Shooting the tennis like it’s 1986 (and colour film hadn’t been invented either)…

Last month I was lucky enough to get (for christmas!) a ticket to the Kooyong Classic again, which I can walk to from home – and unlike other years where I’ve taken some sort of medium format photo kit, and made strange shots of the crowd and bits of furniture – this year I brought along a useful kit of sorts, at least insofar as capturing some of the actual activity on court!

The platform of choice this time was the wonderful Olympus OM4t – the last in a line of innovative 35mm SLR’s that are super small and light compared to their modern-day equivalents, with large bright viewfinders and excellent metering. I took along a couple of lenses, but the one I was keen to test (and used most) was an Olympus Zuiko 300mm f/4.5 prime lens.

This kit is quite lightweight, even with all that metal (the OM4t has a titanium shell, and is a charming ‘champagne‘ colour). Focusing is all manual with a split diopter in the viewfinder – and so with sports, you really need to pre-empt the shot you’re going to make. To make things easier – I used Ilford HP5+ film, with an ISO of 400 – so in bright sun, I could shoot almost everything at the fastest possible shutter speed (1/2000th second) to eliminate my own movement, and to capture things like fast racket swings. With 300mm, even halfway up the stands, I was still getting a decent head-to-toe shot of either player – and with a 2x adapter (i.e. 600mm equivalent), I was hard-pressed to get anything wider than head-to-belly button. Conclusion: 300mm is a great focal length for Kooyong, and probably many other sports where you’re not miles away, and the light is good!

Because I mostly shoot Large & Medium format, I often find it hard to actually get through the 36 exposures on a 35mm roll in any useful time (and end up with several camera bodies with quarter of a used roll of film in them, grrr), but this time I was so engaged with the novelty of it all, I went through 3 rolls really rapidly.

That will save the economy.

A whole mess of pictures in one big happening!

The delightful gold and silversmiths from Melbourne’s Part B invited me in November to photograph their “ManJewellery” happening – ‘an exhibition of jewellery for men, displayed on live models, in a setting where men are often seen to congregate. An inner city bar!’ Before we actually headed off to the bar, I set up a mini studio with a roll of paper and two monolights, and snapped away at the various ‘man models’ the artists had brought with them – a ‘tethered’ setup, insofar as I had the shiny Canon 600D attached to a macbook via USB & Aperture software, so we all could look at the pictures as we went. My concession to my film habit was to make additional snaps on a Fuji 6×4.5 medium format camera, and the lens on the Canon was an old Olympus Zuiko 28mm f/2.8 thing from my OM kit. Everything triggered by pocket wizards and a good time had by all!!

Gabriel Anderson models for the ManJewellery happening!

http://crafthaus.ning.com/group/manjewellery

Annual absolutely EPIC Christmas Calendar Extravaganza!

Every year since 2005, I’ve embarked upon a MONSTER end-of-year project – a calendar featuring 12 prints from the preceding year of photography, reproduced for family as presents for Christmas. When I first started, the calendar was all scanned and inkjet printed,

An inkjet printed page!

but that wasn’t my thing, so in 2008 I switched to an entirely handprinted (darkroom) calendar – whereupon even the printed calendar dates were darkroom printed in an epic undertaking of double exposures for every single print (through acetate reversal transparencies).

Another inkjet-printed page from 2006's calendar

That was some serious hard work – I was making about 14 calendars, which equated to 364 exposures, not including tests, errors, changes-of-mind and so on. They were nice though – but I was binding them in a very traditional calendar style – commercially wire bound, in a style I thought wasn’t very sympathetic to the prints. Plus, the calendars were on 8×10″ paper, which with room for binding, date info and a compositionally nice border, made for a rather small print indeed – by 2010, I was ready for change!!

An entirely darkroom printed page - dual exposures for the photo and the text!!

And so, for the last two years, I’ve been making a calendar I’m really satisfied with – here’s the workflow:
1. Throughout the year, I make photos – and all the stuff I shoot on film & in b&w is up for consideration. In November(ish), I revisit all the negatives, making a list of twenty or so I reckon would be nice calendar pics – if I haven’t scanned the negs already, I do so, to make a mockup I can test various crops on, and see if I still like the pic after staring at it for a while
2. In Adobe InDesign – I mockup the printed calendar layout detail – based on a nice template I setup (with credit for the overall excellent design idea to family) last year – this will all be inkjet-printed on a slightly longer sheet of paper (from K.W. Doggett!) so that lifting up the 8×10″ darkroom print for any given month reveals the camera used and other interesting info, and the month/date info is visible always.

3. Having pondered the pictures, I narrow it down to 12 (and assign them to months) and start printing – with test prints, and fussiness – I am often only getting one print done in an evening (15 copies) – but as I get into the swing of things, I can get as efficient as two or three. Things slow down if it’s a difficult negative in terms of exposure/contrast, or I radically change my mind about composition. Throughout this – I jot very specific notes about each print in my ‘darkroom book’ just in case I have to do reprints – what contrast/lens/aperture/exposure/enlarger height etc. I try to print in a sensible order (like all the same size negatives together) rather than chronologically, so that I don’t make foolish errors (as much). That said – the last couple of calendars have only featured a few formats. This year’s was only 4×5″, 6×6 & 6×4.5cm – so I only used three enlarger lenses.
4. Around this activity, I’ve edited the InDesign doc to include specific detail for each print chosen for each month, and printed out a few drafts for proofing. I also do a bit of a digital (bah!) photo shoot of each of the cameras used for the pictures in the calendar (to include) – because I reckon that’s interesting!

The longer page underneath the print - with print info and the camera used!

5. When everything’s printed – then comes the tedious part of assembly, with family assistance(!!) – lots of ouchy hole-punching and careful assembly – then wrapping up in jolly christmas paper and gleeful distribution.

The cover page for this year and last year!

What do I enjoy about all this? Well – all my extended family now have my photos hanging up in their homes – with the print changing every month. Additionally, having done seven of them now, they are really evolving into an interesting sort of ‘personal retrospective’, whereupon I can reflect back on, not just the previous year of life and photography, but the previous seven years – it’s very interesting, and I’ve already done the hard work of sorting out the good stuff! Even looking back through them to write up this blog entry, I’m rediscovering stuff. I hope I have the motivation and content to keep churning them out for many years to come!

Who listens to the (internet) radio?

Here’s a quick post to let all 3 of you know that I’ll be on the ‘radio‘ this Wednesday, at 5pm (AEST), chatting specifically about the perils of photographing ‘art’. My media strategy is to rabbit on with as many factoids as possible, until the host (Camila) drowns me out with music…
So listen in (to Radio Valerie) if you have a mo’!

Radio Valerie!

From the mountains to the lounge room, via Collingwood.

I just hung up a rather pleasing print on the dining room wall, and it struck me that there was a tale to tell about it, that was actually well documented for once!
The photo in question was made in July this year, and shows a grand view of the Bernese Alps, from the Piz Gloria restaurant atop the Schilthorn – made famous by George Lazenby in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service‘. There is a photo of me actually making the picture, and a keen eye can see: I’m using a 4×5″ Large Format camera (the Wista Field Camera). There’s an orange filter on the lens (to make the sky contrast nicer), and so I must also be using black and white film (in this case, Kodak TXP 320, exposed at 200 ISO). What kind of fool drags a 12kg backpack of camera/lens/tripod madness up a 2,970 metre summit just to make a nice picture? Well, plenty – and those folks with big SLR kits and lots of lenses are probably carrying just as much weight as me. The wooden camera is prettier though – like carting a grand old piece of furniture with you on travels…
As always, I made two film exposures (to be sure, to be sure), and also made two colour negative exposures too (which I don’t always do, because the costs of processing all that colour film when I get home are prohibitive: AU$7 per sheet!)
And then, a month later, I processed the sheets on the processing robot at home, and the pictures came out well!!
Jumping back in time a bit – this time last year, ‘Lachie’ from Vanbar Photographics in Melbourne, suggested I join the ‘Melbourne Silver Mine‘ – a local group of analogue photography enthusiasts. So I duly did, and have spent the entire year inadvertently missing every activity they have undertaken, due to work and general busy-ness. Crikey. So, when the opportunity came about to submit a print for their annual analogue group exhibition, I was determined not to miss it, and duly sent off my forms.
Like most artists, I embrace procrastination and ‘leaving important things to the last minute’, and so it was that I didn’t really do much further about this ’till a fortnight prior to ‘hanging day’.
At this point we return to the aforementioned photograph of the Bernese Alps. I took the negative into the darkroom and made an 8×10′ test print on RC paper. It turns out that the picture looked heaps more ‘epic’ as a panoramic crop (rather than the full 4:5 frame), so I moreorless printed it like that, and stared at it for a bit. Testing the idea with some aesthetically savvy chums, I decided to print the final picture as large as I could, but at a natural panorama of 16:9 (same as modern telly!) so the picture would look ‘right’ to the eye. And as the largest paper my tank will fit is 16×12″ – I only had to waste 3″ from a single sheet.

The other challenge was to use fibre paper instead of RC (resin coated) paper. I use RC paper all the time, but fibre paper has that je ne sais quoi of tone and texture, and is generally a heavier weight of paper and to me somehow more imposing as a PRINT. Trouble is – you have to wash the paper for aages, and when dry, it bends like a crazy thing.
In the darkroom, I made 3 fibre prints to arrive at the exhibition print – the first was perfect, and the second was on a different type of paper, which was older stock and printed a stop too light. The third was also perfect, but I didn’t like the paper so much (a warm tone) – so the first print was destined to be ‘the one’!
I should add – it’s super rare for me to get a ‘perfect’ print – usually there’s extra stuff I could do, or there’s a spec of dust no-one can see but me, or the composition is not as awesome as my mind desperately wants it to be. But this time… success! And so, with some trepidation, I washed the print for an extremely long time, hung it up to dry, and then flattened it (a bit) in a large dry mount press (I just happened to have nearby). Still a bit curly, I put it under 7 years’ worth of the UK ‘Black & White Photography’ magazines… and that seemed to work a treat!
Meanwhile, I’d rung up the friendly ‘Neo Frames‘ in Collingwood to get a framing quote – they’re great because they do everything themselves – use all archival quality stuff, and locally sourced hardwood which they paint to order. Normally they have a fortnight turnaround, but I must have sounded suitably despairing on the phone, as they agreed to have it done in less that a week (so I could pick up the frame on the morning of the hanging day)!
Taking the print there the next day, I picked out a nice thin black wood frame and they showed me how the matte would go, and I left it with them. Fingers crossed.
Fast forward one week, and I picked up the picture – framed so beautifully I really didn’t want to let it go – but then had to leave it unceremoniously on the stairs of the Collingwood Gallery for hanging later in the day! Seeya little fella…
But at the opening the next day – there it was on the wall, looking super, and the gallery was FULL of happy analogue aficionados – burbling merrily about everyone’s work. There were quite a few other darkroom prints, and at least one other Large Format work (an 8×10″!)

A fortnight later I picked up my masterpiece again and have hung it on the wall… What fun – and of course I’ll do it all over again next year!

Unsensored

Well, they’ve linked to my blog, so it’s only sensible I post a link to this exhibition, which, with all things going to plan, I’ll have a print in. Following common arts practice, I haven’t made or framed the photo yet (aieeee!), but I have made a few test prints, so I know how I’ll print it, what size/crop, and most importantly, what the negative I’m actually printing will be…
No spoilers though, because it’ll be nice for folks to have a surprise if they can actually make the exhibition!

If you’re in Melbourne… come along and have a look – there promises to be a heap of interesting analogue photography on display, thanks to the good folks at the Melbourne Silver Mine.

Lighting “down”!

Looking back through past photo shoots, it strikes me that nearly everything I’ve shot (with the notable exception of the UV test in the last post) has been rather high key – bright backgrounds and bright lighting! I largely blame the “corporate brand” at work for this, as it specifically demands white backgrounds et al, but then again, not everything I shoot is for work…
So with glee, this week I was able to set up a shoot that was (by comparison), kind of underlit, and modestly only ended up using two lanterns (monolights) to light everything. Such restraint…
The brief was a portrait to grace all the print/web propaganda for a specific fashion & textiles event during next year’s L’Oreal Fashion Festival – my colleague Jodie, had a couple of good visual ideas, so I needed to find a model, makeup artist, space to shoot, time, and figure out how I was going to light it!
With the resources sorted, I was able to setup the day before to test out some lighting theories, and came up with this setup:

Unusually for me, the key light is a shoot-through umbrella – I wanted a really soft lighting source, to approximate the diffuse lighting through a window, and I’d experimented with bouncing a flash off a large reflector panel, and that worked for the quality of shadow/softness, but gave a rather horrible catchlight reflection in the test subject (me)’s eyes! So the shoot through umbrella does the same thing whilst keeping the catchlight ’round’ and pleasing looking (I reckon!).
I’ve also added a backlight to lift the hair and neck – I used my least powerful studio flash, at a height of around 3 metres, and some distance away so it wouldn’t flare into the camera. And with this setup I was able to squeeze f/16 at 1/160th second within ISO100 – so, nice sharpness and no grain!

I keep forgetting to make reference photos as I go – so this shot comes from right at the end of the shoot, where I’d wheeled in an additional reflector to test as a white background, and another flash to light it with. One thing we found with the sheer fabric the kaftan was made from (a beautiful, digitally printed silk cloth) was that the colour came out MUCH better with a dark background – the white made the colour look weak. Putting the key light so close to the model meant that the background (black woollen drapes) fairly disappeared into black as well, instead of being a wishy washy grey, had the key light been further back.
I had the camera tethered to a laptop throughout, so my colleagues could help art direct/choreograph as we went, to get the best shot for print – and a slightly annoying discovery was that Canon’s EOS Utility does not actually work with Mac OS X Lion yet (grrr!!) – lucky I had a PC to hand…
And so, the final result: the glamorous Tayla Gentle, with finely crafted hair and makeup by Kate Radford, Brief & Art Direction by Jo Lawson, and general helpfulness and some good choreographic advice from Lynne Ellis. Hardly any fiddling in post except to get rid of some sensor dust spots that the 5D seems horribly prone to. This never happens with film – if only folks would put up with me shooting 4×5″

The “antimatter” of airbrushed portraiture!

Several years ago, I invested (on a whim) on a transmissive UV filter for my Rolleiflex. Unlike a regular UV filter, which cuts the amount of light in the UV spectrum to avoid unsightly colour effects (that bluish tinge on bright white things), or distance haze, a transmissive UV filter cuts everything BUT light in the UV spectrum!

Folks who’ve done a bit of black and white portraiture might know that using a warm filter is very flattering to human skin – so a yellow filter is nice, a red filter even nicer, and Infrared gives skin a positively ethereal glow (whilst making eyes seem alien and slightly scary). On the other hand, a blue filter is not flattering AT ALL, and the more blue-violet you go, the worse it gets, with every bruise, blemish, or bit of sun damage becoming progressively more visible.
And so, once I’ve explained this, it becomes difficult to convince a potential portrait sitter just how cool an experiment this would be to try, which makes me doubly pleased that my pal Adele and her friend Phillipe agreed to be guinea pigs for a UV portrait sitting recently.
Before making the photos, I had to think about how to light them. The filter in question is rather dark – like welding-goggle glass, and so you lose a fair bit of light with it. I calculated (by metering through it with a spot meter) a loss of 7 stops. That means an normal exposure at f/16 would become f/1.4 with the filter attached. Yikes! I would need to light VERY brightly, and perhaps use a faster film. Additionally, tungsten lamps omit barely any UV light, so they weren’t going to be any help – studio flashes would be the go, BUT… modern studio flashes have a golden UV coating on the flashcube, specifically to prevent UV light being emitted (so white looks “white” without a blue cast). Crumbs!!
Fortunately I have a couple of antique British Courtenay “Solaflash” studio flashguns, that look like spaceships from Blakes 7, that aren’t evolved enough to incorporate such forward thinking technologies, so I duly set them up in a crosslight pattern, and did some incident readings to see what sort of light I could get.
Now, just because I’d thought this all out unfortunately doesn’t guarantee I’d remember it all on the day – so the Rolleiflex was duly loaded with Kodak Plus-X – not an especially fast film at all (ISO 125) – but I have had some success pushing that film in development to ISO 400, so I decided to give that a whirl.

As you can see from this diagram – the key light is about 30cm away from Adele/Phillipe, and yet with the 7 stop loss of light, I ended up exposing everything at f/4, and at 1/250th second (a leaf shutter syncs with flash at any speed – so fast is the go (but not faster than the pocket wizard can handle!)). To fill the frame, I used a Rolleinar closeup adapter, and with that and the aperture, you can see the depth of field is very narrow indeed!

And the effect? “Leathery”! I would really like to photograph someone freckly, as I think that would come out a treat. Phillipe’s glasses must have a UV coating on them because they are completely black. Interesting, n’est ce pas? The Plus-X I developed in Rodinal 1:25 for 9 minutes, and that made for some satisfyingly dense negatives, even with that much under-exposure. I must remember that.

Where have you been?

It’s a fair question – I haven’t posted anything in aroundabout a month. “Disgraceful!” You say… Well, I have a good excuse: I’ve been on travels/photo hunting/holidays, and as well as giving me a (slight) tan, this will provide rich material for these pages, as I slowly begin processing all the accumulated exposed film, and post some of the pictures here (with stories).
Here’s a snap of me (with my very warm Norwegian hat, and 4×5″ Field Camera) atop a newly formed Volcano peak in Iceland, near the aeroplane-disrupting Eyjafjallajökull. The steam on the ground indicates that the earth here is still rather warm – I was warned that in some spots my bag or the rubber feet on the tripod might actually melt. You can see all the sulphurous rocks, and a sort of fissure behind me was letting out all sorts of sulphury vapours. A fascinating bit of brand new planet surface, which involved a significant amount of impressive four-wheel-driving by the guide, and a bit of a hike, to get to.
And this was only day three or so…
You can see in the background, that shortly after this photo, the mountain weather got a bit yucky too, so it’s a good bit of timing also.
So, more to follow, including of course, some nice large and medium format film pictures.

Some Idol photography…

It’s that time of year, whereupon I’m dashing about like a mad person, attempting to complete a variety of all-consuming tasks, and completely neglecting my blog! Enough, I say! Here’s a tale about a poster I needed an appealingly strong image for, this week:
I’ve been doing the posters for this specific event for the last couple of years, and 2010′s one was not as dynamic as the idea I had in my head (it seemed like a GREAT idea at the time), so I wanted more life in the 2011 one – and what’s more lively than jumping in the air?
So – I recruited my supportive colleague Holly as the model, and set about assembling this set:
Featuring the last few metres of an 11m roll of arctic white paper, strung up on an aluminium pole between two lighting trees, two great aluminium screens (on wheels!) that here serve as reflectors, but were originally constructed as backlit theatre set, and have also served as a projection screen… Aaaaand, four studio monolights – the two Bowens ones I always use, as back/side lighting, and two ancient Courtenay Sola flashes with umbrellas – the stronger of the two acting as key light. Here’s a diagram:

Then all that remained was to shoot – lots of jumping!! The radio triggers (for the flashes) and the SLR itself, limited me to a 1/200th second shutter speed – but that was enough to get nice sharp action photos, at ISO100 and f16! I used my fave 50mm lens, and had to stand back some distance to get everything in…
All in all, about 20 photos before “jumping fatigue” set in, but I had already snapped a few useful ones, choosing this one:
You can see the essential coffee cup down the bottom, the leg of the keylight stand, and the paper roll beginning to suffer from being jumped on. The reflectors really soften the shadows well, and the backlighting gives Holly’s jacket some nice definition. It is astonishing how high a person can jump without some sort of springy assistance (other than coffee).
With a touch of “corporate branding/style manual” treatment (making the picture monochrome, using the proper Black & White adjustment thingo and a green filter for lighter fleshtones, and a Pantone-correct Red wedge device), we end up with this:
which will be printed and plastered all over the place (well, the workplace!) shortly, for all to see.