my life, as far as i know.

my number one fan gave me a shiny new portfolio book for christmas. the cover is aluminum and hinged. the pages are welded polypropylene with archival liner sheets. the set is really perfect for the images i’ve been working on.

it is moving slowing, but it is moving forward. a real series of images.. what i consider my first coherent body of work. and thanks to this new nudge, the makings of a real product are forming.

since photography is as much of a process as a method for me, it’s been difficult to set aside prints i wonder my “work”. i forget that the word work is part of work in progress, the eternal label for what i’ve produced. i’m realizing that a portfolio is just a snapshot of my work, and that in no way should it mean i change how i’m working.

thanks, mom.

who are we?

this is an old photo from my father. on the back is written: Summer 1937 / Winnipeg Ca

i’m not sure who these people are. The man in the center looks like my grandpa harry, but he is too old to have been. harry would have been 17 years old that year. is he a relative of harry’s? my mom thinks they might be related to harry’s wife, esther, but she is not sure either.

in my ongoing research into the schlachet family, i now have four working family trees, none of which intersect. i think the problem will end up being the holocaust, accounting for missing links and gaps in the tree. i’m finding schlachets who arrived in the united states from austria, poland, and germany. with so many growing but separate trees, the search is getting difficult but very interesting.

i recently heard from two brothers, david and daniel, whose father is from berlin. they pointed me to an alexander shlahet. alec changed the family name to bring it closer to the original polish pronunciation. he has a son adam and a daughter larisa, both of whom i have messages sent out to today. i will keep trying to go upwards on all trees to find the missing links.

so far, the closest new contact i’ve made is a jeremy, my second cousin (his grandfather is my great uncle abe). there are also a lot of J names: jared, jason, jaye, jeremy, josh, joel. jerome.

researching one’s family like this is an unusual matter. on one hand, most of the people i’ve been in contact with share only a name with me. they’ve had their own lineage and lived separately. on the other hand, i feel we are related in a large extended family sort of way. most of the schlachets i’ve talked to are interesting in what i find out. some, like anita, share my enthusiasm and excitement in the research.

my kuya jude asked me this morning, what i thought this all brings to me.. to know who the rest of my family is.

i think family tree research helps heal the gaps families accumulate over time. families have arguments, disagreements, and falling outs. they split and branch out and, over time, the original animosity fades. the research reminds you that you are still family and that the common ancestry is still there, despite what has happened in the past.

and sometimes, you think you knew how you got here. i mean, you knew the extent of your family’s “story”.. at least as far back as you or your parents can remember. when you discover there is more detail than you knew existed, it all becomes exciting again.

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my favourite vacuum tube just trying to fit in.

i’m learning to control the jamin-darlot a bit more. trying to center inside the image circle, for one. i’m such a sucker for old glass. lens and tube alike.

background is grey paper. black foam core to the left, medium chimera softbox to the right (with 50Ws of speedotron pop). scan of a polaroid 54 shot with a shen-hao 4×5.

this is a close-up of my new lens. i spent some time cleaning it with brasso and it’s cleaned up pretty nicely. what i love about the barrel is the detail in the lettering.

the only thing i didn’t understand about the words is the succ’r. tonight at dinner (at our favourite french bistro) i asked the waiter. he thought it might be an old version of a new word, obscuring the meaning a bit. he also thought of succursalle, but there’s no ‘r’ in it. he called his mother-in-law on the phone, who suggested it might be successeur, which seems to be much closer.

successor might be right, since jamin and darlot worked together before darlot went on to work on his own.

this is a straight scan of a polaroid i shot last night with a new lens. it came out so contrasty, moody, and smooth.. i can’t wait to do more with it!

it’s marked “maison jamin darlot” and dates around 1860. i took the lens apart last night to try and see which formula it follows. cemented doublet and air spaced doublet. the element shapes aren’t quite the same as a common petzval but it may still be. from what i’ve seen so far, i am definitely pleased for a $63 lens.

while i had the speedotron setup, i took this digital pic of the lens:

something very interesting happened today. i got an email from an anita schlachet. she found me online, searching for our last name. through a few email exchanges, we were able to quickly link her immediate family tree to the jared schlachet that i discovered through searching.

with some help from my mom, i was able to fill in some of my own tree. i was inspired to contact another schlachet on facebook.com, a jeremy. he got back to me fairly quickly, and it turns out that he linked to family pretty closely — we are 2nd cousins! see the tree:

there’s a small branch in san diego. eli and his two sons, josh and joel. i recently found joel on facebook and he remembers that visit (he was 9 years old at the time).

hopefully joel will get back to me with information from his parents. his father and my father had some common history but i could not remember it. i’m sure he is loosely related to me.

the stories i know about my family are really started to gel now. for example: one schlachet owned the vienna meat company in chicago. another schlachet was their distributor in cleveland. that guy (my dad’s “uncle abe”) once sent us a huge package full of meats for christmas. incidentally, the vienna meat company supplied kosher deli meats to shapiro’s deli, which if i’m not mistaken, i’ve eaten at.

family history is pretty interesting. more so, than before. the three question marks on the far left of the first diagram.. those may be victims of the holocaust.

the ellis islands records organization has scanned logbooks containing 12 entries for schlachets entering the country around the turn of the 20th century. i’ll keep those in my notes, in case they connect to the trees somehow.

anita should get back to me tomorrow. i hope to connect these trees together.

happy birthday, dad. love you.

this is a kodachrome dated feb 1973.

once in a while, my job brings an opportunity to write some sort of documentation.

this week i gave an internal presentation on a vmware product named lab manager. getting a bit tired of the vmware slides, which all use the same small set of icons, i decided to do my own. using a blue pen and copier paper, i drew out all the diagrams for my hand-out. i then used a scan-to-tiff-and-email machine we have at work. then a few actions in microsoft word brought it all together. it looks so official, with the corportate document template and logo. and my document ended up being pretty content-rich. anyways.. i gave the presentation today and gave everybody a copy of the hand-out.

this one illustrates the derivation of multiple virtual machines as they are deployed, checked in and out of the library, etc.

i’m becoming quite an authority on vmware.

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this is another hand-held 4×5 shot from the financial district in san francisco. that’s a window washer’s scaffolding in the corner of intersection of these huge buildings. you can see the transamerica pyramid, one of the city’s most recognized landmarks. this shot came out so clean on this neg scan i decided to post a large version of it.

over the years, the sensitivity of plates and film has changed. one thing that’s interesting about collodion work is that the emulsions were very slow, and very blue/uv sensitive. one way to effect would be to use a dark blue filter.

i picked up a tiffen 47 yesterday. it’s a dark blue filter with a exposure factor of about 3. it is typically in a set of three for color separation and tri-color printing. Most people have the #29, or dark red, in their black and white filter set. the third in the group is #61. (The numbers are wratten numbers.)

the polaroid above shows a self portrait i did this morning (who else would be up at 7am doing photo work!?) through the 47. if you want to see a comparison of the with and without, i made a javascript rollover page that will show you both.

overall, i really like what it does. it may be difficult to tell on a monitor, but i can definitely tell some differences using the polaroids.

the most noticeable difference is that with the filter, my skin tone is much darker and more textured. it appears a bit more contrasty. the texture and contrast both make the image appear clearer. it’s difficult to be too scientific about it.. after all, the with image is shot at f/5.6 where the without was at f/11-f/16. but i’ve seen enough to want to use this filter next time i do a portrait.