The towns of the Central San Joaquin Valley are mainly rural, farming communities with long, rich heritages of many cultures and groups of people.  I have always been interested in looking at and wandering through some of these small, valley towns, especially the old downtown areas.  Scattered throughout much of my work are these sorts of images.  Here is a small look at Wasco, California taken in March 2010.  We’ll see how many other towns I get to and how often I am drawn back.  For now I want to do these strictly as black and whites.

All images are shot with a Nikon D200 on Lexar digital film.  Kevin Malamma, March 16, 2010

Hand Tools

Jacob's Chuck

Belts, Shadows, and Light

I have a friend that is a machinist here locally and he has been good enough to let me photograph the shop where he works.  I have been in there once, exploring and shooting, but have only made it through about a third of the place.  This is an old shop, with all sorts of machinery, dusty floors, tools, and debris typical of a machine shop.  Not only that, there is great filtered light, light that seeps through cracks in the ceiling, old, fogged windows and around the edges of big sliding doors.  All in all it is a great place to photograph.  These are just the start and are only a few of what I have done.

For those of you that care, I shoot everything with the Nikon D200 and use Lexar digital medium.  These are all natural light with little post production work to convert them to black and white.  Likely less manipulation than what would be done in the darkroom.

What was once lost is now found!  Some of you may know that several months ago I lost one of my hard drives (no, not everything had been back-up, but that is another story) and had little hope of recovering the files according to the local computer gurus.  Fortunately one of the computer guys at Ros’ school was willing to give it a try.  Working with his brother-in-law, a retired FBI computer forensics expert, and after several months, Rick brought me my hard drive — with all of the picture files intact!  This is one of the ‘lost’ pictures.  Enjoy.  I am.

I have been working to have several images ready for both our Youth Missions Auction and the MCC West Coast Relief Sale and Auction.  WHile some of these may look familiar, I have been working with the Nik Plug-ins to just tweak things a bit.  Anyway, here are three of the images that you might see at the Sale if you attend (Friday and Saturday, April 3rd and 4th at Fresno Pacific University or FPU).  

Stay tuned after the Sale I will be getting some additional images completed and on the website that I have been working on.

I am giving another short talk on MCC in Bolivia this coming Sunday and wanted to re-work some photos, delete some that I used in the previous talk, and add some additional shots. I have also been working with more of the Nik plug-ins for Photoshop.  So, just to stay in practice and to post a few photos, here are some of the photos I will be using.  So just enjoy (Click on the thumbnails for a larger view – just thought I would try this).

Josh Bradley and I headed out Saturday morning to shoot wildflowers, remembering the old adage that the worst day fishing is better than the best day working, or in our case the worst day photographing… you get the picture.  Well, here is the perfunctory flower photo cause that is about all we found.  As you can see we headed out to Taft and Maricopa as well as the West Kern Oil Museum.  While I have worked out in that area since the early 1980’s, this is the first time that I have actually gone out to photograph.  I will have to go back!  The shots here are just a smattering of what I actually photographed and of what is out there; I am sure that the more I return to shoot, the better the images will be.  Any way, had a great time shooting (besides, I  missed out on housecleaning day!).

These images were shot in the machine shop of the German Mennonite Colony we visited outside of Santa Cruz, Bolivia.  The amazing thing about this place is the finished products that were created in this shop, including the making of some of the machines.  I am really excited about seeing these images printed in black and white.  There is a certain tactile feeling looking at the images; that I can feel the metal shavings or the coldness of the metal.

Welcome back to my site.  I know, I know.  It has been down for quite some time and to be truthful I am still really learning how to do all of this stuff with of course, help from my good friend Josh Bradley (at least as long as I don’t wear our my welcome).  And, more truth, I would rather be working on photos either here or in the darkroom.  Yeah, I still have one!

Anyway, keep coming back to see what I get going here.

Kevin