Tom Fritsch

This is an ongoing project that I started a few months back. These radios are part of my father-in-law’s massive collection. More to come.

Here’s a project I’ve been working on for a few weeks.These are all single captures done with one light. Minor photoshop work was done to clean up dust and frayed edges
More images can be seen here and here

The images below are small pieces of broken glass and go along with the other translucent series I have done in the past. Ice and Trip
I would like to give a shout out to Jerry Catania and Becky Wehmer at Water Street Glassworks for hooking me up with the glass. Thanks!
Click on images to enlarge.

It’s been a long time since I have posted anything. Here are two random images. More to come…

The blog has been slow for a few months so I thought this would be a good way to start off the new year.I’ve had this lock for a while now and finally ran across the right kind chain.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

Open publication - Free publishing - More still life

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]