Photographic Jiu Jitsu, Kinda

Alas, my days of active grappling are pretty much behind me at this point. Which is fine. I do miss it, but my body is certainly grateful. Thankfully, too, some of the knowledge I picked up over the years transfers pretty well to my photographic practice. 

It was a very breezy day in Oslo and it soon became apparent that, try though I might, and I did, there was no way I was going to get a perfectly sharp image of the flowers. And I didn't. So I stopped down to f/16 and shot at 1/8 sec for a decent impression. :) 

In rolling, sometimes simple survival is the point.

Good light and fair winds this weekend.

Tasting notes: Fuji X100S.

Intentional camera movement on super slow film

 

Using a slow emulsion such as Lomo Babylon 13 opens up the possibility of shooting wide open on a sunny day, which might be useful for capturing environmental portraits. Another use case for low ISO film is ICM photography. If you stop down the aperture to f/5.6, f/8, or beyond, you often will be shooting at or below 1/15 sec, ideal for blurring water and clouds if you are on a tripod, or doing ICM if that is your cup of tea. Naturally, you are free to adjust your exposures to taste. Camera movements during exposure involve a certain element of chance, so you may end up with many unusable frames at first. For this reason, it might be a good idea to practice using your phone or digital camera to get an idea of the possibilities before blasting through several rolls of film. The lack of apparent grain in the above ICM images added to the overall feel of 'flow', a good match with my artistic intent. I'll be doing more film based ICM work for sure.

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.