Returning to the scene of their very first show, former Okies Skating Polly played to a sold-out house at OPOLIS on Saturday. The show was the first stop in a 15-city tour promoting the release of their fifth full-length album The Make It All Show. Vice Magazine calls it “rip-roaring,” […]
Tea with Tyson Meade (Interview & Gallery)
On 26 May, central Oklahoma felt an earthquake. The vibrations were from the needle dropping on Godfather of Alt-Rock Tyson Meade’s new long player, Robbing the Nuclear Family. The 55-year-old rocker played piano and sang the entire album to an attentive audience at historic music venue VZD’s Restaurant and […]
Walter
Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, my friend Mark Campbell lost custody of his therapy dog, a cairn terrier named Okra. He later adopted a new therapy dog, Walter, a rescue Pekingese. Walter sat for me last year after Mark asked me to take his portrait. I had […]
Wanette, Oklahoma
This past Independence Day, my best friend and photographic conspirator Joe Crumley and I drove to see the abandoned Gandini Circus camp in Edmond. It was a great dissapointment — most of the structures are gone, and overgrown greenery obscured the rest, making it unsuitable to photograph. We decided to go south to a ghost… Read More …
Tuttle, Cordell, Mountain View, & Anadarko
On the same weekend that Joe and I travelled to Roosevelt, we stopped to photograph several other small towns. Our first stop was Tuttle, where I saw this granary next to the railroad tracks. I also took a shot of it with a Leica IIIf, but forgot to pull out the collapsible lens, so it’s… Read More …
Downtown Roosevelt, Oklahoma
Roosevelt is a small, all-but-abandoned town in western Oklahoma. According to the latest census, the population numbers 248. Today it’s known as a massive automobile morgue: several auto salvage companies have set up shop there, and today the corpses of cars and trucks outnumber the living. The town once boasted a beautiful Art Deco high… Read More …
Paige S. Wilson, Photographer
Photographer Paige S. Wilson recently dropped by Mercury Photo Bureau for a facilities tour. We traded places behind the camera as I made her portrait, and she made mine. Wilson was in born Los Angeles and raised in Oklahoma City. After taking a photography class at Harding Charter Preparatory High School, she enrolled at the… Read More …
X-Ray Film Portraiture with Modified Rembrandt Lighting
This is an example of a portrait made using x-ray film and a modified “Rembrandt” lighting setup. I used a film formerly manufactured and marketed by Kodak, now sold under the name Carestream Half-Speed-Blue (CHSB). Like most x-ray film, CSHB has limited spectral sensitivity and is coated with emulsion on both sides. Care must be… Read More …
Claude “The Master” Butler
I met Claude Butler when he 1st moved to Norman in 1987. He had an arrangement with the management at Sooner Fashion Mall (now called “Sooner Mall”) in which they let him set up a shoeshine stand rent-free near the mall’s center court. That arrangement ended in 1990 when some corporate bean-counters got wind of… Read More …
X-Ray Film Exposure Test (Cranberries)
This is a series of shots I made to work out the exposure characteristics of Kodak Ektascan B/RA film. Ektascan is an orthochromatic x-ray film sold in 8″×10″ sheets and larger. I cut it down to 4″×5″ for use in my Wista 45DX wooden field camera kitted with a Schneider Symmar-S 5,6/150 lens. I used… Read More …