Denny Henry

I spent half of last week teaching photography to kids at Camp Innabah in Pennsylvania. I didn't have much time to go into great depths about photography, but my goal for the week was to get them interested in taking pictures.  At the begining of the week, it took a little coaxing to get them to shoot even 10 frames.  Fortunatly they got the swing of things pretty quick, and were shooting wildly by the end. 

Photo Campers taking pictures Photo Campers at Innabah in Pennsylvania

Campers learning about nature

Triptych panorama of Luray CavernsLast weekend I drove with Jackie to meet her parents at Luray caverns in Virginia.  They were there while traveling along Skyline Drive on a motorcycle for vacation. 

I've been carrying a small film camera with a 50mm lens on weekends as a way to separate shooting for work, and shooting for fun.  The 50mm F/1.4 lens was great for the low lighting of the cave, but the focal length wasn't great for getting images of the large rock formations. In order to overcome the limits of the lens, I decided to make a panorama in the camera.  I shot three images, and tried to line them up so when the film was viewed un-cut it would read like a panorama.  I didn't line up the frames exactly, but overall I think the effect worked well. 

It seems like every other night this week in Washington, we've had lightning storms. 

During each storm (after I unplug all my hard drives and other photo equipment) I set up a my camera on a windowsill to capture photos of the lightning.  The way our apartment is situated in the building, we have a limited view of the skyline.  We could see the flash from lots of lightning strikes, but most of the lighting bolts themselves were obscured by buildings. 

Lightning strike in Washington DC

Recently I've been getting my feet wet learning video.  Most of the footage I've been shooting never ends up anywhere, it just helps me learn about the craft and process of shooting video.  While I was in college, I worked a little bit collecting audio and editing video in Final Cut Pro, but until recently hadn't done much with what I learned.

For the past few years, a close friend of mine, Mike D'Orazio has been running a custom guitar shop building and repairing guitars and basses.  I've photographed some of his custom guitars in the past, and been really impressed with what he's produced. 

Below is a video of Mike carving the neck of a bass guitar he's currently working on.  This version is still rough around the edges, but I wanted to get it out there to show the progess I'll be making on it over the next few months. 

After many years of shooting nothing but digital camera's, I've been sneaking film back into my personal work.  It started when I purchased a Crown Graphic 4x5 camera a little over a year ago, and more recently I've been shooting 35mm as well. 

There have been a few things pushing me back towards film. The film camera's I've been using are the completly manual. The act of manually focusing and advancing the film slows me down just a bit and makes me think about each frame for a little bit longer than I normally would.  It also keeps me on my toes by giving me a few more things to think about. I'm not sure how much longer film will be easy to buy.  It isn't yet at the point where It's hard to find the film I'm looking for, but in five years, it could be very hard (or very expensive).  Black and white film in fully manual cameras is what originally got me interested in photography, I might as well shoot it while I still can. 

The image below is a scan of two images I shot before leaving the Air and Space museum in Dulles a few weekends ago. 

Diptych of a plane leaving Dulles Airport