Craig Pindell, Fine Art Photographer

All work copyright Craig Pindell, 2025

New Work

Some odds and ends of my most recent image creations. These are most likely not in their final form. It usually takes some tweaking to get the result I want.

Chuckwagon Race, Cheyenne Frontier Days, 1986

This photo has a legacy of taking a lot of time.

It took me a couple of years to get permission to mount my camera on the post of the inside rail of the race track.

Then it took a couple of tries to get the framing as I wanted it. In the end I used a 20mm lens with a sacrificial UV filter (which was broken on the second day).

I built a radio remote control for my Nikon FE to fire the shutter as the racers went by - making 36 exposures ( at 5 frames per second) as the multiple chuckwagons passed by.

The light wasn't perfect, but it was better on the second day than the first (this photo is from the second day).

After the second day, the racers complained that the camera noise was distracting the horses, so I wasn't able to fine tune any further.

The negatives are on Tri X film, developed in D76 1:1, and are nearly impossible to print. The horses were too dark and the grandstand back lit. I tried a lot of different paper grades and paper developers, but with no success.

At one of the John Sexton workshops I attended, we learned how to make unsharp masks to help with problem negatives. I have made several unsharp masks for 4x5 negatives, and a couple for 120 negatives and was comfortable with my process and happy with the results.

Not long ago I was looking for a different negative and I came across this group of images. Looking at the contact sheet I knew immediately that an unsharp mask would help.

Rather than use my pin registration system, I simply placed the 35mm negative in the approximate center of a 4x5 sheet of film, emulsion to emulsion with a spacer, and exposed the "sandwich" in my contact printer. It took a few tries to get the density I wanted in the unsharp mask, but once it was worked out, I was able to realign the negative and the mask using the sprocket holes on the film.

With the mask I am able to print this image on Foma fiber base variable contrast paper at grade 2 1/2. There is a bit of burning in the sky to get the cloud to show. Other than that, this is now a much easier image to print. At this point I have made an 8x10 and an 11x14 print, and both were the best I have made of this image so far.

It may have taken almost 40 years, but I finally was able to put the image I wanted on paper.