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No Longer The Only One

~ A site about photography and other stuff by Richard Keeling

No Longer The Only One

Monthly Archives: January 2015

Three Views

19 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by musickna in Photography

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Edward "Ted" and Pat Jones - Confluence Point Stat, Mississippi River, Missouri River, photography, ways of seeing

 

Photograph The Confluence in winter by Richard Keeling on 500px

The Confluence in winter by Richard Keeling on 500px

Ever since I became seriously involved with photography, I have found myself becoming more and more interested in ways of seeing. A camera captures a scene, taking in a certain field of view and a certain blend of color or black and white. What it records corresponds to some extent with what you see through a viewfinder or via a display screen, but the resulting image, naturally enough, never truly reproduces what the eye sees. Be it film or digital sensor, the camera records a moment. A moment that the eye sees for a millisecond and then passes on to the next image. Producing a seamless movie for the brain to process, registered in both time and memory. So to return to a photograph is to return to that instant. To examine it in a detailed way that is often overlooked at the time, yet also to become aware of how much is lost, not only in purely visual terms but also in temporal terms. Those unrecorded moments before and after are now solely in the province of memory. Incomplete and often distorted.

Photograph The Confluence in winter by Richard Keeling on 500px
The Confluence in winter by Richard Keeling on 500px

 

I took three photographs of the same scene a couple of weekends ago. A cold winter’s day at the Missouri-Mississippi Confluence. In each case I used a different camera. On one (top), a Rolleiflex 3.5F, I composed the image by looking down at the optical viewing screen, the camera hanging at waist height. On another, I looked through a view finder, the one found on the Canon EOS Elan 7E (middle). The third, looking at the electronic display on a Canon EOS-M (below).

The images produced were recorded at different sizes, using different lenses, and on different media in one out of the three cases. Different sensitivities too – I used a yellow filter on the Rolleiflex and a red filter on the Elan, significantly changing the wavelengths of reflected light recorded on the black and white Ilford HP5 Plus film.

 

Photograph The Confluence in winter by Richard Keeling on 500px

The Confluence in winter by Richard Keeling on 500px

Yet all are clearly identifiable as the same scene, albeit with some differences in what aspect of that view were recorded. Enough, in every case, to bring back a clear memory of actually being there. For many of us, that is the purpose of a photograph. It is so for me, even as I choose to imbue the pictures with value beyond that of an aid for recollection. Taking them, I am conscious of creating something with further and deeper resonance. A resonance, what’s more, that vibrates at different frequencies depending on the quality – and by that I mean the technical and aesthetic aspects – of the photograph.

It’s that second quality, the product of an act of creation, that sustains and rewards me as a photographer. The results often differ in terms of aesthetic success, but that is yet another force to keep me moving forward. Never do I wish to become perfect. If I did, my interest would be killed stone dead.

I feel pleased when others appreciate my work, but even if I was operating in total solitude, I believe I would keep going. Ultimately, what one does alone should be what makes oneself feel a true sense of accomplishment. I am sure these feelings are behind what has become a much deeper exploration of the art of photographer, one taking in old and new techniques, and finding that photography is not better today despite technical advances and new methods of recording an image. It’s just different.

Medium Format

07 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by musickna in Photography

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film, medium format, photography, Rolleiflex

 

Photograph Water intake, Mississippi River by Richard Keeling on 500px

Water intake, Mississippi River by Richard Keeling on 500px

Last year my father sent me his Rolleiflex 3.5F, dating back to 1960 or thereabouts. It’s had a few issues in the time I’ve been using it, mostly a sticky shutter that has necessitated some repair, but mostly works just fine.

The Rolleiflex is a medium format camera, exposing negatives that are 6 cm x 6 cm in size, and uses a single fixed 75mm taking lens as well as, this being a twin lens reflex camera, a second lens for viewing and composing your shot.

No interchangeable lenses for this camera. And a square format image too (unless you chose to install the Rolleikin adapter that allows 35mm film to be shot in portrait orientation).

Film too. In each of these respects this camera differs from the full-frame or crop-sensor Canon digital SLRs that I have been using exclusively for the previous nine years.

Before I started using the Rolleiflex, I might have considered it to be hopelessly obsolete and limited compared to what I can do with my Canons and my large collection of interchangeable lenses, and to some extent that opinion holds. It is limited. It is obsolete.

But it takes beautiful photographs, and, furthermore, photographs that seem to have a quality and aura that sets them apart from the digital pictures than have been my mainstay over the years. What’s more, the medium format negatives provide detail and smoothness that completely surpasses that obtained with the same type of film used in 35mm format.

I have also found it to be less limited than I predicted. If anything, using this camera reveals how many times the images that mean the most are those that most closely resemble what one sees with the naked eye. Certainly there is a place for telescoping or wide angle viewing in photography, but when I’m out with the Rolleiflex I do not often find myself wishing for these ways of taking a picture. Instead, I find myself composing on the square viewing screen of the Rolleiflex an image that most pleasingly strikes my eye. An image that very closely resembles what I see when I look up from the camera. To adjust the scene, I move myself and the camera.

In this way, the Rolleiflex is training me to become a very different kind of photographer from what I was before. Each roll of 120 film has room for only twelve exposures, an absurdly low number of available shots for someone used to firing off hundreds, even thousands, of exposures during a digital shoot. Now I consider very carefully just what I going to capture. As a result, each shot becomes far more meaningful and precious. The worth, in terms of images captured, of my photography has now increased many times over that obtained with dozens of digital exposures, many being meaningless variations of the same scene.

I began last year with the purchase of Canon EOS-M, a capable but limited mirrorless digital camera that is convenient to use from a size and weight point-of-view, but gave me exactly the same sort of pictures that every prior Canon digital camera I owned gave me. Was this the breaking point that led me away from digital and towards film? Over the summer, I used a Canon Elan 7E, a 35mm film camera that was compatible with many of the SLR lenses that I had collected for digital photography. The results were sufficiently pleasing that I now maintain an active film camera with me whenever I go out to photograph, even if I am primarily shooting digital.

Adding the Rolleiflex to my collection has furthered this expansion away from digital photography and moved me deeper into the world of film. Deeper, in truth, into the world of photography. A far larger and more encompassing world than the one I had chosen while wedded solely to digital picture taking.

For all these reasons, this past year has been the most instructive and exciting in my entire photographic career – if career is the right word for a hobby.

Photograph Old Chain of Rocks Bridge by Richard Keeling on 500px

Old Chain of Rocks Bridge by Richard Keeling on 500px

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