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.

Living rough…

I might have mentioned a couple of blog entries ago that I’ve been testing out a “new” camera (circa 1998), to take on travels. This is important to do – it takes me ages to get used to the ergonomics and “way of seeing and doing” of a new camera, and I know it’s worthwhile doing this, because the pictures I love best tend to come from the cameras I feel most comfortable with – for example, the last 8 years I’ve been stomping around on Australian and overseas travels with a 1950′s Rolleiflex (amongst other things), and that’s just like a third arm now – I can fairly visualise a picture before pointing the camera at it – AND I tend to use the same film all the time (Kodak Plus-X), for consistent and repeatable results. Annoyingly, Kodak has just discontinued this film in 120 format this year. But I still have 70 rolls stuffed into the fridge…
Anyhoo – This new Fuji marvel is not there for me yet – I keep making “unremarkable” pictures with it, and I’m not convinced I’m to blame!! So test and test and test I must. On Saturday, for instance, I made a quick trip to the zoo again with it.

Here’s some (imaginatively-named) Kangaroo Island Kangaroos, clearly doing it rough.
Actually, it was refreshing having this camera – previous zoo trips this year, I’ve dragged along the Mamiya with the big lens, and so everything has been a closeup. With the Fuji, its little zoom only goes to 90mm, which is not especially telephoto at all (only slightly longer than “normal” focal length for 6×4.5cm), so everything was a wide shot. It meant I photographed stuff as groups, and gave things a bit more context. I must remember I like these sorts of things – perhaps I’ll write a note, or a self-indulgent blog…

Portrait frenzy!!

I had a lovely job on Tuesday evening, setting up a little studio in the First Site Gallery at RMIT for local gold & silversmith Claire McArdle’s exhibition opening: “Public Displays of Attention” – featuring some really charming, meticulously crafted (hand dyed!) wearable art, that the ensuing CROWD of people took to with some glee – more so, since they were encouraged to try them on, and, of course, have a portrait made by your author here!

So, given the white walls and low white ceiling in the space, I reasoned I’d only need two lamps – a key (little umbrella) and a side/backlight (big umbrella) – deciding that all the fill light would bounce off the walls. The camera I set at ISO100, and 1/160th second shutter for sync, and guessed around f/13 – which turned out to be fine (I say guess, but really, it’s a known – I use my 80′s Bowens ALL the time, and have a fairly good idea of their power over a given distance by now). Certainly makes setup quick – and everything’s triggered by those handy pocket wizards – which seemed an insane investment way back, but have never ever failed to work brilliantly.
And then, smiling, happy folks flooded the gallery, and I worked feverishly, making 124 portraits in all. At various times, there was even a queue!!
In this one you can see the sync & power cable dangling in the corner, pre crop – the other thing was that I only used a 50mm lens – which is a “portrait” lens in the APS-C format, so for a shot of three folks, I had to stand back a fair bit (“excuse me, excuse me… etc”).

I would have to say, that this is a stand-out as one of the more jolly, community-spirited photo events I’ve had the pleasure to be involved in, and I believe Claire is making prints for all the subjects who so enthusiastically engaged with the work!

Butterflies in a bottle…

Some of the most challenging things to photograph are glass objects – they are shiny (and reflect everything back at you) and transparent (and thus require definition of form). Nonetheless, photograph them we must, and when they are lit well, they turn out swell!
Here’s the setup for a piece of work I photographed last week, featuring a glass bottle full of butterflies by Melbourne artist Rachelle Eves. Saving the final picture ’till the end of the post – the table in the centre there has a large piece of shiny white perspex on it, which is reflecting the large white, brightly lit background into the camera lens, almost underneath the bottle (much like my peach thing, several posts ago). The lighting for the butterflies themselves comes from a large umbrella/flash just to the right of the camera.
The biggest trick here, is to surround the whole situation with “black things” – so the shoot is in a large dark space, and I’ve put two music stands either side of the table. All this black is visible in the edges of the glass (via reflection) and so gives the edges a definition that would otherwise be bleached out!!
And so, success! I think this one will end up on a poster, later in the year, hence the generous white space left for editorial. I should add that with this setup, I didn’t have to do any retouching, other than the regular toning down of the Canon‘s over-emphasis of red….

"Monarch" by Rachelle Eves

I went to Trentham East…

Not ONLY that – I had a tasty lunch and saw an inspiring exhibition of Large Format photos from Iceland, and had a nice chat to the gallery owner there over a cup of tea…
Here’s a picture of Trentham East, of the road towards Trentham – whilst this is literally in the middle of town, it’s a little unfair, as the nice country pub, couple of houses, and road leading to the Gold Street Studios Gallery are behind me. I made this to test my shiny “new” Fuji medium format point & shoot camera. Tick, yes – it works. Not only that, but it prints the exposure data under the frame, so I must tell you the above photo was shot at f/11, 1/125th of a second, through a 90mm lens with autofocus on.
The road to Trentham East (from Woodend) is actually a really nice drive, and with the countryside all looking so green, the meadows and rolling hills are very satisfying. Not many folks on the roads on Easter Saturday either.
In Trentham itself, the place was abuzz, and I managed to grab this photo through a fence: Judging from the preponderance of such creatures in Trentham, I’m fairly sure this sort of thing goes on all the time.

You can see here, the Death Star orbiting the forest moon of Endor.

A recent photo project I’ve embarked upon, is to document the western basalt plains of suburban Melbourne before they disappear under a sea of new homes. If you stand at a certain point in Rockbank, near the bluestone remains of the old goldfields-era Rockbank Inn, you can see three of the former volcanos that shaped the plain. In only a short time, this view will be impossible for the first time in thousands of years!!
Here’s one of them – Mt Cottrell, viewed from the North. Within the next few years, these grasslands will be full of roads and amusingly bizarre brick veneer homes, and a further bit of farming and indigenous grassland heritage will be buried underneath suburbia.
Standing around here yesterday in the Autumnal afternoon light, it was amazing how quiet and isolated everything was, and yet it’s closer to the city than much of South-Eastern suburbia. In fact, it’s astonishing the area has remained untouched all the way up to 2011. There are unmade country roads and neglected watercourses, and lots and lots of illegally dumped household ephemera – I wonder what the half-life of a queen-sized mattress is…
The view from Mt Cottrell back towards the city gives you a good idea of the scope and advance of this development – those fields are now full of little survey markers, and already in the latest Melways, you can see where many of the roads and subdivisions will go.
Photographically, the challenge is to find something compositionally interesting in grass plains – but actually, when you start looking, there’s heaps, it just requires quite a bit of wandering about, but that’s both healthy AND fun…

How to make vegetables look yummy on an overcast day! (and yes, I realise tomatoes are a fruit)

Yesterday, I had an interesting commission, and that was to journey to far-off Mirboo North, to photograph a friend’s veggie patch, esp. her tomatoes, which are quite interesting and unusual varieties. There was, of course, also tea and cake, and some minor consumption of said tomatoes, as well as chatting and playing with the dog – all the usual country things one does.

The only downside to this adventure, was that the run of sunny and warmish weather we’ve had down here this last week has clearly come to an end. By yesterday afternoon, the sun had started to go, and ominous clouds began to appear in the West. Anyone who has photographed plants outdoors will know they look very dull indeed out of sunlight. There is no sparkle at all to a flatly lit tomato, so what was I to do?

The answer is to treat the entire world outside like a studio-set, and the light from the sky as just one light source out of many you could possibly use! So I decided that the overcast sky could be my “fill light” – the nice even lighting that brings up the shadows so you could see ‘em – so given that at ISO100, I was metering around f/5.6 at 1/160th – for a nice contrast ratio, I would need something around f/8-ish for my “sunny” highlights, which would be provided by my favourite 1970′s technology: The Vivitar 283.
I brought along two (and a spare) of these little flashguns, on little light stands, with wide-angle adaptors, and cheap little wireless triggers (along with a corresponding transmitter to put on the camera’s hotshoe), that I could simply cross light each vegetable with. So, one I’d position to the side of the camera, at a 45 degree-ish angle to the subject, and the other I’d place behind the subject, on the opposite angle (ie pointing at each other and the subject), to give a nice keylight, and some nice backlighting. If this wasn’t possible (if a fence was in the way, then I’d angle them more like copystand lighting – throwing strong sidelight onto the subject to give it a nice 3D highlight. The beauty of the ancient Vivitar 283 flash is that you can put a little infinitely variable power control on the front – sort of like a lighting dimmer, and control the power output. So, generally the flashes were aroundabout 1 metre away from the subject to give me f/8, but if more or less were required, I could dial them up or down.

It’s such a nifty and portable way of having nice controllable lighting everywhere, but there are some limitations. For instance, if it had been sunnier, then the flashes would have been overpowered somewhat – you can control flash power relative to the sun with the shutter (faster shutter = less sun = same amount of flash because it’s so speedy), but with an SLR, there is also a maximum shutter – sync speed. Using something with a leaf shutter solves that problem, like an old medium format camera… mmmm.
Anyways – I have two bags of gourmet tomatoes now, and shall presently devour some.

Holga alternatives (or how to be 37% cooler than your Holga-using chums)

I have mixed feelings about the extraordinary popularity of Holga/Diana/Lomo plastic lens cameras. On the one hand, it’s great the way so many folks are rediscovering film, and the magic of creating photos that may or may not turn out, with simple opto-mechanical instruments that don’t require power to run… On the other hand, people spend lots of money on what are rather terribly poorly manufactured plastic cameras with low-grade plastic lenses, when these days it’s fairly simple to buy a top quality professional film camera for literally $5 secondhand. I even popped in to the Lomo shop in Vienna last year, expecting to be gleeful at all the film stuff there, but left (WITHOUT BUYING ANYTHING) feeling more like I’d been in a cheap knick-knack shop instead…
“But Marc, I love the down-to-earth simplicity of the Holga, and unlike you, I am not unhealthily obsessed with sharpness and perfect exposures!”, I hear you (Holga users) say… Well, have you considered one of these?
This is a bakelite masterpiece from the 1950′s by Kodak in England – The Brownie Cresta II – one of a series of models that are all moreorless the same. It takes the same 120 film as a Holga, features a similarly cheap and horribly vignetting plastic lens, and has only three “controls”: The shutter button, The film winding knob, and a sliding piece of metal that puts either a yellow filter, or a closeup adapter in front of the lens. That’s IT. The aperture and shutter speed are probably 1/40 at f11 or so – and the only thing you have control over is composition and the decisive moment.
Best of all, I just did a search on that auction site, and found many many minty ones, and one similar to mine for…. wait for it…. AU$4.67. The postage they want is more than the camera. Get one, and be cool I say!

In other news, a good friend of mine is having an exhibition at Craft Victoria shortly, and my photos of her work are being used for the associated catalogue and publicity, which is grand.

Michelle Hamer - Is this your new home?

I encourage you all to pop in and have a look at her great, epic work!

70mm success!

Well, after the last post, I thought I should really complete matters by finishing the giant roll of film that was in my Crown Graphic, and have a go at processing it!! Well, thanks to the annual Swiss Festival (at the Austrian club in Heidelberg – they ARE European neighbours!), I had an excellent subject to shoot a few more frames of film, AND a great excuse to consume cervelat, Rivella, and plait bread. So this is the result: a satisfying mise en scene of Alphorn and folks in national costume standing around. Actually, the alphorn playing was quite good – I have heard much worse (in Switzerland itself, no less – although in that case, I think they were “practicing”).
I processed the Kodak Plus-X Aerographic 2402 film as regular Plus-X film (disregarding the tip in my previous blog entry – ‘uh, cos’ I didn’t actually have any Dektol) in Agfa Rodinal 1:25 – as despite the panic of “have I loaded the stainless steel reels properly?”, or “have I actually put enough chemistry in the tank?” I actually got a fairly even result – with about 40 odd good negatives out of an improbable 65 on the roll in total. The ends of the roll had a few light-leakage dark stripes on them – which suggests that canister and my film loading technique might both be a little awry.
Still, it proves this old film is useful. This scan is a bit soft too – and that’s because I don’t have a 70mm film holder for it (with the sprocket holes, it’s quite a bit wider than 120 film) – so I’ve had to scan it in a 4×5 holder and it has buckled a bit. I’ll just have to make a custom 70mm one….

70mm workflow – or, how to manage when someone gives you a decade’s supply of aerial mapping film…

Almost a year ago, a very kind friend (thanks Frazer!), engaged in some sort of office cleanout, rather than throwing away several 150ft rolls of quality Kodak aerial film, thought “I wonder if Marc would like these?” – and so I became the proud new owner of this grand collection of recently out-of-date 70mm film stock, and wondered to myself… um, how do I shoot and process this?
70mm film is another motion picture industry by-product that never really took off in still photography. Nonetheless, it’s use was widespread in some niche industries, like US yearbook photography and aerial mapping – affording a compact means of taking lots of high quality film up into the air without needing to reload, or reload as often. 70mm film was also used quite a bit in space, with all the manned Apollo space missions taking along specially adapted Hasselblad EDC’s (which they LEFT on the moon!!!) that were fitted with 70mm film backs (they brought those back to Earth).
Shooting the film turns out to be easy – a couple of camera manufacturers, like Hasselblad, Mamiya, and Graflex, made 70mm film backs – the Mamiya one, originally designed for the 6×7 Mamiya RB67, fits a standard mini graflok back – so I found one and stuck it on the back of my little 2×3″ Crown Graphic, and started snapping away.
Um, hang on Marc – you’ve jumped a step or two – if this blog entry is about workflow, then we need to start with getting 150 feet of film into something a bit more useable…
So, the film comes in a box like this, and inside this box is a handsome metal tin, and inside this metal tin is (in this case) 150 feet of film – that’s an awful lot, considering a normal 120 roll is only around 3 feet, and gives you 10x 6×7 shots. Somehow we need to cut the film down into smaller rolls, for convenience…. And so we need a bulk loader – penny-pinching 35mm shooters will be well-used to these contrivances, and here the whole thing is simply “up-sized” to 70mm.
The principle is – in complete darkness (or in a dark bag/tent), you load the 150ft reel into the main chamber, and then you put an empty 70mm canister into the smaller section, wind the film into it until it’s full, and then cut the film off (there’s a handy/scary razor inside), ready for the next canister. So you end up with one of these, full of 70mm film: which I have wisely labelled to remind me (years later) what film I actually have loaded in there. And then the canister, with a friend to takeup the exposed film, are loaded into the film back, like so: One canister gives us around 50x 6x7cm negatives, which for anyone familiar with shooting medium format film, is almost more film than it is possible to know what to do with. Certainly, shooting an event where reloading is awkward or impractical, becomes immediately less silly with a medium format camera.
Here’s my Crown Graphic all ready to go, in this manner. Actually, I’ve had one canister loaded in this for the better part of a year, and am yet to run out of film…

From here on, all that remains is to shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot, until the roll is done, then load (in complete darkness) the film onto a reel:
bung the reel into an extraordinarily large processing tank (in this case, a tank designed to fit two reels, for maximum workflow efficiency):
and process the film per the manufacturer’s instructions. Which is where we can get a bit stuck, because many of these aerial emulsions are designed for processes not necessarily available to the masses – thank heavens for nice people in far flung Nevada who tell you stuff. The hot tip for this particular Plus-X emulsion (similar to the Plus-X we all know and love, but with a thicker base and some other stuff going on) is: “1 gram Dektol per 100 ml h2o, 30 sec agitation and then walk away and let it stand for 15 minutes. Perfect every time. One shot, you chuck the weak dektol after that.” Thanks Jim.
And hopefully, one day when I actually finish a roll, I’ll have some pictures to show. Using all this film may take some years, but, uh, what FUN.