Pointillism

Tags

clarity, digital philosophy, dissolution, fog, imprecision, pointillism, precision

Something of a corollary to this article, this one, but it serves to amplify an aesthetic concern that has bothered me about digital photography almost since its inception.

Simply put, digital photography has become too good.

What do I mean by that?

I mean it has become super efficient at capturing detail. So much so that one can take a picture taken with a contemporary high resolution sensor such as found in the Canon 5DS, take a tiny crop and it will still blow up to highly detailed image.

For many photographers, this seems like nirvana. The quest for ever finer detail seems to be a compulsive mantra, with devotees pushing lenses to their limits with endless photographs of resolution charts.

Why do they do this?

For it doesn’t take more than a moment’s glance through the majority of the results of this effort, when applied to the actual photographs one sees on the web (for example), to see all that it has achieved are cleaner and even more shiny emulations of what has been emulated over and over again during the course of photographic history.

Note that I say the majority. There will always be artists who use this technique for truly creative ends. But they will be small in number, alas. Most are simply seduced by the technology and utterly fail to transcend it.

The results appall me. It’s why I find myself moving further and further away from popular photography. Moving onto lesser traveled roads, some inevitably cul-de-sacs, but at least trails where I can feel that I can breathe photography free of the stultifying compression of fashion, fad and ever more complicated technology.

That’s why I have a lot of sympathy for the world of photographic subculture. The Lomographers. The film enthusiasts. Anyone who challenges the orthodoxies. Digital photographers who exploit the limitations of the technology, using old cameras or deliberately distorting methods – not those clichéd in-camera ‘effects’ or Instagram tricks, by the way – to break out of the sameness of so much of the results.

I’m probably too old and set in my ways to truly embrace these unorthodoxies. But I’m working to bring them into my work and finding the results have real resonance for me.

Look at the image above. A fairly straight forward landscape on the surface, although I find the parallel lines of road, water and shadow leading towards horizon rich in symbolism, its real magic rises out of the deeply pointillistic effect produced by the heavy grain of the Adox Color Implosion negative as reproduced by the film scanner.

Zoom into this image and within moments detail is completely lost, replaced by a seemingly random collection of colored dots.

This dissolution of clarity is entrancing. It speaks more to the soul of the image than any amount of microscopically precise detail. I love this.

You might say that the same effect could be obtained by zooming down to pixel level in a digital image. And on one level you would be quite right. But nothing about that level of pixelation – whatever it may be – suggests a transformation of the image. It simply represents the binary limit of that particular image’s resolution, a limit that will be exceeded by the next generation of sensors. In other words, it is simply a resting point. In most cases, not a deliberately chosen limit. Technology rules the image and technology calls the shots. Impersonally and without soul. Nothing has been arrived at. All we are witnessing is a journey in process without any real exposition of that journey. No wonder so many digital images feel so empty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Against perfection

Tags

imperfection, meaning, perfection, superficiality

I’ve been taking photographs for a long time. A really long time. Since I was a kid and I’m nearly 60 now.

For much of that time I didn’t really take photography seriously. No obsession with cameras, lenses or processing. Just a few rolls shot with a now forgotten film camera and dropped off at the chemists (or pharmacists once I moved to the US) and collected a day or so later.

Many of those carelessly acquired images now have a powerful and emotional resonance. Pictures of people who have died or otherwise dropped out of my life, some of whom were really important to me at the time. Same thing with places.

No thought went into any artistry with those photographs. They were functional. Yet here they are, more meaningful than many – I might say most – of the carefully thought out pictures I’ve created over the past decade or so when I considered myself a ‘serious’ photographer.

There’s a lesson here.

Simply expressed, it’s that much of the received wisdom about photography is irrelevant at best and actively misleading at worst.

Misleading because it takes you away from being true to yourself and moves you towards some sense of perceived excellence. Technique takes over, meaning becomes lost. I see this all the time in the types of photographs that do well in photography competitions or gather popular acclaim on websites. Perfect and empty.

I can make these types of photographs. Have done so. I look back on them now and wonder why I bothered.

I bothered because I wanted to join the crowd. Be acknowledged and acclaimed. Part of me still wants this, to be honest, but another part is rebelling. Rebelling precisely because of those old photographs, imperfect and irreplaceable. Meaningful perhaps only to me, but meaningful nonetheless.

So what’s happened as result?

I’ve completely lost patience with the accepted ways of doing things. In this age of digital perfection, I find myself shooting film using old cameras and old lenses. Home developing and producing work that is unique and thoroughly imperfect. I rebel against resolution and sharpness. I embrace color cast, so easily generated with film yet squelched by digital image processing’s drive for a perfect balance. I’m even buying deliberately wonky films like the wonderful Lomochrome Purple to enhance this effect.

Against perfection. That’s where I am. I see no reason to move away.

(Above, film photograph with slight blue cast. Just want I want to see.)

 

Purple River

Tags

chance, chemical processing, color, developing, film, image processing, scanning

I develop my color film in batches. It’s more economical that way as the developing chemicals have a limited life when reconstituted from powder into water. I don’t like to leave them more than a couple of weeks or so, so I need to have a collection of exposed color rolls ready to go when I begin.

This means that some rolls are really quite old by the time I get around to them. This image, of the Chain Of Rocks Canal and bridge in Illinois, was taken in February. It was taken with Fuji Superia 400 film, a roll that actually expires this month, so I did want to get it developed. This film is slowly disappearing from the retail pipeline, so I suspect it may not be around for that much longer.

Which is a shame, because it’s a cheap yet characterful color film, with good grain qualities for a fast film.

This shot is from my Optic Film scanner this morning. The color balance as processed by the Silverfast scanning software was biased towards purple. I could have corrected this with the Adobe RAW tint slider in Photoshop or Lightroom (or indeed in Silverfast itself)  – funny how that control persists even though it is really only useful for balancing color film – but I decided to leave it as it came out.

I like the look. It gives the scene more of a twilight feel than was actually apparent at the time and adds extra interest that way. That’s the thing with color film; you’re never quite sure just how the balance will turn out. Subtle variations in the developing process itself, the age of the film, and then how a scanner interprets the negative will all play a part. I like this element of chance. Digital images are so well corrected and balanced that they all tend to look perfectly the same. Not necessarily a bad thing in itself by any means, but it removes some of the fun and exploration from the photographic process. Film introduces that in spades.

 

State of the Art

Tags

aesthetics, artistry, digital, film, history, photography, psychology, technology

Detail from a medieval statue photographed at the St. Louis Art Museum a couple of weeks ago.

A single exposure on a roll of black and white film, developed and scanned by myself. Taken with an ancient (by modern standards) Nikon FE and an old manual focus lens.

State of the art? Hardly. This picture could have been taken at any time from 1978 onwards with exactly the same equipment and type of film and would look much the same. That’s almost forty years.

Look forward to today. The pixel peeping camera reviews of the ever evolving technology of digital photography would be able to consign such an image to a specific year, maybe even to a month based on its appearance and digital structure alone (and let’s ignore the fact the image would have been date-stamped in its EXIF data). Photography has never before been so wedded to the moment.

And never has the moment been so fleeting. The peril of buying a digital camera is that the technology becomes obsolete in absolute terms very quickly. It’s a great marketing strategy; a new camera guarantees you finer quality images. Note, finer quality as in features such resolution and noise, not necessarily so in terms of artistry.

Contrast this with film. Only the quality of the lens used is really going to affect the way the image looks. The camera body itself is largely irrelevant, unless you are comparing 35mm to medium or large format. You might argue, for example, that bodies with faster shutters are more advanced – and so they are in strictly technical terms – but with film you rarely move in ISO sensitivities much above 400. Whether your shutter is maxed out at 1/1000 sec (or even only 1/500 in the case of Rolleiflex) or at 1/8000, pretty much the fastest speed available even with today’s digital cameras, is not going to affect almost all of your photographs.

That’s why, when buying a film body, its age and state of technology is largely meaningless beyond lens compatibility. Again, you can argue about things like manual focus versus autofocus or single point autofocus versus multiple point autofocus, or various types of in-camera light metering, but none of these, in the hands of a photographer who knows his or her camera, is going to affect the quality of the resulting negative.

I like this attribute of film photography. You become part of a lengthy continuum, part of history. That may be film’s most important quality for now it’s clear that the images coming from today’s digital cameras completely outclass film images in resolution and light sensitivity. There is no argument to make against that point – it’s indisputable. Digital is better – if better means more absolutely representative. State of the art.

And yet – I enjoy film photography more. I do it more. I get a better feeling from a film photograph than from most – not all – of my digital photographs.

Clearly, this has be psychological in nature. Why a black and white, relatively indistinct image should be more meaningful that a highly resolved color rendition of the same scene remains difficult to define as a consequence. All of the elements of the image, on upwards from the fact that one is tangible artifact, a silver-stained piece of plastic, whereas the other exists only as a decoded collection of bits and bytes on screen or mapped onto a printer, contribute to this sense of qualitative difference.

As such, appreciation remains unique and personal. As it should be. That’s my state of the art. Long may it continue.