San Jose, California — Silver, Silicon & Prussian Blue
Light, recorded
slowly.
Landscape, night sky, and alternative process photography — made with everything from an 11×14 view camera to a tracked astrograph.
Landscape
Eastern Sierra · Death Valley · Central Coast
Night Sky
Tracked & stacked under Bortle 2 skies
Wildlife & Coast
Moss Landing · Elkhorn Slough · Pajaro Dunes
Alternative Process
Cyanotype · toned prints · watercolor over iron
The blue in this site's margins comes from here: hand-coated cyanotypes printed by contact from large format negatives, some toned in coffee or gallic acid, some worked over in watercolor.
This gallery is being scanned and printed now — plates will appear here as they clear the wash. In the meantime, prints can be seen in person by arrangement.
About
The photographer
Thirty years building storage systems taught me patience with slow processes. The view camera taught me what it's for.
I'm John Mansperger, a photographer based in San Jose, California. My practice runs the full width of the medium: ultra large format film on a Wisner 11×14, medium format digital, tracked deep-sky imaging, and 19th-century iron printing processes done by hand in my own darkroom.
Before photography became the day's main work, I spent 25+ years as a solutions architect in enterprise technology — AMD, Pure Storage, EMC — with five U.S. patents in storage and data networking. I'm a U.S. Air Force veteran, and I serve on nonprofit boards in the Bay Area, including Family Giving Tree, after leading Momentum, a men's development 501(c)(3), as president.
In the bag & on the bench
- Wisner 11×14 — ultra large format field camera
- 4×5 field camera — landscape on sheet film
- Hasselblad X2D II — 100MP medium format
- Canon EOS R5 — including 720nm infrared
- ZWO FF131 APO — deep-sky astrograph on AM5N
- The darkroom — cyanotype, toning, contact printing