Three years of film

Tags

digital, experience, film, imagination, photography, process, subject, technique, technology

Back garden, May 2014

Back garden, March 2017.

Well, almost three years. But close enough to make a few points.

Firstly, I’m shooting much the same scenes then as I am now. And I could go back a lot further too if I admitted my digital photographs into this comparison.

Secondly, my technique – as far as photographing, developing and scanning black and white film – hasn’t advanced much in terms of absolute image quality. This was a surprise at first. I fully expected my early photographs to be full of imperfections from the developing process, and, to be fair, many of my early attempts are less clean and more scratched (through impatience with the washing and drying process). A few, maybe three or four, rolls were ruined by misloading the camera or by developing mistakes. This has not happened recently.  But overall, those early negatives look just as good as my latest ones.

In the early days of my digital photography, I produced many under or overexposed images, lost images through careless handling of storage media, and noticed a marked improvement over time as I upgraded my cameras – as well as improving my personal technical skills. As this period spanned from about 2000 to today, the technological advances were considerable. Film, on the other hand, is pretty much an end-developed medium. And when I took it up three years ago, my camera skills were about as advanced then as they are today.

So perhaps it is not that surprising that three years worth of negatives show nothing of the changes and advances of the digital years. I have learned many more techniques, from the use of color filters for black and white, many developing methods for both black and white and color film, to wet printing gelatin silver prints. I’ve also absurdly expanded my camera and lens collections, largely because older film equipment is largely unwanted and consequently inexpensive and a lot of fun to use. But as to making photographs – not so much.

Perhaps that’s a good thing. When you are no longer chasing technical advances – on whatever level – it becomes easier to step back and simply think about what you are photographing. Certainly I’ve seen a change in emphasis. I’m no longer that interested in producing ‘Wow’ pictures. Instead I’m looking for subtleties. As I indicated above, I’ve found myself photographing the same places and objects over and over again. At different times and in different light. This trend is likely to accelerate as I retire and can devote more hours to any particular scene.

The results may end up interesting only me. But that’s OK. What I do have now – and what I did not have three years ago – is a massively expanded battery of potential photographic treatments that extend far beyond any popular Photoshop effect. It’s a path I would recommend to any photographer looking to further his or her abilities and imagination.

The triumph of the ordinary

Tags

anti-pop, black and white, fashion, film, photography, pop, relevance

In many ways I am the stereotypical amateur photographer.

An older white male. A collector of camera equipment.  Compensated sufficiently elsewhere that I never have to rely on my photography to generate an income. A potential dilettante who takes just enough interest in the art to move me out of that category yet not really enough to move me into the photographic artist league.

Just like thousands, I might say, tens, even hundreds of thousands, of my fellow photographers.

Is this a bad thing?

Yes, if I really want to be taken seriously as an artist. No, if I simply want to enjoy what I do with a camera.

That’s the issue. I inhabit the borderline between these two options, never really settling into either.

Why is this? Why does this divide even exist?

Much of it has to do with how I, or others, define an ‘artist’. An artist has a vision, something to say. Something, moreover, than can be articulated and placed into the context of a philosophy of art.

But there’s more to it, isn’t there? There’s the problem of audience.

Art is requires a creator and a viewer (or listener, or any other sense). Without that audience, is it art at all (a corollary to the famous ‘tree falls in a forest and no one hears it’ conundrum’)?

These days, thanks in large part to the internet and photograph sharing sites, it’s almost laughably easy to get an audience. This ease is seductive. The problem is that this audience, as measured by number of visits or likes or comments, is such a pronounced source of ‘strokes’ (to use the language of transactional analysis) that whatever art you produce becomes biased towards the accumulation of this acclaim. And in doing so, it becomes homogeneous, lacking in differentiating qualities, accumulating instead an abundance of trigger aspects that ultimately speak far more to the audience’s expectations and preconceptions than to any vision derived from the artist’s own imagination.

But strokes are important. We all desire them. The question is – how much? I’m fortunate that other aspects of my life, work, family, other hobbies and interests, provide plenty of satisfaction. I feel no overriding compulsion to be praised for my photography. Yet – naturally enough – I still like it when I am.

It’s this psychological conflict – the twin yet often opposite desires to be liked and to be true to a certain way of looking at the world that I find meaningful – that can derail my motivation when it comes to photography. A tortured artist sounds romantic but most often it simply means an unproductive artist.

So how do I – or you – overcome this?

Firstly, you really have to decide which side the equation really motivates you. Are in the game to be praised or in it to express some idea or concept that really concerns you? Ironically, it’s actually much easier to go the ‘praise’ route – all you need to do is find the paradigm that generates the most popular acclaim and milk it for all you are worth. If you are technically accomplished, it comes even easier. Of course, the price you pay is the loss of originality and an outlook that you might consider to be truly personal, but that may not matter.

The other approach is just as likely to leave you in the wilderness as it is to gather acclaim. Ironically technical accomplishment is largely irrelevant here; what matters far more is imagination and a creative impulse. Skill with a camera will help you fine tune your vision, but without the vision to start with it’s not going to substitute for substance. Furthermore it’s only sustainable with a very healthy ego, a strong belief in the rightness of what you are doing.  Not many of us have that to begin with, let alone the strength to sustain it over a lifetime of creativity.

Maybe that’s why out of the thousands or even millions of photography enthusiasts worldwide, there are really not that many that one might call artists. For every well-known and successful art photographer, there are hundreds languishing in obscurity. Deserved in some cases, perhaps, less so in others.

But even the undeserving (through a combination of lack of imagination, vision, skill and originality) get credit for trying. Their results may only please their creators – and that’s enough. It’s easy to get caught up in the intellectual analysis of art and forget that photography is functional too. As a record of people, place and events. A visual diary of people’s lives. That is important – maybe more important, in truth.

And therein lies the true significance of the title. It’s worth remembering when I find myself getting too involved. Sometimes art need to be artless.

 

 

Ordinary

Tags

art, black and white, film, ordinary, philosophy, stair

Something has been happening both to my outlook and to my photography.

Partly this is a result of my upcoming retirement. I am adjusting to a world where work no longer plays a paramount part. Even now, some months before I leave, I feel a tangible loosening of the bonds of responsibility.

Partly it may just be age and experience. It may also have more than a little to do with the cumulative effect of the many of the issues and thoughts I’ve detailed here on this blog. Philosophical growth, I suppose I could call it.

Whatever the blend, the result is a fairly radical reevaluation of what is meaningful to me in terms of my photography. Long gone are the pretty or technically dazzling shots that used to preoccupy me. Instead, I celebrate – and I use that word deliberately – a certain kind of ordinariness. Scenes that I wouldn’t have given much a look to in the past.

Such as this stairwell.

It’s one of the access stairs in the St. Louis Art Museum. Unlike almost everywhere else in the building there is no art here. Just a cloakroom attendant and a fairly ordinary staircase.

I took it after collecting a number of art work related photographs. Those came out fine, but not in any exciting way. This, somehow, did.

I like the angles and the shading. The attendant serves as a far point focus of interest, the light shimmering off the bannister as a near point. They balance, yet none of the other lines and angles really do. Asymmetry seems to dominate, partly a consequence of the lighting and partly a consequence of the camera angle. There are large areas of dead space. The photograph draws you in yet leaves you unbalanced. It’s unsettling.

This is the type of photograph that appeals to me now. Ordinary yet unordinary. I intend to follow this path for a while.

 

In and Out of the Light

Tags

art, artifice, artists, blind alleys, film, fine art, garbage, mood, photographers, reality, technicians, technology

It’s a little ironic – I suppose I might say more than a little – that, as I survey a basement filled with cameras and lenses, I have finally begun to embrace imperfection as an underlying aesthetic rather than as an annoyance to be actively squelched.

I spent a lot of time and a lot of money collecting the most technically perfect equipment only to find that the technically perfect results I obtained were of almost completely devoid of artistry.

Why did I waste so much time and effort on this?

Partly it’s the fault of the photographic community. Far too many photographers are technicians and not artists. As a beginner, you don’t really grasp this. You in thrall of those who spout the jargon and use the most impressive (as in lauded) equipment. You look at your little consumer camera with its kit lens and feel quite inadequate. You feel that way because you’ve already fallen into the biggest trap of all, the technology trap. The technology trap exists solely to promote camera equipment sales and as such it is relentlessly encouraged. You learn that so-called ‘professionals’ use expensive equipment, for that is what a professional is supposed to use. Never mind that the improvements offered by a $2000 lens over a $200 lens will be invisible to most eyes, the fact that a pixel-peeper magnifying his or her screen to 100% can see better sharpness right in the corner of a frame (where no one looks anyway) is used as a weird justification for such upgrades.

It’s pathetic really. None of this has anything to do with art – and by that I mean real art, not the ‘fine art’ garbage promulgated by the technicians as some sort of pinnacle of achievement. The sort of crap that dominates popular photography sites but would never be seen in an art museum or gallery because it really is empty of any meaning or soul whatsoever.

I really feel in a way for the technician photographer. Take them to an art museum and they are the type that sneer at modern art – ‘could be done by a child’, ‘this is worth that much?’ – I’ve heard this and worse over and over again. It’s a emptiness of imagination, a rigidity of thought, and an outlook of frightening blindness.

I can’t stand these people – as photographers that is, in other respects they can be lovely people. They represent a dead end. Fortunately, there’s no law saying I have to associate with them. Give me a child with a cheap cell phone and you’ll get more interesting pictures than any number of technicians with their supermegapixel sized sensors and their lenses with their near perfect MTF (modulation transfer function) graphs.

So back to imperfection. Such as in these two black and white photographs from Henry, Illinois, on a foggy night just before Thanksgiving. Photographs taken with a very old (1959 vintage) manual focus lens. Complete with flare and ghosting, on an obsolete medium (film) pushed to its limit by overdeveloping. Full of grain and optical flaws, but, to me, totally lovely in their moodiness. To get this in digital would take hours of Photoshop tweaking or using as shortcut some film emulation routine. And even then it would not be the same, and all the time you’d be rebelling against the imperfection because you’ve been trained to think that imperfection is bad. Brainwashed really.

Breaking free of this has been the greatest and most important shift in my photographic outlook since I began. It’s not a guarantee of better photographs, but it’s a damn certain guarantee of more interesting ones.

 

 

Still Videos

Tags

analog, assumptions, conventional wisdom, digital, film, history, obsolescence

From Popular Photography, January 1988 edition:

“Electronic Imaging Today” [September] aroused my curiosity. I’m interested in learning more about still video systems. What is a still video? How does it create an image or print? And how might it practicably be used? Will it eventually replace the single-lens-reflex camera?  Robert A Yanckello, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania

Beginning with our July 1986 issue (see “The Future Arrives,” page 62) we have been closely following developments in electronic still photography. Extensive coverage can be found in “1987 New Producr Review” (November 1986), “Taking The Fifth” (April 1987) and “Gear of the Year” (May). As this new imaging technology evolves, rest assured that we’ll continue to keep you up-to-date on the latest news and products – George Schaub

These days given the ubiquity of digital imaging products, it’s hard to envisage just how strange the new technology was in its infancy in the 1980s but this letter and its response show very nicely the sense of novelty that surrounded the technology at the time. The terminology wasn’t even settled – electronic still photography sounds absurdly anachronistic today even though it’s a perfect apt description. The letter writer is wondering – will this technology replace film SLRs. Would it indeed? The speed of the replacement only really revved up in the early 2000s, but now it’s complete. Film SLRs are a niche product for a miniscule proportion of camera users.

It’s an interesting exercise to look at the conventional wisdom at any period in the past for the assumptions that are born out and those which never come to fruition. In 1988, no one really understood how completely and rapidly photography would be renewed. The camera manufacturers who were capable to switching to digital equipment did just fine, but the entire industry built up around film manufacture, processing and printing collapsed. Easy to see in hindsight, but not so clear at the time. It rarely is.

Today, we are seeing a small scale revival in film photography. It remains a niche product, but, in much the same way that vinyl records have made a comeback, the tactile qualities of this older analog technology are attracting people turned off by the ephemeral world of digital processes. I think that is a good thing. When photography first became popular, portrait painters saw their profession gutted but the art lived on. Who knows what common feature of today’s life will meet a similar fate? Gasoline stations perhaps. We’ll see, but I bet it will more of a surprise than not.

Experimenting with Redscale

Tags

altered color, canvas, false color, film, film cameras, lomography, manual focus, printing, redscale, scanning

I’ve been working hard on getting a set of pictures together for my upcoming show at Washington University Medical School in December – so much so that I, getting old and confused, misread the exhibition year as 2016 when it’s really 2017. So a year and not a month away, but the effort has been fully worthwhile and is likely to lead to a better show altogether when it comes together next year.

I’ve been printing almost exclusively on canvas, a medium I like because it encourages a more painterly looking image that suits my current style of moving away from precision and towards impression.

This film photograph, shot using the reverse-rolled Lomography Redscale color film, is a particularly good example of a photograph well suited to canvas. The strong browns and reds produced by shooting a photograph through the red-tinted cellulose acetate backing give this landscape a feel very much reminiscent of landscape painters of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

I used an old and worn Nikon F3 that I bought as a bargain from the second-hand camera dealer KEH and an equally old 20mm Nikon manual focus lens to generate the negative. A digital scan of that give me the jpg that I used to make the canvas print. The result enhances both the grain of the film and the curious color balance, with blue-tinted shadows, yellow-tinted highlights and brown-red midtones.

As a result the picture looks very old, not in the least bit suggesting that I shot it a month ago in October. Of course, the lack of any modern elements in the composition enhances this appearance. I like this timeless feel. I’ve just ordered some more redscale film – I think this is a technique well worth experimenting with.

 

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.

 

 

 

Simplicity

Tags

digital, film, photography, travel

A view of the vineyard at La Petite Ferme, Franshhoek, one of the more spectacular wine growing regions in the world. Taken a week or so ago, with the winter leaves still clinging to the vines.

The sort of view I like to photograph and I was happy to be there with my cameras, even if they were by now rather antiquated digital bodies, a Canon 7D and 5D Mark II. Deliberately antiquated, for I wanted equipment with me that I would not miss too much if it was stolen. And being stolen was a distinct possibility in crime heavy South Africa.

Still, even if the picture quality is no longer top of the line by any means, it was good enough. I took a lot more pictures, falling back into my digital habit of taking a lot of alternatives. Just as before, most of them were duplicates with irrelevant differences.

I’m looking at these right now. Looking and wishing I’d taken a film camera – even though taking a film camera on holiday these days is a pain in a dozen different ways, from trying to avoid x-ray exposure at airport security to actually finding a retail outlet that sells any sort of film whatsoever. Those reasons held me back and probably I did the right thing by sticking with digital, but I can’t help but wonder whether I would have got better photographs. Or at least more meaningful photographs.

Maybe. Maybe not.

It was a reminder, though, of how much my outlook on photography has changed.

In a day or so I’ll feel better about what I did and dig out out some more worthy photographs. Although I don’t think there will be that many. But you never know.

Sometimes you just can’t be as simple you want to be.

 

 

 

The Best Thing I Ever Did For My Photography

Tags

digital, fashion, film, history, learning, photography, technique

So here I am, traveling with a couple of digital bodies and taking pictures in much the same way I’ve done for the past decade or so.

 
Much the same, but not the same.

 
For even though the equipment is what I’ve been using for all that time, especially the lenses (the bodies are of a little more recent vintage), my approach has been moderated by my experiences over the past two years with film.

 
Taking up film was the best thing I’ve ever done for my digital photography.
That seems counterintuitive, surely. Instead of gaining more practice and experience mastering the intricacies of digital cameras and digital images, I largely put that to one side and instead concentrated on using, developing and printing film. What’s more, with cameras that are completely obsolete by today’s technological standards.

 
Yet I learned more about photography during this excursion that I could possibly have done had I stayed with digital.

 

What did I learn?

 

I learned patience. I learned how to pay attention to the scene in hand and to the camera settings I was using to capture that scene. I learned how to judge light in all its qualities from intensity to color balance using my eyes alone. I learned how to see in black and white. And perhaps most importantly of all, I learned how to admit the entire history of photography into my technique and not just the latest bells and whistles that accompany the newest cameras.

 
Of course, this meant going a bit further than simply photographing with film. I had to spend some time studying the history of the art. Such study revealed that much of what we think is new is simply the recycling of what has come before, albeit with slightly different clothing. It revealed that photography is subject to precisely the same fashions, fads, and shifts in critical opinion that influence all art forms and that ultimately what remains as worthwhile are photographs that engage both the heart and the mind and do so in ways that challenge the imagination.

 
Finally I shook off all the nonsense I had accumulated from photography forums and popular photography websites. You know the stuff I mean, from simplistic assertions that one manufacturer’s equipment is superior to another’s to the click-bait lists of tips for better photography that most often convey little beyond the obvious and, curiously, often seem to feature no more than the author’s own work.

 
For this nonsense is corrosive and deeply inhibiting. The net result is scores of technically good photographers simply emulating each other and following the prevailing fads and completely failing to understand that their work is not art and are never likely to move beyond whatever cul-de-sac they are inhabiting. And those are at least the ones who try; many more are so caught up in the joys of being a technician that all they care about is how their work is sharper/noiseless/HDR-ed/bokeh beautiful/color vibrant – take your pick, all are equally meaningless to what makes great art.

 
Sadly, these types of photographers are far too common and congregate together, reinforcing their own lack of vision. This is not the way to be.

 
And I might well be one of them. Or, at least, have been one of them. Everything I describe above once seemed very important to me and led me to spend lots of really unnecessary money on expensive lenses and cameras. And all the while that I did this, I felt inadequate and unfulfilled, yet could not finger the reason just why.

 
Hence film. Instantly I was catapaulted out of the prevailing trends and into a backwater while most of my photographer friends scratched their heads and said ‘Why?’.

 
This is why.