I just updated my Facebook page to remove the year of my birth from my personal information, but I can’t talk about this next entry without focusing on that sensitive subject. In 1968 I left the US and headed to Korea as a newly minted Army 2nd Lieutenant. During the first couple of months there I spent some time at an orphanage that was supported by the unit I was first assigned to. Initially my duties weren’t that onerous and on my free time I did a lot a lot of photography. Over the years I exhibited a few of the images from that experience and showed about nine of them online. These were mostly portraits that I felt had some artistic quality. The bulk of the negatives were stored away and over the 40 plus years much of what I had done was forgotten while I manhandled my negatives, many, almost to the point of being useless.

When I had exhibited the portraits from this period, I was approached on two occasions by individuals who themselves had been Korean orphans and had been adopted by American families. They surprised me when they showed such strong emotions in talking about the images and how little they knew of their early childhood.

Last year while working in my yard I talked to my 10 year old neighbor about my experiences in Korea. She told her teacher in school and then asked if she could show some of my pictures to her class. In putting together a CD for her I began to realize that without knowing what I

was doing at the time, I had done a fairly good job of documenting the life of the orphans I had visited. As I resurrected those images, some of which I had never looked at except as negatives, I decided that there might be an exhibit here, and possibly more.

So, for the last four months I have been cleaning and scanning the 35mm black and white negatives and a few color slides and have sent out some medium format negatives to be scanned. I have ended up with about 50 usable images that tell a very powerful story of that orphanage some 40 years ago.

With the help of Blurb I will self publish my first book during the next few months, The book, to be called “Orphanage – A Soldiers Memories of Korea” will include a good bit of text as well as those lost but now found images. A few are included here. Let me know what you think.
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In December of last year I undertook a project to do portraits and have an in-house exhibit of the members of the small Buddhist group I belong to. One member, a young student, had a very interesting face but she was not available and the final exhibit didn’t include her. I recently had an opportunity to photograph her and the session yielded some very nice portraits.

When I first met this young lady I knew instantly that she would make a great portrait subject. She had very distinct features, especially her eyes. She has a freckled face and a full head of curly black hair. The look is at first one of wildness with a certain animal quality, feline to be sure. At the same time her youthful face shows some vulnerability. I was anxious to see if I could capture all of that in a portrait.

I contacted her recently to see if she was available to do that portrait and was pleased to find that she needed shots for her student portfolio. She is studying music and hopes to become a singer. I set up the session and shot it in my studio (living room).

I planned on using natural light as usual and because my living room has large (almost floor to ceiling) windows facing north and west. I used black out cloths along with reflectors to control the direction and amount of light. I used three lenses for the session, a Canon f28-135mm zoom, a Tamron 90mm f2.8 macro, and a Zeiss 85mm f1.4. The Zeiss is a manual lens from my Contax film kit but with an adapter it works very well on my Canon 30D. I have used the Tamron over the years in both the auto and manual version. It is an inexpensive but very high quality portrait workhouse. The Zeiss is tack sharp wide open and is indispensable for low light situations and when you want that very shallow depth of field.

Some of the shots were clearly intended for her portfolio, but most were my efforts to try a few new things and to capture that look that first attracted me to her. I have decided that this one image fully captures what I first saw.

She is a lion cub, cute, frisky, but a little dangerous. Her face says it all.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the “Viva Mexico” photo exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The exhibit features images by Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Paul Strand and others. It’s truly a great exhibit.

A number of years ago I visited an exhibit of images by Mexican photographers at the MACAY or Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Ateneo de Yucatán, in Oaxaca, Mexico. I saw many similar images there. There is a certain feel to much of the photography that came out of Mexico during 1920’s and 1930’s regardless of which of the great American or Mexican photographers took the images. I think it has a lot to do with Mexico’s turbulent history and the struggles of it’s campesinos (farm workers). Or maybe it’s the agrarian and highly religious culture, or possibly the printing methods used by these artists. Regardless, I love it. The images are often moody and very powerful

All of the MFA images were black and white and many were platinum or palladium prints which have that very soft and rich feel. I spoke about that feel in a recent post (9/7/09).

In 2004 I spent two weeks in the city of Oaxaca In south western Mexico, not too far from the Pacific coast. I was attending a language school and was able to visit some surrounding towns. I did a lot of shooting there but to date have only printed three images from that trip. The MFA Mexico exhibit inspired me to go back and look at my proof sheets to see if I had enough to possible put together a portfolio of Oaxaca images.

I was a little surprised at what I do have, and the extent to which some of them have that same feel I saw in the exhibits mentioned above.

So I have decided to begin work on these images which with a few exceptions, were shot on black and white film. In keeping with the spirit of the MFA exhibit, I decided to print all of the images in my darkroom and try to create that 1920’sand 1930’s pictorialist feel. I’ve include here two images from that series which I’ve already printed.

I am often amazed by the interesting subject matter I can find in my own back yard.

I am an avid gardener and in a month or so I will begin the task of cleaning up the yard and getting it ready for winter. Last year I noticed in a corner of my garden, a Japanese iris plant that had a small vine growing at its base and winding up one of its long slender leaves. The vine is a weed that I often find in that area. Usually I just rip them out. This embrace of the iris leaf was so delicate and unusual I decided to take a stab at capturing it.

I dug out the iris and vine and put them in a pot and took them inside away from the wind. I placed the pot in a sunny window and decided to shoot with natural light and use black and white film. I waited for late afternoon when the sun was low coming in through a west facing window. Just as I was getting ready to shoot, the sun hit a glass table and backlit the leaf. The light was amazing, but it just lasted for a few moments.

I got a silver colored reflector and placed it to achieve the same backlighting effect. This image, “Embrace” is the result. The whole thing was pure serendipity, but I’ll take it any time.

Technical information - I shot this with a Tamron 90mm macro lens mounted on my Contax RX loaded with Ilford Delta 100 film. I processed it in Formulary FX-2, a high acutance, fine grain developer purchased from Photographers Formulary. The negative was scanned, and cropped and edited in Photoshop.

It was 2003 and I was in Cuba with a group from the School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This trip turned out to be one of my most rewarding photography related experiences ever. This portrait and the circumstances surrounding it provide an example.

I was walking down a side street in Viñales, a picturesque town southwest of Havana when I came upon a building with bread cooling on racks in front. There was a woman sitting next to the bread and as I approached she was joined by this girl. I asked if I could take a photograph and as the woman said yes, the girl, without hesitation, turned and moved away into a corner. When I had finished taking shots of the woman, I asked if I could take a shot of her daughter. The girl looked surprised when I motioned her to come back. She seemed very pleased that I would want to take a picture of her and stood with this barely perceptible smile.

Often when shooting a portrait I prefer to have my subjects look straight at the camera. I have shot that way for years. When the subject looks straight at the lens they are opening themselves up to the photographer (and the viewer) allowing their emotions and sometimes their thoughts to be read. They are in a sense making themselves vulnerable and this may be the reason that so many portrait subjects are nervous. Sometimes this directness makes the photographer nervous and that is why some people have difficulty taking these kinds of portraits. This subject was not nervous. Her face is very strong and it is somewhat controlled, but without any tension. I would guess that this girl is accustomed to controlling her emotions. The woman was similarly controlled. Maybe this was a family trait.

Some research says that basic facial expressions are inherited, but the intensity of the expression can be a family or cultural trait. I have found that subjects who are controlled like this young girl often create in the mind of the viewer a mystery, or leave the viewer puzzled about what the subject was thinking?

After saying "Thank you." I turned to leave and the woman grabbed my arm. She took two small loaves of bread and held them out to me. I said no thanks, but she wouldn’t hear it and kept motioning me to take them. I put them in my camera bag.

When I exhibited this image I accompanied it with a caption that recounted my experience. The emotional reaction of some of the viewers was a surprise to me. Many viewers lingered at the portrait for a long time. First looking at the image and then reading the caption and then going back to the image and then maybe reading the caption again. I imagined that once they had read the caption they went back to the picture to see if they could see in her face what I had described, and then maybe back to the caption to see if it described the face that they had just seen. I enjoyed watching this.

One woman had tears in her eyes when she told me how much she liked the picture. I know that as children some people experience feelings of being unimportant or maybe even neglected. That might explain why some viewers were able to relate and empathize with this young girl.

This image was shot with a Contax 167MT and a Zeiss 28-85mm Zoom lens.

I took this picture of my wife Suzanne in 2000 on a stopover in Newport RI. It was winter and I took it late in the afternoon by the hotel window. I was intrigued by the way the shadows fell on her face and on the wall behind her and I tried a couple of different compositions before the light changed. I had my old Rolleiflex Automat twin lens reflex with me (I can’t remember why), It was my uncle's and is probably a 1939 vintage with a very nice Zeiss Tessar 75mm lens . The shot was hand held and I used Ilford Delta 100 film and most likely developed it in D76.

In some of the shots my wife was looking at the camera and those are nice shots (she prefers them), but this shot appealed to me because of the softness that accompanied her closed eyes. Shooting a subject with closed eyes is a little unusual for me. Closed eyes really don’t allow for any communication between the viewer and the subject. My usual approach is quite direct.

It took me almost ten years to print this image. I couldn’t decide what to do with it. The square 6 x 6 format and the unusual composition were problematic. I finally decided that I would crop it and print it in a vertical 11 x 14 format. I had recently been looking at some portraits of Tina Modotti done by Edward Weston in Mexico in the 1920's and 30’s and really liked the feel those images. This is my attempt at duplicating that style, extra soft and low key with smooth gray tones.

The old orthochromatic black and white film often used back then rendered the reddish skin tones of Weston' and Modotti's Mexican subjects very dark. Cranking my enlarger filter down to 1 gave me the tones I wanted but the Tessa lens had yielded and image that was a little too sharp. I made a couple of attempts at getting the right softness using my Zeiss diffusion filter under my enlarger lens for half of the exposure but I still wasn’t quite there. Placing a sheet of a gift wrapping tissue under for the balance of the exposure did the trick. I printed it on Ilford Warm Tone fiber paper to enhance the mood and toned it in selenium toner to deepen the blacks.

The result was what I had envisioned. It is soft and moody and this treatment gives her head and features an almost statue like quality. Her slight smile and closed eyes beg the question, “What is she thinking?”; “Where has she gone?”

Yesterday my wife and I headed north to Rockport, Mass. for a seaside breakfast. I came away with a couple of interesting shots.

It was a perfect late summer day, but the tourist traffic in Rockport was very light. The window next to our table looked out at the little sheltered harbor with Motif 1 sitting on the breakwater sheltering the harbor. For those non New Englanders, motif 1 is a quite famous and often painted and photographed red wooden fishing shack. Check it out on Google images.

I brought my camera with me but had left it in my car trunk. I decided to go back and get it remembering my recent vow to always try and have a camera with me. I have realized that just having a camera with me changes the way I view the world and what I choose to see. (I’ll talk about that later)

Rockport has an interesting feature that has always intrigued me. Its’ galleries and shops are located on Bear Skin Neck in Rockport Harbor. Because the neck juts out into the water there are scenic views behind most buildings. Often a window at the end of a shop or restaurant with a view of the harbor will look a little like a picture hanging there.

The buildings there are all very old, some probably dating back to the late 1700 or early 1800’s. Because access to the water was probably very important then, there are alleys between many of the buildings with views of the harbor beyond. Some of these are now flower gardens with quaint gaits and arches. They present great photo opportunities.

I tried to see if I could use an alley to frame a shot of motif 1 and if possible use an element in the foreground to frame the shot. The question then was background in focus or out of focus and how much to include in the foreground. Time was not working for me as my wife wanted to move. I wasn’t quite able to find what I wanted but a few of the views did work.

This is one of my oldest photographs. It took it in the late 1950’s. At the time I was in high school and lived not too far from Boston’s Charles River Esplanade. I went there often to shoot. This image has stood the test of time and is as poignant today as it was the day I took it. It was likely a late fall or late winter day given the bare tree and the woman’s coat. It was overcast with a little mist or fog shrouding the Cambridge side of the river.

The woman had probably walked this route many times before with both her and her dog braced against the cold wind that blows across the river. Her dog looks old and tired, trailing behind her, its head hung down, not the posture of a pup. The woman is small and looks frail. Her legs are almost as thin as her dogs while her slumping posture contrasts with the thrust of the lamp post. Were the bench in front of her you would almost expect her to stop and rest.

Companionship and loneliness usually don’t go together, but that’s what you can see here. The water isolates the woman and her dog, and with the fog shrouded shore behind them they seem as if they are cut off from the rest of humanity. The dog, looking like he wants to drop, is dragging himself behind her, matching step for step and she doesn’t need to turn to know that he is there. That’s probably where he always is. They are companions; they belong together like the bench and the tree.

This spot isn’t too far from the Hatch Shell where the Boston Pops Orchestra performs its 4th of July concert famous for its William Tell Overture. At a point, the walking path on the Esplanade splits going left and right around a pool or estuary that’s about 100 feet wide and maybe 150 yards long. On this day I was on the city side and my subjects were on the river side when we passed.

Luck and chance had a lot to do with this shot, but it was not an accident. The contact sheet of this roll of film shows a series of images tracking her as she walked. The shots before and after look unbalanced because of the change of perspective and the positioning of the woman and dog relative to the lamp post, bench and tree. This image worked.

Balance and symmetry contribute a lot to this image's restful and relaxed feel. The weight of the elements on the left side of the image balances those on the right, and with the rocks along the waters edge suggesting some weight, the top half of the image is balanced by the bottom half. There is no tension. With the Cambridge side so faint, the scene seams to float.

This image is a scan of a silver gelatin print. On the print the buildings on the Cambridge shore are a little more visible. On viewing the image, many people who are familiar with the area would try and identify the buildings. Most of them are long gone, and not only does this age the picture, but it presents a real distraction. I played with curves in Photoshop to make the background drop out a little and this eliminates some of the distraction. I can no longer say that this is an un-manipulated image, but it is certainly a better one. It is one of my all-time favorites.

It is truly great when you can see the immediate social impact of photographs and especially portraits. It's also rewarding when you can see how a formal portrait can attach a measure of dignity to its' subject.

I have been taking portraits of children for as long as I’ve been a photographer, but for the most part they’ve been younger children. I never sought out teenagers to photograph and for some reason opportunities to shoot them were few and far between. Last year a friend asked me to shoot some images for a non profit organization that employs teenagers as community organizers doing violence prevention work. The organization, Teen Empowerment has operations in Boston and Somerville, Mass and Rochester, N.Y.

Initially I shot these young men and woman while they were involved in their program activities, pretty much in a documentary style. I was asked in December to take some images for a February fund raiser and decided to take formal portraits. I wanted the portraits to be accompanied by quotes from each teen with their take on the events theme (Justice is Truth in Action). The portraits ended up being a combination of available light and flash done in color and printed in black and white.

The event was held at the relatively new Moakley Federal Courthouse building overlooking Boston Harbor. Each portrait was displayed on its own easel with the easels surrounding stages where the teens were performing rap and spoken word pieces.

Copyright 2009 Merrill Shea Photography

Some of the guests, who appeared to be benefactors of the non-profit, had had little contact with these young people. It was clear that there was a clash of cultures here and the rap performances, which are extremely effective in the community and on the streets, were for some, unfamiliar and maybe a little unsettling.

I was told both at the event by guests and later by my friend, who had made the original request, that the portraits had provided a valuable function that was unexpected. After viewing the portraits of these teens and taking in some of their words and thoughts some guests felt that the teens were more approachable and less threatening than they would have been otherwise. I had hoped that the portraits and quotes would allow the guests to see the teens in a new light, but was surprised at how they had facilitated communication between these very different groups.

The reaction of the teens to their portraits was amazing. The event was the first time that they had seen them and there were all kinds of screeching and hollering as they caught sight of their images. I suspect that most had never had a formal portrait taken of them. They were exuberant with the results. Teenagers are often not taken seriously by adults, especially teenagers with backgrounds similar to these young folks. I believe they interpreted the exhibiting of their portraits and quotes as an expression of interest in them as individuals and, an acceptance by adults of them and their opinions.(Click here to see the portraits)

This shot is of the daughter of a good friend. She has been one of my favorite subjects for many years. It was taken in Aug. of 2007 when I was photographing the family at a local park. I was shooting individual portraits of her and her brother and some of the whole family. She is a dancer and would periodically strike a dance pose or twirl around as she did here.

It was late in the day and the light was low. I had been shooting with my monopod with aperture priority so the speed setting was very low, f8 at 1/50. It was a grab shot and I didn’t pay to much attention to it at first because of the blur. I hadn’t intended to create the blur

Later I decided that the blur really worked and that printing it in black and white would add significant impact to the shot. She was in a bad position in the image frame and I had to do a tight crop to fit in my regular 8x10 format. This meant cropping off a portion of each hand, a real rule breaker. It wasn’t until I actually mounted it that I realized that this tight cropping gave the feeling that all of this energy and exuberance were trying to push out of the frame. She appears to be trying to make her own space

This picture is about motion, but it’s not directional motion, but rather expansion. Interestingly the expansion is only implied and it’s not physical expansion. The expression of joy and bliss on her face says that this is about spiritual expansion. This suits her personality and I think makes it work as a portrait.