What A Difference A Day Makes

Yesterday, we got our first taste of real Fall weather. Welcome back, old friend! I decided to chuck a roll of the new Lomography 92 film into my R9 and just snap away. The dog days are gone, for a time, for a time. And the Fall light sure is sweet. After lunch, I mixed up a fresh batch of C41 chemistry and processed the film myself. It is definitely a grainy film with a coolish color response. Something a bit different, though, just what I was looking for. Just what the doctor ordered. These are our wild crepe myrtles looking like a forest.

A Rare Thing

Every once in a while I will find a new view of things in my yard, one that for some reason I've not noticed before. Not very often, but it'll happen from time to time. It helped that I was using a slightly longer focal length than I usually do, in this case, a 120mm lens on medium format film. As an aside, the Rollei 120mm f/5.6 S-Planar lens is a real gem that I became aware of by browsing old photobooks from the 1980s. I saw an inspiring photograph by an artist who must have had a pretty high profile at the time, but who doesn't show up in an internet search these days. Alas, that's likely the fate most of us have to look forward to.

Tasting notes: Rolleiflex SL66, Rollei 120mm f/5.6, Ilford FP4+.

The Power of Multiples

We've all heard about the wisdom of crowds, and in a similar vein, it sometimes seems that a collection or group of similar things can make for a more impactful and interesting image than a single object can. If the display had consisted of the main dress in front, I would probably walked on by. But the collection of similar dresses really engaged me visually, so I made a photograph.   

Twisted

Shooting with a wide angle lens can lead to all kinds of problems. In modern digital cameras, the geometric distortions are usually corrected automatically, but when shooting on film, you get to see your lens's faults recorded for posterity, so to speak, along with the subject of your photograph. Of course, you can correct your scans a little bit if you are so inclined. In this case, too, the ravages of time have contributed to some of the sag.

Tasting notes: Leica R8, 35mm Summicron; Ektar 100, summer.

Ready or Not...

Most photographers, and I could probably generalize to 'creatives', are rightly skeptical about the long term unintended consequences of artificial intelligence. (I ain't gonna use caps.) Even if they use it everyday in the form of 'smart' masking and other tools in Photoshop and Lightroom. We have all been on our collective guards since the likes of Richard Prince appeared on the scene. That said, I have still experimented a little bit (in the privacy of my studio) with Dall-e and the neural filters in Photoshop.

This image was shot on black-and-white film and colorized with one click in Ps. Not yet perfect, but with rolls of medium format film approaching $20, getting pretty close. 

 

Surprise and Delight

Photography continues to surprise and delight. I saw this composition at the botanical garden, but after developing and scanning the film, ended up thinking that the negative was actually more interesting than the positive as an image. So, in this case, the scanned negative is the final version. I've never felt that way about one of my photographs before.

Tasting notes: Olympus Pen FT, 38mm f/1.8 lens, Ilford FP4+.
 

Divine Stallion

I’m almost certain that I was the only person shooting with black-and-white film in a half-frame camera at the Atlanta botanical gardens yesterday. Scratch that. I know I was. It was a spontaneous decision to go have lunch there. We called an audible. But I came away with a nice set of photographs, I think. And lunch was good. The absence of color and the surprising appearance of the faux origami Pegasus gives an enjoyable image.

Tasting notes: Olympus Pen FT, 38mm f/1.8 lens, Ilford FP4+.

Singing the Film Shooting Hipster Blues

Sometimes experiments flop, ideas don't pan out, and you come home with nuttin', feeling kinda like a dummy. Yesterday was such a day for me. Earlier in the week, I had had the seemingly righteous idea of attaching my Leica R-21 mm f/3.4 to a Leica MD-2 body using an adapter and then going out to 'shoot from the gut'. You see, I don't own a viewfinder with the field of view of a 21mm lens -- they are simply too damned expensive. So, even with my belly button in cosmic as well as geometric alignment with the sun, I struggled, managing to capture the very top of my wife's head in this shot (lower right). Sigh.

Dealing with your hoarding through photography!

Sometimes you just have to stop thinking, pick up the damned camera, and start shooting. Being somewhat infatuated with my new digital workhorse -- the electronic marvel I recently purchased after selling every single underutilized piece of equipment I could find lying around the studio -- I hadn't used my beloved Rolleiflex SL66 that much in a while. So with no particular 'project' in mind, I simply grabbed a roll of Tri-X, loaded up, and started shooting. I had been thinking of thinning out my pile of old dead things, that, in addition to cluttering up the studio, were in great danger of becoming playthings for studio cat, so those ended up being my subject. And, it was interesting that creating a photographic catalog of all my crap made it easier to chuck this stuff out.

I hope your weekend is full of photography and interesting light.

Developing film in mint?

Does it make any sense to try to reduce the environmental impact of chemical photography? Or should we simply move on if environmental issues are the main concern? After all, cameras existed well before the discovery that silver-based materials could be used to record projected images, and they work amazingly well with silicon-based digital imaging sensors, too. Beyond the issue of environmental impact, though, there is something enticing to me about using materials that are to hand to produce unique photographic results. Low toxicity is a bonus for storing this stuff in the studio with you and your studio lizard, right? At any rate, at the moment, I won't offer any hard and fast answers to these questions, but I have started playing around with different DIY developing and fixing methods. 

Of course, I've tried coffee developers before and have gotten very nice results with them. Coffee can also be used with darkroom papers, something that I intend to try at some point. In the meantime, plant-based materials containing high levels of phenolic compounds are interesting candidates for film developers. Hence, mint. I steeped a handful of mint from the garden in hot water for an hour, added 40 g of sodium carbonate (not bicarbonate), 10 g of ascorbic acid and water to make 600 mL. I exposed a roll of Kodak XX at EI = 200, developed it at room temperature for 30 min, washed and fixed normally (commercial fixer). The negatives were super, super thin. I lost at least 4 stops of film speed, but I got images. So, time to see if this can be viable. 

As far as fixing is concerned, saturated sodium chloride is a historical fixative. I think it is probably archival enough, by which I mean, your negatives will outlive you. Controlling what happens to your negatives after you leave this mortal coil depends on more than your choice of fixative, I reckon!

Holga hell

There is certainly much to hate about social media. Don't worry, we are not going there, not even thinking about it. But, in terms of photography and art, one thing that annoys me about Instagram is how people tend to only show their best work. Me too! But scrolling through the extensive feed of an accomplished artist can really mess with your psyche. 

There is nothing particularly new here, of course. Elliott Erwitt once said that, "contact sheets should be as private as a toothbrush". Only showing the best work has long been part of the artist's mystique. 

Fine and dandy, but I still think it would be very interesting to see some near misses from time to time. 

My personal bete noir is the Holga. I don't know why. I've shot with actual broken cameras before. But after shooting dozens of rolls through it, I've finally started getting some okay images. No 'bodies of work', but solid images.

This one has a little of the famous Holga brooding atmosphere, and you can rest assured that I'll be sandwiching this negative with another one at some point. 

Being open to inspiration

Keeping a loose but consistent schedule has helped us maintain a modicum of sanity over the past eight months. So, while pizza and a movie on Friday evenings has always been a thing for us, it has become nearly sacrosanct in 2020. This week's watch was a film about Moholy-Nagy called "The New Bauhaus". Zwei daumen hoch, Leute. 

On Saturday morning, we went for a little photo walk, and I guess thoughts of Moholy had been percolating in my brain subconsciously overnight, because I came back with some rather Bauhausian images.

The instrument of choice this day was the Leica R6.2 with the 60 mm f/2.8 macro lens attached. This is a terrific lens, by the way, one that, in my experience, also pairs very harmoniously with digital sensors. Since it was designed to image up close, you have to be a little careful when focusing on subjects in the distance, but that quirk just serves to promote mindfulness, never a terrible thing.

The weather was crisp, clear and bright, so I grabbed two rolls of medium speed film on my way out the door.

I had a roll of Foma 100 loaded when I made the photograph below. This is a cheapish emulsion made in the Czech Republic and this was my first time shooting it. Very decent results, I would say, and I'll gladly shoot more Foma in the future. What caught my eye in this scene was the door to nowhere about 3 m up. Perhaps this is the smoking area?