i love how this globe thistle looks as if it’s in motion. needless to say, it was not moving as my digital shutter “opened” for the analog equivalent of 1/16 of a second. today i got to see the other end of that technological spectrum. we spent an afternoon in the basement of a friend and fellow photographer’s house, as he developed tintype photo portraits of my family. rather than iso film speeds of 200, 400, or 800, we were throwing light onto silver nitrate with an iso of 0.3, and, as a result, staring into the camera with fixed smiles for 5-8 seconds at at time. the results were some serious expressions, a very shallow depth of field, and a childlike sense of how almost frighteningly magical the first photographs must have appeared to the people who watched images of themselves take ghostly shape on wet sheets of metal.

globe thistle

mary jo hoffman

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