About – iLsg

A camera lost, a passion found…. My affair with photography began in August 1964 at the world’s fair in flushing queens New York. I was 8 years old, my parents, siblings and I had just had lunch at what I remember to be a restaurant. My father realized he left his camera behind and we hurried back to get it…. my father asked our waitress if anyone turned in his camera that was left behind at the table we had just ate lunch. Hearing “no” was a disappointment to my father…. but seeing the camera at my eye level tucked behind the utensils at the waitress station I grabbed it and proudly announced that I had found it. My father said when I get older I could have that camera, a twin lens 35mm Bolsey with rangefinder range-finder focusing.

Fast forward a few years and countless requests to use the camera… I used allowance money to buy my first roll of film at the local pharmacy and returned it to the same pharmacy for processing…

I managed to convince my mother to buy a black plastic developing tank (Yankee) and a chemistry kit (Kodak) at Kingsbridge camera shop on Fordham road… and my first successful roll of film was mostly of my dog Paco. I stared at those reversed little B&W images for what seemed like an eternity.

My fascination and determination was rewarded with a willingness by my mother to take me back to Kingsbridge camera to buy a bogen enlarger, 3-4×5 trays and a box of 4×5 paper (DuPont Velour matte surface)… in a not so light tight closet and a 29.95 enlarger I made my first prints, I was 12 years old. Later that year I discovered books by Ansel Adams and his method of print visualization, meticulous control of processing that allowed complete control of tonal values to achieve the print he pre-visualized. Photography in this context of visualization and execution appealed to me as an artist, and unknowingly that experience altered the direction and purpose of my art.

I had applied to Art & Design HS in NYC during 1970 and was starting what was intended to be a career in art & illustration. After the start of my junior year in October of 1972 I changed my major to Photography. By my senior year of HS I was shooting w/ a 35mm Minolta SRT101, 6x6cm Hasselblad 500C and a 4×5 Speed Graphic… I had a functional darkroom, aka a bigger walk-in closet and very understanding parents that allowed my domination of the kitchen sink when I was printing.

I applied to a few colleges and choose SUNY-FIT for its proximity, cost and brevity… Prior to graduation I was working as a freelance assistant in NYC, after graduation, I worked full time assisting many well-known commercial photographers. A photographer I was working for (Fred – studio on 23rd St) had become ill and was not able to work, his agent asked me to do a sample shot (unofficially) of a new product line for Revlon cosmetics. My whimsy and confidence to play with the cosmetics and my prior history in painting compelled me to smudge and smear the cosmetics on the white Lucite background…. like a painter would mix colors on a palette… these test shots were delivered to the agency by the agent despite the lack of conventional “product beauty shot” … my creativity became Revlon’s “pallet of colors campaign” summer 1976. The photographer I worked for did not return to work and I was let go… needing a job I started another job at a large catalogue studio on Park Ave & 20th St. In my first year (age 19) I was asked to shoot 3 full page ads for K-Mart that appeared in parade magazine… again only by chance it was a rush assignment and I was willing to work late into the evening for the chance to do more than load film holders. I built a small set that looked like a beach location, I shot it with a bare bulb Ascor Sun-tube with 6 daisy chained powerpacks… 6 sheets of 11×14 Ektachrome transformed an unknown kid from not having a name to the talk of the studio.

My samples and experience opened doors to work for Arnold Newman printing his Great British book and show sponsored by the London Times, and his 50yr Retrospective at the Light Gallery in NYC. I also worked freelance for Ray Kelman, Richard Avedon, Gary Bernstein, Lowell McFarland, Irving Penn and then a full time position for Lionel Freeman. My years of assisting NY’s Greatest photographers opened the door to a staff photographer position at large production studios in NY and FL…. and my eventual status as Independent Photographer. In the half century plus as a professional photographer my assignments and clients have spanned multiple generations of change and trends beyond the changing cultural styles to the transition of print media to digital media to social media.

The journey has been as diverse as life itself. My relationship with photography has remained unchanged through all of the mutations and transitions as it is my preferred method of communicating to the world in my native “visual language”.

When making the choice to own art,

“love how it makes you feel” !

To have said … “it speaks to me” “it moves me” “it inspires me” is to have experienced art… music, painting, architecture, dance, etc etc. Art is meaningful, art is engaging, art beckons a response. The desire to own art is a legitimate response to the attraction and positive emotional satisfaction it provides. The connectiveness to reality and the inherent truthfulness of light, lens, film and true photographic print magnifies the emotional response in ways that other art forms cannot. A photograph by definition is a physical representation of light, reality captured in the moment that film is exposed.

Silver Gelatin Print from Camera Film

Love at first print, more than a half century ago I made my first B&W print from a projected 35mm negative (Kodak plus-x pan) on 4″x5″ Dupont Velour Paper in a not so light tight closet. This combination of projected negative and Silver Gelatin emulsion represents the overwhelming majority of my work produced it the past 50 years. It remains today as my primary print process.

Commercially produced or Personally Hand Coated in my lab, the essential ingredients remain same, the difference is the unique personality of each print.

The combination of silver salts and gelatin quickly became the preferred medium of photographers in the 1870’s due to the emulsion’s sensitivity to low light … by comparison to other processes of that era that required long exposure to daylight. This process advantage allowed the projection (enlargement) of the camera plate to a larger print. Prior to this discovery image size was 1:1 to camera and plate size.

The use of direct contact printing has regained popularity due to the ease of making digital negatives from low cost consumer grade inkjet printers. …. more on this in another section.

Platinum / Palladium print

From National Gallery of Art.

The platinum print process is based on the characteristics of light-sensitive iron salts, which react with platinum salts to form platinum metal. A sheet of paper is coated with a solution of these salts to make it sensitive to light. Once dry, the sensitized paper is exposed to light through a negative image film, developed in a chemical solution, cleared, and washed. The print’s hue may range from charcoal gray to sepia depending on the chemical properties of the sensitizer and developer. Various image hues can also be achieved by adjusting the moisture content of the sensitized paper and/or the temperature at which a print is developed. Further chemical additions to the sensitizer and/or developer provide seemingly endless options for fine-tuning the appearance of the photograph.

The first commercially manufactured platinum paper was introduced in 1879 by British inventor William Willis Jr., who perfected the process over the following decades, gradually expanding the variety of his Platinotype Company products. A chemical variant of the platinum process was introduced in 1887 by Austrian Giuseppe Pizzighelli and marketed by several manufacturers in Europe and the United States.

Unlike a gelatin silver print, the image in a platinum print is absorbed directly into the paper, taking on its characteristics. Thus, the paper upon which a platinum print is made affects the quality of the image. An untreated paper will yield a matte print with a softer and less-detailed image than one made, for example, on a paper that has been chemically modified to impart a sheen, such as the Platinotype Company’s Japine papers, first introduced in 1906.

Silver Gelatin Print from Digital File

Something new something old and something borrowed. This is a hybrid process of transferring a digital asset (image data) to a light sensitive material… in this case the digital data is transferred to a silver gelatin emulsion by light. The aesthetic qualities of the print are that of traditional “light-film-lens-paper” processes with no perceivable variation between prints, making every print “the same”. I offer this print from original camera film images that have been converted to a digital image format. The image is then worked to the same parameters as would be available in the darkroom… crop, contrast, localized lightening and darkening and spotting. I do not introduce new image elements that did not exist in the original camera film, this process eliminates wasted photo paper and chemistry, variation between each print.