May 31, 2009

The Project

I’ve had the idea for a while that, in keeping with my ideas of photographic simplicity being tantamount to photographic truth (or to put it in a simpler way; keeping things simple keeps things truer to life), I should try to go a month shooting one camera, one lens and one type of film. This would serve to stop me over-thinking things as can so often be the case when dragging around 3x DSLRs, 8 lenses, 4 flashguns and various other bits of kit clutter that aren’t really needed.

Instead of debating whether the 85mm or the 80-200mm was the better lens for a shot, I’d be forced to work within the constraints of something a little less complicated thereby focusing my thoughts on composition and light. I’ve noticed a degredation in my work at the moment and I’m partially attributing it to this ridiculous kit-clutter which seems to dominate my photographic life at present.

So to this end I have derived a plan based upon those of many others (which always seem to be the very best plans, going by experience). This plan is to buy, learn and use a cheap 35mm camera which must have three features.

  1. A decent lens, preferably around the 35/40mm mark. 50mm will do, but could prove to be a little too long if it’s going to be the only lens I use for my personal work for 31 days.
  2. A manual meter, which only has to give a ball-park figure. The plan is to use Sunny-16 most of the time anyway as I want to get myself back into the swing of recognising light and being able to beat my camera’s meter to working out the best exposure for the desired effect.
  3. It must cost less than £50 all told. This is to stop this turning into a glorified gear hunt, and focus me on doing something worthwhile with this exercise.

With these ideas laid out, I’m going to stock myself up with some HP5 Plus, which normally I don’t like all that much, but is forgiving and is pretty resilient when it comes to pushing and pulling exposure. My typical diet of Delta 100/400 and APX-400 with the odd bit of Pan F on the side is more flexible regarded as a whole, but is a little too specialised for me to choose one and use it for an entire month.

I’ll aim to shoot at least 5 rolls a week, and will then make a book of the best 40 shots from the exercise (that means two really high quality SOOC shots a week).

The Project will start the first day of July… Wish me luck

May 3, 2009
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Imogen Heap has a new album out soon. (This is one of her oldies from the Frou Frou days.)

That makes me happy; she’s one of the best people to listen to whilst trying to slog through a load of editing.

Or as seems to be more the case at the moment, Economics revision.

Huzzah for A-Levels.

Or not.

April 5, 2009

Transition

I’d like to think, given the amount of time I’ve spent seriously photographing (around 3 years now), I’m a relatively mature photographer in terms of the way in which I treat the medium.

I’ve moved away from gear hording, and have simplified down to a few lenses, fewer cameras and a very basic lighting set-up; I came to the realisation that whilst I should keep enough to ensure that I can allow for most situations, I honestly wasn’t using some of my gear enough to warrant it.

I don’t stick to a particular brand or type anymore, I use what will get the effect I am searching, and if that means bodging it slightly, then so be it.

I’ve spent far more time lately working out just how light works, rather than how my gear does what it does. I’ve realised that being a tech-head and a photographer aren’t necessarily inclusive…

But recently I’ve found myself thinking ‘If I just bought that new lens/flashgun/filter/tripod/light modifier I’d be able to do stuff I can’t right now, which will make me a better photographer’.This more or less goes against my whole photographic ideology; I’m for simplicity and improvisation rather than buying every piece of gear under the sun and only using it twice a year. After all, if I’ve got that much gear, I can’t learn the individual foibles of each individual lens, flash etc, and therefore cannot use them to their fullest potential. Yet still I couldn’t shake this dreaded Gear-Acquisition-Syndrome.

So I decided to go through my already culled gear and work out whether or not I REALLY needed anything more. The Leica’s a lowlight and street machine, especially with the 50mm on it; The Fuji lets me do stuff with digital that other cameras don’t because it actually looks like film but shoots like digital; The Trip is a brilliant street camera (see my review directly below); The Zorki is retro cool; The Nikkormat has some good memories of my first few photos with a ‘proper’ camera; The AV-1 is simplicity itself and I quite like the rendition of the 50mm it came with; The D40 lets me experiment with non-ai lenses for very cheap….

Those are just my camera bodies……. Just my 35mm or smaller camera bodies.

I seriously don’t need anything more, for a very long while. I can generally improvise most things with that sort of gear list, and already there’s no way I can bring that all out on a single trip with me. Even in my Peli. I’m going to have a week just taking each and every one of these cameras out individually each day so we can see how necessary they all are. In the meantime I’ve set a 6 month gear-embargo, which means nothing new for me, just learning how to better use what I do have.

Maybe we should all try to apply that sort of thinking to the wider-world, rather than just that of our cameras?

March 23, 2009
The Trip 35 was way ahead of its time. As in lightyears, and in a few ways it’s actually far better designed than a lot of far more expensive and modern cameras. Take, for example, the way it powers its meter - a selenium cell, or in slightly less geeky terms, a solar panel. That’s right, a camera which was originally designed more than 30 years ago powers a fully automatic exposure system through the only power source that’s unlikely to run out. Plus, you wont accidentally have it go off in your bag, wasting precious film, because it will refuse to trip the shutter (nice terrible pun, eh?) if there isn’t enough light reaching the aforementioned selenium cell/solar panel. Clever Olympus. This camera is riddled with nice little touches like this, like the oddly named ‘judas-window’ in the viewfinder, which allows you to see where you’ve put the zone focus and the aperture ring without having to take your eye away from the viewfinder, or the inclusion of eyelets on both sides of the camera, so our south paw friends needn’t go without a wrist strap. To think that Olympus managed to create a camera with no battery dependency, which could probably be used by someone who had never even picked up a camera before with little trouble. Just set the aperture to A (for automatic), set the focus to the red group (which sets the camera to its hyperfocal distance), and shoot. Brilliant. But that isn’t to say that this camera is solely for people who aren’t really photographers, or to put it another way, overly simplistic. No, this camera actually has a few traits which bely its ability to be used as quite a serious, albeit simple and unobtrusive photographic tool. Why do you think David Bailey used one? The first of these is the scalpel-like lens. This is better than a lot of the modern, expensive Nikkor glass I use, and is able to hold its own even against the sharper members of my Nikkor herd, including the legendary 55mm f/3.5 Micro-Nikkor and the 17-55mm f/2.8 Nikkor AF-S. The results really have to be seen in print to be believed, considering it is a) A 30 odd years old design and b) was mounted on what was intended to be a mass market camera. The next is the inclusion of the hyper-focal marking, albeit rather subtly. This is quite a rarity nowadays, and I must confess it took me a while to work out why Olympus marked one focus point differently to all the others. Now I know, and so do you. Remember it if you use one of these brilliant little things, as it is key to what I reckon this camera is best put to use as. “Which would be?” Street-shooting. This camera has all the traits necessary to create a truly legendary street camera. It’s unobtrusive (especially in the increasingly rare, but oh-so-sexy black finish) because of its leaf shutter, it runs at a constant shutter speed of 1/60 or 1/200 (depending on whether you set the aperture manually, which is supposedly for flash, or leave the camera in A mode) which is fast enough to slow most action, whilst ensuring a smallish aperture is set during daylight, guaranteeing the success of the hyperfocal focussing technique. The choice of a 40mm lens means that shooting from the hip isn’t as ridiculous a prospect with regards to composition as it is with other cameras (I personally don’t really enjoy shooting from the hip, I’m too much of a control freak, and I don’t really enjoy wasting film). It’s light, and never needs the batteries replacing, so if you miss a shot, it’s your fault rather than the camera’s. And they’re cheap and plentiful, so you don’t have to worry about losing/dropping it. This thing is simply brilliant, and it isn’t half a handsome beast. If I’m leaving the house, this thing is probably in my bag, because even if you’re not going out with the express intention of taking photos, you can never tell when an opportunity for an excellent image will present itself. The Trip means you need never miss that opportunity, if you’re lucky enough to catch it, that is.

The Trip 35 was way ahead of its time. As in lightyears, and in a few ways it’s actually far better designed than a lot of far more expensive and modern cameras. Take, for example, the way it powers its meter - a selenium cell, or in slightly less geeky terms, a solar panel. That’s right, a camera which was originally designed more than 30 years ago powers a fully automatic exposure system through the only power source that’s unlikely to run out. Plus, you wont accidentally have it go off in your bag, wasting precious film, because it will refuse to trip the shutter (nice terrible pun, eh?) if there isn’t enough light reaching the aforementioned selenium cell/solar panel. Clever Olympus.

This camera is riddled with nice little touches like this, like the oddly named ‘judas-window’ in the viewfinder, which allows you to see where you’ve put the zone focus and the aperture ring without having to take your eye away from the viewfinder, or the inclusion of eyelets on both sides of the camera, so our south paw friends needn’t go without a wrist strap.

To think that Olympus managed to create a camera with no battery dependency, which could probably be used by someone who had never even picked up a camera before with little trouble. Just set the aperture to A (for automatic), set the focus to the red group (which sets the camera to its hyperfocal distance), and shoot. Brilliant.

But that isn’t to say that this camera is solely for people who aren’t really photographers, or to put it another way, overly simplistic. No, this camera actually has a few traits which bely its ability to be used as quite a serious, albeit simple and unobtrusive photographic tool. Why do you think David Bailey used one?

The first of these is the scalpel-like lens. This is better than a lot of the modern, expensive Nikkor glass I use, and is able to hold its own even against the sharper members of my Nikkor herd, including the legendary 55mm f/3.5 Micro-Nikkor and the 17-55mm f/2.8 Nikkor AF-S. The results really have to be seen in print to be believed, considering it is a) A 30 odd years old design and b) was mounted on what was intended to be a mass market camera.

The next is the inclusion of the hyper-focal marking, albeit rather subtly. This is quite a rarity nowadays, and I must confess it took me a while to work out why Olympus marked one focus point differently to all the others. Now I know, and so do you. Remember it if you use one of these brilliant little things, as it is key to what I reckon this camera is best put to use as.

“Which would be?”

Street-shooting.

This camera has all the traits necessary to create a truly legendary street camera. It’s unobtrusive (especially in the increasingly rare, but oh-so-sexy black finish) because of its leaf shutter, it runs at a constant shutter speed of 1/60 or 1/200 (depending on whether you set the aperture manually, which is supposedly for flash, or leave the camera in A mode) which is fast enough to slow most action, whilst ensuring a smallish aperture is set during daylight, guaranteeing the success of the hyperfocal focussing technique. The choice of a 40mm lens means that shooting from the hip isn’t as ridiculous a prospect with regards to composition as it is with other cameras (I personally don’t really enjoy shooting from the hip, I’m too much of a control freak, and I don’t really enjoy wasting film). It’s light, and never needs the batteries replacing, so if you miss a shot, it’s your fault rather than the camera’s. And they’re cheap and plentiful, so you don’t have to worry about losing/dropping it.

This thing is simply brilliant, and it isn’t half a handsome beast. If I’m leaving the house, this thing is probably in my bag, because even if you’re not going out with the express intention of taking photos, you can never tell when an opportunity for an excellent image will present itself. The Trip means you need never miss that opportunity, if you’re lucky enough to catch it, that is.

March 8, 2009

Welcome…

To the complementary Blog to my website.

Posts will follow on the themes of:

  • Gear
  • Technique
  • Jobs
  • What NOT to do
  • Procrastination

Enjoy.