Tom Fritsch

5 years ago my Father-in-Law passed away and left many items that he collected over the years. He is my main source for many of the things I shoot. Just when I think we have discovered all that he left behind something else shows up. Yesterday, 3 boxes of old liquor and beer bottles were discovered in a crawl space that hadn’t been touched in years. I’m not quite sure why he collected some of the things he did but I’m positive he thought that one day someone would put them to good use. He was right, thanks Jim.

The shape and the color of the oil can is what drew me to capture this image. For some reason this shot took me a long time to finish. I messed around with the lighting on background for hours. The rusted metal has tons of great texture and scratches, but it started to take away from the shape of the can. In the end it was best not to light the background at all.

This is an overview of a series I have been working on lately. I colored the ice with food coloring and broke them up into a variety of sizes. I captured these shots in different stages of melting and some are in pools of melted ice. It has a cool effect when you can see the different colors start to melt together.

Due to an extremely busy summer, I had to put the blog on hold. I’m probably a few weeks away from getting back to it on a regular basis but I thought I would give a sneak peak into what’s coming next. The shots below are tests of a series that I’m working on. I will get into the details when I have finished the project.

I have recently signed on as a contributor to Glasshouse Images.I look forward to working with them in the future and will be adding new images to my stock portfolio.

I made a new flip book from some of my more recent shots on the blog. I have this posted on my Issuu page.

This was my wife’s wagon when she was a child. It came from a hardware store and was painted yellow and green before it’s final blue coat. It hasn’t seen much action in recent years, it’s duties have been downgraded to moving plants and bags of stone. 

I really like all the scratches and air bubbles that are on and in the marbles. I did however clean up the odd color marbles in both shots. I was pleasantly surprised how saturated the color came out.

These shots don’t look like much until you click on them. There’s some pretty cool things happening in the bubbles.

Here are some shots of food coloring. Some are captured with the dye moving and some are still. These are all straight captures. I did clean up the dust and air bubbles in photoshop. It took me a while to get the hang of getting the dye to move how I wanted and ended up moving it with a corner of a paper towel in a brush like motion. The dye was sitting on glass.

This is where I ended up after my Paper Cave post from last week. I’m much happy with the result. The color is better and I think these shots are more interesting. They kind of have an emulsion transfer feel to them with the folds in the paper.

These shots are a beginning idea that I’m still working on. I like the different colors in the shot on the left. Click to enlarge.

The shot below is a bit of a time warp for me. In the late eighties and early nineties I was experimenting with in-camera masks where I would shoot a textured background and then tape the developed film in front of the film plane and expose it onto the shot I was working on. Since I don’t shoot film anymore I thought I would do a quick revisit to the idea today.I got a very similar look to what I use to do but I didn’t do it in the camera. I used a very cheap 16 x 25 blue furnace filter and put it about a foot in front of the subject. Shot. Done. This look seems very dated to me because it is so you won’t be seeing anymore these shots. Just for fun.

These are the last shots on white for a while. I had a lot of fun working on this series. I highly recommend working on something basic over a short period of time. It clears the mind.

These shots are a continuation of the “Basket” series I did a few weeks back. I like the looseness of these and they have a jellyfish feel to them. The netting came with three cantaloupes. Click to enlarge.

I don’t shoot liquor ads nor do I try to pass myself off as someone who does, I do however like shooting glass and bottles. Continuing on the “red” theme I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks I was drawn to the red and green contrast. This bottle belonged to my Father-In-Law and I’m not sure of its age. As you can see it’s still sealed and I will probably keep it that way. I’m more of a beer and red wine drinker. 

I added another spread to my mini series of old cooking items. These objects were donated to me from three different families. I love the character in all of them and will preserve them for the next generation.

Here are a few shots of soda crates I did today. This was my stress relief after a long week.

I recently started showing my work on Viisualpro.com. Pretty cool site that has lots of great photography. You can search by category or click on the word “mix” and it will bring photographers up randomly. Here is the link to my page.

I was playing around with the curve in my capture software to see what I could do to make the blacks deep and rich. I always set the curve and shoot to it rather than adjust in post. It was a fun experiment and I will continue to play around with it. I usually like to see the texture of the stainless in the highlights.

Here is another shot utilizing the color red. I stumbled across this background in the reject bin at Ikea. Seventy cents well spent.

I have been playing around with the color red for a few weeks now. Aside from my car I don’t have a lot of red in my life and I’m not quite sure why. At one point I had a red office and it was very comfortable to be around. People react differently to red and it seems to have many meanings.  

Here is a new edition to the Opaque section of my website.

Here are two shots of a World War II Officers watch. I like the scratches on the glass and the metal on the back of the watch. The background is an old leather jacket. I normally shoot with a medium format camera but recently purchased a newly released Nikon DSLR and these are some of the first shots I have taken with it. Overall I’m pretty pleased with the results. If you click on the photo it will enlarge and you should be able to enlarge it again to check out the detail in the shots.

This is my first post for 2009. I’ve been quite busy lately, between working and a few home improvement projects I haven’t had time to blog so I thought I would put something up to get the year rolling. I’m looking forward to what the new year will bring. More to come.

I don’t have much to say about these shots other than I’ve had a bowl of bottle caps sitting on my desk for a couple of months and decided to do something with them. Now that they have been shot, I can move something else in their place.

This is my third volume of “Random” that I have made through Issuu. As you can guess by the title, I pick random images and throw them together.You can read more about Issuu from a early post of mine here.
Click on the book to enlarge.

Get your own - Open publication

I have posted four images of the combat boots my wife use to wear in the mid/ late eighties. I believe she wore these to her prom with a pink dress. It was her way of sticking it to the man.

Since I have been hauling these boots around for the last fifteen years I figured I would get my use out of them. I have posted the first group on my website. The second group shows the other versions that I did.

The blog went on a short break between Thanksgiving and working out of town for a few weeks, time got away from me. Here are a few new images I’ve done recently. The background is a thin shiny paper that gives off the distorted reflection. When I started this blog I had mentioned that from time to time I would show things that are out of character from what I normally do and I would say these shots fall into that category.

I did another series of images in my on going experiment of shooting quantity and editing out the images I don’t like. This time I shot eight images and edited them down to four.

 I’m leaning towards liking the two images of the three men in a row. I like where the point of focus is in both of these shots. From a color stand point I like the way that the green,blue and red play off of one another in the upper right hand side.(see image below)

I recently joined Wonderful Machine and look forward to working with everyone there. They represent a large group of diverse photographers and I am happy to be one of them.

I thought I would talk about a book project that I have been working on for the last couple of years. The title at the moment is called “50th@f8″.I have proposed this project to different organizations over the years trying to gain interest and support. Below Is a brief overview of the project.

Overview:

On November 19, 2004 my Father-in-Law Jim Clark passed away leaving an unfinished book project that contains over 200 images from the Korean War. Seventy percent of the images were shot on Kodachrome from 1952-1954. I have spent the last several years pulling together his text and images that give a descriptive account of his life as a soldier. This collection contains letters,official documents, and propaganda leaflets.

Jim Clark with his dog $4. 1954

Artist Statement:

When you look at someone’s work you should be able to see how they lived their life and what kind of person they are. In viewing Jim Clark’s work you see just that. When looking at these photographs you notice one thing that shines through in all of them, human connection. They capture the warm personality of a twenty year old from a small town in Iowa. There is a sense of ease and commradery under the worst circumstances. The camera was his way of relaxing during the war and from the looks of his subjects, it had the same effect. He came from a time when people didn’t protest or question the actions of their government. His statement is not a political one but a document of his time in war. Armed with three cameras , this self taught photographer brought back images that told his story.

Jim was prompted to put his thoughts on paper some fifty years later due to the lack of coverage on the Korean War. These photos were used as the starting point for his words, It was easy for him for he documented his journey every step of the way.

I have put together a much different project than what he set out to do. I have included letters,emails, and other artifacts that really show who he was and the effect the war had on his life. Jim saved everything that was important to him and what we as the viewer get see is his life’s work.

From time to time I will post his words and images. We will start today with a overview of some of his images. A lot of the Kodachrome slides have deteriorated over the last fifty years. My wife and retoucher Nicole Clark has been restoring them. I left some of the images unretouched so you can see the condition that some of them are in. I may end up making a separate blog or website for the project.

This is by far the best song ever written about Halloween.

the_shaggs_-_its_halloween

Here is a old transfer that I did in the early nineties. Happy Halloween.

I added two new shots to the “Lucent” gallery on my site. I have been shooting this series over the last four years and have quite a backlog of these shots. Posted below are the new shots and one from my archives.

These shots are just about the colors and the movement in the shadows. I needed some color to brighten up my rainy day.

A couple months back I made a book through Blurb and was fairly pleased with how it reproduced. The one thing that did bother me though was the weight of the paper. It was a little thin for my liking. I wasn’t the only one who had this complaint, I found several posts on their forum asking them why they don’t offer a heavier paper.

I received a email today announcing that now they will offer 100 pound Premium Paper on books up to 160 pages. There is a little more info here.

 I was talking to friend and photographer Chris Dicicco about how much time I spend on a shot when I’m trying to create something new. I told him that there are times when I feel that I have fallen short of my own expectations when the shot is finished and wondered if I had spent to much time over thinking what I’m doing.

He made the suggestion to shoot many shots in a short period of time and go back and edit out the ones I don’t like and see if I liked the results better. Going for quantity over quality.

I chose a very plain object, a audio cassette tape. Not exactly state of the art, there isn’t even a good shape to deal with. I decided to focus on the tape itself and see what I could come up with quickly.

I ended up doing about twelve versions of this and edited it down to six.

After going through all of the shots there are four that I like. I separated the four into two groups to see how they flowed together. The first group below goes from very simple to complex. 

The last group is the one that I like best and as it turns out these were the shots that went the quickest.

This was a fun experiment to try. Normally I would finesse the lighting a little more, but it was nice just to let things go and see what would happen in the end. I wouldn’t say these are book worthy but I think it was a worth while effort to get to some place new.

The other day I was in my garage when I kicked over a tub of plastic BB’s. They rolled all over the place and as I was dropping F Bombs I noticed that they made a cool pattern on the floor. Suddenly my rage turned into joy and I started thinking about how I would photograph the BB’s. Clearly, this is some sort of illness that I suffer from.

The shots below are two out of the five that I did. The shots are nothing like what I pictured during the spill except that I knew the shadows would play a big part of the shots.

This week we take another trip back to the mid nineties for some manipulated Polaroid Time Zero shots. Everybody has there own method of manipulating their shots. I used a metal pottery tool that was much like a pencil but rounded on the end. You can see it’s effect in the meter shot below. I believe it was my attempt to simulate brush strokes, but to be honest I can’t remember my train of thought at the time. I do remember that it was some what costly to use Time Zero and the chances of screwing up the shots were high, at least for me. I use to travel a lot when I was shooting people and it was always fun to bring along the SX-70 to crank off a few shots while waiting for models. I believe the shots below were taken in Key Biscayne, St. Augustine, Captiva, and Ft Meyers Fla.

My old friend Ivan works with this film a lot and has a large body of work to check out. While your there click on his links page and you will see what other people have done with it.

Here are two recent additions to the site. I tend to gravitate to objects that have a lot of texture. That seems to be a recurring theme to a lot of my work. The backgrounds are the backs of old metal Pepsi and 7up signs from the fifties. It’s hard to recreate fifty years of aging. 

My Father-in- Law was a collector of many things. He passed away a few years ago and my wife and I have been going through some of his treasures. He loved music and had a fairly large record collection. I was gathering his records together to give to a friend of mine when I noticed how vibrant and saturated the album covers were. As much as I love iTunes there is something lost not being able to hold a album cover and stare at the art work.

I love to photograph plain and ordinary objects and make them into something visually interesting.I also like changing the look of the object to the point of not being able to tell what it is. The shots above are of masking paper. Sometimes you need to do a shot about nothing.

Today is the official launch of my new website. I took my time putting it together and thought at times I would never finish it, but having been through this process in the past I knew that time was my friend. It’s never really finished but a starting point were it can continue to evolve as I do.

I chose to use aphotofolio.com for the design of my site. This is not a product placement post, but I am really happy with how it works and the features that it offers me. The fullscreen feature on the site really helps show all of the detail that I put into my images and the load speed is great as well.

Throughout the course of putting the site together I enlisted the opinions of my own panel of experts that consisted of three retouchers and three photographers. A big thanks to Jer, Chris, Chet,Vic, Rich and my primary retoucher Nicole Clark, I appreciate all of the feedback that everyone gave me.

 My intent for the future of this blog is to not only show the work that I like, but also feature new ideas, unfinished thoughts , and things that may seem out of character for the work that I’m currently doing.I have posted below several shots that I like, but didn’t make the cut for the site at this time.

Here is a look into my archives from the mid 90’s. The two images below are lacquer transfers. Easy to make and a cool effect. Make a laser of a print, lay it face down on water color paper and apply lacquer thinner to the back of image with a rag and the image transfers. Done.

A glimpse into my iTunes Purchased folder.

Here are a couple new shots I have done recently. I usually shoot in 8.5×11 or 17×11 formats. Forcing myself into these formats helps me get the most impact out of the shots and really gives me a good idea of how it will look in my book.I also like to shoot things in pairs when I’m splitting the double page spread.

In February of 2007 I joined a web based publishing site called Issuu.It allows you to upload PDF’s into a flip book format that reads like a magazine. You can have as many different books as you want and have the option to embed them into any blog. It’s another online avenue to get your work out there. I have four of my books linked to another blog here. I have posted one below.
You can click on the icon to enlarge.

Get your own - Open publication

Lately I have been working on a series of images called “Aged”. The shots are of old rusted/tarnished metal and silver objects that I have collected, borrowed, or inherited. I have shot them on black to help bring out the texture and shape of the objects. My intent was to show as much of the texture in the metal that you normally can’t see. This will continue to be a work in progress and I tend to shoot several versions of each object. The Image below shows the different versions of the scissors that I did. I ended up picking two of these for the series which is on my site.