Etch-A-Sketch

 

A new lens for my digital camera arrived yesterday, and I decided to bring the whole set up along on my daily walk. My wife was not able to join me, so I knew I could spend a little more time looking for compositions. For some reason, the childhood memory of my brother taking away my Etch-A-Sketch to write me a lovely expletive laden message (you know the one) popped into my head. A construction site is kind of like an Etch-A-Sketch, just on a grand scale. These compositions only exist for a short time. Luckily, sometimes artists are nearby to record them. 

National Memorial for Peace and Justice

It was a very hot and humid summer day and I was in Montgomery, Ala. to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I had my beloved Rolleiflex SL66 with me, along with the 80 mm f/2.8 lens and a roll of East German made ORWO film that expired in 1976. I was so grateful that the guard decided to let me in carrying the old Rolleiflex -- I wasn't sure he was going to at first. Frankly, the SL66 is a lot of camera to schlep around as a tourist. But the photos! There was a lot of base fog when I developed the ORWO, but the images were satisfying. I also exposed a roll of Fuji Acros to cover my bases.

No country for old men

We have one or two daily walks on the menu, and on one of these walks recently, I shot a few images with the Contax T. I decided to create a montage out of the 3 images that I liked the best from the roll of Lomo 800. I loaded one image into the red, green, and blue channels in Photoshop and then turned the colors to eleven (they were pretty out there to begin with). It is a technique I picked up by reading some interviews with photographer James Welling. He has a couple of videos on Youtube as well, if you are interested. Folks down here like to park on the grass, its kind of a thing, but this car runs just fine, it's not sitting on cinder blocks. No sir.

Needs a nude

At an image critique one time, a relatively well known photographer told me, that's a very pleasant image, but there's just something missing... it needs a nude. Maybe I need to hop into Photoshop and address the concern... I'm just afraid that if I did, another critic would knock me for it. Dude, it's just a documentary photograph of vernacular architecture in the Deep South.

Conundrum

 

I shot this scene twice, once with the house perfectly aligned in the frame, and the second as presented here. Maybe I should combine the two as an animated gif. Hmm. Shot using the Leica R8 and a 50 mm lens on Ektar film. What I really wish is that I had brought my 35 mm with me that day. 

Field of dreams

It is hard to believe, but I created the Albus & Fergie blog in about 2006, in other words, back when blogs were a common way for folks to share images and words online. Before social media took the world by storm. These days, Instagram is the way most of us put our photographs in front of other people's eyes. For better and worse. But, I digress. Funny enough, I did virtually nothing with the blog for 14 years because... I really don't know. I would post an image or two, lose interest, think the whole thing was just dumb, and take it all down. That pattern repeated for several cycles until this past Fall when things kind of stuck for me. Now that blogs are no longer a thing I am blogging. You see, I'm on the leading edge of the inevitable wave of blog nostalgia that is sure to kick in soon.

So, welcome to the 100th post! I've taken a real "Field of Dreams" approach to this little project. Build it and they will come. I would like to pause for a moment a moment to thank both of you! 

Now that I've generated a little bit of reading material for the random few who bump into the blog, I'm planning to change things up a little bit. I've established a daily writing habit, and want to push myself to do a little more long form writing. Develop my thoughts a bit more. That kind of thing. So, I think the format moving forward will be to post a picture a day and to feature a longer form article of some kind once a week. Let's see what happens.

A couple of years ago, I found an old roll of exposed color film lurking in the bottom of a drawer, and sent it off for development and scanning.

The image is from a trip to the Grand Canyon nearly a quarter century ago. The degradation of the latent image on the film over time reminds me of the fragility of our memories.

Tuning the radio

It can be quite informative to watch another photographer work on their images. I mean an established, practicing artist -- someone further along on the journey than you are. You might have to part with some of your hard earned shekels to gain this level of access. But, you might be pleasantly surprised at what you discover about your own way of working. 

One of the most important lessons I learned from watching other artists is how willing they are to 'turn the volume up to eleven'. Just to see what happens to the image. Naturally, you can back off from the extremes later if you decide it does not work. But if you never see the image break, or come close to failing, how do you know you have not missed something?

To me its like tuning an analog radio, when you're driving through west Texas and want to listen to some music. You roll the dial back and forth through the frequencies until you find an interesting channel, and when you have, you go back and forth to find the spot with the strongest signal and a tolerable amount of static. 

Your work shows who you are

A year ago, none of us could have imagined what was about to transpire in 2020. This idea was percolating in the back of my mind when I was made aware of William Kentridge's thoughts on the responsibility of an artist:

The essential responsibility is to work well, and hard, and a lot, and look at the work once it’s made. In the end, the work shows who you are, and you can fool it for a certain time, but if you are a shallow or a pretentious or a vain person, that comes through in the work. If there are other elements to you, then those also come through in the work.

How have each of us been marked by our pandemic year and how will that come through in our work?

One of the nice things about being a 'walker' is the chance to re-photograph a scene again and again. This shot was captured on a walk in a favorite park using a conventional 400 speed emulsion.

Highly recommended: The Photographer's Playbook

Your first reaction upon hearing about "The Photographer's Playbook", edited by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern might be to dismiss it out of hand. This initial reaction might be further reinforced upon seeing the front cover of the book (look it up). But I highly encourage you to tamp down your native cynicism and pick up a copy right away, because there are many great ideas contained between the covers. Essentially, the book is a curated selection of assignments, exercises, stories, and the like from a large number of well respected photographers. You could probably design an entire course or seminar around ideas borrowed from this book.

At any rate, today's topic comes from John Gossage. You'll need to buy the book to really get the most out of the exercise, but the brief is to "make pictures to annoy people".

This could be a practical strategy if you are preparing for a critique and are expecting the worst. If your critic is a hard core documentary photographer, including a few images created using intentional camera movement (ICM) could be interesting.

This was a digital capture created by setting the ISO to its lowest value, the aperture to its smallest value and leaving the shutter open for 30 sec while walking around the house at night swinging the camera around. What makes this image memorable to me was that the brightest element suggests a human figure.

Magnolia seasons

I never saw very many of them growing up in California, but here in the Southeast, the magnolia is indeed a common sight. Over the years, I've become a huge fan of these majestic trees, although some folks can't seem to wait to cut theirs down. I guess the shallow root system can be pretty annoying and the leaves hard to rake, but I find them lovely to look at and don't feel compelled to rake, so that isn't a problem for me. Also, magnolias don't tend to fall on your roof the way the pine trees do, so there's that. In addition to their beauty, I've come to appreciate how magnolias help me mark the four seasons. In particular, once they start to bloom, you know it's fixing to get hot. 

This particular tree was a healthy specimen -- just look at the number of blooms. The photo was shot using a very old Fuji 690BL and the Fujinon 100 mm f/3.5 lens on Portra 400. This is the original model of the so-called Texas Leica, a beast of a camera producing an enormous 6x9 cm negative. I loved the older model because you could change lenses, and I used it until the day it broke in my hands. 

Streaming landscapes

We've been streaming a lot of movies and television shows during the past 10 pandemic months. It was only a matter of time before I would start photographing the screen, right? I mean, one of the attractions of streaming in the first place is as a substitute for travel in a time of restricted movement. So, I have started a little series of streaming landscapes. I doubt I will do anything too serious with it, but perhaps I will feel a bit different once we are on the other side of the pandemic.

Traveling back to what I imagine were the 1960s. Leica R9, 135 mm f/2.8. Lomo Berlin 400 film.

Can your photographs of other people's art be considered art in their own right?

I was taking a load off in the main lobby of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta when my attention was diverted to how the surface of a large painting by Ellsworth Kelly was changing as the ambient light fluctuated. I'm that kind of person. I was motivated to frame up and take a shot.

I don't think this image can be considered a documentary photograph of the original artwork, if for no other reason than it doesn't show the entire piece. That said, I feel that it does successfully record one aspect of my experience of contemplating the piece, namely my interest in how the shadow cast by the canvas interacts with the painted surface and the wall behind. Leica R8, 35 mm Summicron, Kodak Portra 400. Notice how the old lens adds a nice vignette to all of the images I took that day. Saves time in post.

Sometimes you get what you pay for :(

A few years ago, I picked up a bulk film roller off of that auction site. I was really excited to start preparing my own custom rolls for daily shooting. In particular, I wanted to be able to make shortie rolls so that I would be more inclined to use my half frame cameras. I love them, but the prospect of having to fire off 72 frames on a single roll is a bit daunting.

To test my system out, I decided to purchase a bulk roll of the absolute cheapest film stock I could find, so I ordered 100 feet of ISO 400 Brand X film. Let's just leave it at that. I shot a roll through one of my cameras and, after developing the roll, was disappointed to see everything was under exposed by just over two stops. Arrgh! It looks like they sent me 100 speed film by mistake, even though the box had a big 400 on it. I was not super thrilled, to say the least. Well, it turns out that one of the images makes a decent abstract composition. Perhaps I can do something with it at some point, like use it as a texture in Photoshop. In the mean time I jacked up the contrast in post production and am thinking about it as an interesting figure/ground study. Yeah, that's it.

None of the other frames on the roll, particularly the portraits, could really be salvaged. Bummer.

Tofu and radishes...

Sometimes it takes a decade for me to cross an item off my bucket list. It probably makes sense to start picking up the pace a little bit to avoid a mad rush at the end. For whatever reason, I have always wanted to make tofu at home, but I've just never gotten around to trying. I even bought a very detailed book about the craft. Well, this past weekend, through a confluence of mysterious forces, I finally got around to making a batch of homemade tofu. And, I am glad I did. It was really straightforward (far easier than reading about it, actually) and the results were delicious.

Here is an image of my chunk of tofu floating in its water bath. I like the pattern that the cheesecloth imparts to the surface of the tofu because it reminds me of other kinds of cheese I've made. Who knew that tofu could be so photogenic?

Monstrous light

When we moved into our house, one of the first upgrades we made was to install uplights on several of the trees in our yard. You see, there is nothing worse than looking out the window at night and seeing... well, nothing. Much more pleasant to look out and see your trees.

Frankenstein lighting is not particularly flattering for human subjects, but I think that trees take on a new beauty when lit like this at night. The first image was shot on an old IR converted Canon 5D camera (the first model) using an even older apochromatically corrected 180 mm Leica lens. This lens is so well corrected that it has the same focal length for visible as well as near IR wavelengths, meaning it is easy to accurately focus the old 5D even at wide apertures close up.

I've heard that the Leica R 180 mm was designed to work best at longer working distances, near infinity in fact, but it seemed to perform admirably here as well.  While I'm very fond of this image, frankly, I'm still trying to make up my mind about IR photography in general.

Double wide

For a long time I preferred shooting with a 50 mm lens. I had no hesitation going longer for certain shots, as the perspective of a longer focal length always fascinated me, but I never really considered using a wider focal length. Frankly, I tended to zoom with my feet, preferring, in general, to carry less equipment. I did lust after fisheye lenses, but they tended to be far too expensive for such a specialty item. At any rate, slowly, over time, and especially since the advent of cell phone cameras, with their wider view of the world, I've started getting more comfortable at the shorter end of the focal length spectrum.

I decided to pick up a copy of the Leica R 21 mm f/4 lens several years ago, before things got out of hand with prices on old film equipment. I found a beater copy for a couple of hundred dollars. A strange fact about this lens is that it has two L-shaped aperture blades. It is always amusing to see how a camera company like Leica would chose to cut corners. Candidly, the lens is plagued by soft corners and vignetting until stopped down to about f/11. Seriously. But in bright light, it performs very well indeed. Doesn't hold a candle to modern wide angles, but quite an achievement for the lens designers of the 1960s.

Death becomes them

Our house has a plethora of windows and a very open floor plan, enjoyable for us, but a condition which can be pretty confusing and dangerous for birds. In fact, I've gotten used to hearing the periodic thud of a flying bird crashing into one of our windows. Usually, the victim recovers almost immediately and flies off to wherever it was going. Sometimes it takes them a few beats to recover, and once, a poor stunned bird took over an hour to regain consciousness and fly away. I've only ever seen one bird die from crashing into one of our windows.

The crash sites can be beautiful to photograph, as in the case of the image below, which I made yesterday.

The wind was blowing pretty forcefully, accounting for the motion blur, and transitory condition of the scene in front of me. Gone now.

A sense of time

We watched the movie Paterson the other evening, accompanied by a delicious pizza with a cauliflower crust. I found certain aspects of the film quite interesting, while other parts flowed past me like the waters of the Passaic River. The notion of time as the fourth dimension came up in some of the poems (you'll have to watch the movie), and this got me thinking about how time manifests itself in photography. Of course, poets have their own ways of dealing with time.

Here, waves of water passing through a double slit superpose to create a simulation of the diffraction that can also occur at much smaller scales. Coherent and incoherent wave dynamics are an interesting way that time can be manifested within a photograph.

Emulsion compulsion

For me, and I think for many, the past week has been an incredible energy suck. The only thing I really want to say is that having a daily studio practice where I just try to show up to make work has helped me not get completely mired in a doom spiral. I wish the same for you.

One of the distinct pleasures of analog photography is the possibility of working with specialized or even unique emulsions. This could mean shooting a long-expired, even out of production emulsion, working with a stock rated at ISO 0.6, or finding a cache of film that is used in surveillance cameras for pennies on the dollar and rolling it yourself.

You really do never know what you are going to get. As an example, here is a shot taken in Jackson WY on color IR film, perhaps the most unique (and expensive) emulsion I've ever used. This film is no longer manufactured, and I paid about $20 for a 24 exposure roll of the stuff. I kept it in the freezer next to some gorgeous scallops until my trip. The film results in an image with a very unique look, that is for sure, but is it too much of a gimmick?

For increased credibility, I'll add that the photograph was made using the Leica R6 camera and the yummy 35 mm f/2 lens (Summicron in Leicaspeak). For me, the dark band of magenta/purple at the bottom really anchors the composition, and makes the image work, but not everyone would find the color palette appealing. Many might have preferred the scallops, actually.

Panasonic LX3: digicam of the stars

I came across a short film about the photographer John Gossage recently. Full disclosure: Gossage makes it to my personal top ten list, at least for this phase of my photographic journey. Anyway, I think the video was made within the last 3-4 years in connection with the publication of one of his recent books. I noticed he had a small and relatively ancient digital camera slung over his shoulder during the interview. I am ninety-nine percent sure it was the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. Damn! I owned that camera back in the day and I really loved it, all 10 megapixels worth. It really was a wonderful little everyday carry camera, including being pretty stylish as well a good imager. And isn't it cool when we discover we've used the same gear as a well known artist?

I remember that I especially enjoyed taking the LX3 to the various greenhouses and garden shops around town in order to have something to do while my wife was picking out new plants for the yard. A greenhouse is one of a photographer's best friends.

Be true to yourself

I saw an interview with Cicely Tyson in the New York Times this morning. First things first. I was stunned to find out she is 96 years old. The interview makes for good reading. I don't know about you, but I feel inclined to listen to what a 96 year old has to say about things.

The take away from the interview was a famous quote from Shakespeare, "To thine own self be true". I think it can be hard to make photographs that are true to one's self. But we sure should try.

I liked the way the afternoon light raked across the paper bags in this image, which is a bit of an homage to Lilo Raymond.

Homing in

A while back, I made a little spur-of-the-moment trip to Columbus, GA on a crisp sunny winter morning. I had the Nikon F3 with me, but in my rush to get going, I only brought one lens along, the famous 105 mm f/2.5. That was just the lens that happened to be mounted at the time. The lens is justly well respected for making portraits, but its field of view is a bit tight for walking around a city, I think. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful day, and I wasn't about to leave the lovely F3 in my bag, so I thought I would just focus my attention on interesting details as I strolled through the historic part of downtown.

The lens provides sharp and contrasty images on film, but I remember that it also worked nicely paired with a Nikon digital camera I had back in the early years of the 21st century.

Photographic 'states'

Do photographs pass through a series of 'states' as you move from an initial idea to the finished work? Or is it more of a concerted process that proceeds directly from start to finish? In other words, is your process single- or multi-step, and, if multi-step, do the intermediate states have any particular value? Are they potential branching points for further developments later? Personal detritus?

Is it important to keep a record of the various 'states' of your photographs, say in the form of a sketchbook (or Photoshop document)? Often, I've found myself flattening my documents in the heat of the moment, in order to force myself to commit to an edit. To make it easier to move on, I guess.

New year, new discoveries

Last year, we had multiple trees die due to drought conditions in our area. It was the largest number of trees we ever lost at one time. We cut up the felled trees and saved the best pieces for our son, who likes to work with wood. While waiting for the wood to season, our sausage-like cat seems to enjoy jumping between these two logs -- it is his main workout for the day.

The photograph of the tree rings was made using the Rolleiflex SL66 and the 80 mm lens on a chunk of Kodak Tri-X film. Conventional silver halide based photography, in other words. 

Out of blackness...

A flush of oyster mushrooms emerging from blackness.

Intrepid 4x5 camera (mark IV version), Ilford HP5+, Caltar 135 mm lens.

That is all for today.

Lazarus cameras

Let's face it, photography should be enjoyable, at least some of the time. I'm sure an argument can be made in favor of perpetual angst, but today I'm in the mood to talk about fun. Several months ago my beloved Rolleiflex SL66 started misbehaving so badly that I had no other choice than to send it across the country for repair. It was going to take a minimum of 3 months to complete the work. Ugh. What was I going to shoot in the meantime? I decided to purchase a couple of Lazarus cameras. Two medium format cameras that shoot 6x6 cm negatives just like the Rollei. The constraint was that the total investment in each was limited to $200. I figured that at those prices, the laying on of hands might be required, so I decided on snagging two cameras to double my odds of raising at least one Lazarus.

The first camera I purchased was a Kowa Six. I was familiar with the Kowa brand from that time long ago when I bought a spotting scope to try my hand at birding on a trip to Galveston. Meh. Birding, not Kowa, not Galveston. The Kowa Six came with a 85 mm f/2.8 lens for a total price of $175. The body was in pretty decent shape, and did not require extraordinary measures to bring back to life, but the lens was a total disaster. But, Youtube. So, I took it apart and cleaned off all the schmutz and reassembled it. Wow, pretty nice little set up! The image below doesn't pretend to show off the high quality optics, but instead takes a deeper dive on the concept of fun.

These days, it sometimes seems as if everything has a name associated with it, and I learned that the technique demonstrated in this photograph is called intentional camera movement and has an official acronym (you guessed it, ICM). Ha ha! I'm pretty satisfied with my first ICM shot.

Expose for the shadows

What properties are more fundamental to a photograph than light and shadow? In his essay, "Is Photography a Plastic Art?", Jean-Claude Lemagny states that "continuous encounters between light and shadow result in new meanings". I came across this essay in an anthology called Poetics of Space edited by Steve Yates.

As you might have intuited, the answer to the question posed in the essay's title is 'yes', with the interplay of shadow and light in photographs serving as the corpus delicti. 

Study the light

I don't know if this little experiment would work as well in new construction, where the houses are often plunked down willy nilly on their lots, but we live in a home from the 1950s that was carefully oriented with respect to the trajectory of the sun. It has definitely been worth the effort to study the movement of good light around the house as the day progresses. In the morning, the laundry room is suffused with warm light which is further softened by the semitransparent window.

This photograph was made using the Voigtlander Bessa TM with a classic vintage Pentax Takumar 105 mm f/2.8 lens. The image pleases me because, while it suggests that the moth might have flown out of the vase, in reality, it is crawling around on the outside of the window while the vase is inside on the sill.

Sizing things up

One of the things that fell by the wayside during the past year was buying bouquets of fresh flowers for the house (and, of course, to photograph). Unfortunately, flowers just didn't make it onto the minimal shopping list all that often; instead, we relied on our own garden. Fine, but I do rather miss photographing the fancy store bought blooms through their life cycles. Anyway, I was rummaging through piles of negatives for flower photographs and I happened across some that I took with an old Pentax auto110 camera. 

What a sweet little imager! The film is 16 mm stock, comes in little pop-in cartridges, and funnily enough, is still available. I found a source of something called Fukkatsu film. How could I resist buying a few rolls? The negative size is pretty tiny, 1.3 cm by 1.7 cm. With that in mind, the quality of the Pentax optics is pretty stunning, resolving plenty of detail in the sunflower. By the way, I always enjoy how one or two little petals wend their way to the center of the flower.

Tumbling dice

According to my iPad, I did not complete a single book in 2020. I didn't know it kept track of information like that, but in any event, I've resolved to do better this year. I was flipping through one of the books I didn't finish this year, Robin Kelsey's "Photography and the Art of Chance". It's an academic text, and I've started reading it more than once. Maybe this year I can actually stick with it...

How many times would you have to throw three balls in the air and photograph them to end up with an image in which the balls are in more or less a straight line? A few times, probably. You can read up on John Baldessari to see how the results of these studies turned out. I am not being dismissive, I just think there are other meaningful ways that chance and disorder can impact an image. In other words, we're not done yet with this topic. 

Since the time of Julia Margaret Cameron, the material accidents of photography have been used to great effect by some artists. A contemporary example would be Sally Mann. Pulling this off successfully can be a lot harder than it sounds.

Slightly missing focus is a good example, I think. But out of focus blur (bokeh) depends on multiple factors, making it hard to control perfectly in a photograph. So maybe chance can play a role here as well? 

For this image, I photographed the roses with the optically most perfect lens I own, but at its closest focus distance and wide open at f/1.2. I chose where to stand, how to frame, and where to focus, but the arrangement of the flowers and the distance of the vase to the window were not determined by me.

Welcome the new year

I took this photograph about one year ago on a walk in the park. It was a crisp winter morning and I was feeling like my batteries had been fully recharged over the holidays. I had not used the word pandemic in a sentence since a term paper I wrote in high school about the Middle Ages. A few years ago, that was. I had no earthly idea what was coming. At any rate, I was naturally attracted to the clouds that day because of the drama they impart to the scene. At the time it seemed like an optimistic view. And you know what, I still think it is. Today, I'm hoping that the clouds are about to part, just a little.

The image was shot on the Leicaflex (original) with the first version of the 50 mm f/2.