Week 6 - no pics

Just a quick update - I did in fact shoot several rolls of film this week, but they were all production stills for a movie I was producing. I will post shots as soon as I've gotten approval from the director to publicize things, hopefully by next week.

Week 5 - Hasselblad

The Blad is Back

When I finished graduate school and got my Master's degree, I decided to buy myself a graduation present. I have, for as long as I've been interested in photography, wanted a Hasselblad V series camera. You may remember it as the camera on the cover of that Elvis Costello album.

So I went ahead and bought one from a gentleman on craigslist. And a week later its shutter broke.

To be fair, I don't think he knew he was selling me a not-quite-broken camera, he just hadn't had it serviced in a while and probably didn't use it much. Caveat emptor and all that. But it was still a big blow; I was given a taste of the dream and then had it yanked away from me.

So I sent it off to Massachusetts, to the best Hasselblad technician the Internet could recommend. One month and several hundred dollars later, it came back in like-new rebuilt condition. I was ready to lock and load.

I shot two rolls on Sunday the 22nd. Here are the highlights.

Roll 1 - Rachel in the Window

Portrait of Maud Cook
Thomas Eakins, 1895 - image from Wikipedia

Last week I discussed Thomas Eakins, and attempted to emulate one of his paintings. I decided to keep going in that direction this week while trying to apply the key lessons I learned last week:

• Don't get too fancy with your composition. If you throw in a lot of context, you'll probably end up cropping it out later. Focus on faces.
• Cool it on including the light source in the photo.

I should point out that, with practice, neither of these rules would apply. Eventually I'd like to get to the point that I can masterfully use these elements in my photos, but for now I need to focus.

I took as my inspiration another Eakins painting, Portrait of Maud Cook. It is another fantastic portrait that uses a directed light source to display the subject in a pleasing, if not necessarily flattering, light. Eakins was known for the strong realism in his portraiture, he didn't try to make people look younger or prettier than they were. But for all that, their direct presentation still leaves people looking attractive. I think that's what draws me to them.

I sat Rachel by a window and set about shamelessly ripping off paying homage to Eakins. Like my Yashica, my new Hasselblad shoots in a square 6cm by 6cm format. This can be limiting when you're doing portraiture, as I've learned, because you have to stay a certain distance from the subject in order to properly focus. That tends to leave you with blank space on the negative.

Thus, these shots are cropped to an 8x10 aspect ratio. I am less upset this week about that, though, because I shot these intending to crop them. All that's missing is about another two inches of that grey wall to Rachel's right.

I'm very happy with the way my new lens handled the contrast on this; coupled with the relatively grainy Tri-X film I shot them on, I think they almost have an abstract quality that is similar to the painting that inspired them.

I really like the photo of Rachel holding her head in her hands, and I'd like to claim that I directed her to do that, but that's a genuine moment. She was feeling a little tired and a little frustrated with me for making her sit by the window for so long while I fiddled with my new camera.

Thus, another lesson. I need to work on not only my technical skills, but my interpersonal skills as well. Rachel lets me take her picture all the time, she's used to me--but some people are going to be nervous about having their picture taken.

My "bedside manner" if you can call it that could stand to be improved. I am usually too focused on the technical aspect of the image and not on whether or not my subject is at ease. I think it comes partially from my personality, which is not terrifically gregarious, but also from my background in filmmaking. Perhaps if I were a documentary filmmaker I'd have learned something about putting my subjects at ease, but as a narrative filmmaker the people with a camera pointed at them all want to be there and more often than not have done it before.

Roll 2 - Campus

After shooting with Rachel, I went to the University of Texas campus to play with my new lens outside. Not shooting people allowed me to both use the native square format of the film and also focus more on textures.

Main Building

Calhoun Hall breezeway, South Mall

Cesar Chavez statue, West Mall

I look forward to getting more comfortable with my new camera. Thanks for reading, I'll keep trying to post something new every week.

Week 4 - Emulating Eakins, Foiled by a Lamp

Lessons from Portraiture

Miss Amelia Van Buren
Thomas Eakins, 1891 - image from Wikipedia

This is a painting by Thomas Eakins, an American painter whose work I only recently discovered. Given how important and influential he was, I imagine that I'd have learned about him had I paid better attention to art history while I was in school. As such, I was too busy making movies where puppets embezzle money and commit murders to cover it up (said movie is not nearly as good as it sounds).

I came upon Eakins when I was looking for inspiration for portraiture. When you are a writer, especially before you have discovered your own style, you are supposed to find a writer you like and shamelessly copy him/her until your own voice emerges. I thought that I would do well to think along the same lines.

I find myself interested in very expressive, moody use of light. In film school, I had a cinematography teacher tell me that studying paintings was a great way to get a feel for artistic use of light; now, here I am, ten years later, listening to her.

Anyway, I decided that I would sit down with Rachel and try to get a very deliberate portrait, inspired by Eakins (and especially the painting of Miss Van Buren). I'm sure it would take a lifetime of study to fully appreciate everything a master painter does, but I observed a few things from his style that I could immediately emulate.

First, subjects almost never look toward the viewer. This gives the portrait more of a "narrative" feel--what are they looking at? What are they thinking about? If they look at you, they are engaging directly with you, but if they're focused on something else, they're enigmatic.

Second, light is strongly motivated from one side, and shadows are important.

I generally try to do these things already, but not in as deliberate or careful of a way. So I got my medium-format camera, moved a bunch of stuff in the living room around, and put Rachel on the couch.

That Damn Lamp

HAI I'M A LAMP LOL

I had a very deliberate scene in mind. I shot an entire roll of film, all with the same camera position, lighting, and settings, and had Rachel vary her pose in every one. This is the negative I decided to use.

While shooting, I thought I had everything lined up beautifully. However, after developing and seeing the photos on the proof sheet, I immediately realized two errors.

The first is relatively minor. There's an ugly seam on our wall behind the couch that I thought would be in shadow. I should have read the light back there; if I'd known you could see it I'd have reframed the shot.

The second problem, though, is kind of a big deal to me. It has to do with that lamp.

I thought the lamp would look cool; it would be obvious where the light was coming from and it would contrast with the relatively darker area of the subject. Having seen the photo, though, I completely disagree. It takes up almost a quarter of the frame!

Here I have this somewhat interesting scene, and there's a giant glowing eye magnet taking up the top right of the frame, saying "hey look at me, even when you're looking at the woman on the couch you're trying to keep looking back up at me. I'm the brightest thing in the shot!"

That's better.

I was able to save the photo with a relatively heavy crop, which I was able to do because I shot the thing on medium-format film. It still irks me, though, because it's another instance of me throwing away a huge chunk of my negative to get the photo I want.

This crop is basically what I was trying to do from the start, and I'm kicking myself a little that I didn't just do it in-camera. This is the process that Ansel Adams calls "visualization:" you don't just shoot and hope that something turns out, fixing it later by cropping. You imagine exactly what you want the final picture to look like, and then you manipulate the camera and film to get that image. That's what I'm striving for.

That being said, I got what I think is a very nice photo out of it, so it's not all bad. I'm just going to chalk this one up to experience and try again next week.

Bonus!

The day after I took the photo above, I took this one on 35mm. I don't have an instructive story to tell about this photo, but I like it. So I'm sharing it.



Thanks for stopping by. Drop me a comment if you like. I should have a new post next week, hopefully.

Week 3 - Flash

Meh.

The point of this blog is to shoot something every week and talk about it, in an effort to focus on and get better at my photography. Unfortunately, that means that not every week is going to be amazing. I almost didn't want to write something this week because I don't think the photos I did are very good, but I'm gonna power through.

I decided that it was time to get over my hatred of flash photography. I actually already owned a flash that would work with my camera if I got an eight-dollar coupler, so I ordered the part and decided to spend the week experimenting.

First of all, let's look at this thing. I tell people that the flash for my camera is comically gigantic and I don't think anyone fully believes me. Here it is, next to a gin bottle for scale (and also because I was drinking gin). It's probably 150% as tall as the camera. It is a hilarious monstrosity and I almost am ashamed to take it in public. And to cap it all off, it has not one but two flash heads on it.

To be fair, that second flash head is pretty cool. It's fairly weak and is just there to soften shadows on peoples' faces. But the whole package just screams LOOK AT ME I'M A FLASH in a glorious, angular, 1980s way. This camera and flash set are from the era of the boombox; small wasn't really "in."

So I mounted that thing up and took some pictures of Rachel. Here's the first shot I took:

As you can see, the exposure is fine but it's kind of boring. I angled the flash head and bounced the light off the ceiling to  keep it from being too harsh. Unfortunately, this is about as good as it was going to get.

We went out to eat and sat on the patio. There was obviously no ceiling from which to bounce anything, so the shots I took there were with the flash head dead-on. Sometimes it's almost passable:

A little harsh, but it'll do.

And other times it's not.

People do not actually glow.

We came back home and I bored her to death by making her sit for something like 20 shots in which I angled the flash head differently every time and took careful notes.

So what did I learn? I still hate flash photography. But I could stand to practice it more and hate it less. I can see that it could be useful in a studio setup, where the flash isn't on the camera itself but on a second tripod and at a different angle. That requires either a network of sync cables or very expensive modern wireless flash heads, neither of which I'm in the mood to acquire right now.

I may play with making a bounce card or a diffuser for the flash head, but I'm beginning to wonder if this is even worth my time. I'm not an event or wedding photographer, and I don't know if flash is something I need to learn. Part of me thinks that it's a waste of my time, but I suppose that if I become passable at using a flash and then intentionally never use it, I won't be worse for it.

Who knows, maybe it'll come in handy. I'm going to try to line up some natural-light portraiture this week, though.

Week 2 - Davida

Take Pictures of People

After my last blog post, Steve Metze (former instructor of mine, documentary filmmaker, and independent game publisher) suggested that I take pictures of people. I actually consider taking pictures of people to be my biggest strength in photography, but that's not to say I think I'm amazing at it. I just think that all of my best pictures are of people. This is one of the reasons I like to go and take boring pictures of trash cans sometimes--I'm trying to branch out.

But there's plenty of learning for me to do in the world of portraiture. That's what this week is about.

The model this week is Davida Dwyer, a friend of mine from college. She is an attorney working in a state office, and I asked her if she needed any professional-looking lawyery photos. She's not in private practice, so she didn't really, but she humored me and we pretended she did.

I did two sets of photos with two cameras.

I used a medium format camera (my Yashica Mat 124) to take some color photos. I tend to focus almost entirely on black and white, so I felt that I should try to get some color experience. The difference in visualization and composition can be pretty strong between color and black and white, so I wasn't really sure how this would go.

Second, I took my trusty Nikon F3HP 35mm camera and shot some black and white. I did this mostly because I am more comfortable working black and white and I wanted to cover my bases.

Cropping after the fact leads to things like the edge of a couch poking in at the corner.

Color

We shot the color photos inside the architecture library reading room in Battle Hall on the UT campus.

I do not like flash photography, primarily because I am very bad at flash photography. I think I'm going to try to tackle that in a future edition of the blog. But for now, I needed to work with natural light, so I sat Davida by a window. This not only gave me ample light for photos but also ensured that the colors would come out correctly (if you shoot most color film under fluorescent light, everything looks nasty and green).

Unlike the rectangular 35mm format, the Yashica (along with several other medium format cameras) shoots in a 6 cm x 6 cm square format. I'm not so great at using the entire frame effectively. I ended up doing a lot of cropping after the fact. In a sense, this is good--I was able to get decent 8x10 crops out of these. But it was bad as well--I threw away a lot of the information on each negative to get to something I liked.

Black and White

After we finished the color roll, we went across the street to Caffe Medici (which used to be called Metro, if you're of the same UT vintage as me). The upstairs loft there has one of my favorite big windows in town.

I really love window light for black and white, but not because I need to worry about what color the light is. I love it because I am drawn to very directional, dramatic light. It creates nice contrast between the light and the dark in a frame and gives you great shadows.

I really do feel much more comfortable with black and white, and I think these photos are stronger than the color ones. I don't think they satisfy the goal of "professional portrait" but they suggest more of a story than the color ones. I guess it's hard to shake off all that film school.

Wrap Up

I'm much more happy with the black and white photos than I am with the color. While I feel like the color photos are technically good, they don't really appeal to me in the same way that the monochromes do. Part of that is my preference for black and white and part of it is my inexperience shooting color. Color portraiture often seems to be about using the color as a key element, almost as another personality in the shot. I know of people who do it beautifully, but I think that I have a lot of work to do if I want to work with it more often.

All in all, not a bad week. Thanks to Davida Dwyer for letting me take the pictures, and thanks to Dano Johnson for reading the Onion out loud to us while we took the pictures. Dano, you're coming on all my photo shoots now.

Week 1 - Pease Park

Shoot, Damn It

I really wasn't sure what to shoot this week, but I decided I'd go out and shoot something anyway. One of the primary goals in starting this blog was to keep myself accountable; to kick my ass into going out and shooting something every week. I've heard the advice that writers get, that you should write every day regardless of whether or not you want to. Like exercise, it's supposed to make you better through sheer experience and repetition. I am trying to do the same thing (though not every day, it takes me long enough to develop and scan film as it is).

So, on Thursday June 21st, I grabbed my Yashica Mat 124 twin lens reflex and a roll of film before heading out to work. I told myself that I would go and shoot SOMETHING after work. And while I don't think that what I shot was remarkable artistically, I am proud of the fact that I went out and did it. I tried to practice my visualization, not just to take pictures of anything and everything but to try and find the interesting shots available to me.

I'm pretty sure I did a crappy job at that, but you have to start somewhere. I think that every roll of film I put through a camera while being thoughtful about it, even if nothing is clicking that day, is good exercise.

Even though I don't think the pictures are that interesting, though, there are two interesting things I want to talk about with this roll.

Sunny 16

My Yashica Mat has a light meter built in to it, but it's busted and unreliable. I don't even look at it. This has, in the past, kept me from going out with this camera, which is a shame. It's fun to use and it's no heavier than any of my film SLRs.

I recently decided that I needed to develop (get it, it's a photography blog) the ability to guesstimate my exposures without relying on a light meter. So I started practicing using the Sunny 16 Rule.

The fact that every frame of film I shot this week has an image on it means that I did pretty well. Most of them seem exposed correctly, too, so I seem to have been more or less on the money. Black and white film is pretty flexible, though, so I would still use a light meter if I was doing anything in color, or anything very important.

Still though, being able to go outside with a mechanical camera and say "I'm thinking I need to shoot this at f/4 and 1/125th" is freeing. It gives you a little more confidence not to have to rely on another device.

Plus-X

The other thing I want to talk about is the fact that I shot this on my second-to-last roll of Kodak Plus-X, which has been discontinued. This particular batch expired in January 2009. The one roll I have left will almost certainly be the last roll I ever get to shoot.

Plus-X is the slower version of Tri-X, meaning it has finer grain but requires a lot more light. Tri-X has been my film of choice for forever. It's very forgiving--you can shoot it in almost any situation and you can quite frankly abuse it and you still get pictures. It's kind of an easy film to learn on in that regard. It's grainy and old-fashioned looking, but I don't mind. It's kind of like the black coffee of film.

Plus-X, on the other hand, never interested me. If I wanted something with less grain, I'd get one of the fancier slow-speed films. The benefit of Tri-X is its versatility, which Plus-X didn't offer to the same degree. I'm sure many people loved the film, and it's been around forever, so I'm not knocking it, but its discontinuance didn't bother me too much.

But all the same, it was kind of an icon. Sure, it was overshadowed by its faster, more versatile brother, but you always knew it was there. And now it's not.

You'd think I'd have corrected that framing.

Kodak is going through some financial troubles, and no one is really sure how much longer they'll stick with black and white film. They say they intend to stick it out, and I'm sure they'd like to, but... I don't know. Kodak's problems are bigger than the niche market of black and white photographers; they're dealing with Hollywood's transition to digital and with their own failure to effectively compete in digital imaging. I'm sure they mean well, and they say they want to stay in black and white but...they discontinued Plus-X. What am I supposed to think?

I don't think black and white film is going away. Kodak aren't the only players in the game: Ilford in England only makes black and white film and is a smaller, nimbler company that can tolerate smaller profit margins. Fujifilm is so diversified, and makes so much money, that they seem to put out old-fashioned products just to satisfy their own whims. And like I said, I never really shot this film.

But all the same, it's a sobering sign of the times. I have one more roll, and I hope I do it justice. Happy trails, Plus-X.

Last of the Steam-Powered Trains

I've threatened to start this blog for a while.

I just finished graduate school, and I find myself with a great deal of spare time that had been taken up with reading about rhetorical theory. I knew that I should devote this newly-freed-up time to something I've been woefully bad at the last several years: focusing on photography.

I really enjoy photography. Specifically traditional black and white film photography. Oh, I'm not a professional, let me point that out right now. Sometimes I get lucky, I've taken some decent shots, but a quick Google Image search will show you that I'm not any sort of authority. All the same, I'm in love with the process. I develop my film at home in my sink. I rent darkroom space from a lab in town and print when I can. I find the experience to be meditative and deeply satisfying, even if I rarely find the prints to be so satisfying.

I decided months ago that I would spend a year focusing on photography, shooting every week, and posting the results on a blog to hold myself accountable. If I can look back on it at the end of a year and see improvement--even small improvement--it will have been worthwhile.

Two factors have finally pushed me to get on the stick: my birthday and a Kinks song.

I turned 31 this weekend. While that was not anywhere near as monumental a landmark as turning 30 (an event marked by a temper tantrum on my part followed by a great deal of gin), it did serve to remind me that procrastination is the enemy. I am not getting younger, and what better time to mark the start of an educational year than my birthday.

But more importantly, today I was listening to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, and it put an idea into my head that pushed me to go ahead and do this. For those of you who don't know, that album is essentially Ray Davies' long-form exploration of nostalgia. He sings about the England of his youth besieged by "American tourists;" about his old friends forgetting his name; about the good old days that won't return. But at the same time, what makes the album work is that Davies is obviously aware that it's all a fantasy. Nostalgia is a longing for what you remember, not what was; what you remember was never actually there to begin with. It's just a story you tell yourself.

In particular, I am thinking about the song "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains:"

Like the last of the good ol' choo-choo trains,
Huff and puff 'till I blow this world away,
And I'm gonna keep on rollin' till my dying day.
I'm the last of the good old fashioned steam-powered trains.

For me this song captures the inspiring, confrontational, here's-mud-in-your-eye feeling of thinking that you are the last of a dying breed. You're a flag-waver for an older, more pure way of being, and damn the torpedoes, you're going to keep on rollin' till your dying day. You against the world! It's a satisfying fantasy, but it's just a fantasy.

I indulge in this fantasy sometimes.

I'm not against digital cameras at all, but I'm also not interested very much in them. Photography for me is about the experience, and I admit to feeling a certain bit of pride in using 30-, 40-, 50-year old equipment to make an image. Autofocus makes me uncomfortable, I want to set the aperture by clicking the barrel, and I eat film grain for breakfast. I admit that, in my less-than-good moods, I get kind of a chip on my shoulder about it. And then I get to thinking that I'm the last of a dying breed, and that film photography is some sort of grandiose fight-the-power lost cause.

But that's a stupid way to live. Love for the past and respect for a way of working is one thing; making it into an oppositional fantasy is something else entirely. I catch myself thinking along these lines--that by working in an old-fashioned medium, I'm somehow making a statement to the whole modern system--and it's silly. It's like Andy Samberg throwing everything on the ground.

Ansel Adams says that photography is "an inclusive language." There's no shortage of pictures to be taken or ways to take them. I am not the last of the steam-powered trains, and this is not a race. I am just a guy who loves his cameras and wants to do the best he can.

Let's see where the year takes me.