Don Goodman-Wilson

Photo Essays

Training for Semana Santa in Seville

Holy week is fast approaching, and in Sevilla the devout are training hard for a demanding test of faith—carrying massive floats on their shoulders for the annual parade.

Essays

On “Real Photos” (All Photographs are Lies)

There is no such thing as a ”real picture”, and any attempt to delineate such represents illiberal and unnecessary gatekeeping in the photographic community.

Photo Essays

Getting Lost in the Wholesale Markets of Seoul

Let's get lost in the back alleys and byways of the markets of Seoul, and lose ourselves among the industrial quantities of goods for sale.

Photography

Announcing: Crown + Flint R3

After months of hard work, I'm happy to announce the latest version of my mobile app for analog photographers, Crown + Flint.

Stations

Stations: Praha

When you think of good public transit, I doubt you think of Praha. Or maybe you do, but you picture its extensive network of trams. But the city has an extensive metro system too, and in the city center each station is boldly adorned in the colors of the lines

Essays

Adolf Fassbender (All Photographs are Lies)

Adolf Fassbender, in his 1943 essay “Why Bother?”, laid the foundations for an argument that there can be no purely mechanical photographic portrayal of a scene independent of the photographer making the image.

Stations

Stations: Seoul

The Seoul metro is comprehensive, efficient, clean, and bright. But it is above all else melodic; so melodic that, if you’ve ever been, you‘re hearing those jingles in your head now. I’m very glad to have had the chance in April 2023 to photograph Seoul’s trains

Essays Featured

Setting the Stage—Pictorialism vs Straight Photography (All Photographs are Lies)

This week I dive into the origins of toxic gatekeeping in street photography culture, identifying its roots in a hundred year old beef between two of photography’s earliest movements: pictorialism and straight photography.

Photo Essays

A walk through Myeong-dong night market

This was my first visit to Seoul. I prefer to learn about new cultures through their food, and so one of the top things on my list was to visit the Myeong-dong night market, a nightly festival of Korean street foods that, while pretty touristy, doesn't disappoint. If

Essays Featured

All Photographs are Lies*

No one can agree what street photography is. I think most attempts boil down to gatekeeping, and are built on very shaky intellectual foundations. Let's blow some of that up.

Photo Essays

Breaking Down Albert Cuypmarkt

Like an enormous, slow-breathing organism, Albert Cuypmarkt slowly inhales blocks of vendors and shoppers each morning, and expels them from its paved lungs again each evening. This respiratory process is the product of a dedicated team of roustabouts whose job is to break down the market each night, and build

News

Changing blogging systems

I've outgrown my old blogging system, and (being the new year), I am moving on to the new shiny thing. You, dear reader, couldn't care less. But migrating old posts to the new system will take some time. So if you don't see what

News

Announcing the Open Film Database

I've started a new project, a natural outgrowth of my work on Crown + Flint. My app relies on a database of technical data on film stocks, a database that I currently maintain myself by hand. I've been in the world of open source software for a

Experiments Featured

Introducing the RB67-Pan: Panoramic photos in a medium format camera

It's easy to transform a Mamiya RB67 medium format camera into an inexpensive—if extremely bulky—35mm panoramic camera.

Experiments Featured

Backlighting Negatives (Pt. 3)

If you haven't yet, you might enjoy reading part 1 & part 2 first. I think at this point in my backlighting experiment, we're finally starting to see some really interesting results. For this round, I sought images with maximum contrast in order to simply focus

Equipment

Nitpicking Lenses—Comparing the Industar-50 & Canon 50mm f/1.4

Can inexpensive Russian glass hold up to the pinnacle of Japanese rangefinder optics? I take these two lenses for a head-to-head test—and come to some surprising conclusions.

Experiments Featured

Backlighting Negatives (Pt. 2)

Last week I wrote about a new experiment I'm toying with, colorizing black and white negatives during scanning. Inspired by the aesthetic and technique of classic 80's animated movies (especially "Tron"), I'm riffing on the technique of backlight animation by lighting my

Experiments Featured

Backlighting Negatives

I enjoy exploring the creation of images that ride a fine line between analog and digital, images that raise questions about how they are made, versus how they are perceived. Isometrica was my first hike along the uncanny valley, but I have several other ideas brewing. One idea that has

Film

5 frames of Shanghai GP3 100 in a Mamiya RB67

Bargain hunting for a Mamiya RB67 in Seoul turned out to be a bigger adventure, and a lot more fun, than I'd anticipated

Equipment

5 Frames with BCG PHC-50 (aka ORWO Tf12d)

BCG PHC-50 (aka ORWO Tf12d, aka Film Washi S) is a high-contrast, ultra-low grain black and white film, and it might be my new favorite.

Equipment

5 Frames of (Extremely Expired) Kodak Gold 200

Ever seen film with a lime green base? Let's explore photography with extremely expired, badly stored consumer color film.

Essays Featured

Hiking the Uncanny Valley

I deliberately plunge myself into the Uncanny Valley—it's more work than I thought.

Equipment

Kyoei W.Acall 35mm LTM (on Fujifilm X-Pro3) Review - A Delightful Daily Walkaround Lens on APS-C

[Originally published on 35mmc.] I’m a street photographer with a preference for manual-focus 50mm-equivalent lenses. I got my start with a Zeiss Contax rangefinder (w/ 50mm Sonnar f/1.5) and Pentax MX SLR (w/ 50mm SMC Pentax-M f/1.7), and loved the compact size, minimal feature set,

Equipment

Industar-69 (on Fujifilm X-Pro3) Review - A Dreamy, Compact Wonder

[Originally published on 35mmc.] The Industar-69 (Индуста́р-69) is a strange but beguiling beast. Originally designed for the Chaika (Чайка) camera, it wasn’t really meant to be used with other cameras. The original Chaika’s lens wasn’t removable; on later models it was affixed with an M39 thread,

Equipment

Industar-50 (on Fujifilm X-Pro3) Review - The Joy of Flawed Lenses

[Originally published on 35mmc.] I had the good fortune to be wandering the Kazimerz neighborhood of Krakow, Poland, on a Saturday morning, where I stumbled upon a small but very interesting flea market. An American child of the 80s, I’ve always been fascinated with Soviet artifacts, and their cameras