changes

We are moving....

I am finding my posterous blog does everything I need at the moment so have decided to cease using blogger altogether.

And Bill's main blog is at wordpress. I'll be contributing there regularly too.

........

8x10 portraits, or the boredom of the large format photography model

Last weekend Kim and Nikhilā visited and I decided to try and take their portraits with the 8x10.

See the full gallery on posterous

I took Nikhi's picture out on our front porch using existing light. The light was failing and I had to spend a long time focussing on the very dim ground glass of the old camera. Depth of field is very limited with these cameras - which lends a special character to portraiture, but makes setting up the shot difficult. Nikhi was very patient but as the series of photos shows, it was a trial for her I'm sure. The final image is a full scan of the negative - with edges visible.
 
I shot Kim's portrait indoors. He was reading contentedly so the situation was ideal. "Just sit there", I said. The light was even dimmer indoors and I had a lot of difficulty focussing. I pulled out an old maggy-lamp to give some more light, and rigged up a reflector to cut the shadows a bit. That gave me an extra couple of stops. In the end it was an 8 second exposure. Got a little motion blur but it's only noticeable in larger sizes. The final image is a crop.
 
Kali, Nikhi's bearded dragon, watched on with interest. Helen took the colour photos.
 
Difficulties I have with 8x10 are mostly related to focussing. The ground glass on this camera is dim, and in low light my eyes are really struggling to tell what is blurry and what is sharp.

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image circles and cropping

the lens on a camera projects a circular image onto the film. to shoot with large format film one needs a lens with a large image circle - big enough to cover the film and more. my 8x10 shooting is very low budget. i have been using a 210mm rodenstock lens which has an image circle more suitable for 4x5 film to shoot 8x10. most of the time it covers it, but in this shot it didn't. the reason is i used a lot of front tilt in order to get the foreground and background in focus. this swung the film sheet out of the image circle - resulting in the radical vignette effect seen here.

sadly i did not notice this on the ground glass when i was setting up the picture, probably because there was so much wind i could barely hang onto my darkcloth.
 
the solution? for now, a drastic crop... which i think looks good anyway. in the long term though i need a lens designed for 8x10 film. until then i'll try to avoid large movements.

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see on flickr

incidentally this is a photo of an old bridge near the lemontree feedlot, north of millmerran, on the darling downs, queensland.

last of the batch

polaroid no longer manufactures it's large format instant films. in fact polaroid no longer manufactures any instant films. apparently they are still marketing some of their consumer films, such as pola 600, but they have engaged another company to make it.

thanks to my friend sam, i today obtained an unused and only slightly out of date pack of polaroid 56. this consists of 20 single 4x5 inch sheets of sepia film. one of the sheets is visible to the left of this shot, standing behind my old polaroid 545 film holder - which i had almost consigned to the museum shelf. this could be its last hurrah...

watch for some polaroid sepia images soon.

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suffering for art

my legs are aching from unaccustomed exercise but I console myself that I got this picture for my pains. sometimes we have to suffer for our art.

taken on a little cove in noosa national park after a 4 hour drive then a 6km walk over sand in hot humid conditions, carrying a heavy 4x5 camera and tripod. i want to go back with the 8x10… and maybe a welsh mountain pony.

on flickr

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It's like a Rubik's Cube, actually...

I've been doing a lot of reading up on those important photography things, like composition, lately.

I grabbed one book by a Japanese nature photographer that has a nice series of diagrams that show you everything you need to know to be as good as this Japanese nature photographer. Diagrams are an important aspect to everything here in Japan. Even the bidets have diagrams to help you on your way to cleanliness.

Anyway, the best English title I could come up with for this book was "Tanaka-san shows you how to stuff shapes into the Rulathird!!". And it does that very well. Not only telling you how to pick a nice mountain peak by it's triangularness, but also how to place it within your frame so it looks extra mountainy.

This shot was me giving the Rulathird a try. It's a bit difficult in film because most of the older film cameras don't hand the Rulathird to you like modern DSLRs. Heck, I think the Nikon DSLR viewfinder has the grid built in*.

You gotta eye it and hope for the best. I think it worked in this case.





*So I'm gonna call all of them "girly men".

at the door

i'd like to gain some portraiture skills. i would like to use natural light as much as possible - i have enough gear without carrying lighting equipment around too. still feeling my way with the new format, i tried a double challenge here - utilising the very narrow depth of field of the rodenstock 210/5.6 lens, and coping with very broad exposure latitude from light to shadow.

the focus was very critical. so much so that i kept having to refocus, even after i had inserted the film holder. a lot of patience needed - esp by the model. perhaps that's why the pose became a little wooden.

i am fairly happy with the result though. the light on helen's hair is barely adequate, but her face is well exposed, and the focus is confined to a very narrow field indeed. also the outside world is displaying some wonder bokeh. i need to work more on getting some ref;ected light in the foreground for this sort of shot though - i used a small reflector for this but it was not enough.

as for the knack for directing a model - i don't think i have that as yet... back to landscapes....

photo info -

camera = burke & james 8x10 inch view camera

lens = rodenstock apo-sironar 210mm 1:5.6

film - kodak t-max 100

exposure - ½sec at ƒ/45

processed in t-max developer

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Rope seen as a snake - musings on reality and visualisation

Today as I walked back from the lab to my office I saw a flash of incredible blue on the ground. Thinking it was a really beautiful butterfly I stopped to investigate. It was a piece of plastic... but for a few more moments it still looked like a butterfly - and beautiful too - then the illusion faded and it was just plastic.

I found myself thinking that this was somehow an important message about visualising - seeing a beautiful image in the common-place. But a piece of plastic doesn't hold one's attention for long once one sees through the illusion.

I've been having a discussion on another forum about photography and honesty. Contrary to many, I think photographs cannot lie - but they can fool the stupid - well, the casual observer.

There is an Indian teaching story about a rope that is mistaken for a snake. Nisargadatta Maharaj says - To know that consciousness and its content are but reflections, changeful and transient, is the focussing of the real. The refusal to see the snake in the rope is the necessary condition for seeing the rope.

So is photography a lie? Is it promoting illusion and keeping us from the real?

For me - photography, like all art, is a pursuit of beauty. The rope, the plastic - they are no more real than the snake, the butterfly. The sense of beauty in art is what is real.

Bellows extension

Canna, originally uploaded by The Central Scrutiniser.

Took the Shenhao 54 out in the garden today looking for something to shoot close up. Lit on this Canna seed head.

With the 150mm Nikkor-W 1:5.6 lens I was able to achieve something approaching 1:1 size on the ground glass with a bellows extension of about 9 inches.

Now here's the thing - when the bellows is extended beyond the focal length of the lens, one must increase the exposure to compensate for light drop-off.

Lens focal length in inches = 6. Take that as an f-stop, f/6. Close enough to f/5.6.

Bellows extension measured from ground glass to middle of lens board in inches = 9. As an f-stop, f/9 is close enough to f/8.

f/8 is one stop narrower than f/5.6. So we must increase the exposure by one stop.

This was taken in full sun, using 100ISO film (Fjui Acros), so, using the "sunny 16" rule, we would expect an exposure of 1/100 at f/16 (i.e. in full sun the exposure is 1/ISO at f/16). Increasing that by one stop gives us 1/60 at f/16 - and that's what I used.

It would have been nice to stop down more and get a little more depth of field, but there was a slight breeze and the Canna was moving a little.

I processed the Acros in Rodinal diluted 1:100. I tried to achieve 18 minutes at 20ºC but the developer warmed a little during the process. At 15 minutes it was 20.5ºC so I cut the time short at 17 minutes. The perils of processing film in the sub-tropics.

I like the tonal graduation and the sharpness. Rodinal is great stuff. I normally use it at 1:50 and it gives a bit more contrast but I like this a lot and will stick with it.

Lots of good info on bellows extension factor

And lots of data on film and deevelopers at massive development chart

Difficult lighting

Welcome to Fortress Louisburg, Nova Scotia...



The thing about foggy, rainy, or cloudy days is that they're a pain in the ass to meter for. I mean, here you are fiddling with the knobs on your camera, trying to keep your object of focus from being too dark, while trying to avoid having the sky completely white.

I've found the best way to get around this is to use B&W film... or switch to the B&W settings on your digital. B&W is completely forgiving of all of your photographic screw-ups. People have been trained by decades of old photography to view B&W as ARTISTIC and anything you can't do properly with a camera will always get seen as intentional.

Brilliant stuff. Don't be afraid to do it.




* According to the Laws Of Photography, pure white is bad, you know... Unless it's what you're trying to do, then it's genius. The Laws Of Photography are pretty much as arbitrary as Canada's pot laws.