Mark Anderson

A Photographic History Tour

2010-03-01T14:02:21Z

I meant to post this earlier when I saw it listed on the Flickr blog, but I was happy to see that the National Archives has started to post photos on Flickr using the creative commons license. One of the first collections they added were the scans from the Mathew Brady Civil War collection.

Mathew Brady (1823-1896) was one of the most prolific photographers of the nineteenth century, creating a visual documentation of the Civil War period (1860-1865).

The U.S. National Archives has digitized over 6,000 images from the series Mathew Brady Photographs of Civil War-Era Personalities and Scenes (National Archive's Local Identifier 111-B) and included them in our online catalog. We plan to upload all of the ones available in the online catalog to Flickr gradually over a few months.

The sets for the Civil War photos can be viewed on Flickr under their new collection. One of the benefits for me is that I can now easily explore these photos for my own Civil War photographic project. I have already been inspired by many of the photos I have seen in this collection for my upcoming work.

The Civil War was one of the first historic events that were able to be covered via photography and started the career of photojournalism. These photos are a great tour of the history of that time and I can spend hours looking through this collection.

General Ambrose B. Burnside and Staff of Twenty

Flickr link

The National Archives has also posted the full sized scanned images of these wet plate photographs. This gives you the ability to zoom in close to see the amazing details that were captured over 150 years ago. Here is the same photo zoomed in to 100%. Ambrose Burnside is shown on the right with his distinctive style of facial hair which is now known as sideburns, derived from his last name.

I enjoy putting a face to a name. Many times these names also have locations named after them. Here is a photo I took of Burnside Bridge in Antietam. I will always think of his sideburns when I look at this bridge.

FONZ Photoclub Gallery Show

2010-02-27T22:54:41Z

The Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ) photoclub is going to be holding a photographic gallery show on Friday March 12th at the Washington School of Photography in Bethesda Maryland. The theme of the show is Wildlife and Wonders: The FONZ Photo Club.

Please join us for the opening of the show on Friday March 12 from 6-9PM. All sales will support the construction of the new Clouded Leopard facility at the zoo's Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, VA.

The gallery is located at the following address:

Washington School of Photography
4850 Rugby Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814
(301) 654-1998

My Sunflower Sunset photo will be one of 50 photos that will be show at this show. I decided to print this photo as a 16x20 gallery wrap canvas for the show. The canvas arrived yesterday afternoon and I'm very happy with how it looks as a canvas print. I hope to see you there on Friday March 12th.

Experimenting in the Snow

2010-02-09T14:10:11Z

This past weekend a historic snow storm hit the mid-Atlantic region and dumped about 30 inches of snow on average across the DC, Maryland, Virginia area. As I'm typing this another storm is on its way to hit us with another 10 inches of snow.

During the weekend snow storm I took hundreds of photos of the storm and the day after results. I also took the opportunity to setup several cameras to do some photographic experimentation. My first experiment was a time lapse of the snow fall on the trees in my backyard. I setup a camera on a tripod and set an intervelometer (Canon TC-80N3) to record an image every 30 seconds for the next several hours.

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The process of creating a time lapse is fairly easy, you just need to take a series of photos and place that series of photos into a folder. I used the paid version of QuickTime Player to open the folder of images and select the first image in the series.

Another dialog box will ask you what frame rate you would like to use to process the images. This is where you can experiment with different frame rates to give you different effects. For the time lapse above I used a frame rate of 24 fps (which is the standard rate for movie film.)

Once the conversion has finished you just need to save the file as a self contained movie file and upload it to the service of your choice. I uploaded mine to both Facebook and Vimeo.

I shot the first time lapse on Friday afternoon. On Saturday I decided to experiment with shooting a time lapse of me shoveling snow. This time I set a preset white balance. When I started the second attempt I also discovered I needed to lock down the focus as well. The falling snow kept fooling the auto focus. This time I setup the intervelometer to take an exposure every second. Since I was just experimenting I had know idea what it would look like so I had no set shots planned. Here is the result of this time lapse.

After seeing the movie I was quickly reminded of Benny Hill and I grabbed the Yakkity Sax Benny Hill theme music and added it to the video using Adobe Premiere. Now that I see what it looks like I probably should have hammed it up a bit more for the camera. Maybe for my next time lapse. Philip Bloom has written a nice post about the lessons learned of time lapse photos at DSLR Timelapses addictive, frustrating and often rewarding... that I plan on reviewing in detail before I do my next time lapse.

My third experimentation for my snow weekend was to shoot a panorama. The sun came out late on Saturday after we finished shoveling the driveway. I decided to go for a walk and take some photos of the neighborhood. I ended up taking a panorama of the cul-de-sac. When I brought my photos into Photoshop I discovered that the pano I shot didn't blend very well since I didn't use a set exposure for all of the images. I saved the image by up using a frame around each image to give it the snapshot layout effect you see below. I think this effect would work better if I shot more shots with closer details and also with alternating image tilts. I could have also just shot it correctly to start and I could have done a traditional pano as well.

As with all experiments some work and some don't. The key is to keep trying stuff out and to keep learning your lessons so you can do better the next time.

Is a History Project Doomed to Failure?

2010-02-01T12:44:59Z

One of my major goals for this year is to finish planning and start my Civil War Infrared photography project in anticipation of the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the Civil War next year. In a nutshell my project is to photograph the Civil War battlefields using an Infrared converted digital camera. You can view some of the images in this Flickr set.

I have always found the study of the past and history an interesting subject. I continue to research and learn about the history of the world in my spare time and listen to several history based podcasts on my daily commute to work. I'm not sure if I'm just wired that way or maybe it was an influential history teacher in my past that generated my interest in History. You can't chalk it up to older age since I have always been interested in the subject (especially Military history.)

Many people could care less about history and have no idea why I would want to waste my time on such a project. I recently saw the following article in my feed reader and it gave me a pause to think about how people think and view history.

Proof that History puts people to sleep
Gary Crabbe Enlightened Images

"However, with my current book project, the minute I tell people (or they sense) that it's a history book, they fall asleep. They turn off. They tune out. They switch off their radar. It's like you suddenly become a non-important entity. In all of my career, I've never experienced anything like this. But it's happened so often, among so many people at so many levels, that I'm now 1000% convinced that it's purely related to the history aspect." [ read more ]

So with this in mind I'm opening up the following questions to my readers.

Do you tune out history?

Do you have interest in history based photographic projects as an art viewer or maybe an art buyer?

Please leave a comment below.

I ask this question more out of curiosity rather than determining the future of this project. As a creative person and image maker I'm still going to proceed as planned no matter what the response. I'm just curious if history based projects are doomed to failure from the start.

Say No to Casino at Gettysburg

2010-01-29T12:47:34Z

Back in 2005 a group of developers made a strong push to open up a casino near the city of Gettysburg Pennsylvania. After a tough fight from many historical preservation groups this plan was defeated. Well the same developers are proposing to build a casino again. This time even closer to the historical battlefield sites in Gettysburg. Click on map to view proposed casino site.

This proposed casino site is opposed by many historical preservation groups: Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT), National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP), Preservation Pennsylvania. They recently drafted a letter in opposition to this proposed casino plan.

Preservation Groups Declare Opposition to New Gettysburg Casino Proposal
Proposal poses direct threat to National Park and America's most famous small town

(Gettysburg, Pa.) - In a letter dated January 26, 2010, a coalition of state and national preservation groups conveyed to Adams County, Pa., businessman David LeVan their decision to oppose his effort to open a casino a half-mile to the south of Gettysburg National Military Park. In the letter, the Civil War Preservation Trust, National Parks Conservation Association, National Trust for Historic Preservation and Preservation Pennsylvania cited the location's proximity to the battlefield as a direct threat, noting that the potential development and traffic impacts place the National Park at further risk. [read more]

If the casino plan comes to pass years from now Gettysburg could end up just like Charlestown West Virginia. I have driven through Charlestown several times in the past couple of years and the only remarkable thing about this city is the amount of signage and billboards dedicated to lure people into the race track and gambling. All of the historical significance of this city has been forgotten other than a footnote on Wikipedia. They also have the most obnoxious radio ads promoting Charlestown Races and Slots. I would hate to see this happen to historical site and city like Gettysburg.

If you oppose the construction of a casino near one of our most famous Civil War heritage sites. Please sign the petition.

Additional information can be found at the following links:

A Civil War Era Photographic Process

2010-01-25T13:10:30Z

Recently I saw a post on The New Modern about a documentary of Sally Mann's process to photograph Civil War battlefields using a Civil War era photographic processes. Introduced in 1851, the wet-plate collodion process is a method of making photographic negatives on glass plates that have been coated with light-sensitive chemicals. The plate is then coated with a silver nitrate solution, loaded in a plate holder into the camera, and then exposed while still wet and sticky. The photographer has only about five minutes to make the picture before the solution dries.

This process is alluring and the results have a distinctive look that I find attractive. There is a growing number of practitioners returning to these alternative photographic processes. As I spend more time researching my Civil War photography project I'm finding that many of these practitioners are also actively working on projects as well. I don't see myself switching to alternative processes at this time, but it certainly interesting and maybe something I could explore later.

For those interested in the history of photography I highly recommend Jeff Curto's History of Photography podcast. He records his lessons from his History of Photography class at the College of DuPage. I have listened to a couple of semesters worth of classes and have found them both interesting and valuable in my photographic research.

Here are some additional links to people that are actively exploring and using the wet plate process for their photography
Tintypes, Ambrotypes - Wet Plate Photography
Photography Contrastique - My Alternative Photographic Processes Diary
Civil War Photography - R.J. Szabo

The Importance of Opportunity Costs and Goals

2010-01-21T23:46:31Z

"Waste your money and you're only out of money, but waste your time and you've lost a part of your life."--Michael Leboeuf

One of the key lessons I learned in my college economic classes was the concept of opportunity costs. In a nutshell given a set of scarce resources and multiple needs, when you apply that resource to one of the needs you are giving up on the others. Those unmet needs are the opportunity costs.

One of my goals for this year is to focus my time, money, and attention (all scarce resources) on just a few goals and projects. This requires me to postpone or give up other projects I had running simultaneously in the background so I can use my scarce resources towards the goals I want to accomplish.

A recent example was presented to me last week. For the past couple of years I have been asked to photograph the talent show at my daughters old elementary school. In the past I saw this as a way to give back to the school and to potentially build up a portfolio and client base for a future photography business. Last week I was asked once again to photograph the event this year. I was not able to photograph it due to a scheduling conflict but I took this opportunity to explore my options as if I was available.
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In the local DC Metro area I'm surrounded by several examples of people that are looking at these opportunity costs and have decided to focus their efforts towards their goals.

One example is Michael Palmer who has recently decided to focus his photography business on food photography. In the past he had a great portrait, food, and fine art portfolio. Last year during a recent photowalk he mentioned he is changing his focus to specialize on the food photography market. He converted his website and blog and has started to create an excellent food photography portfolio and client list. This change in focus comes at a cost to his other photographic efforts, but I feel like he will become more successful with this new focus.

Shawn Duffy is another local photographer that gave up his job at the World Bank to pursue his goal of being a photojournalist. He is now currently in Palestine as a freelance photojournalist trying to build his photography portfolio and client base. His goals out weighed his need for a steady paycheck so he can pursue his passions.

Personally I have been thinking about the time I spend on various projects and activities in my life. For example what is the opportunity cost of me playing a video game versus doing research or training on one of my projects. If I still feel like playing a game, what is the opportunity cost of playing a game alone on my PC versus playing the same game on the PS3 with my daughter for some quality family time? These are the type of questions and decisions I want to ask myself.

Another friend came to this same realization a couple of years ago. Jon McRay gave up video games and other distractions to concentrate on his nature photography. He has dedicated many of his weekends to travel to locations several hours away, or waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning to ensure he is at his location before sunrise. His photography has also improved greatly since he has made this change in his life. That is dedication to your goals and choosing that the goals win over the other opportunities.

I admire that dedication and focus. These photographers provide me with the inspiration to dedicate myself to my own goals.

So my dedication for this year is towards the goals I set at the start of the year. On the photographic front I'm focusing on my Civil War photography project. I still need to determine what the actually end point is going to be, but having a focus will help me to create my path and achieve my goals.

Burning Down the House

2010-01-18T13:16:05Z

Talking Heads - Burning Down the House

Watch out you might get what you're after
Cool baby strange but not a stranger
I'm an ordinary guy
Burning down the house

Hold tight wait 'til the party's over
Hold tight we're in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house

This weekend I helped Emma with her 8th grade science investigation project. She was able to pick any project she wanted and decided that burning down houses would make a fun project.

Her study was to compare black and silver heat resistant paint against a control of no paint. She built 9 different popsicle stick houses, painted them, and then we burned them to see which one would last the longest.

She also needed photos for her project board and with fire involved I was very happy to give her a hand.

In the photo above you can see the glue bubbling on the corner of the house.

For those that are curious, the silver heat resistant paint lasted the longest by almost a minute. The black heat resistant paint didn't do much better than the unpainted houses.

The project made for some interesting photos and I can potentially see myself doing some more controlled burns of stuff in the future to get some abstract photos using my 180mm macro lens.

My 2010 Goals

2010-01-11T20:52:22Z

The start of a new year gives me time to reflect about the coming year and also about the year past. What went well and what didn't. The last year was a tough one for the family and I. This time last year I had a single goal, to find a new job. I accomplished that goal in the middle of July and I'm happy to be fully employed again, unlike many people in the current economy.

My creative photographic output also suffered for the first half of the year. I guess Maslow knew what he was talking about. While I was unemployed I took consulting jobs to help pay the bills and I also toyed with the idea of taking some paid photographic jobs. I shot several events and portraits last year with the idea to build up my photographic portfolio. This portfolio could be used to help launch a photo business. During these small odd jobs I quickly confirmed something that I already knew, I don't want to make a business out of my photography. I like having my photography as a hobby and creative outlet. Turning it into a business and becoming a professional photographer is just not for me. I'm happy and proud to call myself an amateur rather than an aspiring professional.

Back to my goals for this year, I have found that the goals that have the highest likelihood of being accomplished are the goals that are written down. So with that thought in mind here are my goals for Twenty 10.
]]> Focus: One of my first goals for the year is to simplify my life and focus on what is most important to me. In the past I have had so many different projects and ideas I tried to accomplish. I found that I was unfocused and nothing was accomplished. I was suffering from the too many balls in the air syndrome. I have decided to pair down my outside interests and projects with a goal for the year of being focused. I have already killed off several projects and websites that were sitting in limbo. I have also started to reduce the many inputs that were competing for my attention. One example is I started the year off with over 760 RSS feed subscriptions in my Google reader. My guess is over half of them sit unread with the dreaded (999) staring back at me. I plan on deleting half of them since they are a distraction. I have also started to delete and unfriend various social media contacts that are not providing value to me. I was also maintaining several social media profiles which I will delete and centralize into my main personal profile. I will continue to cull down these elements competing for my attention so I can focus on the projects and tasks that are most important to me.

Health: One of the things I learned about myself last year is I like being a vegetarian. I feel better about myself and my health. However, I need to expand my food palate so that bread and grains are not my go to solution when hunger strikes. I have also committed myself to help Michele with the meal planning and go with her on our weekly shopping trips. We have been doing this for the past couple of weeks and we both feel that it has helped since we both have dramatically different diets and meal plans. One of these days I will write a post about that. Now I just need to kick the exercise habit into gear.

Career: One thing I learned from last year is you can't be too comfortable in your work environment. You need to be prepared for the next opportunity when it comes your way. One way to combat this is to dedicate time to professional development and training. I created an Lynda.com online training account last year and have taken several online courses. I have found this type of training very valuable and I plan on spending a couple of hours a week going through additional courses. With the change to my website to a blog format I also want to write more to help improve my written communication skills and also expand my web presence beyond just my photography.

Creativity: My photography has been a great creative outlet for me and will continue to do so in the future. I have several photographic goals that I want to accomplish in the coming year.

The first goal I have set for myself is to take a photo everyday this year. I'm not planning on doing a photo a day project this year. I just want to force myself to click that shutter button at least once a day. Good or bad I want to take a photo a day. The best way to improve your photography is to be shooting. I already have a camera with me everywhere I go and I'm also actively taking photos on a regular basis for the MyDrive photoblog. So with this goal in mind I'm forcing myself to take a photo everyday to help force the habit to improve my technique, eye, and creativity.

My second goal is to take over 10,000 images for the year. I took a quick look at my photo counts for the past couple of years and they have been consistently in the 7000-8000 range per year. I do actively try to delete the stinker images and will continue to do the same in the future. But I really need to break out out of this comfort zone and take more photographs this year.

In years past I had several events and trips that gave me the opportunity to shoot up to a thousand photos for one event. I don't have any of these opportunities planned in the future, so I will need to rely on lots of smaller photo outings and projects if I want to meet my goal.

My third goal is to create and finalize my plan for my Civil War infrared photography project. It could be either a book, a folio, or maybe just a website. As stated above I want to focus this year, and this is one project I want to focus on.

The 150th anniversary (sesquicentennial) of the Civil War starts in 2011 and I would like to have my project plan completed before this Summer so I can plan my photographic outings. There are going to be many events over the next couple of years around this event and I want to make sure to be prepared now. So this year I plan on shooting at more Civil War locations and I plan on doing my first round of photographic production in the Winter. I also plan on researching and studying the history of the Civil War to help with this project. I will be posting more about my research on the blog.

My final goal is to print more of my photos. I have found several great online printing services that are able to produce better quality and cheaper prints than I can produce at home. I have very few photos printed in my home and I would like to experiment with various finishes and mountings to see what works best for my favorite photographs.

These are the goals that I have prepared for myself this year and I'm excited about the future. Here is to a great start of a new decade.

Techie Stuff

2010-01-11T15:59:00Z

One of the reasons I had for converting this website from a photography portfolio website to a blog was to give me a central location where I can post my thoughts and writing. At one point I was maintaining 3 different written blogs, a photoblog (which I'm still running at mydrive) and a static photography website. One of my goals for this year is to write more and a having a centralized location will help me to fulfill that goal.

During my day job I program and manage several websites. That provides a great deal of information that I can write about on a regular basis. So I recently created a Technology category that will I will use to record my thoughts about technology, software, hardware, and the like. Here is an ideal example lesson learned (or maybe re-learned.)
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I normally assign variables for various components of the script so I can re-use the code in other areas and all you have to do is change the variables in the script header. However for something this basic I didn't worry about creating variables.

For those that are interested here is a basic sample of the shell script for automating an FTP upload:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/ftp -n  <open ftp.domain.com
quote user username
quote pass password
prompt off
put /location/filename.html
quit
EOF

This very basic script was failing to login and I couldn't figure out why. The server I was sending the file to is on the Rackspace Cloud sites platform and I was wondering if they were doing something strange with automated ftp transfers. So I decided to test the same script between 2 different servers and it worked fine. The only difference with the new test is I used different usernames and passwords. So I changed the usernames and passwords on the problem server and it worked flawlessly.

This really had me confused, the script now worked, but I needed to find out why it didn't work with the old username and password (which worked fine when done manually.) After some trial and erorr and changing the login credentials back it hit me. The password for the problem account had a $ in it (example: pas$word). I found the culprit of my problems!

In shell scripting (and many other programming languages) you read in assigned variables with a $variablename. So the shell script was trying to enter the letters "p a s" and a variable called $word which didn't exist. So the login was failing (as it should.) If I had assigned a variable at the start of the script I wouldn't have had this issue, or I just need to remember to escape out special characters in scripts like $.

The problem was solved and I now have a reason for the problem in the first place.

Photo in 2010 National Zoo Calendar

2010-01-08T18:40:01Z

During the month of December the 2010 Smithsonian National Zoo calendar was shipped to all of the Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ) members. I'm happy to report that one of my images was selected for a page in the calendar that was set aside to promote the FONZ Photoclub. For this page they took a selection of photos from our photoclub members for display on the calendar.

The FONZ photoclub meets on the first Tuesday of every month in a relaxed and inviting environment to share and learn about photography. The club also raises money to support the Zoo by selling member's photographic work at special events. Club members also help out with photographic services at various zoo special events.

Earlier this week we had our January meeting and there were several new faces in attendance. They all mentioned they learned about the photoclub from the calendar. So this little promotion seems to have done the trick.

Shown below is one of my images they selected to be shown on the page.

A New Year

2010-01-07T15:36:33Z

As we enter a new year and a new decade everyone starts to think about changes... changes to habits... changes to goals... and in my case changes to websites.

I have been wanting to update the structure of my website for sometime and a new release of the Movable Type content management system gave me a good excuse to make some updates. With this change I decided to merge my 30seasons.com blog into my main manderson.com domain. This website will be my primary home for all my photography, writing, and links to my social media presences on the internet.

The first round of updates have been completed and I plan on additional changes over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Hidden Lake at Glacier National Park

2009-10-04T00:21:52Z

This photo was taken on a trip to Montana in 2007. This is Hidden Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana. This desktop wallpaper has been posted by special request.

This desktop wallpaper is available in sizes:

1024x768 | 1280x800 | 1280x960 | 1440x900 | 1600x1200 | 1920x1200

This wallpaper is free for your personal use. I just ask that you do not use it as a basis for creating additional graphics. If you wish to link to this image, please do so by linking to my wallpaper page, and not to the jpg files directly. Thank you very much.

To use one of these images on your computer desktop, just click the appropriate size for your computer monitor. Then once the image loads you can right-click (Windows) or opt-click (Mac) and click on "Set as Desktop Background."

Talent Show Portraits

2009-05-13T14:22:10Z

A couple of years ago I was asked to take photos for my daughters elementary school talent show. The photos were going to be used in the yearbook and were also sold as a fund raiser for the PTA. At that time I was starting to practice my new found "strobist" techniques and setup a black backdrop and 2 speedlights to shoot the portraits for about 40 different acts. It was a great learning experience.

This year I was out shooting at the Maryland Zoo when I received a call asking if I was available to take the photos again this year. The only problem was that the talent show was that night and the photographer they had scheduled was unable to attend. I have been actively seeking opportunities to shoot portraits for my portfolio so I agreed to shoot the event.

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This time I had four speedlights, two in the front and two in the back to make sure the white seamless was truly blown out white.

The kids were great and both the parents and I are very happy with the results. I'm already anticipating the call again for next year.

Photography Monthly Magazine

2009-04-26T14:39:48Z

Back in July of last year I shot some family portraits for a friend from work. I shared some of those images from that shoot in a blog post called Family Portrait. When I shot those photos I had enough people to try an idea I have been thinking about. I laid on the ground and shot the group as they circled around me. It was a fun experiment and it paid off. I posted the image on my Flickr stream and was contacted in February from a photo editor for London based magazine Photography Monthly. They had an article idea for interesting family portraits and they wanted to use my photo in the article.

This is another example that you should always try to experiment and try something new. It may not work out but when it does people will take notice. I have taken this to heart and now try to think of new ways to do things in my photography and also in my day-to-day work life.

Here is a tear sheet from the article. They mention I used a Canon 1Ds MkII which was not the case. I used a Canon 5D.