful decay.  The tension between what something was created to look like, and what nature is incessantly transforming it into.  And the irony that something could become beautiful precisely because someone had so unceremoniously heaped it outside their condemned apartment building.

So I spent a whole day wandering through abandoned properties and snatching up all the shoes I could find.  I picked up some other odds and ends – a weathered paintbrush (above), a completely skinless baseball, a headless Barbie torso – but came home with literally a closet full of nasty old shoes.  And I’ve been working on shooting them, in my spare time, since early ’09 (not that I’ve had much to devote).

I’m not a full-time photographer any more, but I also shot professionally long enough to have been completely spoiled when it comes to the technical side of making images.  I have a hard time going out and just making pictures, and just letting them be “okay.”  If I’m going to press the shutter down on a personal project, I want the result to be as good as I’m capable of making (within reason, I suppose).  So I started shooting this project on 8×10.  I want these prints, if and when they’re ever exhibited, to own some wallspace, because part of their charm is in the tiny details you can get lost in.  I like big prints, but I hate when I get close to them and they fall apart.  It’s a little disappointing.

But 8×10 is a bitch to work with.  I was tray-developing my own film, scanning and dusting it, and though I didn’t mind the process, per se, it just came to be that I didn’t have the time to work with it.  Again, this is spare-time personal work, and with an infant crawling around the house, that time has been severely squeezed.  So last month I finally sprang for a H3DII-39.  I had tested the Hassy earlier last year, and it was the first digital camera system I’ve ever used where I was just blown away by the quality.  Pixel peepers will say it’s as good at 4×5.  I’ll say it’s plain good enough for anything I plan on doing, and if it’s not, I can easily stitch.  For the stuff I’ve been doing, and the stuff I would do if I had more time, it’s a pretty ideal system.

All of these images were shot on the new Hassy over the last couple days.  The upside is that I have a direct digital capture, and once I press the shutter I can run upstairs and start working on the post-production.  I also have a more practical way to use several captures, with different lighting or focus distances, to extend dynamic range or depth of field.  For shot #3 in this post (the twisted boot with the zipper) I shot 9 frames, and used 5 in the final composite.  Doing that with 8×10 would mean that I could only do one shot per day, since that’s about all the film holders I have.  Losing camera movements sucks, but if it turns out to be a huge deal, I’ll just man up and buy the HTS 1.5 tilt-shift adapter.  It’s a nice camera system.

It’s been nice to shoot inanimate objects, on my own schedule, and I enjoy the challenge of composing, lighting, and printing something to give it presence on paper.  It’s hard.  I have a new respect for product photographers.  But I also miss having people in front of the lens.  It’s lonely shooting the things people leave behind.

Hopefully I have more time to finish this project and start some new ones in 2010, and hopefully some of these images finally find their way onto a gallery wall somewhere.  The web is a shitty place to view a photo.