doug grosjean

<p>Here's the rest of one of our bow sweeps, the one with duct-tape shown above, but in Period clothing.</p><div></div>

<p>Duct-tape fixes almost anything.</p><div></div>

<p>Day 3, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes in the morning....</p><div></div>

<p>Several of the excavated batteau had fire-pits, so the modern ones do as well. Lined with earth, clay, fire-brick, or some combination of the three, they allowed cooking on board so the men could eat on the way.</p> <p>So of course, modern batteau have fire-pits too.</p><div></div>

<p>And later in the day, scenes from the past such as this one....</p><div></div>

<p>The second morning started out foggy and mysterious....</p><div></div>

<p>The batteaumen were portrayed as wild, brave, hard-working and hard-drinking, shirtless, and shoeless. Here's a simple shadow selfie that I hope conveys all of that....</p><div></div>

<p>Poling is done from the walkboards, which are 8" wide and run along both sides of the boat. At first they seem impossibly narrow, and the whole idea of pushing a boat through rapids with a 20' long pole seems crazy. But... after a while they don't seem as narrow, your balance improves, and the pole touching the bottom of the river adds another point of stability to your stance.</p> <p>We only lost one or two people overboard in rapids. And yeah, we brought the back in right away, none the worse for the experience. Well, a little wide-eyed.</p><div></div>

<p>Saturday, June 14th, the festival begins. The batteaux are poled across the James to Lynchburg's Percival Island, for the start.</p><div></div>

<p>Batteau have a rudder at each end, called "sweep oars" or "sweeps". This results in both ends being steerable, and the boat being very nimble for a boat that weighs 4,000-6,000 lbs. empty.</p> <p>The person running the bow or stern sweep does so from a raised deck. That raised deck is the perfect place to sleep at night, as I usually did....</p><div></div>

<p>Hi all,</p> <p>I usually post at Classic Camera, but this is the first whitewater trip I've taken where I was able to have enough electricity to shoot it all on my compact digital, the Tough 3000.</p> <p>A James River batteau was a Colonial-era whitewater cargo boat, designed and built to carry 4-10 ton of tobacco down the rapids of the James River in Virginia, from the Allegheny foothills to Richmond, for export. Usually crewed by slaves or free black men, it was an occupation where color didn't matter if you had a strong back, and the skill and bravery to run the rapids with cargo - and then push the boat a couple hundred miles back upstream with poles, loaded with supplies.</p> <p>These batteau were common from about 1770 - 1880 on the James River, slowly overtaken by canal boats and then the railroad. At that point, they slowly faded from memory, living on only in literature and a few artworks. By the late 20th Century, nobody alive had seen one.</p> <p>But then, in 1982, a construction project in downtown Richmond uncovered about 100 batteau hulls in the sediments of the former canal boat basin. Archaeologists saved a few, measured many, photographed all they could, and .... made drawings. Re-enactors built new batteaux, based on the drawings and designs of the excavated examples, and began to run them down the James River again, this time out of curiousity.</p> <p>It turned out they were fun boats to run down the river, and by 1986 the James River Batteau Festival was founded, a 120-mile run from Lynchurg to Richmond, completed in 8 days, with stops at history river towns along the way.</p> <p>From June 14-21, 2014; I was able to crew aboard the batteau, the Clifton Lee. These are the photos from that trip.</p><div></div>

<p>It might be more accurate to state that it affects the flavor, more than the quality.</p>

<p>For a couple Grand Canyon whitewater boating trips, my Ikon Ikonta 6x9cm survived both very well inside its leather case, inside a Pelican case that appeared to have been made for it (perfect size).</p> <p>I was careful not to drop the case on rocks or anything like that; no padding.</p> <p>Leaving in few days for another boating trip, 8 days on the James River in Virginia aboard a Colonial-era whitewater batteau, and the Ikonta is going along on that too.</p>

<p>Answers to the best of my ability:</p> <p>A. Consider the camera simply a fixture that holds film flat and perpendicular to the lens, and has a shutter that admits light. Assuming the film is held flat, the camera is light-tight, and the shutter timing is accurate; it's a good camera.</p> <p>B. Can you buy an expensive film camera in 2010? But to answer your question, in my opinion, and based on my own experience, the quality of my photos has very little relationship to when the camera I shot them with was made.</p> <p>C. Good question. I've shot on Kodak cameras from that era, using modern film. For example, using a Kodak Panoram from 1900 and color film. In that case, since there wasn't any color film back then, no. My photos don't look like they were taken in 1900. But assuming you shoot black-and-white film, the answer is still probably no, they won't look exactly like 1900's photos. But they will look very different from modern digital or 35mm.</p> <p>The true measure of most photos isn't in what camera they were taken with, but whether they are well-composed images that provoke a response from the viewer. Your cameras are capable of that, regardless of what era they are from. </p> <p>High quality lenses are nice, but... Sometimes a large negative with a so-so lens will do fine.</p> <p>More depends on the photographer than on the camera.</p>

<p>A couple areas where film holds its own (against digital) are scanned medium-format negatives and swing-lens camera panoramic photos.</p> <p>Yes, digital medium-format exists - but as the Jochen Schrey wrote above, the price of entry is so high that it prevents entry to almost everybody but the pros.</p> <p>Film panoramic photos shot with swing-lens cameras are *quick*. You press the button, the lens rotates, and you've got the whole panoramic image on the negative in 1/100 of a second. Yes, you can also shoot a great panoramic photo by stitching images together, but it takes computer time, and if people are moving through a crowd between exposures, you're going to be very busy trying to edit the images into a passable result.</p><div></div>

<p>Current film emulsions are better than ever, and a high-quality classic film camera coupled with modern film can produce amazing results in competent hands.</p> <p>I own modern gear, and film gear dating back to the early 20th Century. I'll use whichever seem appropriate, or sometimes both.</p> <p>I've gone on Grand Canyon whitewater trips, where electricity was not going to be easily available, and shot the entire trip on film cameras that were fully mechanical. I've done other trips where my cameras were a waterproof compact digital, and a medium-format folding camera. </p> <p>I leave in a month to participate in an 8-day trip down mild whitewater on the James River in Virginia, and I'll take a tripod, compact submersible digital camera, some spare batteries, a folding medium-format camera and a dozen rolls of film, plus drawing supplies.</p> <p>It's not a question of how good is film or how good is digital. The real question is how good is the photographer?</p><div></div>

<p>Saw this movie last night in Royal Oak, Michigan. It raises many, many questions about Vivian Maier; and about the man who is promoting her as a great unknown artist....<br> <br> http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/finding_vivian_maier/<br> <br> Her work is great, but I think there are many undiscovered artists who go to their grave without ever making it big.<br> <br> The producer of the movie is the man who purchased her negatives. He'll do well financially if the movie does well, or if he gets people to see Maier as an artist, or if the movie helps him sell her work.</p> <p> </p> <p>Overall, I liked the movie. Not many movies get me excited about photography (even though I love photography in the first place), but this one did. The movie does make me want me to load my Rolleiflex with a roll of good black & white film, and go shooting....</p>