A friend is curating an upcoming NYU exhibit of young New York photographers reflecting on the city in the wake of September 11th, and asked that I put together two or three prints for the show. Flattered, I accepted before realizing I had no idea what I might photograph. After spending about a week racking my brain, I finally reached a mental image of what I wanted: crowd scenes, the city’s hustle and bustle, but viewed through a dreamlike haze in darkly exposed black and white. I blew through several rolls and hours and hours of darkroom time experimenting with different techniques that might yield what I wanted, but none of the prints looked right to me. On a lark, I decided to buy a very cheap filter, cover it with a thin layer of Vaseline, and shoot a few rolls through it. It came out perfectly.

I’m still trying to decide which shots to use for the show, but as soon as I do, I’ll scan and post them. As several visitors have pointed out, the newest picture in my gallery is about six years old, and at that point I was mainly shooting color wildlife and nature photography (to sell through a stock photo agency) rather than the black and white portraiture and street photography I mainly do now. I’ve been meaning to add more recent images to the site for a while, but good medium format scans are expensive and difficult to come by. Time to bite the bullet and get some scans done.