Krappy Kameras
December 6th, 2008
This is the time of year when there seem to be a lot of juried shows looking for entries. So I’ve been busy getting entries ready. Several have already been sent off and several more are in various stages of preparation. I’ve gotten so that I’ll only enter these things if it is easy to do the entries on line and the entry fees are very reasonable. I think a lot of them are just fund raising affairs intended to get as much money as possible from the entry fees with few of the entries actually accepted for exhibit and little or no benefit even if your photos are accepted.
So I’ve gotten pretty particular. Some, like the Kinsey Institute’s annual show, are put on by institutions that I’m more than happy to support with my entry fee. Others are just fun. One that falls into that category is the Krappy Kamera show put together by the Soho Photo Gallery in NYC. The basic requirement is that the photos must have been taken with a “Krappy Kamera” such as a Holga or Diana F or anything else that has a really crappy lens, including pinhole cameras.
I’ve enjoyed playing with crappy lenses over the years, so I’m enjoying getting this entry ready. I am not a big fan of the Holga and Diana F, having been forced to work for a year with the Diana F back in photo school and hating every minute of it. I like the effects of old soft-focus lenses for some subject matter. I just don’t like the random bad things that tend to happen with those plastic cameras. So I’ve found a variety of other ways to get the soft effect.
I’ve had a single-element soft focus lens made for a Nikon mount for many years. Recently I bought an actual Holga lens attached to a Nikon mount. I also have a variety of store-bought and homemade pinholes that can be mounted on my Nikons. So I have a bunch of photos made with those crappy lenses and my digital cameras.
But, even more fun is the “camera system” I used for the photo of Nemesis in this post. I call it my “Speed Holga.” I duct taped a $3 magnifying glass to an empty lens board for my Speed Graphic and used the rear shutter and a Polaroid back to make this photo and a bunch of others that are in the running for the Krappy Kamera show.
Photography, at least for me, is about having fun. And doing things like this sure are fun. And maybe now and then they are art too.
Sorry posts have been so few and far between lately. I expect it to be like this for the next few weeks. I’m just simply very busy, mostly with things other than photography and the blogging. But I’ll be back here posting when I get time and I’ll hope to be back to doing that more frequently after the holidays.
Thanks
November 30th, 2008
Thanks for still coming here after I’ve let the blog go for nearly a full week without an update. I’ll blame it on the holiday. It’s been a busy one, but a very enjoyable one. Since my last post on Monday here’s what I’ve been doing: Tuesday I shopped for Thanksgiving food, including the difficult-to-obtain ingredients for my special ham loaf. Wednesday I cooked and had my whole immediate family over for dinner for the first time in years…and the first time ever for my new son-in-law and grandson. Thursday we were surprised by a tree service that showed up to take down a tree in our back yard on the property line. My neighbor wanted the tree removed, I agreed and he hired the company, not knowing just when they would come. But we didn’t really expect it to be on Thanksgiving Day. So I stayed home to supervise the tree people while my wife went to some friends for dinner. I joined her a couple hours later and had my second go at Thanksgiving gluttony. Friday we got up early and drove 3 hours to my brother-in-law’s to join their family for yet another Thanksgiving feast. Drove back home Saturday. So today I’m finally finding time to get back to the blog.
But I really haven’t had time to select and edit something new to post, so I cheated. That’s Athena in the foreground and Phoenix Kelley in the background in the photo above. Athena chose that photo from our shoot at a painter’s studio in the Oregon District in Dayton. Athena did the PhotoShopping on the photo and posted it on her Model Mayhem page. I really like the shot too, so I just swiped her edit off her site to post here today. Athena is a real master at PhotoShop. I hire her to work on my problem photos that need someone with real skill to correct something. She has a Model Mayhem page for her retouching work here. I can highly recommend her if you need any PhotoShop work done.
And, while we are talking about PhotoShop, let me say something about the photo in the last post. I did a little “burning” of the background in PhotoShop on that file. On the monitor I was using, which is calibrated to my printer output, that darkening of the background was invisible. I’ve since seen the photo on some other monitors and found it to be very obvious. I’ve noticed that on some other files that I’ve uploaded over the years. Monitors vary widely and as a result it’s impossible to know just how any photo is going to look to the many people who view it on a wide range of monitors. I’m a bit at a loss as to what to do about that. I could work on that file some more and make the work I’ve done invisible on a monitor that renders the photo lighter, but then the file would not print correctly on my printer. And it would look too dark on my screen and, I assume, on the screens of many other folks who have calibrated their monitors. So maybe I’ll just ask you to take my word for it that if what you see seems too light with some noticeable PhotoShopping, it doesn’t look that way on other monitors…and most importantly, it doesn’t look that way in a finished print.
Something Old and Something New
November 24th, 2008
That’s a new photo…but shot the old way…on film. I’m starting a new project inspired by the availability of a new way of working with film. Call it hybrid photography, if you will. I’m shooting medium format black and white film and having it processed at a lab that does very high quality scans at time of processing for a very reasonable price. About what you’d pay for regular prints. But the scans are really excellent. From my square negatives they come in at a little over 5,000 pixels square. Each file is about 74 megapixels when opened in photoshop. That makes them roughly the same size as the photos I shot at Lois Greenfield’s studio in NYC using her Leaf digital back. And all I had to do was drag my old medium format gear out of cabinet and buy a few rolls of film. A lot cheaper than a $30,000 digital back. Oh…and I did have to go buy new batteries for the strobe meter that I hadn’t used since I switched to digital back in 1999.
Oh…and the highlights don’t block up. And there’s no anti-aliasing filter to de-sharpen the photos. On the original scan you can count the hairs if you have enough time.
I learned about this new service at Ken Rockwell’s site. Ken has declared that “digital is dead” and film in this hybrid approach is the future. I think he’s exaggerating just a bit, but that’s his way. I’m very pleased with my first results and I’m working on refining how I’m going to approach this new series of nude portraits shot on film. I’m also going to try it with some 35mm film, both in black and white and with color negative film, just to see what those scans look like. And that will give me an excuse to pull my 60-year-old Leica out of the cabinet and shoot with it again. Wonder if the rangefinder is anywhere near accurate after all these years?
You’ll be seeing more things shot on film as I play with this. If you are interested in trying it yourself the lab is North Coast Photographic Services in the San Diego area. A direct link to info about this new service is here. I’m sure other labs will soon be offering similar services, if they aren’t already. But I can certainly vouch for NCPS as far as quality price and service go.
Who wudda thunk? Dave shooting film! Can the apocalypse be far away?
Dance Your Life Away
November 21st, 2008
More from the wonderful senior dance majors at the Ohio University School of Dance. The light for this piece was easier to cope with than the one in the previous post that was lit by flashlights and the choreography was very interesting. Couple that with really strong performances by the dancers and a few nice photos result.
Dance photography is fun. I really enjoyed taking these photos and I find I’m really enjoying looking through them and picking some to post here. I hope you are all enjoying them too.
And More Dance
November 18th, 2008
Lighting, of course, is key to successful dance performance photos. And particularly when working with student productions I never know what I’m going to encounter. The Ohio University School of Dance has an excellent lighting designer on the faculty who teaches lighting design. When he lights a piece I know I’m going to be getting good photos. His students also do a good job when they do the lighting, but there are sometimes surprises for me as they learn the exacting craft of lighting design.
Most often what I encounter that provides a challenge for photos is a lot of range in the intensity of the light. Since built-in exposure meters are useless in this lighting situation I have to shoot with the camera on manual and adjust by eye as the light changes. That’s one reason I like to attend the lighting rehearsals. I take test exposures and make notes. When I’m shooting I’ll have a notepad open beside me with the lighting adjustments for each dance noted. I also do quick “chimping” to check the histogram now and then to make sure I’m not too far off.
This piece was one of those curve balls for photography. Yes, that’s right, the piece is lit by flashlights carried by the dancers. There were parts of the piece where that was the only source of light. Thankfully most of the dance also had some, not much, but some, light thrown in from the stage lights.
My exposures ranged from 1/15 to 1/100 of a second at f/1.4 at 1600 ISO. My goal was to capture the feel of the light and the piece while still getting an occasional somewhat sharp photo. I think it worked out pretty well.
Dance, Dance, Dance
November 15th, 2008
I’ve spent the past week immersed in dance. Three days of watching lighting rehearsals so I could be familiar with each of the 19 dances. Then one evening of shooting two concerts in technical rehearsal, one after the other. Then back home to spend three days downloading, sorting, editing and uploading the photos. I shot a little less than 2,000 photos. That’s not really all that much when you consider that most of the dances were run twice at the tech rehearsal…so roughly 50 shots for each run of a dance. That was edited down to somewhere between 20 and 60 photos for each dance that made it to the web site.
Here’s the site where they are all available, in case you want to see more: http://public.fotki.com/DaveL51
I may post a few more of my favorites here too.
It’s always a pleasure to return to my alma mater and watch these wonderful young people performing their own art. Their energy, enthusiasm and creativity is a joy to see. There are some mysteries, though. For instance, I couldn’t possibly have been as young as these students are when I was a student. I was all grown up then.
Stealing Souls
November 12th, 2008
This post is a response to a post that Lin made on her blog: http://www.fluffytek.com/blog/2008/11/photography-agressive-sport.html so you’ll probably better understand what I’m talking about if you go there first and read what Lin had to say.
First I need to say that I hold Lin in the highest regard. She is a beautiful model, has a brilliant mind and is a very talented writer. I look forward to reading every one of her posts. But this time she has it completely wrong. It takes a brilliant mind to come up with ideas this far off the mark. Sorry Lin.
The basic thrust of her post is the idea that a photographer attempting to “capture” a deeper, more revealing photo of a model, a photo that reveals the “real” person, is somehow violating the model involved. Well, all I can say is bullshit…ok…I can say a lot more and I’m afraid I’m going to.
Here’s a clue for all you models out there. Pay attention. When a photographer tries to get a photo of you that reveals the “real” person you are, guess what…he’s doing HIS JOB. That’s what good photographers do. And, second clue, when you announced yourself as a model you announced that you were going to help him do that job. That’s right…if you are a model it is YOUR JOB to be there…really be there…in front of the camera and help, yes HELP, the photographer capture that photo of who you really are.
Saying you are a model but you don’t want to reveal yourself to the camera is like saying you are a brain surgeon, but you “don’t want to be involved in any of that messy cutting or drilling or sawing…that’s gross…don’t want any of that…it could traumatize me…how dare you expect me to take part in something so disgusting…just hire me to do your brain surgery and we’ll just not bother with any of that stuff.”
OK…yes, it’s more complicated than that. And most good models don’t really reveal their true selves to the camera. They are actually just excellent actors and they have a practiced, professional “model-self” that they turn on for the camera. The better they are, the more genuine that model-self seems. As Sam Goldwyn famously said, “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you learn how to fake that you’ve got it made.”
But this is the game that is played between the photographer and the model. If you don’t want to play, then don’t call yourself a model.
Those of you who are familiar with my more recent work may now be saying to yourselves, “But he doesn’t show any model’s soul in his photo…heck he even says the models are just objects in his compositions.” True enough for much of my recent work. But I’ve been doing this for a few more years than most models out there have been alive. I’ve done a lot of different kinds of work and expect to do different work in the future. I like to think that the soul revealed in my “figure in nature” work is primarily my own. But the models bring their own selves to even that work and make an important contribution, one that can’t be overestimated.
Having been doing this for more than 40 years I’ve seen things change a lot. The past 10 years or so have brought a major change with the internet bringing many new “models” and “photographers” onto the scene. I guess a lot of those “models” don’t feel the need to bring their soul to a photo shoot. I’m not so sure some of them have one to bring. But that’s ok because I see a lot of photographers whose primary message in their photos seems to be: “Look…look here…see…she’s NAKED…and, and, and…LOOK…she has HUGE TITS!” I guess that’s a message…maybe it will touch the soul of a lot of 13 year-old boys with jars of Vaseline. But that’s not exactly what I’m going for with my work.
If all I wanted to do was lighting exercises with a female figure I could get along just fine with some used store manikins. But, you know, I’m out there hunting for souls. And when I find them I want to shoot them and capture them so everyone else can see them. Because that’s the most important thing that photography can do. Show us each other. Show us who we are…who that other is…and maybe reduce that desperate gap between each and every one of us.
Of course, one of the basic problems of photography is that it cannot succeed in bridging that gap. It is limited to showing just the surface. No human is so simple as to be summed up in a photograph of their surface. But we can probe. We can look for the hints of what is in there. And when we show a hint of that we have succeeded…and maybe we have made that existential gap just a fraction smaller.
I started out as a photojournalist. I photographed floods and fires, fatal traffic accidents, riots and tornados. I intruded into other people’s suffering. After a time I couldn’t do it any more. Journalism is just the same things happening to different people every day. I also used to do street photography. That also got to feel too intrusive, as I realized that taking a photograph did indeed take a little piece of the subject’s soul. So I stopped doing that too. Eventually I ended up doing the work I do now with models precisely because it is an agreed-upon situation where the subject is a willing volunteer to the taking of that little piece of her soul.
There is much more to be said here, but this is already a very long post, so I’m going to stop…but first just a note about “aggressive male language.” That’s insulting. It’s very aggressive, in fact. Language arguments like that always remind me of my favorite candidate for a non-sexist pronoun: she-he-it. Best pronounced with a slow Texas drawl.
Now, a bit about the photos I’ve posted here. They are old…from the 1970s. I think there may be a bit of soul peeking out from behind those surfaces. Barb up at the top was an actress…so I really don’t know if that’s her soul or the soul of a character she made up. But I think there is something there. Below is Lisa and her soul was a dancer. For the photographers out there who care, both photos were taken with Leicas. Either an M2 or an M3…I carried both most of the time back then. Usually the M2 had a 35mm f/2 Canon (there’s that aggressive language again) lens and the M3 had a 90mm f/4 Elmar. Barb’s photo was made (is that better?) with the 90…Lisa’s with the 35. Tri-X developed in D-76 1:1. These are scans from prints made back in the 70s. Barb’s print was made on Agfa Portrega Rapid paper, selenium toned and hand bound into a book of prints for that project. Lisa’s print was most likely made on Kodak Polycontrast Rapid paper.
And, Lin, again, I’m sorry to have to so totally disagree with you. I hope you don’t find what I’ve said to be disagreeable…and I hope one day when I finally get over to England that you’ll give me a shot at capturing a little piece of your oh-so-deep soul.
In The Circle
November 10th, 2008
It’s a busy time at my place. We have a friend visiting from Finland. She leaves tomorrow early in the morning. And, meanwhile, I’ve been photographing a dance concert, actually two concerts, at Ohio University. That has involved spending this weekend in Athens watching the dances while they are being lit. I’ll be doing more of that this evening. Then tomorrow evening the tech rehearsal will run for both concerts, one after the other, and I’ll do my photos.
These concerts are choreographed by the senior dance majors at OU. The dance program requires each dance major to choreograph and present in concert a group piece and a solo piece. They do these in concerts in the fall and spring. There are so many seniors this year that they ended up with 19 dances to be presented at this time. Way too many for one concert. And way too many for this old photographer to keep straight.
Usually when I photograph a concert I attend these rehearsals, make notes, and take test exposures, establishing the correct exposure for each dance while also learning, in a sense, the dances so I know what’s going to be happening and can plan when to take photos…which moments I particularly want to capture for each dance. But I’m overwhelmed with all these pieces and have just given up on keeping them all straight. I’ll do my best…and it will be better than if I had never seen them before and was just shooting them like a basketball game. I hope to have my editing mostly done by the end of this week and will post some samples here when I get them ready.
Meanwhile, another story goes with this photo of Mischief Vixen. While looking through my photos on Model Mayhem I started looking at what lists they had been added to. I found one of them on a list put together by Mischief of photographers she wanted to model for. So I sent her a message saying, essentially, “Well, ok, let’s shoot.” And this is one of the photos that resulted.
If you are a model and think you’d like to take part in the work that I’m doing, well, you have already met the basic requirements to work with me. So don’t just sit there, send me a message and let me know you are interested.
I don’t work with a lot of models. I don’t try to shoot with every model out there. I’m more interested in working with a few models who really understand what I’m doing and want to be in those photos. I don’t have a certain physical type that I require for models. I just like to work with models who I enjoy being around and who are committed to making art. It also helps if they are ok with getting cold and wet and dirty. If that sounds like you, let me know and we’ll make some art together.
Now I have to get back on the road to Athens for an evening of watching dance.
This Rocks
November 5th, 2008
I’m resisting doing another political post. I’ll just say that now that the promising, posturing and lying is over for a while it’s time to see if any of the promises will be kept. History tells us that it’s not likely. But I have hope, while remaining a skeptic.
That’s Phoenix Kelley posing while freezing her pretty ass off down in the Hocking Hills a couple weeks ago. I shot this before I rediscovered Anne Brigman and started researching her work. Now I find this photo looks so much like some of her work that it’s a bit strange. I think I’m doing some different things from what Anne did with her work…but I have to wonder what her work would look like if she were alive and working today. I’m certainly not into the heavy manipulation and deliberate fuzziness that was a big part of pictorialism. And I’m very interested in color and the effect of light on the color of our surroundings. But still…my interest in the relationship of the female figure to the forms we find beautiful in nature seems to be very much what Anne was working with.
A Famous Photographer
October 31st, 2008
And now something a little different.
I recently received a copy of the Taschen book, Camera Work, The Complete Photographs, as a birthday gift from my wife. It’s a great book. Every photographer should have a copy in their library. This book will show you the starting point for photography as art. And it’s a beautiful starting point.
Pictorialism has often been ridiculed in recent times because of its attempts to be like painting instead of following the inherent qualities of the medium of photography. But seen in the proper context of the times and the goal of establishing photography as a legitimate medium for creating art, pictorialism was necessary and proper. And I would argue that there is value in the pictorialist approach even today.
But I’ll let that argument wait for another day because I want to talk about one of the pioneers of photography as an art form. And I want to mention that one inspiration for this post is the wonderful blog, museworthy, which I read and enjoy regularly. Her posts about artists provided the pattern for what I’m about to tell you about a great photographer. I’m not going to be nearly as articulate and thorough as she always is in her posts, but I’ll give it a try.
Looking through the Camera Work photographs I kept coming across photos that were clearly taken by someone with similar photographic interests to mine. The photographer is Anne (or Annie) Brigman. I had seen one of her photographs along the way as I studied the history of photography, but had never investigated her body of work. The first photo in this post is the photo that is most often associated with her.
But she did much more work, of course, and it was consistently, at least in her early work, concerned with the connection of the form of the female figure with the forms of nature. And the work is beautiful. Everyone shooting photos today of the nude in nature should be familiar with Brigman’s work because she was doing what we are trying to do and she did it extremely well. And she was possibly the first to work seriously with photography on this subject matter. And that was more than 100 years ago.
According to Wikipedia Brigman lived from 1869 to 1950. She died the year before I was born. She was born in Hawaii but spent much of her life in California. Her studio was in Oakland and was the center of art photography on the west coast at the time. She was published in Camera Work, was the only woman and only photographer living west of the Mississippi to be a member of the Photo-Secession.
From Wikipedia:
“Brigman’s deliberately counter-cultural images suggested bohemianism and female liberation. Her work challenged the establishment’s cultural norms and defied convention, instead embracing pagan antiquity. The raw emotional intensity and barbaric strength of her photos contrasted with the carefully calculated and composed images of Stieglitz and other modern photographers.”
Pretty amazing stuff for a woman at the beginning of the 20th Century.
Brigman was also an actress and a poet. She continued to photograph into the 1940s with her work becoming more modern as pictorialism fell out of favor. Her only book of her poetry illustrating her photographs was published in 1949 just before her death. It had been delayed for 8 years because of World War II.
The text accompanying a 1997 exhibit of Brigman’s work at the Oakland Museum of California says, “As a California photographer, she was revered by her West Coast colleagues, influencing a whole generation of prominent photographers that includes Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.
“Brigman’s favorite subject,” that text continues, “was the female nude, often posed outdoors in dramatic landscapes to suggest an intimate, immensely powerful connection to the natural world.”
Is it any wonder I am drawn to her work?
Of course, now I find myself wondering why it took me so long to find her work. I studied the history of photography in college. I read and look at photo books all the time. Anne Brigman doesn’t come up. Is it because she was “isolated” out on the west coast a century ago? Or because pictorialism is so often disrespected by “modern” photographers?
But she was was a major figure in the photo world of her day. What does that say about those of us who are minor figures or less in the photo world of today? Is there any hope for our work to survive us and be seen in the future? Does that matter at all? 
I don’t know the answers to those questions…and that doesn’t matter. I do what I do because it is how I see the world. I guess if others in the future come across what I’ve done and enjoy it, that’s a nice thing…but it can’t be the motivation for what I do today.
Thank you, Anne Brigman, for doing beautiful work. I wish I could have met you. I think we might have had a pleasant conversation. I’m sorry that couldn’t happen, but I’m very pleased that you left your photos here for me to enjoy.
I hope you all enjoy the photos Anne left for us as much as I do. These are just a few examples. I’ll be looking for a museum where I can see some of her original prints as I travel around the country in the future.
All photographs in this post are by Anne Brigman.
