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.

dusk on the ground glass

dusk on the ground glass, originally uploaded by The Central Scrutiniser.

Using large format gear takes a bit more time than medium and smaller formats. Nikhi and I drove out to Millmerran the other evening to cath the golden hour of sunset light on the cotton fields.

We called at the Yandilla church on the way to see how the light looked there. This was a mistake. The church faces east and the nicely lit aspect is not to attractive, so after a few shots (I think I only shot digital here) we headed for a nearby cotton-field where I had seen some big bales (modules)of harvested cotton.

The cotton looked great in the golden light, but we had only minutes to get a photo. As I was setting up the Shenhao a farmer came by to check what we were doing.

By the time I had spoken to him the light was gone. All that was left was the aftergolw of the sunset. I shot this digital image of the ground glass of the Shenhao. It shows the inversion f the image well.

Chinchilla Weir 4x5 : 2

Chinchilla Weir 4x5 : 2, originally uploaded by The Central Scrutiniser.

It's a long learning process fiddling around with large format cameras. I have a distinct hankering to get into 8x10 photography but have decided I need to be getting consistently good results with 4x5 before I make the shift up.

Chinchilla is town on the western edge of the Darling Downs in South Queensland. It's a pretty quiet place on a Sunday when we went there for a look-see. Out at the weir, just south of town on the Tara road, there were a few grey nomads camped and a few locals fishing.

I'd like to go back there for a dawn shoot. It's a peaceful spot, with a lot of interesting photographic subjects.

On the streets of Cologne, Germany

On the streets of Cologne, Germany, originally uploaded by asthmatic.

flickr's decision to censor content to germany, korea, singapore and taiwan has not gone down well with many of it's users.

i've been using flickr as a networking tool for photography for about 2 years now and i am sad that the management of flickr have deconded to listen to their lawyers rather than their users.

i've been enjoying the freedom of the internet for over a decade now. it seems that freedom is bad for business.

Water quality

I mix up my photo-chemicals with filtered water that has been through a "Brita" cartridge filter containing activated charcoal and ion exchange resin, but i rinse my films with water straight from the tap. It's never been a big problem until this week.

There is a darkroom at my place of work, which is rarely used. I have started using it lately just to load film holders and such. This week I decided to develop some films.

1. The first film was a 120 roll of Delta Pro 400 shot in my Holga. I just used the tap water. When I turned on the tap the water came out orange. Apparently the pipes had not been used for a long time and were full of rust. I let the water run a long time and it cleaned up a bit.

"What the hell", i thought - its a Holga film. I went ahead. Development was unremarkable but the result was filthy and over-developed. The negs were almost black and covered with grains of grit. Washing the grit off caused some scratches. Total write off.

Question - do iron salts in water accelerate the action of the developer?

2. Next batch - 6 sheets of 4x5 delta 100 shot in my Speed Graphic. This time I mixed up the chemicals using water from the water filter in the tea-room. It has two big cartridges full of resins and things. However I rinsed in tap water.

Tray development, timed with music. Result was perfectly developed negs but again with grit from the tap water. Careful washing in filtered water and Photoflo removed this and I am happy with the end product.

3. Last film. having learnt my lesson I developed my final film for the week (a 120 of delta 400 shot in my Rolleiflex) totally in the filtered water, including the rinse - which was the Patterson inversion rinsing technique.

End result was the cleanest set of negs I have ever made. They didn't even need dusting to be printed or scanned.

So - I thought I'd tell my story as an illustration of the need to control water quality - but I'd like to know the answer to my question about iron salts.

Photographic time capsule

photographic time capsule 1, originally uploaded by jayavant.

Here's another found film. It was stored in similar conditions to the other and is a few years younger, but for some reason has faired much worse. This film was exposed in the early 80's and developed just last night.

It shows my eldest son, Kim, with his mother, Jan. There is an odd dendritic intrusion across the image. Fungus? Bacteria? Static electric discharge?

The denity of the image is very low. When I took the negs out of the tank and hung them up I thought there was nothing on the film at all. It was not until I examined them closely that I saw faint mages - barely there at all.

I like lo-fi photography, and I like found films.As a technique though, leaving a film for years before it is developed requires a lot of patience.

Here's an idea. Shoot a roll of film, seal it up and bury it for 25 years. Then dig it up and develop it. I think I may just do that. I know just where to put it too. Watch this space in 25 years for the result....

I may experiment with simply mistreating films. heating them, feezing them, then developing them. I don;t think I'll get those detrite forms again though.

새해복 많이 받으세요!

scene of the crime, originally uploaded by jayavant.

New Year's wish - a darkroom.

Oh and a house...