Monday 14 December 2015

One Subject, Many Approaches II

The Wall and The Bright Side of the Moon

This past summer I wrote a post called "One Subject, Many Approaches" where I looked back on the results over the years of my efforts to photograph the same subject I'd photographed many times in the past, all the while trying to keep the images fresh enough to avoid the creative dead end of making essentially the same photograph again and again. In this sequel episode I'll be presenting another one of those well worn subjects I keep returning to. It is the crumbling remnants of a concrete break wall that once helped still the waters for revellers at the long defunct Erie Beach Amusement Park. Now if that sounds a bit familiar it's likely because the original One Subject, Many Approaches centred on another ruin, the concrete base of a carnival swing ride, from that very same attraction of yore. It is just a quick jaunt, about 300 metres, from this disintegrating nautical structure that is the focus of today's episode, and it wouldn't be at all unusual for me to come away from a little afternoon stroll with images of both. 

Proximity aside however the number of appearances these two subjects have made in my photographic corpus can be attributed to two simple virtues both posses - I find them interesting, and they are convenient. If I only have an hour to kill, if I'm testing new equipment, if there's interesting weather or lighting conditions that could disappear anytime and I need to find a subject now, I know I can get something if I take the five minute drive to old Erie Beach. Still, it's hard to shake the notion that it's really too easy, an almost guilty sense that another trip out to the wall somehow falls short of doing something photographically worthwhile. In spite of this, I often come away with results that surprise me a little. Maybe it's just the low expectations I have for the results.

Here is one from my early days with the RB67, a time when I was still a bit giddy to finally own such a camera. I was smitten with the works of a host of photographers known for their work with long exposures. Lacking a proper neutral density filter at the time I would set up in the fading light of dawn when, if I timed it right, I might be able to make two or three exposures with shutter speeds of one then two then several minutes before they finally became unworkably long.

My first experimental roll putting 35mm film through the RB67, yielding panoramic sprocket hole images. Obviously I wasn't so careful levelling the camera but tilt the film a bit and it almost looks like I meant to do it that way.

An example of the classic leading off to the horizon composition I see as a metaphor for our ceaseless journey into an unknown future that beacons us to a destiny at once fearful and full of promise. Others have suggested images like this are straight up phallic. Hmpf... Freud.

Here's one from this past October that I could have included a few episodes back in The Cool Colours of Autumn. Not a great success but I was just a tad too late to catch just a brief few seconds when the setting sun burst through the clouds casting the wall in a bright warm glow. Even though I had the F80 set to auto focus aperture priority, by the time I realized what was going on and managed to compose this shot it had all but faded. 


There were days this year when water levels in the lake have been unusually high, the changing water levels at times seeming quasi-tidal.  Here a driftwood log serves as foreground interest as the wall, nearly level with the waves, is barely noticeable. There was a workman from the town at the beach that day who, seeing me pull out the camera informed me that I was too late, that there had been a rainbow out over the water that had faded away only minutes before. Looking at that cloud I can't I've lost that much sleep over not having arrived earlier.

Finally here's one from my most recent roll out of the Bronica S2A. Obviously water levels were much lower this time and I decided to chance a stroll along the wall itself. I had been out exploring new locations but with a bit of time yet to kill made a quick side trip on the way home to blow off the last few frames on the roll. Figuring I would travel light that day I left the tripod at home, an unusual choice for me. Regrettable as I could have used it here. With the short days the late afternoon sun was already beginning to fade on an already bleak day and shooting hand held forced a shutter speed/aperture trade off I just couldn't get the better of and I wound up sacrificing foreground sharpness I would have sooner kept. Negotiating the crumbling sections of the wall is a bit tricky to begin with and doing so with a bag containing prized cameras and lenses always feels like a calculated risk, It looks like I may have to do it again though.

Saturday 5 December 2015

December



Let's play a word game. I say "December" and you think...

Okay, I don't know what you think but no matter where in the world you live or what your background is a pretty good bet would be it involves some sort of holiday celebration. And somehow it's become a widely accepted notion that a winter wonderland theme goes along nicely with holiday festivities. This can even be seen in parts of the world where, not only is snow unheard of in winter, but where the holidays actually mark the start of Summer. But while it's all well and good to spend a December afternoon at an Aussie beach sporting a Santa hat, here in Canada where the whole wintery theme is a bit more realistic there's a sense that the true holiday spirit can't be felt in earnest until there is a covering of snow on the ground. It's been noted time and again that a good pre-Christmas snowfall, something that should be an impediment to shoppers, are accompanies by a spike in holiday sales figures. Like so many others I've been guilty of worrying over whether it will be a white Christmas.

Why "guilty" though? After all, it's such a heart warming image, the world all covered in a frosty virgin white blanket, the multicoloured glow of holiday lights shining through, the neighbour's kids waving as they pass by, toboggans in tow. I say guilty because it's one more way in which the anticipation of something hoped for can make us overlook the blessings of what is right in front of us. Once the riotous colours of autumn begin fading to a dull brown it seems our thoughts skip ahead in anticipation of the (at least where I live) hopefully snowy holiday season to come. Until it arrives it seems so many of us are just biding time, getting shopping done so we can enjoy the season once it starts in earnest. Autumn may be a single season on the calendar but in these temperate climes there is no mistaking its later days from that time of peak foliage colour that gets so much attention. And two thirds of December, after all, consists of late autumn. That may of course have little to do with when the snow actually begins to fly, but depending on when (or even if) it does, much of December sometimes can feel disappointingly just not sufficiently holidayish enough.

It can be a shame because if you take away the omnipresent and not exactly subtle proclamations of the festive holiday season the month is supposed to be building towards and we might begin to notice December's pre-winter, absent the glitter and the lights, has a character and a soul of its own. It's in the skeletal forms of trees, the low hanging sun, the sombre silence of a still day. And then of course there's the autumn clouds you may have heard me go on about before.

If you're a photographer, letting any season pass without exploring its unique character would be like travelling somewhere new and interesting, somewhere you may never be again, and neglecting to get out your camera. But even when you're not carrying a camera, or if you're not a photographer at all, it's worth while, as a simple act of mindfulness, to take in what this time of year offers us in its own right. This is a time of winding down and of renewal. It can be quiet, reflective, maybe even a bit sombre. With so all of the other in-your-face goings on in December why not welcome the reprieve?

Sunday 22 November 2015

Abstract


When I was posting the above image on my Flickr page the other day I stopped myself short of tagging it with the term "abstract". In practical terms it was a good tag to use, a word a lot of people might search on, drawing more eyeballs to my image. It made me uncomfortable though, so that even after I finally decided to use it I went back and took it out. Heaven forbid I do anything myself that might lend credence to a photograph, one I took no less, being referred to as "an abstract."

 Before you jump to any conclusions though let me hasten to add that that "abstract" is not something I find objectionable or in any way wish not to be associated with my work. Quite the opposite. What bothers me is that when a particular image is deemed to be "abstract", especially "an abstract", the implication is that it possesses some quality that distinguishes it from all those other images that aren't abstract. The problem is there are no such photographs. If I could point to a single realization I've acquired over the years that is most critical to who I am as a photographer today it is the understanding that when I make a photograph, especially one with any sort of expressive intent, abstraction is, without exception, the whole point. That point only gets lost when the term is used to single out only some images from all the rest.

To be clear here I'm not imagining that acquired any special talent that allows me imbue my work with some subtle abstract quality that I'm surprised others don't see. What I'm suggesting applies equally to anyone who has ever made a photograph whether or not they had any notion of this. While this may not be of much interest to those who do photography practical documentary purposed, but even here images are occasionally seem to posses a compelling visual appeal purely by accident. The reason is simple, a camera is a tool of abstraction, that's what it is, that's it's very nature. In short, if it's a photograph, it's abstract.

By this point I am imagining most if not all of you are thinking something along the lines of "But that's ludicrous. I know what abstract art is and that beautiful shot I took of my nephew standing by the window that everybody loves so much is not it!" So if you are thinking something along those lines, given that we're all intelligent, reasonable people here, it's probably safe to assume that I'm not using that word abstract in quite the same way you are. If this were a mere semantic quibble though I'd have done you a disservice allowing you to read as far as you have. The understanding I've come to of that word abstraction though is how I make sense of the fact that the some of the most mundane sights, things you might have passed right by and never even thought to cast a glance towards, perhaps a row of dishes drying on a rack or a clump of trees lying across a soggy field of barley, can become the subjects of photographs we find absolutely captivating. Not incidentally I also find it immensely helpful in the way I understand and approach my own work. When you're trying to make a interesting photographs it can't hurt to have an idea about what it is about photographs that can make them so interesting. If you have a notion to read on then I'll try to make it worth your while.

First, let's talk about the way the word abstract is usually used with reference to art. I think it would be fair to say that whatever the particular usage it is meant to convey a sense of the intangible. We might call the work of a surrealist like Dali abstract because what it depicts defies our sense of how we've come to understand how the world works. Or it could be used with reference to "installation art" such as that pioneered by Marcel Duchamp who used very concrete objects to represent and invite the contemplation of abstract concepts. Perhaps more than anything however it calls to mind non-representational art epitomized by the work of Jackson Pollock whose expressive paint dripped canvases bear no relation or resemblance to anything found outside the world of the psyche. All are abstract, certainly, in obvious though different ways.

The only trouble with this in my view is that when a painting, photograph or any other piece of art is only referred to as abstract when it incorporates some unusual element of abstraction that makes it stand out the message is that when art doesn't have these elements the word abstract doesn't apply. The reason that's not trivial is that it can keep us from appreciating how the element of abstraction is at play throughout all art. As I see it, it is the very essence of art. So how can we ever understand art if we think the word only applies when, for example, a painter is attempting to depict a state of mind without reference to some external "thing"?

Having said that let me take a moment to reel things in a bit. I'm a photographer, this is a photography blog so let's get back to talking about photography more specifically. To me the central mystery of photography and why I even bother with it boils down to the following question:
 How is it that, finding myself before some rather pedestrian scene or object, something I might otherwise have walked right by without a thought, point a camera at it, trip the shutter and end up with something beautiful and engaging enough to want to hang on my wall so I can look at it everyday for years? 
Objectively that thing on the wall is just a pale reflection of whatever it was that I photographed in the first place. To start out with it's been removed from the context of its surroundings to be confined within the rectangular borders of a print. There's no motion, no depth, no hint of the sounds or smells that were present when it was taken. If it's a photograph I made chances are very strong even the colour has been left behind. Given that the thing photographed was often not worth a second glance to begin with this whole endeavour sounds like a profound waste, a good quantity of time material of effort gone to take something that may not have been all that interesting to start and make it even less so.

Except that it isn't. A photograph can be so much more than a poor substitute for the thing photographed, a mere memento. It can become a new thing entirely, not despite the loss of context, dimension or motion but because of them. When we remove these things we make them less specific and therefore more universal. This is how that old pair of shoes in the front foyer you just haven't gotten around to throwing out yet can, when photographed, become all things that have been cast aside and forgotten about. We may not even be aware of the symbolism when we see it, but w well conceived and executed photograph can make you feel it even though those actual shoes in the foyer strike you as a pair of meaningless inanimate objects that would be cause for embarrassment if they were still laying there when company stopped by.

What has happened here is abstraction. That may not seem like it has much to do with the way we usually hear the word abstract use. Commonly understood abstract is sort of the opposite number to that which is real and concrete such that abolishing slavery is a concrete action while freedom is the abstract notion behind it. Fair enough, but it doesn't really help much with our understanding of how a photograph of a thing can possess engaging qualities that even the thing itself lacked. For that I want to go a bit deeper at what that word I keep batting around, "abstract", means more generally. It's comes from the Latin "abstractus" meaning drawn or pulled away. It would have been used mainly to describe some sort of material process such as separating, or drawing away, the wheat from the chaff, the metal from the ore and so on. More simply it means to take a pile of stuff that is a mix of things you want and things you don't, pull away only bits you're after, and leave the rest behind.

Now as a photographer, if you hold it in mind that this is what abstract means you'll see at first that it's a process that's at play in every photograph you've ever made or ever will make. On a foundation like this it now becomes simple to understand how all of the camera's inherent limitations - the way it flattens a three dimensional scene, severing its connection to limitless surroundings to imprison it within a tiny rectangle, all motion arrested, all sounds silenced - these are not limitations at all but the source of its power, the means by which we draw the photographic wheat from the chaotic chaff of the world around us.

I believe any photographer possessing even a modest talent will have some intuitive sense of all this, and even if they go on to great mastery may never put their now highly developed sense into these terms. When we reserve the word abstract denote only work of a more experimental nature the developing photographer (i.e. any photographer not on their death bed) is left to grope in the dark on their own for this understanding. Nor is it enough to save the word to mean "especially abstract" or "abstract in an unusual way". For example, photography has been called an "art of subtraction", where subtraction means something very close to what I mean by abstraction, so why don't I just say subtraction and leave those who want to talk about abstract photography as a special category alone? The answer is that used this way the new word "subtract" in no way fails to apply once we start talking about the things people like to refer to as distinctly "abstract", such as an image in which we have subtracted the cues that normally allow us to clearly identify the subject, thereby introducing one more abstraction.

The problem isn't the choice of terms, it's that we're trying to use terms to draw a distinction between things for which no fundamental distinction exists. Pretending they do only obscures things more, stifling our understanding along the way. The kinds of abstraction we use - the more abstract black and white rather than colour or more abstract still photography rather than motion pictures - are creative choices and asserting that the choice to photograph the more abstract distorted reflection of a subject (thereby creating "an abstract") rather than shooting it straight on is somehow different in kind from all the other choices does nothing but put up additional barriers to understanding.

And if the word abstract makes you a little uneasy because you fancy yourself someone who goes for literal interpretations in photography, remind yourself that, in photography especially, the idea of being fully literal and the idea of interpretation are inevitably at loggerheads. As is true with so many things, in photography abstraction is inevitable. Learn to embrace it, to use it. It will bring you greater understanding and make you a better photographer. And if you're not sure how, imagine yourself standing in front of a print by a one of the great photographers who's name you would never think to associate with the idea of "abstract photography". Let's say it was Ansel Adams, and he was standing there with you so you could ask him how it was made. I don't know what his real answer would have been, but a perfectly true and valid answer could be... "I simply cropped away, desaturated and tonally compressed everything that wasn't Moonrise Hernandez."

See... abstract.



Saturday 14 November 2015

The Cool Colours of Autumn



It's perhaps only a small irony that we connect autumn, a season of cooling, with a palette of such warm colours as the green canopies above transform, taking on colours of flame which, even as they fade leave us with a warm earthy browns. I happen to be particularly fond of warmer tones;  I tend to favour them when making home decor choices, generally prefer my black and white prints to have a somewhat warmer than neutral tone to them and when I load up with colour film as I am wont to do each fall I imagine filling them with images dominated by warm earthy tones.

Often they are, but I'm often surprised myself at how often it's just the opposite. You may have noticed for example that the photo that accompanied "A Season for Colour" a few episodes back may have featured a small stand of trees with leaves in full yellow autumn glory, but these really provided a complimentary accent to the foreboding sky that occupies most of the image space with it's cool blue, tones that seem to speak of the months to come once the snow begins to fly. These aren't the images even I usually envision when I head out to do colour work at this time of year.

To me it seems this is a simple consequence of a being a predominantly black and white photographer with leanings toward the foreboding and moody set loose on the world with a colour emulsion. It's not that find myself ignoring what's in the camera and approaching what's in front of me the same way I do with the usual monochrome stock loaded. Except for those times when I may grab a camera on the way out the door to do other things I'm not committed to colour. There is always an extra film back in the pack when I carry either the Mamiya or Bronica system loaded with HP5+ or Acros and whenever a photograph to be made calls out for it, a not infrequent occurrence, I'll happily make the switch. I have to say there I rarely find myself in doubt as to which is called for, though there are situations when it seems either could work.

The image at the top is an example of this. Had I been shooting exclusively black and white that day I probably would have shot it more or less the same way. As it happens this was taken the same day I was testing out the Polaroid Automatic 220 that I wrote about previously. What I didn't mention there was that on that day a wicked wind was blowing up a minor havoc along the lake. As I emerged from the relative shelter of the nearby wooded path a few small breaks in the cloud was letting through the first rays of direct sun I had seen all day bringing a welcome drama to the wind whipped seascape. I was able to grab a Polaroid shot right off but the fast moving clouds meant I had to wait for another shaft of sun to bring the drama back again so I could get another shot with the Bronica. Good thing I did too because as fate would have it about 1/3 of the previous image I had done with the Polaroid ended up appearing in this exposure. Despite the distinctly un-autumn-like colour palette I think the sombre sky, weathered reeds and blustery weather so typical of this time of year make this an appropriately seasonal colour image.


One more example is this recent shot of my son Brennan. It was a bit of a side jaunt to the beach I took him on while running a few errands. Noting some rather interesting clouds before we left I grabbed my Nikon F80 on the way out the door. I can't say I was really planning to use him as a subject, but somehow he just belonged in the scene so how could I not? Now someone may prove me wrong, but I don't think too many would argue with the suggestion that it just wouldn't work the same way if he'd been wearing, say, a red hoodie. And though, yet again, the predominantly cool blue tones here hardly scream out autumn, despite the lack of any real queue I can point to here that gives away the fact that is image was taken in October rather than, say April, somehow there's still a sense of the season here. Maybe it's just me, because I know, because I was there. Maybe it's something else though, something about the lake, the clouds, the play of light. There are always things that can't be put into words. If there weren't we probably wouldn't bother with pictures.

Saturday 31 October 2015

Fostering Good Mistakes

I've heard many a film photographer wax lyrical about their love for our medium's beautiful imperfections, its inherent unpredictability and I confess to being a little baffled by it all. Hardly the most careful photographer to begin with, even on my worst day, trying out an unfamiliar film stock while relying on 'sunny 16' exposure guestimations because I left the meter at home, I can't say I'm ever left holding my breath about whether I got anything, all the while holding out hope that some completely unforeseen happy accident may have transformed my humble efforts into a masterpiece. Save the more modern film stock I'm using the same medium used by Paul Strand, Dorthea Lange, Ansel Adams for Pete's sake, not exactly people whose work is characterized by flaws. Even when marred by the occasional strand of fibre or fleck of dust floating around the camera at least it only appears on one frame. I'd agree that contrasted with the clinical perfection of today's digital cameras there's a more organic look about images shot on film, I had no idea where all this talk about film's unpredictability and imperfection was coming from.

Turns out I was just doing it wrong. 35mm Nikons, 6x7 Mamiyas and 4x5 technical field cameras sporting beautiful German glass... piffle. To truly understand film in all of its capricious, expressively blemished wonderfulness all I really needed was to get my hands on a Polaroid pack camera.


The Polaroid Automatic 220 camera arrived just two days prior to this writing so it's a bit early to say if the above is truly overstating things for effect. It was an eBay buy, and while it's in remarkably good shape, the greater part of purchase expenses was the shipping cost. Should you be tempted to look for such a buy I should hasten to add that the camera did require a bit of surgery prior to use to retrofit the camera to take 3 AAA batteries in place of the out of production 4.5V No. 531 battery it was designed for - a 5 minute job with a soldering iron but something to think about if you're not handy that way.

I've yet to get an entire pack of 10 exposures through the camera, but so far fully half of the images I've taken have gone awry due to some mishap or other. This isn't counting the images that simply came out dark before I learned I need to compensate for the camera's tendency to underexpose. Take for example this test image of my son Brennan.


Classic double exposure it would seem, and simple enough to do with this camera if one simply cocks the shutter and fires off another image before pulling the sheet through the rollers to start that magic development process. What actually lead to this image was a bit more complicated than that however. Unlike Polaroid's more familiar integral film formats such as SX70, 600 and Spectra - the film formats now manufactured by the Impossible Project, Polaroid pack cameras don't just shoot themselves out of the camera to develop before your eyes. After taking an image with a pack camera there is a leader that must be pulled by hand. (I should say as an aside in case you're wondering that Polaroid doesn't make the film for these cameras anymore, it's now manufactured by Fuji.) This still doesn't get the image out of the camera however, it just brings a second tab, the one attached to the actual film, out of a second door where it must be drawn through a pair of rollers that burst the little chemical packets inside the film and spread it over the surface as you draw it out of the camera where, after waiting the requisite period to allow development to occur, the sandwich is peeled apart to reveal whatever it is you managed to get.

Maybe it will just take more practice but my experience is that things here don't always go as planned. Somehow after the image prior to our double exposure mishap above was taken half of what was supposed to be the sandwich that constituted the next exposure, the paper that was supposed to carry the image, came out attached to it. That happened the day before and I had forgotten about it when I wen to take this image until I went to pull the film only to find the other half of the sandwich. Believing that image had simply been a dud I shot a second image on what I thought would be a freshly advanced sheet of film. Obviously whatever actually happened inside the camera was something else. Accidental double exposure despite the best intentions. Happy accident? My son seems to think so.

Happily, being an instant camera, I didn't have to wait several days before the happy accident would be realized and I was able to grab an on purpose version.


Having had the camera all of two days now it's hard to give you more than this these quick first impressions. I'll have more to say on this camera and my experiences with it in future episodes. It probably doesn't need saying but I have no illusions about using this camera for my usual sort of work. It should make for some interesting experiments though. Oh, and let's not forget, it should be great fun at parties too.

Saturday 17 October 2015

Through a Filter Darkly


Long exposure photography, where the shutter is left open long enough to blur even slower moving subjects in the frame, has been with us for a long time. In fact in photography's early days the poor sensitivity of photographic plates compared to the film speeds we are used to today made it impossible to do anything but, requiring portrait photographers to put to use braces to hold their sitters heads still less any small motion during the many seconds to minutes the shutter was open blur the image. As film sensitivity improved and it became the norm for photographers to truly be able to freeze an instant in time and long exposure photography became something of a special technique. Often this involved night time exposures such as the familiar images of star trails, where darkness allows the shutter to be left open for hours even with today's more sensitive materials. Sometimes though it would be desirable to leave the shutter open for long periods of time even in full daylight, for example to give a soft gossamer appearance to the flow of water in a fast moving stream. When simply closing the aperture down to its smallest setting isn't enough photographers wanting to achieve this effect have long carried neutral density (ND) filters to cut down the amount of light reaching the lens by perhaps three to four stops which might allow exposures to be stretched out to a full second or more.

It's hard to say when but over the past decade or so a growing number of photographers began to push the envelope of where these long exposure techniques could be applied. By extending exposure times even further, to minutes instead of seconds, motion such as the rolling of waves or the drift of clouds across the sky could transform the entire feel of a scene, achieving a new level of abstraction by viewing the world over a time scale much different from those at which our eyes operate. Suddenly, rather than three or four stops, photographers began seeking out ND filters that reduced light by ten stops. There are now many such filters on the market.

If you have never used a ten stop ND filter, you need to look carefully at a rather bright scene to be able to tell that they are not completely opaque. (It is not safe to look directly at the sun through a 10 stop ND filter however, or any filter not specifically designated as safe for this purpose. This includes looking through the optical viewfinder of a camera with a filter in place. Seriously.) The effect, as you would imagine, can be dramatic, altering the feel of a seaside image as radically as the use of infrared film can transform a photograph of a forest scene.

Having moved beyond a technique a photographer could pull out of their bag of tricks for special occasions, long exposure is now often referred to as a different kind of photography, its own genre. Photographers have built successful careers largely, sometimes almost entirely, through their long exposure work. I wouldn't dare be so presumptuous as to try to list the "most notable" long exposure photographers, but to give you a taste you might want to have a look at the work of Michael Levin,
Keith AggettNathan Wirth or Paul Simon Wheeler.

Do so and you'll probably note the way bodies of water feature strongly in the portfolios of these photographers. While long exposure techniques affect the appearance of anything in the frame that is moving - windblown grass, clouds, humans - somehow it is water and the motion of waves that seem to create the greatest emotional impact, especially when the ethereal mist created by motion and time is contrasted with the solid unmoving presence of a rock, a pier or the wreck of an old ship. I imagine it would be hard to incorporate long exposure photography into your work if you lived out on a prairie.

Situated as I am among the Great Lakes, effectively oceans in terms of their photographic potential, I have favourable geography for long exposure photography easily at hand. It may seem a bit surprising, therefore, that it doesn't constitute a larger portion of my work. I should say first of all that this is in now way because long exposure isn't in line with any personal philosophy or ideal about photography. In my understanding the reason we might find photographs in particular so fascinating in a way that the actual scene photographed may not have hinted at even if we were present when it was taken is that the camera presents us with an image that is familiar and recognizable in a way we can easily relate to, but through an eye that sees the world in a different way than we experience it. We can make creative choices to record in a way that may be a little more or a little less like the way we see the world with our own eyes - motion versus still, colour versus black and white and so on. Often times we find the fascination deepens the more an image differs from the way our eyes see it. Add to this the photographic essence that anchors the image to reality and the fascination deepens. Long exposure photography then is just one more way in which the camera can see the world differently.

I hasten to add it is not an unreal way. If creatures somehow evolved to see the world changing on a time scale of minutes rather than fractions of a second what we see in a long exposure image might be a better representation of how the world really looks to them. To such beings the sort of everyday image we see now made at a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second might be as strikingly unusual as Harold Edgerton's images of a bullet frozen in motion as it emerged from an apple it had been shot through. While we tend to think of the way that we see the world as "objective" and any other way as somehow "unreal", these are accidents of the kind of beings we are. This isn't to say that how we see the world is irrelevant to the way relate to a photograph. I don't imagine an image of a scene made in radio frequencies would have much emotional impact. There needs to be that anchor.

In the end then my choice to stick with the usual sub one second shutter speeds comes down to the particulars of what my muse chooses to whisper in my ear at any given time. I choose to make long exposures sometimes, but not usually in much the same way I shoot colour film sometimes, but not usually. I just have to trust the muse, she's been good to me so far. (What, I can have a female muse if I want to.)

One reason I often don't choose to go with extended exposure time is clouds. If you've been following this blog for any length of time you'll know I love clouds. In fact the very reason I'm writing at this moment rather than being out there with a camera is that there's a beautiful cloudless blue sky outside my window right now - useless. The way clouds render in long exposure images, silken puffs rushing by like freight trains or sometimes extended into aurora like fingers reaching across the skies, can sometimes bring an ethereal sense of its own to an image, but that's not what draws me to the, at least not usually. I'm drawn to clouds for their form, foreboding, the play of light and the sense they give that the sky is a thing. Whatever an extended exposure times may bring to the way it renders clouds, much of the time these other things can be lost.

And so it was that last week I finally found myself at a beach on the shore of Lake Ontario I've been meaning to explore. The weather was terrible, and by terrible I mean just about perfect - blustering winds stirring up waves, dark threatening clouds with the occasional break to let the sun flood through. I walked the length of the beach with the big pack containing my Wista kit then, having shot all 12 sheets I had with me returned to the car and grabbed the smaller pack and did the whole thing again with the Bronica. I honestly hadn't given any thought to doing long exposure on this outing and while I had my 77mm thread size ND filter with me, there were no thread adapters packed anywhere meaning the one and only lens I could use it with was the 50mm Nikkor wide angle for the Bronica. It wasn't until well into the morning, when I came upon a large branch that had washed in from who knows where with what appeared to be a sort of cobbled together ladder I would guess once lead to a tree house still attached that I had any notion of getting it out. Objectively it seemed the clouds were just the sort I usually like to shoot just as they are (or as they appear to me) and the rough surface of the lake with waves that would curl then spread into a frothy blanket as the hit shore were ideal things to incorporate into the photographs I was taking but, you know, the muse.

I have two film backs for the Bronica and on this day one was loaded with HP5+ which is excellent generally and has the speed to allow me to hand hold when the need strikes, the other containing Fuji Acros which, among its other virtues probably the best film ever created when working with exposure times longer than a few seconds. As luck would have it the composition called for the 50mm, the only lens my 10 stop ND filter would fit. To this I added a Cokin graduated grey filter to save me having to burn in the sky later on and a pair of 90 second exposures were made. It seemed prudent to at least rattle off a normal exposure too so after switching backs, removing the ND filter and putting the grad filter back in place I did another shot on HP5+ at, I think, 1/30th.

The long exposure result is up at the top where it stands the best chance of catching the eye of potential readers. It is almost an entirely straight can of the negative though I burned in the lower right corner in Photoshop just a smidge. Now for comparison here is what I got without the ND filter:


For easier comparison here they are side by side. You might want to click to enlarge:


Your evaluation may differ, but even though I'd be happy with the normal exposure if that's all I had taken and your view of the situation may differ, I'll make no bones about the fact that I prefer the long exposure version in this instance. It's true too that I put a good deal more time in Photoshop with the standard version to get it to look as good as I think it could though honestly this is probably due at least in part to some vignetting imparted by the cheap no-name neutral density filter I've been using (even some expensive ND filters are prone to uneven expousre) doing some of the burning-in work for me.

Who is to day if I'll be making this sort of image more in the future. Maybe I'd use it more often if I had something better than a no-name filter. It's an investment I've been considering. (There's never a shortage of things one should consider investing in, is there?) At the very least I'll have to be more careful in future to keep my thread adapters at hand.


Saturday 10 October 2015

A Season for Colour

Here it is October again and, not unlike countless other photographers (at least those who live at similar latitudes), my normally black and white photographic muse begins entertaining thoughts of colour. Simple enough it seems, it's autumn, the leaves take on riotous colours and every photographer wants to capture that. I wonder though if there might not be a little more to it than the changes that occur to leaves. Beyond colour, autumn has its own emotional pallet. It's in the air, in the scents, the crisp silence of still moments, the immediacy of the chill wind, waking us from dreamy days of summer, bringing us back to earth, to the world of our direct experience, carrying its reminder that we are after all as much a part of it as anything else. There are times, even when the flaming yellows, oranges and reds of October have given way to November's dull browns, that something of this sense of presence can be lost to the abstraction of black and white.

An image from the fall of 2014 made with the Mamiya RB67 on Kodak Portra 160.
None of this is to say I'll be putting away the Ilfords, the T-Max's and the Neopans until the snow flies. Some of my most treasured black and white images were made at this time of year. Knowing there will be times when colour is an important part of the feel of an image however it does mean I making plans so I'm not caught unprepared. Two years ago I accomplished this by packing my old Nikon D80 DSLR along with the Mamiya kit. Shooting digital and film side by side like this presented me with an interesting contrast between how I thought and felt about using one photographic technology versus the other (and as a result I haven't taken a digital camera with me for creative purposes since). It did not, however, result in any memorable colour images. Last year I was better prepared with a couple of pro-packs of Kodak Portra, a 1L kit of C-41 chemistry and some thawed rolls of 35mm Fujicolor that have been sitting in the freezer for the past decade or so. To be honest black and white has become such a habit that I didn't reach for it as often as I could have and never felt I really got into the colour photography groove, but I did come away with some reasonably good images that worked where black and white wouldn't have, at least not as well.

That brings us to this year. My hopes were that by now the new Ferrania E-6 film would be on the market. Alas that project has hit more than its fair share of snags that started with the unexpected discovery of asbestos contamination in the factory which set off a small avalanche of delays in its wake. If you haven't been following the project though fear not, they are soldiering on in Italy and the project is starting to get back on track once again. Alas, not in time for there to be hope of having film on the market before it all gets covered over in a frosty white blanket.

Whether or not I'm giving the new Ferrania a go, which I inevitably will, shooting transparencies (or slides if you care to mount them) rather than colour negatives does have a certain attraction for me, especially these days. Back in my late teens and early twenties when my fascination with photography was really starting to take hold I rarely shot anything but. The great thing about this for an "improving" photographer is that since the image you would see is on the actual physical piece of film that went through your camera you saw exactly what you shot as you shot it in it's unadjusted, unadulterated, uninterpreted form. What would be more important to me these days is that having a direct positive provides me with a finished, physical, hold-it-in-your-hand image in a way that a negative doesn't. Back when the term "photo shop" referred to a place rather than an app this wasn't a big deal since when you got your colour negatives developed they came back accompanied by a small stack of prints, but as that sort of service isn't easily available, at least where I live, getting that finished physical image from colour print film has become a challenge and working with just a scan from a negative doesn't seem to be the same thing.

If that was all there was to it though I don't have to wait for Ferrania. Fujichrome is still out there and for a bit more of an adventure there's an interesting selection of transparency film available from the Film Photography Project (henceforth and heretoaft referred to as FPP). An the E-6 chemistry to process it is a little more expensive and a little trickier to use than the C-41 equivalent needed for colour negative film but still well within the threshold of how much of a challenge I'm up to. The real issue is that, once mixed, the chemistry has a shelf life that is measured in weeks. As it was the much longer lived C-41 chemistry I used last year went off as a result of sitting too long on the shelf well before it reached its potential in terms of the number of rolls I might have been able to process. To get full use from a batch of E-6 chemistry I would really need to go on a colour shooting binge. I have heard some E-6 shooters say they will save up exposed film until they have enough to justify mixing a batch of chemistry to make sure none goes to waste but that seems to me to require a special kind of patience that I just don't have.

And so it was decided that for now I was better off sticking with colour negatives. The little snag I had to confront was that at some point since last year my main supplier, B&H in New York, has unfathomably restricted their C-41 kits to in-store sales only. Now B&H is one of several great dealers for those of us who have little choice but to get our photo supplies online, but with punishingly high shipping rates from the U.S. to Canada these days the fact that B&H (at the time this is being written anyway) can offer free shipping to Canada on orders over $100 is hard to ignore. No matter though if I can't get what I need from them, I can still order C-41 kits from the FPP online store. The kits are actually priced lower than at B&H if you ignore the fact that for me that means foregoing the free shipping, and better yet sales go to support the Film Photography Podcast which, if you're not familiar, stop reading now, go to http://filmphotographyproject.com/podcast where you'll find links to listen to each episode, then return when you're ready.


The order was placed, shipped the next day and arrived a few days later. To spread the shipping cost a bit thinner I ordered two C-41 kits along with some 120 Portra 400, some 35mm Ektar and a roll of of FPP's Retrochrome E-6 which I plan to cross process in the C-41 chemistry as soon as the first batch is close to exhaustion. Retrochrome, by the way, is a typical example of the way FPP will repurpose film that was originally made for specialty applications such as motion picture duplication or traffic cameras for use by photography enthusiasts who may enjoy the unique characteristics some of these stocks offer. Retrochrome itself is from an expired surplus stock of Ektachrome 2239, a film that was produced for industrial use but with characteristics that were probably not unlike the Ektachromes available to consumers and professional photographers at the time. The unique look it offers today is likely solely due to its having mellowed over the years resulting in a warm nostalgic look as the name suggests. Who knows what if anything that will mean to me when I cross-process it in C-41 chemistry, but stay tuned and I'll let you know.

For now though I have the day free and a roll of Portra in the Bronica. I also have a mind to load a roll of the 35mm Ektar into an RB67 back with a set of home made adapters I put together for panoramas "sprocket hole" style. Autumn has hardly just begun (I can tell because the stores are only now putting out the Christmas/Hanukkah/Saturnalia merchandise) but as always will present only so many opportunities to photograph what it offers before once again I'll find myself challenged to write convincingly about the joys of photographing the ice and snow.

Saturday 5 September 2015

Keep It Real

Browse the photography related offerings in the app store on your phone and you'll find not just a few of them specialize in taking your straight camera phone images and imparting upon them qualities meant to make them look as though they had been taken with film. This could mean imbuing them with punchy Velvia like colours, giving that new selfie the characteristic of an old snapshot that's been sitting neglected in a shoebox for 40 years complete with fake scratches and dust spots, or simulating the appearance of a 19th Century ambrotype. I certainly don't begrudge anyone the enjoyment playing with these apps can bring. They're a nifty tool for those looking to get a bit creative with digital slideshows and the images they post on social media and aren't even beneath the needs of some more serious photographers.

The thing I find a little bit disturbing about this little trend is the perception it has created with a good segment of the population that this kind of software is a viable substitute for the real thing. I have on more than one occasion fielded questions that in one way or the other amount to "why bother fiddling with those old cameras when you could just run a filter to give you the same look?" My answer is that no matter how good an app is at making the latest output from the iLife camera on your phone look just like a scan from a 1968 Kodachrome, it will never give you a slide. No matter how indistinguishable the results may be from a cracked and faded old family snapshot on screen it will look nothing but fake printed onto a clean sheet of photo inkjet paper. There will never be software that can simulate an historic process well enough to give you a print out that can hold a candle to a real wet plate image.

Somehow the notion of a photograph as an object, something complete in itself, is being swamped like so many other things by an experience of the world that comes to us via a screen. It's easy to forget that this can only go so far. What would it even mean to be simulating the look of actual physical photographs if we had no experience of the real thing?

Lest you think I'm just talking about using software to make new images look old there are plenty of digital tricks aimed at simulating the look you would have gotten if a digital image were shot recently on fresh film as well. It could be argued that prints made through such means can be indistinguishable from a photograph shot on film and printed in a darkroom. Well, if this is what someone wants to do, it's their art. For my money and my time however keeping heart in the process is a worth while endeavour, and part of that is being genuine. This isn't an anti-digital stance or even a suggestion that I'm above using digital technology myself where it makes sense. It's a necessary part of producing this digitally delivered blog let's remember and I'm grateful the technology is there to do it. I do however believe that any expressive medium should be allowed to be what it is. If saying what you want means pretending to be some other media then to me there are serious questions to be answered about whether you've chosen the right media for your vision.

While I can't say I feel starved for reassurance that mine is not a lone voice crying in the dark it is never the less heartening to not only see that same sentiment being expressed by others, but that it has some resonance out there. This little rant started out as a short introducing those who may not already have seen it one such message. It's a little graphic that Ilford has put up, available for download on their website, and it seems to have struck a chord with many photographers, myself included.


Ostensibly an ad for HP5+, an excellent film that I happen to use quite a bit myself, the main message is more about keeping it real, whatever film you use. Ilford will be adding to the collection with more "reasons" featuring other film, but it appears all of them will feature this same theme. Even when it's just a shot of the dog playing in the back yard, what we do as photographers always has an expressive element. Because it matters enough to us, because of all thing things in this world we chose to photograph that, somehow we create art with our cameras even when it's not what we set out to do,  So when we're putting a piece of ourselves into it, isn't it worthwhile to make it genuine?

Thursday 3 September 2015

The Scheimpflug Way

It's easy to understand how allure of working with big, beautiful 4"x5" negatives and the motivation they provide photographers to step up to large format. Since returning to 4x5 photography for a significant portion of my own work the difference this makes has not gone unnoticed. Leaving aside the oft touted benefits in terms of grain and sharpness, images from these negatives seem to exhibit a crispness and presence that seems to come through even when viewing scanned image on a not particularly high resolution screen where you wouldn't expect to see any significant differences when compared to similar images from smaller negatives. 

To be frank however, if this were the only advantage I'm not sure I'd bother. I'm still a believer in the balance of quality, compactness and versatility of medium format for a lot of work. While I enjoy the sort of slow photography approach that large format demands there are situations that simply don't allow for that and I'm sure a good number of my more treasured images wouldn't have come to be if I had to capture them with a large format camera. Oh, and let's not forget every time the shutter opens to expose another sheet of film it costs me $2 before any sort of print is made, and it's only that cheap because I'm using black and white film I process myself. If I shot colour transparency film and had it processed by a lab that figure quickly quadruples. 


As I mentioned in a previous episode what really cinches the case for large format, at least for much of my photography, is the readily at hand ability to use camera movements. When those with even a passing familiarity with the idea think of camera movements the phrase that often comes to mind is "perspective control". Perspective control is nice and now and then I may take advantage of that capacity since it's there anyway, but for the kind of work I like to do a phrase that excites me more is "plane of focus control". While I mentioned this in the aforementioned article, I wasn't able at that time to offer much by way of example other than to present an example of a medium format photograph that, though reasonably successful as is, could have been better if I had the additional sort of control large format photographers take for granted. For those not familiar, I think a bit more explanation of where this control comes from may also be in order.

While you may not have heard the term plane of focus control before you may (or may not) have heard of the Scheimpflug principle that describes the idea in more concrete terms. To understand how photographers can benefit from the ability to use consider first how ordinary hard bodied cameras are focused. The lens barrels of most 35mm, DSLR and medium format cameras will have a focus ring marked with a distance scale. Imagine standing square on to a brick wall exactly 3 metres away. If you set the focus distance on the lens to 3 metres and point then take a picture of the wall it will all be in sharp focus. If we ignore subtleties like optical distortions or the fact that the spot on the wall directly in front of you at eye level is a little closer to you than other parts we can say the flat surface of the wall (Did I say the wall was flat? It's flat.) occupies the plane of focus. Replace the wall with an object at the same distance and it will be in sharp focus to. Objects at different distances, either nearer or farther, will appear less well focused in proportion to how much nearer or farther they are. The difference between the sharp focus distance and the actual subject distance that can be tolerated without this lack of sharpness being noticeable is what the term depth of field means, but no matter how far we stop the lens down it doesn't change how we define the plane of sharp focus.



I don't know many photographers, any actually, who have achieved success photographing flat vertical surfaces like this, but a portrait photographer who typically has a single subject to focus on should not have any difficulty working this way. And if you imagine you're a landscape photographer (not too difficult for some of us) shooting a scene with a winding river about 75 metres distant leading off towards mountains a few kilometres away, having the focal plane at a fixed distance similarly presents no challenge because the nearest subject is distant enough to be sharp at infinity focus just like the mountains in the background. But let's say that you move a little farther on and find an interesting detail along the river bank you want to photograph from only a few metres away while still keeping the distant mountains sharp in the background. Now it's not so easy. The keen among you might consider the possibility of stopping down in hopes you can get them both within the hyperfocal distance zone. You might be able to do it, but then again they might not. Even if it's possible it might require a longer shutter speed than you'd prefer to use and introduces compromises such as the fact lenses don't perform as well when stopped down to minimum aperture.

But what if, rather than being fixed parallel to the camera (or perpendicular to the lens's line of site if you prefer), that imaginary flat surface we call the plane of focus could be angled any which way? Well it turns out that if you aren't bound the way most cameras are to keeping the centre of the lens fixed parallel to that other flat plane, the surface of your film or digital sensor, you indeed can be free to angle the plane of focus any which way. Well, within the limits set by your lens' capabilities at least.

Enter the Scheimpflug principle, which I will attempt to explain in as plane a language as I am capable of (possibly not one of my great strengths I'm afraid). To begin with picture the flat surface of the film as just a small part of an imaginary plane, the film plane, that, like our plane of sharp focus, can extend out to any size we need, and that there is a similarly a lens plane roughly defined by the front of the lens. In an ordinary camera these three surfaces are always parallel to each other. Imagine tilting the front lens forward so that its extended plane is no longer parallel to that of the film. They meet at some point (actually some line before any of you mathematicians are paying attention.) The Schempflug principle says that doing so causes the plane of focus to shift also in such a way that its angle causes it to connect with the other two planes at the same place where they meet. Got it? Didn't think so, but at least I avoided terms such as "oblique tangent" like the Wikipedia page on the subject does. Perhaps a diagram would help.


Here we can see that by tilting the lens forward the focal plane has been transformed from the imaginary vertical wall sitting in front of the camera at whatever distance has been focused on to a horizontal surface that runs along the ground. In this situation if an image were taken of the ground going off into the distance every point along the ground would remain tack sharp from foreground to horizon without any reliance on depth of field to get things "sharp enough". I should mention that a similar effect takes place if the lens plane is kept vertical and the rear film plane is tilted back. The same rule applies about the focus plane shifting so that all three planes meet at a common point, but tilting the film back also results in a perspective shift, exaggerating the relative size of nearer objects, which may or may not be desirable in a given situation.

While I've suggested ordinary hard bodied cameras keep the lens fixed parallel to the film you can achieve this kind of focus magic with SLR/DSLR cameras through the use of expensive and not particularly common tilt-shift lens. Lenses for 35mm size (film or full frame sensor) usually go for in the neighbourhood of $2000, and for medium format let's just say much higher and leave it at that. But the capability that smaller cameras can achieve only through the use of highly specialized optics are just par for the course for large format photographers. This is because instead of the rigid plastic and metal boxes that are the essence of the kind of camera bodies most of us are used to the "box" that forms the bodies of the vast majority of large format camera consists of a flexible bellows supported between two rigid plates, one in front that supports the lens, and one in the back where the film goes. With just a little simple engineering it's easy to design such a camera to allow the orientation of the lens and film planes to be adjusted in all sorts of useful ways. This kind of camera can be generally referred to as a view camera. Not all large format cameras are designed this way, the soon to hit the market Travelwide is a good example, and there are smaller view cameras that shoot medium format size negatives. By and large however large format photography is nearly synonymous with the control you get with all the lens and film plane movements view cameras make possible.

Let's stick to the one we've been talking about however, tilting the lens. That is because of all types front and rear movements possible, tilt (front and rear) is what excites me most. If I could just have that one movement on my medium format cameras I may not have ever gone back to 4x5. There is a medium format camera, the Rolleiflex SL66, that is capable of limited lens tilt and for a short while I was giving some thought into whether ditching all my other kit might leave me enough funds to get a basic Rolleiflex system started but abandoned the idea when my research began to indicate the tilt capability had a bit too many limitations for my tastes. Just as well though, the large format world is not a bad place to be.

So why all the fuss about tilt? I've been getting not too shabby results without it for years after all. Well I'm happy to say this time out I come bearing a good and proper example of exactly what this capability can do for an image. The photograph near the top of this weeks post is one of the first I made with the Wista 45SP I spoke about at length last time. Finding myself in a location I wouldn't have a chance to get back to anytime soon and still in the testing phase with the Wista I brought along the old Iskra to let me grab a few insurance shots. So it is I have a very similar shot done on medium format.



Now I didn't make these to shots with any sort of comparison in mind so I took no real measures to keep them as comparatively identical as possible. Both were shot on Ilford HP5+ and processed in PMK Pyro. They are shot from slightly different positions since I recomposed this second shot to give me something I thought was a little more pleasing with the square format. The lenses, a 150mm Symmar-S for the 4x5 and the Iskra's 75mm Industar are to a reasonable degree of approximation equivalent in terms of focal length. An early 60's Soviet Tessar vs. a more modern six element German optic might not seem to make for a fair comparison it's entirely capable of delivering impressive results and I hope to convince you that this and other differences such as the smaller format don't account for what I am about to show you. While I think both shots look fairly reasonable on screen at the resolution I present them at here, let's see what they look like at higher resolution with a pair of unsharpened negative scans from my Epson V500.


Of course the Iskra shoots a smaller format negative, but it's still a respectable medium format negative and looking closer the lack of sharpness is obvious long before grain becomes apparent. Yes the large format shot was taken at f/22 rather than f/11, but with double the focal length it needs to be stopped down further. The scans are a reasonably close match of the same are of foreground rock a few metres from the camera. When I was using the Iskra I focused on the island which was several tens of metres distant, relying on depth of field for whatever sharpness could be maintained in the foreground. The difference with the Wista image is that I didn't have to chose between the island and the foreground rock, I was able to focus on both at the same time, and I mean bang on critical focus, courtesy of the option I had to tilt the lens forward. As clear as the difference is here, if you open the comparison image up a full resolution you'll see the blades of grass keep showing more detail up to 100% magnification, not just the stalks but the tiny bits of detail on them. It just seems more impressive the closer you look while the comparison shot from the Iskra looks worse. But lest you think the image on the left looks bad because of some overall shortcomings in the image notice that beyond the foreground rock itself even the little bits floating in the water that are nearer to the distance at which the camera was focused don't look nearly so bad. But for the ability to get that foreground in focus without losing sharpness elsewhere there might not be so much to chose between the two shots.

There are other camera movements to speak of such as swing, the side to side equivalent of the fore and aft of tilt, and rise and fall movements to combat keystoning and other perspective effects that might be undesirable in many situations. And for every potential problem these movements have the potential to overcome, they also have the potential to creatively enhance. For example tilt and swing movements can be used to artificially induce a shallow depth of field effect that can often create the illusion that a real scene is a photo of a miniature model. 

All of these movements can come in handy. With the 4x5 cameras I've owned I'm sure I've found occasion to use all of them once or twice. Honestly though I could live without most of them though. All except tilt. To me having a large format camera that lacked that one capability would really just feel like a waste. 

Saturday 22 August 2015

Wista-pon a Star

Shortly after the Wista arrived a camp-out with the extended family provided the perfect opportunity to try it out. I wondered if everyone would be worried that I just up and disappeared at 5am. It turns out no one had the slightest doubt about why I had left or what I was doing. 
It was probably a foregone conclusion that once I started getting my feet wet in the world of large format again it wouldn't be long before the floodgates opened. Just when it seemed the old 4x5 press camera that had been waiting patiently on a shelf for decades might finally be put back into regular service, in a flash it's been usurped. Though it remains a capable instrument, limitations such as it's inability to accommodate larger lenses and the nearly impossible to find lens boards it takes make it a poor foundation for a photographic system. An upgrade at some point in the future seemed inevitable and so when the time came to seek out some wide angle glass the fledgling 4x5 arsenal there didn't seem much sense in trying to make it work with the old camera.

Retro Chic
Weeks were spent researching the possibilities, combing the online auction sites and making the occasional near miss auction bids. At one point I came close to justifying the purchase of a new Chamonix F1 to myself, but blowing the whole budget on a camera with nothing left over for lenses rather defeated the purpose. It wasn't long after coming to my senses that I stumbled upon the used Wista 45SP in the APUG classifieds. It's not often I have to specify that a film camera I found for sale was used, but the 45SP is different. First introduced in 1972 the well heeled consumer can to this day purchase one new with all the innovations Wista has introduced over 40+ years (consisting entirely of replacing the date faux wood panels with black leatherette) for a mere five large, body only. Fortunately examples with a bit more experience can be had for significantly less. The one I found was adorned with the original wood grain vinyl - think 1975 station wagon - which I henceforth decree are retro chic. The seller was asking about the going rate for a similar camera on ebay but this one came with a few extras and I felt better buying from someone who had owned and used the camera.

Better yet, having spent well under half of what the Chamonix I had been eyeing up would have cost I still had a good chunk of budget to work with and it wasn't long before I found a very nice 75mm Nikkor SW to fit the bill. On a 4x5 camera a 75mm lens is roughly equivalent to a 21mm lens on a 35mm camera. That's about as wide as any lens I've ever owned and as wide a lens as I could see myself using regularly, at least with a standard aspect ratio. (Panoramic work would be another story.) I had been thinking of getting a 90mm lens after the 150 Symmar-S I already had, but the extra I mentioned that came with the Wista was a servicable, if not entirely practical, 90mm f/12.5 Wollensak. It's nearly impossible to focus with in anything short of the blazing mid-day sun, but it did mean I had the 90mm focal length covered, at least in a pinch, and the Nikkor seemed too good to pass up.

In the field, the Wista 45SP sporting a new (to me) 75mm f/4.5 Nikkor SW and, above, the result obtained.
Being sturdier and more capable than my old Busch press camera the Wista, not surprisingly, is a good deal more daunting a piece of cargo to deal with when heading out to the field. Significantly more compact than the monorail type 4x5's that are normally thought of as studio cameras, the Wista's ability to fold up into a neat little box the size of a lunch pail never the less doesn't make it any lighter. In contrast to the press camera's 135mm Wollensak lens, I have found that, reasonably sized as it is, the 150mm Symmar-S is still to large to remain on the camera when it is folded up forcing me to remove it and carry it separately. This is one reason the 4x5 kit, with a full set of film holders, light meter, filters etc. is rapidly growing to fill my large photo backpack, the one alternately used fot the Mamiya RB67 and its retinue of lenses and other attachments.

In the past few outings with it I have seen fit to also through the smaller backpack containing my Bronica outfit. I suppose time will tell what sort of balance gets struck between medium and large format but there are times and situations where I still need the Bronica's capabilities, be that rapid deployment, hand holdability or good old centre of gravity considerations. It's easy enough to throw both in the trunk and let the situation dictate which pack to grab when I get out there. I may find carrying the 4x5 just isn't worth it much of the time and that most of my work is still done with medium format. Then again my love of the big negative could just win out. Who knows, this time next year I could be fawning over a new 8x10 camera.

Ready to travel: Inside the trunk of my car with the Bronica kit (left) the
growing large format ensemble (right), and my trust old Manfrotto (lower).


Saturday 8 August 2015

One Subject, Many Approaches


A recent image of this old concrete relic I have photographed so many times before. Though it's really what's left of a
century old amusement park ride, here it seems to take on the feel of a forgotten ancient temple.

You may recall that last week one of the images featured, the crumbling "legs" of a concrete structure along the Lake Erie shore, was yet one more image of a subject I have photographed many times before. It's in fact just one of several features of potential photographic interest along that local stretch of lake shore I've mentioned here so many times before. Useful as it is as a place I know there will be a few images to be made if I'm testing a new lens or camera, or when I just don't have the time to go looking for images further afield, the decision to head down there has long been accompanied by the sense of going for the same old same old, the photographic equivalent of having no better idea than to order takeout pizza again. Yet as often as I have revisited the place and as much as it seems I must have completely exhausted that crumbling heap of concrete as a photographic subject, I find myself surprised again and again when a new way of approaching this humble subject presents itself even when, sure I have all the images that old thing could ever warrant, I'm not really looking for it.

First of all they may be those of you wondering just what this concrete monstrosity is. To get to that though a bit of the history of that whole stretch of beach is in order. Currently known simply as Erie Beach Park, or occasionally as Waverly Beach to Fort Erie locals, the area was from the latter part of the 19th Century to around the start of the Great Depression the Erie Beach Amusement Park. The area included rides, a casino, dance hall, roller skating rink and of course swimming areas, drawing many visitors from the United States via a ferry boat that brought them in from Buffalo NY. It was superseded by the Crystal Beach Amusement park about 10 kilometres further west to which some of the attractions were moved, while what remained was left abandoned. In recent years there has been a restoration of sorts. The crumbling path of the old promenade has been revamped as part of the Friendship Trail project running parallel to the Lake Erie shore linking my home town of Port Colborne Ontario to Fort Erie where I currently live. Included in the revamping are a series of information panels that detail the beach's former glory and go some way to explaining the mysterious concrete remnants that are visible along the shore.

Information panels on the walkway overlooking what remains of the old
amusement park now provide context for the curious on the various ancient
concrete edifices strewn along the shore. 

This brings us to the structure in question. This platform, supported by four outer legs plus a central column is the central support for something I have only ever heard described as "the swing ride". There are several photographs of what this looked like back in its day, perhaps none more telling in terms of what you'll find there today as one of the images from the info panels from the walkway overlooking the beach.


From this image it's clear not only what the function of the structure as it appears today was, but also the original purpose of all the toppled concrete columns that are strewn about the surrounding area.  According to the panel this image was from the 1914 Shredded Wheat annual outing, 101 years ago nearly to the day. It also appears that water levels were dramatically lower in Lake Erie a century ago. The remains of many of the other features in this photograph are still visible today including the foundation of the fun house tower on the left and the old pier walkway in the background.

Though I've lived in Fort Erie for the past 18 years or so, and only grew up just a 20 minute drive up the Lake Erie shore, I really only discovered this structure for myself less than ten years ago. Though I had no idea what it was at the time the photographic possibilities it suggested were obvious enough right from the start, and I'm certainly not the first to think so. Over most of those years I thought of this as a subject I had already covered, no need to return to it again. Somehow I always found a reason to. Ansel famously revisited subjects like Half Dome many times and we are all the richer for it. Apparently he saw value in returning to the same subject time and again. Maybe I should relax a little and see what more I can make of this. It may be difficult to tell by the roughly chronological sequence of images I present below but the structure is crumbling year by year and it may not be long before someone declares it unsafe and it gets pulled down for good. I'd hate to realize then that there were other ways to approach it.

For completeness sake I'll start with one from back in my digital days. All HDR'd
up I remember being quite proud of it at the time. I dialed the colour saturation
back some and made the contrast a bit more realistic to make it presentable here. 
Even in my digital era film was still part of my repertoire. This is image is even
older than the one above, but shot on 35mm Kodak HIE infrared film. I thought
this film was long gone but recently found a roll at the bottom of the freezer.  
In silhouette with the old pier and the Buffalo skyline in the distance.

My favourite image from a long expired roll of Vericolor.

Under a November sky, the clouds of autumn seem somehow different
than at any other time of year.

Taken just this past winter when I was drawn to the beach by some mysterious
looking clouds, here it appears as though transported to a whole other landscape.