Keefer Photography

I love the way flash-blur photography gives a three-dimensional look to photographs.

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Yes, I shoot digital.

I’ve had a Canon EOS 20D for a couple years and enjoy taking photos with it. Digital photography is a new and exciting medium, although frankly an awful lot of people don’t get as much out of their digital images as they could.

A year or so ago I went to an exhibit of amateur digital photography. The minute you walked into the gallery, you could see that all the images — whatever their subject — were the same: over-saturated color, posterized printing, that flat brittle look that has taken over everyone’s snapshots.

I’m trying to avoid that. Here’s a flash-blur shot taken of a pear tree on a summer evening here in western Oregon.

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I’ve been doing a lot more black and white photography lately, seduced once again by the lure of Tri-X and an old, manual focus camera. Digital is great — cheap, quick and efficient — but it lacks charm. There is nothing quite so tactile, so real, as film and traditional prints.

This is a photo of one of the pear trees in our orchard. I’ve posted it in black and white so people can see what it looks like before it’s hand-colored, which it will be — real soon now.

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Hand-colored black and white photograph. 8 by 10 inches. No. 0206.

$25 at Etsy.

This is the sixth in my new series of photographs made in the forest at night or at dusk, taking advantage of the documentary quality of on-camera flash.

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Hand-colored black and white photograph. 8 by 10 inches. No. 0205.

$25 at Etsy.

This is the fifth in my new series of photographs made in the forest at night or at dusk, taking advantage of the documentary quality of on-camera flash.

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Hand-colored black and white photograph. 8 by 10 inches. No. 0204.

$25 at Etsy.

This is the fourth, and one of the most elegant, in my new series of photographs made in the forest at night or at dusk, taking advantage of the documentary quality of on-camera flash.

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Hand-colored black and white photograph. 8 by 10 inches. No. 0203.

$25 at Etsy.

This is the third in my new series of photographs made in the forest at night or at dusk, taking advantage of the documentary quality of on-camera flash. See previous postings for more details on the series.

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Hand-colored black and white photograph, 8 by 10 inches. No. 0202.

$25 at Etsy.

This is the second in my new series of hand-colored black and white photographs made in the Oregon forest at dusk or at night. They are lit by a single on-camera flash, which gives an unusual but pleasantly harsh look to the scene.

The photograph was made with Tri-X film on my Pentax LX with an SMC-M 28mm/2.8 lens and the Pentax 280T flash.

One of the problems of using an old manual camera for this sort of work is that you don’t have autofocus with a focus assist light, as you would on a more modern camera. Instead you set the lens to f/8, guess the distance, set the focus by feel in the dark and pop the shutter.

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Hand-colored black and white photograph, 8 by 10 inches. No. 0201.

$25 at Etsy.

This is the first in a new series of black and white photographs I have been making of the forest at twilight and at night, lit primarily — or only — by the harsh light of an on-camera flash. While on-camera flash has been rightly derided as unflattering in a lot of situations, I like the stark, almost documentary look it brings to photos in the woods.

These were shot on Tri-X on a Pentax LX, with 28mm/2.8 lens and 280T flash.

The prints, on Luminos Charcoal paper, are lightly hand colored with acrylic paint and are signed and dated.

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Hand-colored black and white photograph, 11 by 14 inches. No. 0147. $50 at Etsy.

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