Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Tag: monochrome

  • Photo: Sleeping angel in Bethel Cemetery

  • Indiana World War MemorialNikon F3HP, 50mm f/2 AI NikkorFoma Fomapan 2002016

  • Shooting Foma Fomapan 200

    I guess lots of film photographers look down their nose at ISO 200 film. Get off the fence, they say: go ISO 100 for best sharpness in daylight and ISO 400 for low light. 200 is the ISO of uncertainty and compromise. After having shot miles of inexpensive, highly available Fujicolor 200, I don’t understand the…

  • Hood ornamentPentax ME, 50mm f/1.4 SMC Pentax-MKodak Tri-X2016

  • Chrysler AirflowPentax ME, 50mm f/1.4 SMC Pentax-MKodak Tri-X2016

  • Kodak Six-20 Brownie

    A quick review of the Kodak Six-20 Brownie, a basic box camera for 620 film. It performs surprisingly well!

  • Captured: Looking into an Oldsmobile

    My post-processing work on this roll of overexposed Tri-X really blackened the blacks and created compelling highlights. This room, the giant West Pavilion at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, uses both fluorescent overhead lights and large, high windows to light the space. It makes for the most compelling indoor lighting every year at the Mecum car…

  • Captured: Swan

    I didn’t realize until after I’d shot this whole roll that my Pentax ME was set to ISO 200. Kodak Tri-X is an ISO 400 film. Fortunately, Tri-X is well known for shrugging its shoulders at most misexposures and returning usable photos anyway. Minimal Photoshoppery took away the haze of overexposure and enhanced the contrast, at…

  • Captured: In motion

    I went to the Mecum old-car auction again this year. It was my seventh straight year — and also my last. The number of cars available to photograph has dropped sharply over the past few years, and the once open atmosphere is now tightly controlled. And it now costs $30 to get in. It was $20 the…

  • Nikon Nikomat FTn

    Until the late 1970s, Nikon-branded 35mm SLR cameras were designed, built, and priced for pro photographers. But Nikon figured amateurs would buy SLRs, too, if they were priced right. But Nikon feared diluting their brand, and so gave consumer cameras other names. Nikon’s first go, 1960’s Nikkorex, never caught on. Nikon simply guessed wrong at…

  • Favorite Photos Week: Lady ornament

    Sexual objectification as automotive ornamentation — this flying lady, low breasts proudly protruding, meant to convey fluid motion on this 1930s Buick. Can you imagine anything like this on a modern automobile? Imagine the uproar! While I wish we Americans would get over being so easily offended, I think it’s for the best that a…

  • Favorite Photos Week: Toy truck

    I enter almost every antique store I come across. I buy very little — an old camera here and there, occasionally a piece of furniture. Mostly, and I’m sure to the owner’s chagrin, I go to look. On this day, I was in tiny Roann, Indiana, shooting my Yashica Lynx 14e, which reader Dehk had recently…