I had thought I would try and keep to Alan Ross’ ‘PostAPhotoFriday’ idea, but it’s been more like ‘PostAPhotoEveryFortnightIfIHaveTheTime’!  Still, this is my offering for today, some autumn colours from the Isle of Mull:

Ardalanish Bay; Paps of Jura on the horizon

The Paps of Jura in the distance were remarkably clear.  This was made with my Mamiya medium format camera, on Velvia 50 film, and slightly over-exposed (deliberately, I mean!).  I love that the film doesn’t dramatically blow out the highlights except for the area of the sun itself.  Rather it just gracefully moves off in lovely soft tones into complete whiteness.

I think this one is going on my wall…!

So today I went to collect it. She’s a lovely lady, whose late husband had been the one-time president of the Edinburgh Photographic Society. He had made mainly black and white photographs.

There is something wonderful about “inheriting” something like this – it comes with a history, with baggage, and I really look forward to trying it out. Even if all I do at the moment is some manual printing from black and white film and leave the developing for later, that will be exciting. I hope to be able to suitably honour her late husband’s enlarger. I think I know what at least some of my free evenings during my mid-semester teaching break might be used for…

PS results – presuming they’re any good – to be posted here in due course!

Nakedness

An intimate portrait

Let me ask to begin with: what do these two images bring to mind?

smiling

The first is a photograph I am extremely attached to, for reasons that are very personal: it does what I want it to do, and the model is a good friend who is largely responsible for making me realise that I enjoy creating portraits, and that these can even be rather good. I think of her as my portrait muse (that’s a topic for another day!). It’s not a perfect image by any means, as I have acknowledged in my description, but it is special to me. The second image is part of a slightly mad photoshoot: as I described here, this woman is a professional model who wanted a ‘different’ kind of snow shoot for her modelling portfolio, and all the images from that day are… well, ‘different’ snow images.

Neither, of course, are completely ‘normal’ photographs: both models are revealing more of their naked skin than they might normally do in these settings. The lilac dress doesn’t fall away quite as much in other photographs from this shoot that I’ve published, and the other snow images include a couple more bikini shots, but are mostly of the model wearing dresses (albeit light summer dresses in order to contrast with the snow).  However, it would be very naive to suggest that these images do not also involve a sexual element – especially because of the poses and the fact that both women are revealing more of their breasts than we might expect – and in both cases that’s part of the intention behind the images.

Breasts

Increasingly, it seems to me, women’s breasts are seen solely as sexual symbols (and capitalism exploits this to great effect – think back to the Wonderbra advertisements with Eva Herzigova, and many similar advertising campaigns). This frequently goes to extreme lengths: breasts are abstracted from the rest of the body to the point where they are all that matters (and the taste/level of violence employed in the endless terms used to describe breasts goes rapidly downhill from the almost-endearing language of ‘boobs’).  They become fetishised objects in and of themselves: so-called ‘lad’s magazines’ (like Zoo and Nuts) feature endless photographs of naked breasts, often without the women’s faces or the rest of their bodies (interestingly, these magazines are regularly left on the train I take to and from work, so their viewers – I really cannot bring myself to call them readers – presumably don’t want to be seen with their purchases when they reach their destination).  Breasts, big breasts, are what men want – apparently – and photographs of such breasts are meant to link directly to thoughts of sex (though in general I suspect they just lead to lonely acts of masturbation). The women the breasts belong to are often only valued in terms of their (abstracted) breasts. This is simply pornography – depictions designed to arouse and elicit a sexualised response. Although I’m happy to debate the artistic merits of almost any human creation until the wee small hours, I do not see such depictions as art in any helpful or meaningful sense.

Not what I was hoping for...

However, abstraction doesn’t need to be as dramatically obvious or deliberate as the pornography I’ve just mentioned. Although the first image at the beginning of this post reveals more of the model’s breasts than might be expected, I think it does work, whereas this second image of her does not (which is why I have not published it before). She wanted to create an image that communicated feelings of loss and abandonment: she described it in terms of being deserted at a party. The high heels she is holding, the partially-visible but unopened bottle of champagne, the downcast look – all were meant to be a part of this, along with appropriate post-processing (that I have not carried out). But her dress did not co-operate: it fell away from her breasts too easily, and her pose, leaning to her right, means the viewer’s attention is immediately drawn to what happens to be at the very centre of the image: her almost-completely naked breast that her left arm, reaching across her lap to hold her shoes, is inadvertently pushing out of the dress and towards the camera.  With the almost-naked breast the (unintended) central feature of the image, all the other elements become secondary, and so the image as a whole just doesn’t work for either of us. It’s not that the model is ‘too naked’ or ‘too sexy’, it’s that the way the nakedness is created defeats the original intention of the image, creating an abstraction of her breast that then detracts from all the other elements of the photograph. I don’t want to create abstractions of breasts like that: after several attempts, we knew at the time of shooting that this idea would require her to be wearing a different dress. Neither of us wanted to create an image designed solely to offer titillation.

‘Art nudes’

Of course, there are whole genres of photography that deliberately reveal much more naked skin. The term ‘art nude’ is often used in this context. I am deeply sceptical of much of this genre. It is surely no coincidence that an awful lot of ‘art nude’ photography involves older men photographing pretty young women, and no matter how technically accomplished the photography is, much of what pretends to be ‘art nude’ is simply stylish pornography: the focus on particular body parts seems designed to titillate more than anything else. This is very noticeable on photo-sharing sites, where comments regularly descend into raucous objectification of the models’ bodies or parts of their bodies. Such images are everywhere: a cursory look at the constantly-updated ‘popular’ collection of images on 500px.com will easily demonstrate this (I am a member of this photo-sharing site): it is a rare day indeed when the first page or two of ‘popular’ images do not include breasts, often cropped in such a way as to exclude the model’s face. This phenomenon is also observable in some ‘analogue process’ contexts: images of naked women made using Victorian wet-plate methods can be just as abstracting as ones made using a top-of-the-range digital Nikon (as an aside, it seems to me as an outsider to this field that much of this ‘vintage photography’ is really rather tedious, consisting of repetitive motifs displaying little artistic imagination or compositional ability, and though there is a great delight in the method, the process of achieving an image in and of itself does not give the end result artistic merit; nudes photographed with antique cameras still need to communicate more than just the abstraction of a breast etc.). I don’t see any point in linking to more examples, but I would nonetheless maintain that much ‘art nude’ photography is simply stylish (stylised?) pornography – a form of imagery whose primary function for the photographer or the viewer is to elicit a sexualised response.

Of course, there are notable exceptions. In some ways, photographs of men can subvert such understandings of the ‘art nude’: these (from Redbubble, another photo-sharing site I use) play too much into the über-masculine virile alpha-male understanding of masculinity for my liking (though note that when shown, the penis is flaccid rather than erect). However, the photographer also includes nude images of herself in her portfolio, and so I presume these photographs do speak to her, at least (interestingly, she doesn’t include identifiable faces in these images, but her photographs don’t focus simply on breasts or genitalia). More interesting to me are attempts to subvert classical images of masculinity, as Alex Boyd has tried to do in his fourth image here, for example (I have tried similar images, also using myself as a model, but I wasn’t happy with them; perhaps I should revisit this theme). Another form of subversion is the inclusion of scars and visible disability: it seems to me that this photographer’s work (also on Redbubble) is pushing at the boundaries of art nude, but it intrigues me nonetheless – a woman, over 40, using herself as a model, including scars from her breast cancer surgery in her image-making. Of course she is still beautiful with the scars, but this kind of imagery confounds the heteronormative stereotypes of beauty and the traditional ‘art nude’ style of photography that I have described above.

Sex

Imperfect mirrors

I am not, of course, saying that images should never elicit a sexual response. It is when that is all they do that I think they descend into simply being pornography. What I want is for an image that elicits a sexual response to also do more than that. This is not necessarily difficult. For example, this image, that I created for a book cover about worship in churches, uses a corset to communicate something radically different to the clerical shirt that is depicted in the mirror. The corset communicates something about sex and intimacy and perhaps does so even more obviously from the back than it would do if we could see the model’s breasts and the cleavage created by the corset: her naked back and the elaborate ribbons are – I think – suggestive enough of an alternative milieu to the church’s clerical clothing (it has even been suggested that she looks like a ‘working girl’ – perhaps the term ‘sex worker’ was too much for that commentator – I was present when the model was told this, and she thought it was hilarious!). Here, a suggestion of sex is created through a combination of partial nakedness, and the contrast between the corset and the stuffiness of the church ‘uniform’.

If you’ve managed to read this far, you’re perhaps wondering if I have some kind of problem with nudity and sex.  I don’t think I do, or at least, no more so than most. I see myself as having very broad and liberal understandings on these questions: nudity can be completely wonderful and liberating on many levels, as a physical, emotional and even intellectual expression of self. Sex can be exhilarating, intimate, varied, generous and completely appropriate in a multiplicity of contexts, and the source of great pleasure to those involved. So I am not criticising nudity and sex in photography as such, rather the frequent objectification of a stereotyped image of women’s bodies.

Such objectification is almost always also an abuse of power: abstraction of particular body parts such as breasts or genitalia denies the model’s personhood, their identity as a whole human being. If feminism has taught us anything, it is that power distorts relationships, and performing gender (to use Judith Butler’s language) with a clothed older man wielding a camera in front of a naked younger woman almost invariably leads to asymmetrical power relationships, especially when the focus is simply on certain body parts rather than the individual as a whole. I think photographers and viewers – especially men! – who think otherwise need to reassess their understandings of relationships, and think long and hard about the reasons for wanting to make or view such images.

Photography

Because of the pornographic nature of much of what is supposedly ‘art nude’, the exceptions can be dramatic when we encounter them: there are the examples I have given above, but I have also written before about the brilliant image by Richard Avedon of Nastassja Kinski naked with a serpent: ‘Kinski communicates phenomenal serenity, control, and even power in this photograph, despite being completely naked…’. A friend of mine is in the process of making a series of female and male nude photographs that primarily communicate mystery and longing: very human emotions.  And this is what photography should be about: I want it to elicit some kind of emotional response – and an erection doesn’t count as an emotional response! If a photograph only elicits titillation for either the photographer or the viewer, then we should call it what it is – pornography and not ‘art nude’. If it does more than this, then we can see it as moving into the realm of art.

A little bit of honesty here is all that’s needed.

Warm thanks to Alex Boyd, who read an early version of this text and offered feedback; I am, of course, entirely responsible for the end result.
As always, I welcome comments, but please do not include links to supposedly ‘good’ ‘art nude’ sites – I will not approve them.  Thank you.

What is there not to like about winter? I fell out of bed at 7:15 and was on the beach at the bottom of the road twenty minutes later – marvellous! In the summer, I’d have to be up at some horrific time to do the same thing (and the light isn’t so good…).

It was lovely to watch and photograph (sort of) the sunrise, seeing the light change and transform the shapes on the beach. I wasn’t too interested in the sun itself, of course, but the patterns of the beach and the water on black and white film will hopefully work.

I wasn’t the only one out there: apart from the perennial dog-walkers, two other folks with cameras and tripods were on the beach. Of course, I felt terribly superior: they had some new-fangled digital camera-thingy, whereas I was using my 60-year old Rolleiflex TLR… and now I’m off home to breakfast (whisper it: and to my digital camera for some family photos later on!).

Tomorrow's forecast!

And I must start getting my film developed – I have rolls from October 2011 and perhaps even earlier waiting here! I know that I should, of course, start developing my film myself… that will come…

Alan posts new images regularly, sometimes daily, but there is no way I can keep up with that, given that I have a full-time job that has nothing to do with my photography.  But he also suggests a challenge, that he tags as ‘#PostAPhotoFriday‘ – the idea being that sharing a photograph with this tag every Friday enables others to see your efforts (of course, he posts his own images too).  For example, here is his message from last week:

It’s Friday! Time to post a photo that you love. Share w/the community! #PostAPhotoFriday

— Alan Ross (@AlanRossPhoto) December9, 2011

I think this is an inspired idea: a weekly post should usually be a manageable time frame for me, even with a full time job, and because I think I need the discipline of a time frame to make sure I regularly put images out there for people to see and critique, I’m going to try and follow Alan’s suggestion.  So, below is my first of these Friday photos, on the beach at the bottom of my road.  This was taken whilst out walking with Alastair Cook at the beginning of October, with autumnal skies and tones.  It’s on Kodak T-Max 400 (that expired in July 2009), using my medium format Mamiya and an 80mm lens.  To me it looks a bit like a drunk has staggered along the beach before us (I assure you these prints are not Alastair’s – nor mine!).

Finally, I heartily recommend following Alan on Twitter and taking time for studying the images on his website!

Portobello beach - but not my footprints!

Of course, I’m always open to comments – but if they’re about this image, can I request that you comment in the gallery location instead (clicking on the image also takes you to the gallery image).  Comments on this blog posting can be made below as usual.  Thank you!

Achnahaird Bay

Firstly, it’s worth noting that I have no formal artistic training (unlike my correspondent, who has, I think, a degree in art/photography), and so for me, I hope that a workshop can serve partly to teach me something. Secondly, having a pretty intense full-time job means that if I get the time to go and photograph for a few days and do nothing but think about photography, that is really fantastic!  The week was a proper holiday, and I didn’t read a single academic text whilst away (even though I did have a book with me… I rarely travel without one!).

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, engaging with a photographer leading a workshop is about having someone critique what I do and help me move forward in my thinking and my photography.

Loch Bad a' Ghaill

My week away was with Bruce Percy, who has been running workshops for several years now.  Exactly two years before going on this Assynt workshop, I went (with my neighbour, Mabel Forsyth) to Torridon on one of his weekend workshops.  That was a great experience, as I wrote about here at the time.  So I was confident the week in Assynt would be a good week.

There are some people who seem to be workshop-regulars, going from one to the next all the time. I am not like that: I have attended a couple of other day-workshops in recent years, but have not been on residential workshops other than the one in Torridon and this one in Assynt.  So if you’re wanting me to offer comparisons, I can’t do so (though I have now heard quite a few horror stories of other workshops, some by really famous photographers… and no, I won’t say more on this).  My main purpose in going to Assynt with Bruce was that I wanted to rediscover something about my own reasoning and motivation for making photographs – especially landscapes – that I had found increasingly difficult to identify in recent times.  I felt I knew enough theory in terms of operating my cameras (though of course, Bruce was able to help me improve in certain areas, such as my exposures and hyperfocal focusing). But I felt I needed input on more important things, especially aspects of composition and how and why I frame the way I do or give more attention to certain things in a scene, and what all that says about my own ‘visioning process’ (sorry, I think that is a rather horrible phrase, but I can’t think of a more suitable one; pre-visualisation covers some of it, but is not the same thing).

Glencanisp Lodge, with view to Suilven

Of course, this is not something that I discussed in any detail with Bruce before or during the workshop, because I knew from previous experience that this might come anyway – and it did.  One of the two key things for me in thinking about a workshop is that I have to like the photographs that the workshop leader makes, and I really love Bruce’s work – it offers depth and challenge, simplicity and elegance, in both his landscapes and portraits. Of course, I have no desire to create images that are like Bruce’s, even if I could do so, since they represent his vision and not mine; however, I feel I can relate to his vision. I have come to realise that the other key thing for me is that I have to feel I can connect to the leader, and that he or she can connect to me.  Of course, I’m privileged in that I was able to go on the Torridon workshop with Bruce and I therefore knew him a little already; and we’ve also become friends over the last couple of years – that is not something that is necessarily open to people who don’t live in the next neighbourhood to a workshop leader!  But it is possible to at least gain some impression of the person from their images and their writings (such as their blog) and this offers good clues.  And, of course, you can trust my recommendation that Bruce is a great workshop leader!

So, is it possible to sum up what it was that I gained from Bruce’s input? There are a number of things that come to mind, but the main one for me can be outlined in the following terms.  At the beginning of the week, he noted that he sometimes found it difficult to understand exactly what I was seeing and why I had gone for a certain composition (I did say this was perhaps because the images were no good, but Bruce disagreed!).  A day or two later he began to suggest that my visualising of scenes was perhaps too selective – I tended to visualise one or two really significant elements in a potential image, but I did not always frame these in a way that meant they were as apparent as I wanted them to be, whether this be unusual shapes, repeated lines, patterns on hills, the interplay between different elements in a scene, and so on. This is not simply about excluding extraneous elements – even if I intended to crop the image from whatever I saw in the viewfinder – although this is also a factor (see the tree image I discussed here recently and the grass in the bottom right of the image: 1, 2). Rather, for me, it is about expanding the view of the scene as a whole, about being able to encompass the elements that form the shapes, colours and tones in a way that enables a more holistic image to emerge.  That is what I want to achieve, and I know that I do that, but not always as consistently as I would like.

At Achnahaird Bay, looking south

Of course, this is just me.  Other participants will hopefully have found something in Bruce’s critiques (there were 2-3 hours of image critiques on every day but one; other participants also commented on images) that helped them with whatever they thought they needed – or perhaps that they didn’t know they needed.

A month or two ago I removed all the landscape galleries from this site.  There really was a lot of rubbish there, in amidst some images that I liked.  Before going to Assynt I had begun the process of recreating the galleries and they are gradually going to reappear, but this time with far fewer, more carefully selected images.  In general, I make photographs for myself and not for others: being clearer about what I’m doing is therefore essential, and I feel the week away with Bruce has enabled me to see much more clearly exactly what kind of images I want to create, and given me more tools to enable me to go about doing that.  Those are the images I want to show here.

In essence, I feel I am approaching my photography with new confidence, a clearer sense of why I’m doing it, and how to go about achieving what I want. So in answer to my correspondent: that’s why I wanted to go on this workshop!

Bruce Percy, The Art of Adventure

There are 40 images with descriptive text, laid out like this:

Bruce Percy, The Art of Adventure, sample page

About 3/4 of the images are landscapes from all over the world, the remainder street portraiture from some of Bruce’s trips to various countries in Asia and South America.

It’s a fabulous book – it feels lovely, looks beautiful, and the images are printed fantastically well – they almost feel three dimensional. In fact, they look as if they could almost be prints that have been bound into a book – this book is itself a work of art, a thing of great beauty. Michael Kenna has written a very lovely introduction. And I’m very touched that Bruce has mentioned me in the acknowledgements (I was involved in proof-reading the text earlier this year).

Bruce Percy

Oh, and yes, I did get a signed one…

The book is available now from Half Light Press (and at the moment only from them – don’t fall for Amazon’s cheaper price, because Amazon won’t be able to deliver them at this price and will simply tell you it is not available). I think Beyond Words will also be selling them soon. Half Light also have offers with selected prints from Bruce. The first edition is limited to 1000 copies, and when I picked mine up earlier today, substantial numbers were being packed up to be sent off (all sold pre-publication).

I’ve bought quite a few photography books this year, and this and Michael Kenna’s Huangshan are the two highlights.

BUY ONE! In fact, BUY TWO and give one away to someone you love…!

Interestingly, I realise I’ve just there argued a case for the monochrome version, which I had created at the same time as editing the colour one!

Ratzeburg, lakeside tree, summer 2011

Comments, as always, are welcome!

A early morning view onto one of the lakes in Ratzeburg, Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany:

Ratzeburg Lake, summer 2011

This next image is from the same lake:

Ratzeburg, lakeside tree, summer 2011

I look forward to hearing what you think – thanks!

[Added later: following the comments from Rob Hudson below, I created another blog posting with a monochrome version of the second image.]

Monday

Arrive, after a spectacular journey through Glencoe. Mentioning this on Twitter causes considerable jealousy amongst certain followers (you know who you are, guys and gals!). Settle down to watch a rubbish film in the evening.

Tuesday

Morning: reading – lovely. Afternoon: photography – lovely. Evening: a bit more reading – lovely. And then a rubbish film – well…!

Wednesday

Dawn photography, Ardalanish Bay. I mention this on Twitter, again provoking more envious comments (as before…). Shopping in the “big city” (Tobermory). More reading – wonderful. And then the day is rounded off with another rubbish film. Another good day.

Thursday

More dawn photography – lovely. Read a good PhD thesis: very enjoyable. Evening – nice dinner, followed by next rubbish film. It has rained from mid-morning on, but I don’t care: another good day.

Friday

Most of the last night is spent between bathroom and bed, with a severely upset stomach. I am in bed all day. I have no idea if it is raining or not. A bad day.

Saturday

Feel somewhat restored, but still fairly knackered after being ill, so that an hour’s walk in the woods wears me out completely. It rains all day. I manage to do virtually no reading without falling asleep over my books, so go to bed early. Not a great day.

Sunday

Completely restored to health and wholeness – and off home. Knowing that the ferry’s winter timetable begins today, I have printed it off in advance of leaving home – and am very pleased with how organised I am. Unfortunately, I’m not organised enough to actually look at it. This means I miss the numerous would-be summer ferries that were running every Sunday from March until last Sunday, and have a four hour wait in Fishnish. What is there in Fishnish? A jetty; a coffee shop (closed). It rains. A lot. All day. I am ribbed endlessly by other family members for the timetable faux pas, but am now on the way home (this being mostly written on the jetty, and then posted on the ferry!).

All in all, not too bad a week, though with less reading and less photography than I had hoped for. Hopefully there will some images on here sometime soon, and my book chapter has progressed a bit.

PS And the rubbish films? All four of the Pirates of the Caribbean efforts… quite a contrast to the weather and climate on Mull… and whilst I recommend the cottage, I don’t recommend the films!

A beautiful Rollei image, as scanned

However, this posting is tangential to all of these thoughts!  I have, partly because of the 1953 Project (and yes, there are images to go online from that, too!), occasionally been carrying the Rolleiflex with me as a ‘casual camera’.  This regularly elicits interesting conversations with complete strangers, which can be surprising and very nice.  For example, last week I was dining with a friend in London and after our meal I wanted to photograph her with the Rollei; a couple at a neighbouring table began talking to us about the camera, photography and so on… culminating in a request that I might consider photographing their wedding next year; of course, I declined!

Adobe Lightroom settings

The film I’m using for the 1953 Project is Ilford FP4Plus, which is rated at an ISO of 125.  Ilford’s website says it has ‘enormous latitude for exposure error above and below‘ this speed.  I chose it for the project partly for this reason, thinking it wouldn’t much matter if the exposure was slightly off on my portraits because I could always recover the images once they were scanned in.  I didn’t realise quite what ‘enormous’ meant to Ilford, but these images clearly show that.  The first image above is the scan from the negative (Vuescan reversed the negative for me).  I made adjustments in Lightroom, as this screen capture shows: upping the exposure by four stops, pushing the fill light and brightness up, and then reducing the contrast and clarity settings to bring the grain under control.  Aside from dust removal, these are the only changes I made to the image, revealing… Elizabeth Eva Leach, Professor of Music at Oxford University, with whom I had a stimulating lunch at the beginning of September (click on the photograph to go to her blog):

Elizabeth Eva Leach

It’s not a great portrait, but it astonishes me that it worked at all, not just because of the film exposure issues: the café was relatively dark and I could barely see anything on the ground glass (so focusing was mostly a lucky guess), the lens was wide open at f2.8 with an exposure speed of 1/10th of a second – and yet it’s reasonably sharp despite all this!  And this isn’t a coincidence: another portrait taken under similar circumstances was just as underexposed and with similar Lightroom adjustments it came out fine too:

Another Ilford FP4Plus sample, with similar exposure settings

What I love about all this is the visceral nature of the film and the process.  For sure, I could have taken these portraits on a digital camera and bumped up the auto ISO settings – but I’m not convinced they would have looked any ‘better’ (they would have been different…).  Of course, even the process of ‘extracting’ an image from an almost entirely black square of film gives me enormous pleasure – it’s like finding a treasure!  I don’t regard myself by any means as a format fetishist, but returning to film does give me huge pleasure: my use of the Mamiya for landscapes makes me photograph with much greater consideration and precision than I used to with the digital camera, and I LOVE that.

For example, here’s a dawn image from the Mamiya taken on Velvia 50 of the Ratzeburg Küchensee in northern Germany this August.  I remember taking quite a while to compose it in order to make sure the twisted twigs were below the tree line, whereas I think with a digital camera I might have fired off a good half-dozen shots at different heights and then hoped one had worked when I was back at the computer – but here I composed slowly and carefully, got it right, and then made… two exposures (er… the first one had a misplaced graduated filter that I noticed after squeezing the cable release!).

Küchensee, Ratzeburg

(I’ve lightened the exposure by half a stop and added a little fill light, otherwise it’s as it came from the scanner.)

In a few weeks’ time I’m off to Assynt with Bruce Percy.  I’m really looking forward to this, and though I’ll take my Mamiya, I will mostly use the Nikon D90 so that images can be readily critiqued by Bruce and the group.  I’m keen to observe myself with this, as it were: I’m sure my recent return to film will have changed how I use the digital camera for landscapes.  Before going to Assynt, I’m also going to the Isle of Mull for a week of secluded reading – and I may just take a photograph or two whilst I’m there…

Theoretically knowing what such things can do is quite different to experiencing it, to trying it.  As someone suggested to me, it’s a bit like knowing  about cars in theory, but actually doing the driving is quite different.  This was just an introduction, but the two workshop leaders, Dav Thomas and Tim Parkin, worked well together to explain what we were aiming for and how to achieve particular things.  After showing us some of the mechanics of the cameras and why certain things worked they did, we had a go at focusing on trees in the middle-distance and heather and grasses in the foreground – if you’ve never used an LF camera before, this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds, though very satisfying when it finally works!

After lunch, we went up the hill and took some photographs.  For a newbie, it takes a long time to frame and focus each image, so, including a walk to the top of a hill (and a quick march back down at the end of the day in the pouring rain!), I took three photographs in just under 4 hours.  I think setting up, framing and focusing took between about 20 and 45 minutes – perhaps I’m just slow, but I think the other three people on the workshop were taking just as long.  Of course, it does get faster with practice – I started with a complicated composition in the woods that didn’t really work as well as it might have done had the sun shone consistently.  I then moved to another spot, and took time to get that set up correctly… a good 45 minutes, I think!  My third and final image was simpler in composition and took about 20 minutes, and I was able to release the shutter just as the first drops of rain came down.

So why go for large format?  Aside from the phenomenal detail and corresponding image size involved, for me the attraction would be in what it becomes possible to do when you can tilt and shift the lens and the back of the camera independently of one another.  Last night, after coming back from the Peak District, I found myself dreaming of retaking this image:

Goslpie harbour, final image

When I was in the harbour I wanted the lines of the jetty to be straight and for the coils of rope in the foreground to be visible, as they were when I looked at it without the camera, but it was an impossible effect to achieve with an SLR (these were taken on a DSLR).  Here is the ‘straight out of the camera’ image:

Golspie harbour, from camera

Straightening the lines of the jetty has introduced distortion – still acceptable, I think – into some of the other elements of the image, such as the white boat on the left and the blue boat in the foreground.  It’s also removed part of the coils.  I knew that I wanted what became the final image, and knew that if I took it as it was I could ‘fix’ the perspective in Photoshop.  But with a LF camera, such post-processing changes could have been largely unnecessary, or at least much reduced.  A tilt-shift lens could probably have helped me here as well, but in terms of cost, it seems to me to make more sense just to go with a LF set-up instead of a tilt-shift lens – and then one can benefit from the quality and flexibility of LF too.

So is a LF camera going to be added to my collection of tools in the future?  The one concern I have is that I struggled with the dark-cloth – I know that I am a little claustrophobic and it required considerable will-power to spend long periods setting up each shot under the dark cloth.  A black fleece jacket, which is much more open than the professional cloths Dav and Tim offered, might be a better solution for me.  I think my next step will be to borrow an LF camera sometime and play a little more with it, but I see no reason NOT to invest, once my finances allow!

In the meantime, if you’re wondering whether this might be something for you, or you just want to try something a bit different, do go on one of Dav and Tim’s courses – it was enjoyable, informative, and the two of them are a good team.

Kronsgaard - golf play street

I’m amused to see that my wee collection of photographs of the terrible road at Kronsgaard in Schleswig-Holstein is moving up the list on Google’s search results when looking up the name of the town/the road – this morning it was consistently making it into the top 10 or 20 depending on the search terms used.  I’m not aware of anyone else linking to the page and don’t have the time or energy to promote anything very actively, so I’m not sure why this should be happening.

However, perhaps the local roads authority might notice at some point?

But I think I’ve now cracked it – and this is largely due to a change of scanning software.  Yesterday I downloaded VueScan (in part on the recommendation of Tim Smalley, who bought the V700 shortly before me and from whom I’ve been learning a lot!), and the results are amazing.  Transparencies look just the way I think they should, with incredible detail in all areas, and my first scan of a black and white image has worked well too.  The interface is a bit clunky, but SilverFast is much worse (it looks as if it hasn’t changed much since Apple produced OS9!), and although I need to ensure I get to grips with all the settings, I’ll be upgrading to the full version at the beginning of the week.  The VueScan images are simply better.

Chicken house ruin, Kiesby, Schleswig-Holstein

For example, here’s a section of a ruined chicken house in a village in northern Germany, shot on Velvia with the Mamiya and the 80mm lens, and scanned using VueScan – the rich colours are a combination of early morning sun and Velvia doing its bonkers colour thing… believe it or not, I’ve toned down the colours a bit in Photoshop.  Even in this small jpg image, I think it’s possible to see that the shadows have considerable detail; the full size image is great.  Clicking on the image will take you to the version on RedBubble, where clicking on that version will make it appear almost full-screen.

I find it really quite surprising that the scanning software can have such a huge impact on the end result, but going by my experience of the last few weeks, VueScan is definitely the way to go with the V700.  I’m not quite there yet, but I think I’m now getting there.