Lawrence Ripsher

Happy New Year everyone.
OK this is the last in the series… Just a few shots of my little family as we made our way down the coast. As I’ve already said a dozen times, it was a wonderful four day trip and I intend to do it several times more over the next 12 months. I’m delighted with the shots I took over the week – only the second time I’ve ever felt strongly (i.e. brave enough) to bring only film equipment with me on a trip… I’ll never stop …

I’ve photographed in a dozen different countries, with countless models in abandoned mansions, inside the the hull of a supertanker, with a hundred different dogs, from the pressbox of ATP tennis matches and on set at a TV series… but I have nothing to speak of when it comes to widlife. I have no idea if I even suck or not :) – growing up just outside London gave me little exposure to wildlife and the time I spent in Singapore yielded little more than close proximity to lizards.
That will …

Today someone asked me to elaborate about my reference yesterday to the Canoscan’s 8800F “budget” characteristics … here’s a quick summary and a comparison with a Nikon Coolscan 5000.
As a very quick introduction, the Canoscan is a budget flatbed scanner from Canon. It has a high max DPI resolution and retails at the very low price of somewhere between $160 – $200. When I first got the scanner, I was amazed that it could support such a wide variety of film formats – from 35mm film to MF to regular …

OK, second part. This was the best part of the trip – the endless coastline with deserted beaches. Oregon allows dogs on their beaches so anytime we felt like stopping, we’d pull over, let the dogs out and start photographing. Other than the single trip down to Cannon Beach this summer (when the sea was relatively calm), I’ve never really had the chance to photography the ocean so this was a treat for me. At the beginning of the trip, the weather started in a howling rage but within a …

I’ll be uploading my pictures from our Oregon trip last week in four or five parts. Here is the first part in the series – “Skies”.
These are basically shots of the amazing stormy skies that tracked us as we headed down south on our trip. This subject matter has not been a classical area of strength for me so it was fun to actually get a chance to shoot some of those vast open skies.
I’ll post the rest of the images in coming days.

Olympus OM-4 on Fujichrome Velvia 100

Olympus OM-4 …

A couple of people asked me how I created the panoramic look in yesterday’s triptych. Here’s a post containing a couple of the original images which made up the final version which provides an easy answer to that question.

I arguably prefer the shots in this format, which fits so well with my recent style and Horizons project – but there’s something about seeing the three shots sandwiched together that makes me want them presented in a triptych. I also think they’ll print well like that (which I’ll try tonight).
All three …

We just returned from a four day trip down the Oregon coast. Man what an amazing place. This summer, we went as far as Cannon Beach, but a photographer friend told me that Cannon Beach is the start not the end as far as the view goes. So, with both dogs in the back of the car, we set out along the coast, stopping at motels each night until we reached the Redwood forests in N.California.
I took two cameras with me – a Zeiss Ikon on loan for review, and my …

Lots of chatter online lately about how the UK (my home country) and London in particular, are clamping down on photographers.
On the 8th Dec, The Guardian ran a story about a chuch photographer getting stopped under terrorism powers:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/08/police-search-photographer-terrorism-powers
On the 9th Dec, The Independent wrote about Police searching a photographer using anti-terror laws:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-search-photographer-using-antiterrorism-laws-1836683.html
And at the end of last month, there was a BBC photographer who spoke on UK television about his run in with the law:

I’ve heard reports of friends who still live in London about how photographer is getting harder …

Day 4 consisted of waking up early in the morning in Susanville, and simply heading back. Despite being having driven more than 12 hours the previous day, we still had a 9+ hour journey ahead of us and as with much of our short break, we didn’t have too much time for stopping and photography. On the way back we did want to choose one place to stop however and that ended up being a little park in Lassen National forest. After a short break there, and a few photos, …

Day 3 was actually the purpose of the trip. Woke up at 5am and drove 20 minutes from the campsite to a place called Badwater. This is the lowest point in the US, and during the summer some of the hottest temperatures of anywhere in the world are experienced. The flats of Badwater stretch for miles. Due to the extreme climate, very little water and / or life is sustained and you can walk unimpaired in pretty much all directions. When rain does fall, it goes through a freeze–thaw and …