Yeah, so other photography discussion forums are kind of depressing. I missed ILP more than the other boards.
Nope, there’s no LCD screen on the back. by celluloidpropaganda, on Flickr
feels bad when a photo is favorited, then you look at that person’s other favorites and he seems to be kind of a creep
this was great, I thought
Epson V700 arrived today. Too bad I have two tests Wednesday and finals a week later so I won’t get to really set it up for a bit.
i did the rounds of the ilxor ihardlyknowher accounts in ilx’s absence, there is a pic of a kfc ‘moment’ on one that is ~super~
& i have been getting the first rolls back from a couple of weeks of eating through a bunch of different films (i think i checked in pre-crash to lament my spooling clumsiness, i really appreciated the commiserations from y’all), a bunch of which i haven’t used before (like, the other kodak 400 speed film that’s meant to be a “step up” from tri-x, because it’s sharper; i’m kinda dubious but we’ll see, in a few weeks). i took this, w/some ektar. & tomorrow i’m picking up some konica 1- or 200 speed film i shot, i think mainly indoors, that i had cross processed and am really worried i’ll have jeopardised by doing so—bc the shots were just p straightforward & intimate, and would look best like that, i think, rather than being too trippy (& i have a patchy memory of which slide films it is that are meant to really go crazy when cross-processed; like i think agfa, so maybe i assume konica, too, just because it isn’t one i regularly use or know about), so like whether i should have had actual slides made & scanned to preserve their intended chemistry. development angst.
i like that pic, milo, it’s nice, it maybe feels a lil more spontaneous than some of your stuff?, i am thinking of the more portraity/set-piece ones (okay i am thinking of the decaying pumpkin). so many photos i take now are shot in the moments while people are distracted, engrossed in a phone or w/e.
aw man that balloon phot is great
I’m sandboxing it too.
the recent (a few weeks ago... don’t think I mentioned earlier) snafu for me was neglecting to set the correct shutter speed for a number of flash shots... a whole couple rolls with a dark bottom third of the photo :-(
what are everyone’s ihardlyknowher accounts again? I always just clicked through on the old thread.
oh and mine is http://ihardlyknowher.com/altairnouveau duh!
http://ihardlyknowher.com/celluloidpropaganda/big
i like that pic, milo, it’s nice, it maybe feels a lil more spontaneous than some of your stuff?
That’s interesting—most of what I’ve taken of late is from my immediate surroundings (family, friends, etc. just being around), I haven’t had a project in a while. But before I dropped out of the photo program I was in, I was doing terrible pretentious stuff with medium and large-format, my last student project (IIRC) was a bunch of very large (at least in pre-digital terms) color prints... of dumpsters and shopping carts. Most of the class was ripping off Cindy Sherman, I was trying to rip off Stephen Shore/Hiroshi Sugimoto/the Bechers. I think I’m often still trying for a sense of stillness.
I was thinking today about how most of my favorite photographers are street/documentary-oriented, especially the New York street school. But really, that’s not an idiom I can relate to or explore in my own life—street crowds like that don’t exist where I’m live, and if I found them it wouldn’t really be an honest portrayal of my world. And even if I packed it in and moved to a hovel in Brooklyn, I doubt that it’s work I could do honestly at this point—I’m 30. I need to start figuring out how to make the space (and terrible light) of Texas and working-class suburbia my thing again.
good post!
cv i really dig ur photos in ihardlyknowher series format like
I dug these photos:
http://riandundon.com/links.html
dang he has some nice stuff
cv’s stuff is so good. it has that kinda thomas struth ‘remove’ that objectifies everything in the frame; like i think if i took a shot of the people watching the waterfall i would have just taken a tourist shot of the waterfall, cluttered by some people. even the car in the first picture looks good & makes sense & cars are always usually ruining photos like that. the photos look like how things look without looking how they just ‘look’ (i think dayo mentioned a guy who i wasn’t familiar with not so long ago on the photo thread, a contemporary guy who shoots in slightly muted colours i think on medium format, american slightly-distant-portraiture and not-too-distant landscape scenes; kinda like that guy’s stuff). (really interested you use flash, btw, cv, is that for street stuff or?)
really like your post!, btw milo. it is funny, i was just back in america for a couple of weeks, and it was a really useful experience in making me think about that whole ‘what do you take photographs of’ thing, beyond the extent to which that’s automatic (cf oh look some colourful balloons). i’m not american & there is a huge temptation to gravitate towards things which already have some kind of schematic context, already come with baggage & which you feel in capturing will successfully reinforce some idea of whatever they are—so obvious stuff like flags, which you see everywhere & which are so obviously overwhelmingly proof of america, a signal. but i feel like this extends to buildings and everything else on the street, too, & i wonder whether doing the take-a-picture-of-a-dumpster thing can be limiting because of this; you take a picture of something that already stands in for and suggests a way of representing a city, “here is its cumbersome, paint-peeling necessity, parked on the street, overwhelming but invisible”. & that that’s true, def, but whether there is some other more slight or more complicated way of suggesting the city and the street. your post made me think of this eggleston photo, which is one of my v fav photographs just in the world ever, i guess in reference to the idea of street photography, the depiction of crowds and disorder, being less relevant to where you are—like this is perfectly still. i love reading about what you’re shooting for, anyway. & most all of my photos now are my friends, local, looking, in terrible light, & they are not going to be for-all-time photographs but i think, i hope, eventually, collaterally, they will say something about having occupied this place around now, i think.
oh & to conclude my pent-up to-do list of things-to-post-to-ILP:
man contemporary urban china is just made for high contrast b&w, i think, it’s like new york in the 1960s w/kodachrome. disorder is innaresting in this respect:
geez thanks guys! speaking as someone living in a hovel in brooklyn (and approx. 30) though I sometimes wish I were somewhere else. somewhere with an actual horizon and sunlight and interesting shadows etc.
went back out to california (la and sf) recently for a couple of trips and really would have liked to stay longer to take more pictures. sf is still just about my favorite city and la is really photogenic! there’s light everywhere, lots of odd shadows and reflections, absurd buildings, and poles, antennas, power lines etc. as far as the eye can see! and horizons!! I’d imagine that texas offers many of the same advantages (at least as far as light and the horizon goes).
the flash work was for (argh!!!!) a friend’s wedding! but I was backed up with digital and a second camera. I’ve tried using a flash in public from time to time, but I’m no Bruce Gilden and the results (with a couple of exceptions) weren’t worth it. so I use a flash... when it’s dark!
that Eggleston chromes book looks great...
ha, ahh that’s interesting. see i still just shoot when it’s dark and things don’t turn out. i am not sensible that way. it’s interesting you took photz at a friend’s wedding!, a bunch of friends got married this year & i kinda loved having my camera at both weddings & shooting, but that’s so different from being the actual trusted one-shot photographer person who has the burden of capturing everything ON SUCH A SPECIAL DAY (like at one of the weddings i found i had pulled my trademark ‘roll did not spool’ trick, which i guess would not be well received had i been the main photographer—so yeah a good situation to use digital in).
i think flash is interesting, i have almost never used it, or not when i’ve been taking ~“photos”~ rather than just snapping with a digi on which i can’t figure out how to turn it off. there can be something interesting about it—i know in a bunch of contemporary art a few years ago there was this kinda gloss-print, flash-image aesthetic in a lot of work, picking up on how hyperreal stuff can look, how much you can separate & freeze a figure from a background.
xp yeah doesn’t it; i sorta assume it’s basically a memphis furniture and fixture inventory c. 1973, only with him taking photos of the tables and stop signs, etc. something pure about it also though.
it is like $10 zillion btw
btw, CV, check this guy, idk if you have seen him, he is one of my favs, i maybe enthused about him on the old thread: http://www.ph0.ch/
the first set (under ‘personal’) is new and nice. bleachy.
taobao purchase i want to try the high contrast b+w + urban china vibe with this fucking thing
i liked the burma color stuff a bit better
URBAN
CHINA
KX
SEAGULL
on a t-shirt
Those Matthieu Gafsau pictures are nice! I feel like I might have seen some before but I can’t be sure.
as far as weddings go, I would normally never in a million years want to volunteer for something like that, but they were friends who claimed they liked the way my pictures looked, as-is, and wanted me to snap away, so I figured they knew what they were getting into. still might have held off except for the fact that they also gave me $$$ for the plane flight plus some extra. I can’t afford to take trips otherwise.
other flash strategy = use the point-and-shoot on the “fill” setting (I’ve got an Olympus stylus for this purpose) and just fire away. looks like the kx seagull might fit the bill for that!
and yes, I see now that the eggleston book is a million dollars and I will never buy it.
If it were $200, I might find a way to swing it, but $320 at Amazon is rough. Biggest photo book regret is not getting Winogrand’s 1964 book because it was ~ $120.
hmm, I’ll bet that gets reissued eventually.
aw :/
meanwhile guys the crossprocessing was a roaring success *throws hand up for hi-5*
:D
(have to admit I saw that as ‘hp-5’ first)
got some Amazon gift cards for my change jar, went on a book spree:
Vivian Maier: Street Photographer
Alec Soth’s America
Magnum Contact Sheets
Bruce Davidson: Subway
the book of Tod Papageorge’s essays
used copy of The Photographic Reader (used as a textbook so too expensive new)
only gotten to look at Magnum Contact Sheets so far, but it’s a pretty great deal even at $90—the thing weighs almost nine pounds IIRC.
Great stuff on here already!
In the absence of a WDYLL thread, here’s a photo of me taken by my 5yo daughter:
Whoa Michael, you look like you are in the Spooks control room! Awesome!
The Deep Blue cafe in the Science Museum! Lightbox tables...
it is mine. the seagull4B. is it true that these are still in production (wikipedia says sooo)?
yeah it’s true
Oh wow I forgot how shitty scanning film is.
could crosspost to girl problems thread
If it were possible to fall for a photograph...
Oh wow I forgot how shitty scanning film is.
what time-wise? or quality?
don’t knock scanning film, it’s one of my favorite pastimes.
yeah, explain yourself
i thought you were all-digi, milo
i just scan prints but find it p enthralling anyway, anything at 400dpi+ is fascinating to me
more slide film fun, btw; both of these relevant to both the fun of cross-processing & the what does it mean aspect of what should you take photos of, wrt america & its brazenly americana-n detritus, ie flags & currency &c
That window reflection is pretty great. Where is that?
Bought a Epson V700 and set it up last night, I’d just forgotten what a PITA handling film for scanning was—flatness, dust control, long scans, etc..
Ultimately worth it, at least for medium-format with the V700, but boy does it make me appreciate digital workflow.
it’s grand street, in williamsburg. it is a crop, also, which i never do but did because i wasn’t really uploading it as a photo but as part of a kinda diaristic thing that was slightly less rigorous. ty anyhow. the $5 thing is slightly fetishistic i think, but generally ny is so good for like messy-colourful-urban-sprawl photz.
xp
you probably just need to learn to slow your digital heartbeat milo, and commune with the sound and speed of the scanner; to understand that scanning a photograph & posting to ilx in the interim scanner processing period are as one.
i scan all of my stuff on the scratched-up beat-up library scanners because i can’t commit to buying a super-cheap unscratched regular scanner because i’m still thinking about, unnecessarily chewing over, the whole buy-a-scanner, scan-yr-bw-negs thing that was discussed here a while back.
oh hey also, ILP sandboxer edition:
it was cool that IHKH took off, but just in case anyone was still looking for the tumblr-themes-of-their-dreams, i saw this a couple of days ago, which looks p suitable, size-wise etc
Agreed on that. This is my latest:
re: scanning I don’t even really have any control of image flatness w my machine. it’s generally not bad but sometimes you can see a little curvature in straight lines. nothing worse than you might get from many lenses anyway though. dust on the other hand... the eternal struggle.
my workflow is slow too! but methodical and I enjoy it. 1.) get back (uncut negatives) 2.) cut into sections of 6 each 3.) scan frame by frame and adjust color sliders manually (no clipped anything if I can help it) and 4.) slip into negative sleeves, and label to match the folder the files are in. I don’t do any auto dust removal unless I’m certain its a shot I want and it really needs it. either no sharpening or the lowest amount of sharpening. usually no negative color cast removal. all folders/sleeves say something like 0290–2011-XA2 Fuji Superia 400 so in theory I can easily find anything that needs a rescan down the road.
now what part of that hours-long process doesn’t sound like a barrel of fun???
xpost
agreed on that = “ny is so good for like messy-colourful-urban-sprawl photz”
ha yeah, that sentence was only orphaned until I saw the pic—yr stuff really is so great. I think it’s the relationships between people that make me always say Jeff Wall:
http://images.prophotos.ru/45/28/45282400d92357bb684da0e4991fd2fd_article_660_2008050717.jpg
http://www.chimpomatic.com/file-uploads/large/jeff-wall-bird.jpg
I love the broad church that is ILP, in terms of the varying methodologies of everyone involved; I can’t totally follow the various steps of your scan/clean-up process—like idk what image flatness even is—but it’s interesting. when you’re playing with the colours, is that to match by eye to a print you’ve seen, or according to what you think they should be, or ?
yeah love Jeff Wall.
image flatness is just actually literally getting the negative to be flat, rather than bowing or curving etc. I think some scanners sandwich it between glass, and drum scanners seal it with water maybe? but mine just holds the edges so if it’s a fresh roll and very curved, it’ll show a bit. can be flattened eventually though if I roll it in the opposite direction for a while.
the colors are half “what seems correct based on what I remember” and half “what looks nice.” like I’ll broadly try to move sliders until it looks “right” but will then move them a little more. in real life I never see cyan tinted shadows, but because its something that film does that can look appealing I’ll maybe bring it out a bit on some shots. or warm the photo with yellow in the shadows, sharpen it with magenta, etc. that kinda thing.
I haven’t gotten prints in ages, by the way, and when going through old photos back home in San Jose recently was reminded how nice even quick prints from a point-and-shoot could once look. got some new ones for a roll a week or so ago and the magic is gone! I think a lot of labs do digital prints now, even from negatives, and they automatically bump up contrast and do weird things with the color balance. didn’t look good at all.
I need to get in the habit of making contact sheets of all my negatives ($.39 8x10s at Walgreen’s!), my old negative binders have lost most of the contact sheets and there’s no organization to them at all. Thankfully it’s mostly B&W and I can still ‘read’ negatives without a contact pretty well. Color neg, not so much.
It looks to me like 12x12 or even 15x15 prints from medium-format are doable from the V700 (or the equivalent in 6x7/6x9), which makes me happy. 35mm scanning isn’t going as well, but I can’t tell yet if I was just feeding it less-than-sharp negatives.
have you adjusted the height? do they sharpen up in post?
two tests:
parents’ dog on Provia, girl I was dating, both circa 2002
Scan-111130-0002-2.jpg by celluloidpropaganda, on Flickr
Scan-111130-0009.jpg by celluloidpropaganda, on Flickr
From what I can tell the + setting (3.5mm) is sharpest for my scanner. MF sharpens up well, but 35mm still iffy. Need to try some grainier films and try to base it on grain resolution. (moderately bitter that my professors pushed TMax 100 & 400 back then—so much harder to work with in general than Tri-X or HP5)
Also need to spring for Photoshop while I get student prices from my university—the Lightroom sharpening function does not seem as scanner friendly as the usual PS methods.
what does a full-size crop of a 35mm scan look like? I’m used to them never looking *temendously* sharp at 100%, but still fine for printing in a medium size.
I displayed this in an earlier thread, but this is what a 100% scan looks like before dealing with color noise etc. for me:
black and white negs generally were sharper on the V700 than color negs, for me at least
and for a sense of scale, this is the full image:
but sharpness was never a big concern for me—I think that’s one area where digital is always going to have 35mm beat. I prefer the ‘roundness’ of scanned 35mm—sharpness is not the only way to evaluate a photo!
otm
Untitled by celluloidpropaganda, on Flickr
found a negative that was unquestionably sharp (which is what happens when you use 400 ISO film midday at the Grand Canyon). boring picture, but it scans well (so much Tri-X grain!)
Grand Canyon, Tri-X, 2002-3 by celluloidpropaganda, on Flickr
i dunno, if you cropped below the horizon it could be a cool ambient/noize LP cover
Cabless by celluloidpropaganda, on Flickr
damn, although i wish they’d left us with a sweeter shot to carry home
he hung out w/ a lot of bangin chicks
Second one is from high school... picked up old negatives when in CA.
btw, by dirty secret is that I *do* actually read the rest of ilx
“my”
damn! CV, they’re both awesome. second one is so interesting. what was the aftermath of you shooting the first, the guy just crankily looking at you for invading his personal zone? (i am not a v in-yr-face photographer but the times i am i find i can usually get away with seeming to just be fucking with my camera or photographing something else).
really psyched to go back to my folks’ place for the holidays because imma scan some old photos, everything i’ve looked at since i’ve been scanning stuff being from the past three, four years. that high school landscape is dope tho.
this also booming btw: http://www.flickr.com/photos/altairnouveau/6373831907/sizes/l/in/photostream/
the aftermath was just that I kept walking and so did he. I hardly ever have any trouble at all. if people even notice they just kinda look momentarily confused but rarely even slow down aside from some notable times that I could count on two hands. dunno if I’d have similar reactions in other cities or what...
the thing about the high school photo is I dunno if it would even look so good if I shot it now! like the framing was probably even accidental! the point and shoot I was using is so imprecise that there’s no way I was really intentionally lining up the sign like that.
ha, sure. there are ten zillion things that go into why a photo is good so it isn’t like all the credit goes to your framing expertise anyway. it’s great.
looking at those, the first one especially (which seems so like ‘contemporary new york’, to me, & which you would kinda hope will richen w/age), i just wondered about going back to the idea of presenting photos, do you-all ever think of collecting your stuff? i just mean broadly, what your thoughts are; it was inspiring to me to see grady’s book/pamphlet (online, i haven’t bought one yet, it’ll happen), & part of me thought i should make some kind of something full of mine (i think i eventually decided against this because they look good enough online & i don’t think are neatly cohesive enough to necessarily form a book or w/e). & none of this necessarily relates to like kickstarted attempts to raise $20000 for printing at Peru’s finest press or anything; i just mean on any scale. do you guys, ILP in exile, consider it?
I have been really impressed with (and inspired by) the photography of Missy Prince of late
http://lpvmagazine.com/2011/07/missy-prince/
Came across her quite randomly and wonder what you photography types think!
Funnily enough, that first photo reminds me of Lelant Saltings in Hale, Cornwall.
yeah they’re real nice, FT. & interesting. obv the colours are very good but the angles seem kinda unusual too.
interesting that she mentions wenders’ photography; I can only think of one WW photo i’ve seen, which I liked a bunch & hadn’t ever followed up on
(
, fwiw)
also just skipping the interim detailing of how i looked up wenders and found nice photos he took, does anyone have any experience w/HORIZON CAMERAS?, the panoramic originally russian now maybe lomo-fied (lomotomised?, lol) ones? they look fun
& none of this necessarily relates to like kickstarted attempts to raise $20000 for printing at Peru’s finest press or anything; i just mean on any scale. do you guys, ILP in exile, consider it?
I threw together a blurb book of the photos I took of my friends over the course of the last year, was going to give them out as Christmas presents, but with the nice ProLine paper it’s ~$38/book, which is a bit more than I can afford right now for 10+ people.
oh that’s neat; lol at some of the photos also. that’s a nice idea. i mean, you know when you get ex-libris titles in which plates have been stuck or glued? i kinda wonder whether that’s an option, too; i mean there’s a line between crumply photo album & ~book~ but i feel like even hand-making an edition of one w/photographic prints would be neat in a lot of ways
the idea of putting together some sort of book is appealing, but I just don’t know how I’d have the time?
I don’t even have any meaningful prints really. if I put in most of my editing work on the computer, then I don’t know what makes sense... dig out the negatives and get them enlarged someplace? print from the digital scans? somehow that feels wrong.
ctein over at top is an advocate of printing from scans for negatives—you have much more control over the printing process and editing than you would in a traditional darkroom
huh.. guess I figured I’d be losing out on “the magic” or something. nice to know that it isn’t considered a dead end!
well you get much more precise control over stuff like tonality and gradation and color shifts etc. you control more variables
and since you have a dedicated 35mm I imagine it’s no slouch!
it’s not bad, although prob not the best in the world. I need to get my hands on a decent printer so I can sink further into the photography time hole.
Stephen Shore has also gone entirely to digital output. I liked printing color in a darkroom, but it’s hard to beat the control and archival qualities of a good inkjet print.
xp yeah, I gotta think that digital printing works best with color prints
Those Alex Webb pictures are stellar.
woot!
oh—it did work. disregard previous woot.
huh. sorry that is so big.
dayo, is there actually such a pervasive sense of quiet, anomic despair on the streets in HK, or do you shelve the photos of people going about not seemingly contemplating their insignificance? yr photz are so good & they have such a strong feeling to them. sorta like tsai ming-liang’s taiwan
aw thanks schlump! no there are tons of happy people in HK I just don’t take pictures of them :< I keep thinking about this idea that I read in a gerry badger book that he got from somebody else prob that photography is a medium best suited for melancholy and I wonder how true that is
ha that’s interesting. i saw Geoff Dyer give a talk about photography recently & he was maybe slightly mythically talking about the photographers in the ’60s & ’70s loving the empty streets, or the “built environment” “haunted” by “lone figures”, which you can obv bring a lot of evidence for (i’m not good w/names but obv there are a few of those classic NY guys shooting outta their windows). all of which seems to feed an idea of melancholia—the people faceless & far away & made Keaton-ishly small by the dominance of the city &c&c&c. i think it is def a poignant thing—a kinda break or paradox or something—to be able to get on film, cf Frank’s elevator girl maybe.
the idea of putting together some sort of book is appealing, but I just don’t know how I’d have the time?
but china you LOVE SCANNING, c’mon throw yourself into it. i know what you mean. i have been so pleased w/how things have looked on screen that the impetus to do much with physical prints has become smaller, but i can see the kind of ‘cohesive’ / ‘physical object’ appeal of a book. i think i have less of a priority of things looking their best than you guys (i guess bc my photography is so much better?, & i am sorta a more original visual thinker?, & bad facsimiles of my photos are still superior to well-rendered representations of allay’all’s? no idk i just mean i don’t go that extra mile re: good scans), but just making an object even if it were sorta hand-made would still mean something to me, i think.
here is another tangent: has anyone ever really fucked w/their negatives, much? the violence of it can be so striking & disarming, seeing it in (again) Frank’s later work, it is a wild thing to me. i wish there were more crossover between a couple of the ilx filmmakers & the ilp cru bc i feel like i’ve read some super-eighters talk about the physicality of celluloid interestingly before
lol I was going to post about how frank’s elevator girl is maybe my most favorite photograph ever but I see you got there first!
ha. i can’t even choose that way. i know i posted this maybe a while ago, re: discussion of crowds vs emptiness, but my reflex pick for fav photo is this b/w eggleston, which actually sorta seems relevant to the same point of like, ‘dislocation in built environments’, &c. for frank jeez who could choose, i always liked the guy hugging the girl but it could be one of a million. & yeah the elevator girl is allllll time.
also fond of this photo of christina carter by Benoit Chaput (“after bagels & coffee, 2004”)
& a photo of my grandparents that i don’t have a scan of.
aw that eggleston is a seriously great photo. the shadow on the lawn, some kind of split. wish I could see it bigger.
ah, frustrating i can’t find it any bigger; was so psyched at his whitney show to see it, a slightly damaged print, not so big. the guy in it is holding his spectacles in his right hand & looks sorta dazed, which w/o being too prescriptive is just perfect, what w/it being such almost cartoonish “the american suburbs” in the backdrop. HOW DID I GET HERE?.
all this egglestoning reminds me, i’ve still never seen either of the documentaries about him, but i watched this clip a couple of days ago:
which would only persuaded me to watch it for the lols. it’s like that great saul leiter interview from a while back. documentarians bringing too much to the table.
it’s definitely a ‘sigur ros’ approach tho
Seems like for every time they gain a little shadow detail, there are ten times where they contrast it into oblivion.
The funny thing is with the image I posted, I think anyone working in film with, say, a medium format, would be super pleased to get those tones and that soft contrast, but when someone gets a raw file looking like that, the first thing they do is boost the blacks and pump that s-curve. I’d think it was for the lousy print quality of newspapers, except that I’m guessing these are all mostly looked at on screens anyway.
well the s-curve is usually built into film anyway
I always figured the low contrast possibilities of digital were actually kind of an advantage!
apart from the fucked up zombie gstar shirt i don’t know if i mind. i thought it was following in tradition of punching up contrast of images for newspaper even if like cv said most are not going to be seen on newsprint.
I’m also love to complain, don’t forget.
“I’m also love to...” is what happens when you only halfway edit your post.
Totally not doing the Turnley workshop. $1500 workshop, $400 airfare, and since I’d need to be close to the UWS for morning critiques I’m having a hard time finding a hotel without a million bed bug reports for under $200/night.
What a superb thread this is. You guys are bringing immense content to the table.
I’m a terrible man for the processing; the only one I really don’t like in that BJP article is this one... which I’ve had a bash at myself... (yeah, I know, I’m processing a low-res JPG off the web here)
No beef with the amount of manipulation done here, but much of it is of questionable quality IMO. The first one seems to have a bit of a halo in the transition between foreground to sky, oversharpened maybe.
The men standing in the burned out building (with charred bodies) and the following one (blind man?) are improvements, though I don’t know that it was necessary to bring up his eyes to make them look stranger.
The first one just needs the blacks brought up +5 (give or take a couple) in LR3 (or similar adjustments in whatever) and very little else changed, they totally overdid it.
I’ve been finding that RAW files often need that black adjustment (if LR3 doesn’t have a camera profile) or else they appear to have a kind of grayness overlaid.
It’s more an overall desaturation to the 4th one which completely alters skintones and makes it highly stylised. I do this A LOT but I’d like to think I wouldn’t do it if I was a PJ. It’s just odd.
xp—yes, agreed
Totally not doing the Turnley workshop. $1500 workshop, $400 airfare, and since I’d need to be close to the UWS for morning critiques I’m having a hard time finding a hotel without a million bed bug reports for under $200/night.
― milo z, Wednesday, December 21, 2011 5:04 PM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark
yeah the Turnley thing seems like it’s aimed at well-heeled amateurs who are wondering why they aren’t taking better pictures despite have a 5dII/D3/M9 etc. the fact that it takes place in NYC is a big clue
i mean, this is how i get lost in this thread, maybe because i have a completely diff background to the rest of you guys but i mean i’ll take whatever i get back from asda and i mean i’m more bothered about issues of composition, gesture, mood than really thinking about contrast, tonality etc. this always seems v technical to me. i dont want to go over all that stuff abt “looking” again
asda?
yeah I mean you’ve mentioned before about how there’s a ‘visual grammar’ and yeah everybody’s got their own, it’s not universal. I just happen to approach pics from a documentary mode. and yeah the talk about tonality and contrast can be a little technocratic at times, but it can also be used to get at what the picture is about. like you can def talk about tonality w/ an alec soth picture in both technical and artistic terms, and both avenues have merit.
and there are def critics who talk about photographs in terms of composition and gesture and mood! idk it just makes me uncomfortable because it then starts to implicate questions of intentionality (which are there, but hard to talk around)
I’m just much more happy w/ photographs being mute shrines
asda is a place in england
isnt there just as much intentionality at work in choosing ones gear. thinking about framing might be as simple a decision as looking in the viewfinder and deciding that you’re gonna push the shutter. photographing still lifes, objects landscapes, people, animals, there’s varying degrees to which you can be in control of the image and certain set-ups and subject matter gives you more control. i mean if you think of commercial photographers doing product photography for advertising and the way they endlessly tweak and hone an image, lighting, composition, etc. the way it is fine tuned with the input of different parties and interests. this is probably the furthest i can think of from the lionised street photographer and the decisive moment, but there are different ways of working and approaches. there is the process of trying to repeat happy accidents, returning to a subject again and again. and also how a lot of work is posed, i think of sally mann (who as well is somebody who is all about gear as well so) and how you can see videos of her setting up and posing those shots of her kids.
i saw a clip of eggleston where he said that he doesn’t bother taking two photos of the same thing because he doesn’t like having to pick between two almost identical photographs and i kindof immediately started doing the same thing, consciously thinking about this. and maybe this isn’t what he intends but for me its about frontloading those decisions. and i think the consistency of a given photographers output is sufficient for me to want to think about those decisions. i mean also i studied painting not photography and am v much a dilettante, novice, amateur. like i said, i just get everything processed at the cheapest place i can find but even that is a decision and i think the employment of chance is not the same as leaving things to chance.
I’m happy to talk about the composition, gesture, and mood trifecta! I also think we *are* talking about them when we talk about contrast, tonality, camera choice, format size, digital vs. film, etc. If I don’t talk about the subject, or more directly about, say, composition, I think it’s because those are things that I think about when selecting images, and then not again.
And my obsession with scanning, contrast levels, color balance, etc. is my own method of reducing choice. I’ve mandated that I will always try to process pictures in a sort of kinda “natural” way, so I will never have to think about whether to keep dust & scratches, or whether to amp up the contrast, etc. etc. It’s my version of just getting the film back from asda, but it just takes longer and is a total pleasure!!
Totally not doing the Turnley workshop. $1500 workshop, $400 airfare
Dude, just spend on the airfare and stay someplace cheap and stalk the city with a camera the whole time! It will probably be just as valuable!
nb I know that there is nothing “natural” about the contrast even on a “neutral” film, or film at all, or a still picture at all, but you know...
Yeah, I’m going to spend a week in SF in March, maybe. Or I was thinking of some place like Venice Beach—I’ve never been to LA and if I stuck to one hood, I wouldn’t have to rent a car, maybe.
Pipe dream is to just sublet a place in NY for a month in the summer, but I doubt I can escape my local obligations here.
I default in editing/criticism of other peoples’ work (written, photos, etc.) to ‘how would I do that differently/what choices would i change’ or ‘how is that doable.’
I’m much better at separating myself from that in the arts where I have no personal experience.
For what it’s worth, I think that LA is one of the most photogenic cities out there. All strange landscapes with poles, wires, and signs every which way. Bizarre foliage and buildings etc. And SF is my true love city. Lotsa good pictures to be had all over.
isnt there just as much intentionality at work in choosing ones gear.
yeah! I mean I largely agree with everything you said. funny as you mention gear as gear IS a shortcut for tlaking about how a photographer works—like leicas are synonymous with street photog, large format cameras with ‘serious format.’ I swear to god, find me one essay that talks about a large-foramt photographer that doesn’t mention how ‘measured’ and ‘slow’ and ‘intentional’ you have to be when using one.
and yeah what I meant about the dangers of ascribing intentionality really just meant the dangers of saying ‘this shot came out exactly how the photographer envisioned it.’ peoples choices about what to use, where to point the camera at, when to click the shutter definitely ARE intentional acts—but to get at them you can’t treat it as discrete instances, but like you said, as accretions, accumulations of choices that were made when the photographer picked up the camera in the first place.
and yeah like cv said those technocratic terms can be used to get at the pith of what a photographer does. like I dunno if you can talk about weston without mentioning...tonality.
Intentionality becomes especially relevant when talking about editing, I think.
editing meaning selecting
i doubt there is any art form where serendipity doesn’t exert a strong influence but i feel like maybe overstating its role in photography specifically is about as corrosive as overstating the photographer’s ability to determine exact outcomes. that is, i do agree w/ you by and large. nothing will ever be fully accounted for.
Intentionality becomes especially relevant when talking about editing, I think.
yeah see imo editing/selecting is the act from which can derive the most about a photog’s “sensibility.”
i doubt there is any art form where serendipity doesn’t exert a strong influence but i feel like maybe overstating its role in photography specifically is about as corrosive as overstating the photographer’s ability to determine exact outcomes. that is, i do agree w/ you by and large. nothing will ever be fully accounted for.
i can’t really tell if this is relevant, because it’s so loaded with my approach to taking photos—rather than that of someone who does plan, think better, design & compose better—but i feel like such a key part of photography is the magical-mechanical-alchemy, the emulsion-burning that goes on after you frame & click, which you initiate but don’t really act in, that it wrestles some of what’s happening away from like ‘authorial control’ or intention, the thing we associate personally with painting or writing or anything else. photography’s so collateral, & benefits from the incidental existence of things so much, that there’s something that doesn’t entirely jive w/intentionality for me. i don’t mean because at the last moment a deer could just walk into the frame & enliven your photo, & you couldn’t have controlled that, but that even if you are really well prepped for something & expect its results i feel like they’re not entirely yours.
this is maybe just born of using nice film & being psyched at what for me is a roll of the dice, re: the tone & character your photo ends up taking on, rather than knowing it, & maybe i am just co-signing “isnt there just as much intentionality at work in choosing ones gear”, but i think the result is kinda halfway between where you were & how you prepped, and that’s not the same ratio as with other media.
i had dinner at my friend’s house a couple of weeks back & took a couple of pictures around the table & at some point looked up at his light fixture & took a photo of it, near the end of the roll, & it came out real nice, so much nicer a photo* than it deserved to be, i mean it’s a picture of a light fixture but it’s nicely rendered & there’s a varied focus and all of these other things. i’m psyched for having bothered to take a photo more than i am proud of having calculated it. this would be different if i knew my film inside out & had loaded up knowing that i was off-setting the light in the picture with my faster shutter-speed, &c—there would be less and less serendipity—but i still think you’re outsourcing a big chunk of credit to a machine (which i am totally okay with, i think you get credit for taking your camera with you when you leave the house).
* also i think i have taken a bunch of pictures of light fixtures & never got as far away from “oh i see you like william eggleston, huh”.
that ceiling isn’t very red
(lol, jk. lovely photo!)
ha ha it is inescapable though. i think he is quite beatles-y, or like canon in d or something, in having just monopolised huge areas of ground one could otherwise cover. like taking photos of anything illuminated by window light on an aeroplane. or any sort of textural detail of the side of the house/the ground/some foliage. can’t do it.
i could not compete with his redness though, no.
speaking of no shadow detail
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/black-and-white-and-black-all-over/
also recommended: brassai’s paris de nuit
hey CV do you know this guy, feel like you both work the same beat
i have no thoughtful response to the b/w set above other than being okay with absolute blacks in bw phots; i’ve come to love midtones a lot, & be less into the extremity & pop of high-contrast stuff, but there’s still a huge appeal, & i think a particular schematic appreciation for the feel of seeing that kinda thing in newspapers and on screens and in those like fifties-hollywood contexts for forever
why is the SJ photo landscape when she is holding the camera portrait
Oh yeah, Gus Powell. Part of the In Public scene that I’m inclined to make fun of, but generally I actually really like his pictures. They have that nicely “pulled back” view that I enjoy you know? And he’s def on a lot of the same turf I roam around.
Hey, she can smile. by celluloidpropaganda, on Flickr
finally opened up ‘for now’—gorgeous book! it’s big, too
ha the festive update we have all been waiting for, so cool. i’m a little tempted.
i am photographically celebrating the holidays by, having finished a roll of some interesting kodak 100 (xl or xd or something) film, loading up a 24-exposure roll of 400 speed film that you used to get free from the developers with printing which probably expired several years ago & has been yellowing at my folks’ place. january is gonna be bleached.
first edition already OOP and selling for $200 from the website. feel like I just slashed my copy’s value in half by opening it. oh well, mazel tov!
oh dang, really? i checked rece & saw i could get it for like $50, who knows what edition. but i’m glad you opened it, well-preserved & desirable valuables are truly the possessions of savages imo
there’s a picture from a medium format camera in here! wtf, get out :}
wau @ the dali emoticon there. WE branching out
used two Amex gift cards to get 35 rolls of rebranded Tri-X in 35mm and 20 rolls of Portra 400 in 120, along with the steal I got on Neopan 400 ($2.79 a roll for 25 rolls), I should have plenty of film for the forseeable future.
that is a lot. i spent $40 on prob seven or eight rolls of interesting (new) film a couple of weeks ago & that was almost as much as i’ve ever had planned out. it’s running out quick but i get to swing by the place that stockpiles expired stuff next week, so i’ll end up with another nine, ten. just out of curiosity, Milo, what’s the deal with the stuff you shoot & post here?; it’s all scans of film or is any of it digi?
99% digital—either my old D700 or the X100 I’m using now. I’ve only started shooting film again recently and haven’t scanned anything I found very interesting.
My Flickr views have gone way up since I started putting up more photos of my roommate (that’s her in the last picture) and my friend Erin (first photo in the thread). Shocking.
yeah i think flickr is pretty gross like that
kinda grosser that they’re not even ‘sexy’ shots
i totally co-sign this ^^^ & think flickr is the ultimate lol for getting 10 drooly photographer guys saying WONDERFUL LIGHTING, REALLY INTERESTING ANGLE at some emo nude shot, BUT, i do think there is some room to allow for it being like a general human response to another human subject, more than always being just a terrible, base urge. there are photos which are photos of people that are appealing for those people; either them existing, or gesturally, or whatever, & i think the tangling of “i am looking at a photo” & “i am looking at a human”, to whom we might have a variety of responses (based on attractiveness or aesthetics or w/e), is pretty difficult to divorce. i just found an old flickr account i had for some digi-snacks a couple of years ago & it has photos i’ve favourited, & a bunch of them are these kinda radiant or colourful pictures that have a guy or a girl in. we are pretty drawn to that sorta thing & i wouldn’t have to answer for my gravitation to them in some ways. so seeing the views go up, i can feel that there’s obviously a WELL SEX SELLS response to it but i also think that wondering whether the views would be the same, say if the subject were interchanged, is a hard comparison to make.
maybe this is getting sorta pop your top off love i have an idea
i wouldn’t want to have to answer for my gravitation to them, rather
it’s like i was looking of that picture of giacometti’s face. it is a pretty good face.
yeah i mean i like photos of hot guys
Everyone still <3 photography here? Before this thread drops off the bottom of the page I figure I’ll revive it in the classic fashion, by posting another picture yet again:
After a “fertile period” I’m running out of negs to scan though. It is now grey and cold and not as fun to take pictures, though I’ll continue giving it a shot when the sun shows its face.
PS is anyone ever able to pick up Fuji Superia 400 in 36 exp rolls? Seems they’ve been discontinued. Yet another sign of impending doom. Love those film cameras while you still can.
Everyone still <3 photography here?
ha, i had the same thought yesterday & wondered if this previously out-of-control-freight-train of a thread had run out of steam.
i think i occasionally get on top of photos i have to scan, & feel like they’re p much done, but i still usually have twenty rolls of undeveloped film in a bag, so they’re there for when i have the money to get prints. also i just got a scanner!, an old hand-me down that will diminish the amount of time i spend using the cuff of my sleeve to buff scratches on the library scanners. i’m mainly getting b&w stuff printed, recently, with a two week wait, but i like knowing i have so much old stuff (it’s usually like a 12 month backlogue, interrupted by occasionally getting stuff developed after i’ve shot it).
i also spent a couple of days at my folks’ place over the holidays scanning some old photos i took like five years ago in rome, on ilford delta 3200, which i tend to reflexively duck away from now—like it was a hallmark of my earlier attempts at boldness—but which holds up really well, & is more generous w/midtones etc than i remember (here’s a couple).
like your photo a lot, the guy’s modestly lilac ensemble is nice. that’s w/flash, right?
i am p sure i can still get superia 400 (am in the uk), i’m not crazy about it though. you oughtta stockpile :/
God I can’t even imagine that kind of backlog anymore. It is really kind of nice though, knowing that there’s just a lot of stuff you’ve shot that’s waiting to be seen. When I was broke for awhile I just didn’t develop anything, and it was a lot of fun catching up at first. Until I started to recognize that I was catching up with my “lazy period” and then I couldn’t get through it fast enough.
Yeah that photo’s with a flash, and I just realized it’s a little odd to have put that up while complaining about the weather and lack of light outside.
Those shots from Rome look great. And you’re not kidding about the decent mids. Love the second one especially!
I can get Superia 400 in 24 rolls still, but it’s not as $$ efficient. Didn’t used to like it, but now that I’m home scanning I can get it to look nice. And it’s got finer grain than the cheap kodak stuff. And stockpiling is right. I think Fuji is quietly discontinuing stuff left and right. I bet they get out of film sooner rather than later.
Ha, I have the same tie as the old guy in that photo, pretty sure.
I have not taken a photo in days. Had almost three weeks of intermittent rain that was just a beatdown.
The Fort Worth stock show is coming up in January, I think I’m going to try to make several trips to that to see what I can get.
God I can’t even imagine that kind of backlog anymore. It is really kind of nice though, knowing that there’s just a lot of stuff you’ve shot that’s waiting to be seen.
yes. for sure. i mean i forget what’s on there (i only started even labeling film w/time periods a while back), so there’s this weird gulf between taking and getting, which is generally v true of (film) photography anyway. i think having had a few unspooled roll disasters recently (they’re piling up, but i’m going to just start really being thorough, now, & accepting 36 shots a roll instead of a plucky but risky 39; i am outsourcing some of the blame for this on OM-1s, though probably carry more myself) has forced me into accepting a weird serendipity about what i even manage to catch; i’m sad when things don’t appear, or if i’ve shot ten photos inside on a day when i was using 100 speed film & all i got was muted shapes, but maybe buffering the time between shooting & seeing relaxes me about a specific shot having been lost to time. i def think one of the more profound things about photography is the time capsule element, so i almost think you improve ‘lazy period’ photos by seeing them six months after the fact.
here is another rome pic, it’s so funny looking at these because i don’t really take anything on this scale anymore, but it’s just almost gratuitously easy to get something in somewhere so picturesque, just collaterally, it’s like if you take a picture of grass & are satisfied that your camera bothered to render each blade.
i just hit up my exposed film place & they hardly had anything—i bought a single role of konica slide film, which is fun at least (idk if i posted thanksgiving-porn.jpg from a couple of weeks back). so i went around the corner & bought some weird fuji colour 160 pro film to tide me over for awhile. i might try an expired ebay lot.
i would love a photo-geek response re: why all expired film all seems to reside in israel btw, ebay search is throwing up mysteries
my skills are pretty amateur compared to you folks, i have a panasonic lumix, a holga, and an old canon 35mm, and i don’t photograph nearly enough i’m afraid.
ha that’s nice!, i am amateur as fuck, represent.
what did you take it with? i was saying before about avoiding & then embracing midtones, i think i like more blacks in a b&w photo but it’s a nice shot.
i think photographing enough is just taking your camera w/you when you leave the house
yeah i have a few rolls that i should get developed.
this one was taken w/my panasonic lumix (model # escapes me.) i prefer it mostly for B&W, the color is nice for random family gathering pics but not spectacular.
I like that son
i’m trying to develop my tech abilities a little more, which is tough since i’ve never been particularly tech-savvy. always been fine w/composition, which occasionally makes up for it.
I like that son
using the ‘amateur’ thing to play the pro huh
re: spooling disasters etc., I now have a fair number of, say, misloaded rolls, or rolls where I set the flash sync speed wrong, shots that were just way off (focus, etc.) and these things all used to just KILL ME, but by now it’s not really much sweat. Having thought I shot a roll on a trip some months back only to realize the camera was empty, it just kind of didn’t even matter much to me anymore. If the film isn’t loaded, or I ruin a roll somehow (oh yeah, also through disastrous processing at some local shops a while back!) it’s almost like no big deal. I never saw the thing anyway so I’ve got nothing to miss. If a beloved negative went missing or something though that would be different. I guess I figure all of my shots might as well be disasters until I actually get them scanned.
Plus I get really used to discovering that all of the OMG CAN’T BELIEVE I GOT THAT AMAZING SHOT pictures are generally nothing to write home about, with some exceptions.
PS NICE MIDS!!
thx riv and schlump~
using the ‘amateur’ thing to play the pro huh
― Never translate German (schlump), Thursday, December 29, 2011 12:21 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark
ha, i deliberately didn’t put a comma in there to avoid this
yeah i think its best to just take photos and then wait a while so you forget all the ones you’re crossing your fingers for.
I ‘finished’ that eggleston book—some interesting stuff in the interviews & articles towards the back
-wish I didn’t know that it was curated by michael almyreda or w/e his name is—doesn’t ‘feel’ like an eggleston book or at the very least has a different character to it. a lot more ‘people’ shots, and I think that was intentional, to distance itself from the other egglestone books out
-eggleston majored in painting in college & still paints (hey him and HCB). apparently knows a bit about color theory, probably more than he lets on
-sometimes he shoots the same thing more than once
good book though, I’ll have to return to it
yes. p much. there are exceptions. i remember meeting jim jarmusch when i was young & a young man & living in new york & shooting a couple of pics of him & someone taking pics of me talking to him (i wrote my dissertation on him so it seemed like this weird quintessential moment) & them just never printing, i couldn’t even work out (because of my backlogue-disorganisation) which roll they’d been on, my olympus would sometimes jar on 24 & shred the rest of a roll. & that was sad. but it just sorta isn’t the same thing. i wrote down an index from memory of one of the recent rolls i lost & that exists even if the film doesn’t, it’s just different. & to go an extra philosophical mile, anything i shoot after a mis-fired role wouldn’t exist had i spooled that one correct, everything would be different, so you deal with what you’ve got. people are always like WELL GUESS IT’S TIME TO GO DIGITAL when i lament some classically-analogue failure but its limits & risks are cool with me, it’s just a different thing to the documentation i’d be pulling with digital.
OMG CAN’T BELIEVE I GOT THAT AMAZING SHOT
ha, yes.
looked through yr recent flickr stuff CV, real good, these guys-w-ties are so good, they’re a series in themselves.
ha, i deliberately didn’t put a comma in there to avoid this
― river wolf, Thursday, December 29, 2011 6:27 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink
i still jumped all over you on it, it happened. have you been shooting, btw, i only worked out your sandbox disguise identity a couple of days ago & wondered.
-sometimes he shoots the same thing more than once
sitting here tearing pages out of william eggleston’s guide right now
I specifically chose to go to a digital showing of mission impossible 4 today instead of a film one
*impales self*
gah no, i haven’t :(
i mean, i’ve got a few rolls from the m6 that need developing, but i haven’t really been anywhere or doing anything that i thought merited documentation. need to be better about a) bringing the cam with all the time b) being more fearless about whipping it out (!!) and c) getting that shit developed in a timely fashion
hah I just developed 5 rolls yesterday from the summer that I had forgotten about
still would love developing stuff (almost asked for that for xmas) and a scanner
I have three rolls of medium-format film and a roll of Tri-X on my desk that have been waiting for me to build up enough film to send off for development.
I actually think backlog is good—the Instagram/Flickr/etc. ‘need to post something on the reg’ is not necessarily the best. I mean, you wouldn’t mail a curator or gallerist one print at a time as you did something, you’d amass a body of work and display it. Better not to die with thousands of undeveloped rolls (ala Winogrand or Vivian Maier), but some space between what you did and what you’re seeing on the light table/in prints is not a bad thing.
Discovered an A+++++ meter app for the iPhone—Fotometer Pro.
Works like an old Sekonic, essentially, uses the forward facing camera for incident readings if you want to. Much better than the other light meter apps I’ve tried
I am totally envious of everyone’s backlog on here. I got way too caught up and now am not in a shooting mood :(
I just wish I had a billion unscanned rolls for the cold winter.
And I hate the pressure to always be putting pictures online but I am in THRALL TO THE THRILL. It’s about time to dip into the boring stuff.
still would love developing stuff (almost asked for that for xmas) and a scanner
― river wolf, Thursday, December 29, 2011 6:40 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink
yes, psyched about getting a secondhand scanner but dayo’s do-it-yrself instructions are still a kinda carrot on a string i’m thinking of pursuing, maybe next time i’m feeling settled somewhere
And I hate the pressure to always be putting pictures online but I am in THRALL TO THE THRILL.
yeah this is fun. adventures in curating.
http://www.ministryoftofu.com/2011/12/photos-how-much-time-does-the-reality-leave-to-a-dream/
so this is crude and blunt and manipulative but it punches me in all the right places and now I want to cry
Has anyone seen this? It looks great (You gotta love Joel Sternfeld’s hair!)
I’d love to see that. Of course it’s also got me wanting to pony up for some Steidl books.
lol I’ve heard about that. the photographer lives in a little hut for like 3 months while they go through the proofing process.
the steidl books I have are, well, magnificient
please can we have I Love Photography: fuck the midtones
lol I was just thinking that would be an excellent motto
jeff wall! was trying to remember his name along w/ gregory crewdson and philip-lorca dicorcia
Untitled by celluloidpropaganda, on Flickr
amazon increased the price of neopan 400 from $3 to $6
:(
There were rumors it was getting discontinued, but I dunno what’s up with that. Maybe Fuji let production lapse to make price increases more palatable.
I ordered 25 rolls from Midwest Photo Exchange for cheap and they were supposed to be recently expired. But they ran out of the expired stuff before shipping mine, took a month to get more, etc., so I got a steal on film that’s still good ‘til late 2013.
I need to buy film again
yeah B&W film stores forever, if frozen
can I just
<3
I think dumb fashion collaborations have reached a new low:
http://www.rubyhornet.com/carhartt-x-powershovelqblackbird-fly-camera/