Finding Geometry

This scene looks calm, even peaceful, but behind me I heard the unmistakable power chords and manic rhythms of heavy metal. Loud. Hoping to find a band rehearsing, I turned around. Alas, it was only a CrossFit session, the gym weirdly sandwiched between a couple of art galleries. Just a couple of folks manipulating a giant rope. Nothing like death metal to accompany an intense workout.

Good light this weekend, fellow traveler. 🤘

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+.

Impressionistic Images With An Old Half-Frame Camera

Several years ago, I purchased an old Canon Demi half-frame camera from the 1960s. It was only $35, but needed a little TLC before it could be used. And it took a couple of years, but I recently got a round to completing the little project. I started thinking about this old camera again as I read more and more about the increasing cost of film photography. I found the Demi to be stylish, a fun camera to shoot, and quite affordable, but the results are pretty low-fi. Not suitable for everything, but for casual shooting: two thumbs up. As it turns out, the cost of film photography can be kept pretty low, but if you want to be a hipster, you will need deeper pockets.

Tasting notes: Canon Demi, HP5, DDX 1+4.

Like pears and pecorino…

It is easy to set up most film scanners to handle 35mm frames, making them essentially automatic diptych makers when it comes to digitizing your half-frame negatives. Sometimes the sequences just don’t make any sense, say at a transition point between subjects. Other times, it’s like pears and pecorino.

Tasting notes: Olympus Pen FT, 38mm f/1.8 lens, Kodak XX film. 

It's a Cliché for a Reason

Every photographer loves a good stairwell, right? They certainly make for interesting subject matter. Sometimes it seems to me as if the camera almost points itself toward the upper landing. All you have to do is trip the shutter. This image was made in the High Museum of Art a couple of years ago. It is a place I return to often enough, and grabbing these fun images is part of my museum ritual, one might say.

Tasting notes: Olympus Pen FT half-frame camera, 25mm f/4 lens. With the cost of film increasing right now, perhaps it is time to start using these cameras more frequently. I've never been disappointed in the quality of the negatives I am able to get with them. And 50+ years on, they still look quite fashionable hanging from your shoulder.

Further adventures in half-frame

In previous posts I've talked about some of the things I enjoy about working with the Olympus Pen series of half-frame film cameras. If you don't know, there were three different versions of the camera body that were produced over the years, and I am fortunate to have nice working examples of each. The first version -- the classic Pen, with it's outsized gothic F machined into the face plate -- is a double stroke model, requiring two flicks of the thumb to tension the shutter and advance the film. Then there is the FV model with no built in light meter, that supposedly has a brighter viewfinder than its siblings. I have never found that to be the case. My personal favorite, though, is the Pen-FT, but that has to do more with the fact that mine is the stylish all-black version. Function follows form for these well designed photographic instruments.

One thing I don't love about half frame cameras in general is the fact that a standard roll of film gives you 72 shots. Sometimes more is definitely not better. It might be handy on vacation, but it can be real a pain to fire off 72 frames in a single casual shoot. I've found two ways to get around this, because I like developing a roll of film as soon as possible after shooting. I'm a bit spoiled by my digital camera, I guess. At any rate, the first work around is to bulk roll your own shorty rolls with as much or as little film as you would like. The other is to use a device called the Lab Box, which I've recently acquired. It is a daylight film development tank that you can use to easily develop a partial roll of film, leaving the rest inside the cassette to use another day.

One other consideration is that the size of the negative ultimately limits the final size of the prints you can make, just due to resolution issues. For me, a print that would fit within an 8x10 inch sheet of paper is about as large as I would ever go. If you are just posting scans on IG, not a problem.

Today's images were taken on Ektachrome. The first image shows the interesting geometry of one elevation of a new building under construction. It highlights another characteristic of half frame photography that I am actually quite fond of. The aspect ratio of the image is 4x3 rather than 3x2, and I tend to prefer that for many compositions. Shooting in a different aspect ratio is also a good way to spark creativity.

Nietzsche's typewriter...

You're probably familiar with Nietzsche's typewriter and how the nature of his writing changed after he started using one later in life. Of course, much more research needs to be done to establish how important the tool or process is on what is created. In the meantime, there is nothing stopping us from carrying out little n = 1 experiments to satisfy our own curiosity. And even if the experiments are not definitive, Nietzsche's typewriter is a terrific way to justify all of those camera purchases. (You're welcome.)

Today I wanted to talk about shooting multiple sequential frames of the same subject using half-frame cameras. It's perfectly natural to scan two neighboring half-frame exposures at the same time when you digitize your negatives, since the frame size of a normal 35 mm image is one of the standard settings on your scanner. Once you realize this, it's no great leap of logic to intentionally shoot pairs of frames of the same subject to present as a diptych. And of course, why stop at a diptych?

The image pair below was made using an Olympus Pen FT camera and the standard 38 mm f/1.8 lens, both from the 1960s. In this case, the black bar in the center of the visual field is the actual strip of blank film separating the two images, and becomes a compositional element you can play with.