Lawrence Ripsher

A few test shots from my first roll of tri-x 400… developed in DD-X for 8 mins with ilford fixer. 100% scans show very fine grain for a 400 film. Sharpness doesn’t compare to say Fuji Acros (100) but when I got it right, it looked v good. I read that the DDX development is a similar effect to xtol (fine grain effect). I printed the last shot at 19″x13″ tonight (via scanning) and was blown away. I’m constantly amazed at the resolving power of medium format. Makes going back …

Sora, swimming in the morning, getting some air in the afternoon :)

Pentax 67ii + Pentax 45mm f/4 on Fujifilm Neopan 100 Acros

Despite the fact that Sora continues to grow in confidence, I never thought I’d actually be able to take him jogging. He walks comfortably on a leash but while running, everything happens at a much greater speed and I thought he’d just balk at the idea of pacing through the streets of a big city with cars close by, etc. Turns out I was wrong. On Sunday we tried going out for a run and he was awesome. We ran about 3 miles, over to a local park, and he …

It’s now been three months since we adopted Sora. I just realised that today – it’s amazing how quickly time has gone. Tonight, I completed the migration of all previous entries marked “the Life of Sora” so now all past and future posts about him will appear under the url  http://lawrenceripsher.com/blog/thelifeofsora.
Shortly after Sora came to our house, a friend (thank you Kendra :) told me “wait 3 months, then you’ll find out who he really is”. We weren’t sure whether it was reassurance or a warning, but it has certainly …

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 …

Day 2 started by leaving Reno in the morning and driving 8 hours South, stopping off for occasional leg stretching, photoshooting and a rosie lee. At around 6pm we arrived at the top of Death Valley National Park and began the 30 minute decent into the park. Being a man who doesn’t like to overplan these sorts of things, I hadn’t arranged a parking spot at the campground (for which we had no camping gear anyway). After 24 hours of driving over two days, I started to look a little …

Day 1 of our thanksgiving road trip consisted of nearly a thousand miles of driving over 15 or so hours. Starting out from Seattle, we had breakfast in Portland, cut across and reached Bend, OR by the afternoon and finally Reno, NV by 11pm. Focused on covering ground rather than shooting, I actually took only a handful of pictures on the way down – but here are the first day images.
All shots taken with an Olympus OM-4 + Zuiko lenses on Kodak Ektar 100. Scanned with Nikon’s Coolscan 5000.

An …

When we leave the house, we usually leave Sora in our bedroom. He has our nice soft bed to sit on, room to move around, etc. Ideally he’ll be in the crate as that’s the safest place for him when unattended, but he’s not used to being in there yet – so we’re still training him.
Yesterday we went out for a few hours while he was in the room. Upon our return, we were greeted with Sora’s creativity :). He’d gotten bored and chewed up two of Akuri’s paintings. 

Here he …

We had some bad news today. Sora went into the dentist to have a cracked tooth extracted. During the initial consultation, the dentist mentioned that his upper canine next to the cracked tooth looked gray / discoloured and could have been damaged. There was an area of skin that looked suspicious that caused a lot of pain for him when touched as well. The dentist said he’d take a closer look during the xrays – suspecting that it may have been from the same trauma (i.e. gunshot) that lost him …