I like film...(open thread)

[farnz]

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... What did you develop yours in? ...

i developed mine in a commercial lab, Phil.

 

Pete.

[erl]

i developed mine in a commercial lab, Phil.

 

Pete.

I develop mine in a hurry!

Impatience pays.

[Guest JMF]

What a wonderful picture, excellent use of the panoramic camera! Your latest submissions, esp. the Acros shots, are terrific. It is a great pleasure to be taken around the world by you this way

 

 

Superb!

 

 

 

Really terrific shot Jean-Marc.

 

 

Jean-Marc, your recent Acros work is outstanding! The drama in this picture and some of the others is palpable. Not to mention your wonderful desert pano. Chapeau!

 

 

 

 

Love it!

 

 

 

Cheers to you all for the support !

 

Best regards, JM.

 

"Still life" by JM__, on Flickr

 

< Provia 100 - Ricoh GR1V

 

Twins by JM__, on Flickr

 

< Provia 100 - M3 - 50 Summicron

[Ernest]

I'm delighted you've decided to use some film, John! The HP5+ at 1600 should have that intrinsic film "look and feel". It will be interesting to hear, if you would like to share your thoughts, of your experience in using both, especially in the darker corners of the gallery. Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful day at the gallery and I'm certain there are to be some great pictures come of it!

 

 

Thank you so much Ernest for your erudite thoughts. To be honest, this was the first day of shooting during the workshop, and I was feeling a bit jetlagged still (it can be quite an onerous journey from Melbourne, Australia to Oaxaca, Mexico). Which is probably why I didn't really comprehend what was going on. Still, this nice man was kind enough to stand in front of me for long enough. I'll check the proof sheets to see if there may be something else, although I think I've posted a few others here already and I don't want to bore people too much with them. I'd also have to check through my proof sheets to see if Mary Ellen put a blue, red or yellow dot next to this frame - which means she'd want to see a work print of it next day (edit - I checked - no dot). It certainly didn't make the final cut of three pictures though, but I like it.

 

I pinch myself that I had the absolute great fortune to meet Mary Ellen and get to know her a little - my wife and I and a friend from the workshop caught up with her in Sydney as well later in the year, when she was doing stills for "The Great Gatsby", and we kept in touch after that. She was such a lovely person and a great teacher and mentor - as well, of course, of being one of the truly great photographers. I met up with one of her closest friends a year or so ago in New York and we remembered her with great fondness. She is sadly missed.

 

Pretty sure I haven't posted this before - the wind was whipping around blowing up dust everywhere, but the band just closed their eyes and kept on playing:

 

 

San Sebastian Abosolo, Mexico 2011

M6TTL, 28mm Elmarit, Ilford XP2 Super (at 200 ISO)

Thanks so much for the flashback to your time with Mary Ellen's workshop--inspiring. Perhaps you could give a rewind of your most memorable take-away? Personally or professionally. This sent me back to Ward 81 and what she was doing then.

 

The foreground and background framing in San Sebastian Abosolo, the play of dark against light, gives this composition such a play of depth and scale. Three dimensional with the dust swirling on the verge of over-exposure in the background, just right, like a Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men. Three musicians seated, one standing. The soundtrack, a photograph that begs for a sound track! Adam so keenly observes: "This one tells a fun story; the juxtaposition of the chaotic background with the chaotic (in a good way) musical band has my eating ringing!" And Corona rules. Your 28mm Elmarit pressed into justified service.

[sixteen pads]

Two days ago we got a few flurries in the morning... 

NYC

Portra 400

M7, 28mm elmarit pre-asph

reflection.jpg

lovely !!

[Guest Nowhereman]

Here is an old image shot with the Summilux 50 pre-ASPH, whose rendition I've always preferred to the ASPH version:

 

M6 | Summilux 50 pre-ASPH | Tri-X @ 1600 | f/1.4

_________________

Alone in Bangkok essay on BURN Magazine

Instagram: @mitchalland

[Prosophos]

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"Quiet."

 

Leica M3, Leica 50mm Summicron Dual Range (at close focus), Kodak Tri-X 400, and Plustek 8200i.

 

―Peter.

 

[Guest Nowhereman]

this version is MUCH better.  The previous version crushed the shadows and the shadows has an ugly unnatural blue cast.  This is all fixed in this image.

 

Adam - As I wrote in post #46196, I realize that most people would consider the earlier, darker version "over the top." If the purpose were documentary, I would chose the second version or one with still less density. However, my intent was an expressionist print in the context of a photo essay — and I like the crushed, blue shadows and the general feel of the dark version; but I'm still ambivalent whether this shot will make it into the essay. Any else prefer the dark, expressionist version? (I'm reminded of Eggleston's dictum, "I'm at war with the obvious." But, hey, maybe the dark version I like is the obvious one!)

_________________

Alone in Bangkok essay on BURN Magazine

Instagram: @mitchalland

[Ernest]

Thank you very much, Ernest, for your erudite thoughts on my humble photograph.

 

Let's indeed call it 'Untitled' - I like that.

 

I referred to it (the landscape) as "anonymous" because I'd actually passed it a couple of days earlier, on my way to the ubiquitous "somewhere else" (specific, non-anonymous place). But I sensed that it was, indeed, as you so thoughtfully point out, enigmatic. Can something be both enigmatic and anonymous at the same time? Hmmm. By one definition of anonymous ("lacking individuality, distinction, or recognizability"- Merriam-Webster) this landscape is, as you correctly state, not anonymous at all. After all, at least one photograph exists of it, published on the WWW for all the world to enjoy. Whether it ceased to be anonymous because the picture was taken, or because the picture was published, or because someone actually saw the published picture and related it to a real, extant place, is possibly moot. "The presence of absence" as again you have so articulately put it, is indeed what this photograph is about. And, as such, it is anonymous because its very lack of individuality, distinction or recognizability transforms it from a specific place (Malibu Hills) to something altogether more universal. Much like - and again, I am so glad you invoked one of my all-time best-loved films - L'Avventura - sets the Aeolian island landscape to be a universal anonymous place where an elliptical (or, put another way, enigmatic) mystery develops only to be subsumed by the development of a laconic affair. Such, however unromantically, was not to be the fate of my Malibu Hills landscape. I stopped, made a couple of exposures, drank it all in for a few moments, and then moved on, as we always seem to do in our preoccupied lives. I am exceedingly happy, though, to think that these few fleeting moments may have given me some link, albeit as I see it undeserved and tenuous, to Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Beckett, Shakespeare et al!

 

As an aside, your suggested title of "Murdered Landscape" reminded me of an exhibition mounted some years ago by a former tutor I'd studied under while at photography college, Susan Fereday. She'd gained access to - "repurposed" would be the current expression - archival photographs from police files that had been taken at the sites of murders in and around Melbourne in the 1940s, 50s and 60s and made beautiful black and white prints of them. These pictures had been taken contextually and did not show bodies or offer any other clue that a murder had taken place there, yet they held (for me at least) a most compelling power - perhaps much more so than had the unfortunate victims been shown.

 

Photography is, potentially, so much about mystery. It purports to show reality - and it does - but exactly what reality it shows is selective and at the sole discretion of the person with his or her finger on the button, or who at least has access to the negatives/prints/files and has the imagination to be able to see a broader context to these things than was perhaps originally intended. Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel's book "Evidence" is of course a classic example of that. It is also - and again I am so glad you have recognized it in my photograph - uniquely descriptive of the passage of time, which itself embodies unknowable mystery - as Adam's wonderful pictures taken at 5am in Central Park so eloquently allude. My picture was made on a Sunday - what are the chances that pile of dirt would still be there on Monday evening?

 

I do like 'Untitled' as a title.

It's a good thing I know where to go for everything from A to Z because skipped sideways and missed Sultan and Mandel's "Evidence" but quickly made up for clumsy footwork, thanks to your heads up. Listening to your very informative comments about Fereday's work with "repurposed" photographs snapped me back to Michael Lesy's "Wisconsin Death Trip," although he juxtaposed news clippings contemporary to Charles Van Schaik's photographs from 1890 to 1910. Not the same thing, but when I scanned through "Evidence," I noticed a mention of Lesy's book. Adam Bartos's work has a kind of evidentiary perspective: "Yard Sale Photographs," "Kosmos," and "Adam Bartos: Darkroom," among others. Your argument that "photograph is, potentially, so much about mystery" is totally finger on the red button, or as you astutely allow, finger on the shutter release button! Without the mystery, we are lost. Intrigue. To have a subtle, curious voice in the photograph, perhaps almost an interrogation. Visual evidence that braids into a narrative somehow that connects in a meaningful way, if only to ask a question that is the meaning itself. Can the photograph move beyond the status of simple artifact, or is that enough? Or is that the endgame: Are we entitled to move beyond the perimeter of the photograph printed or projected, or is the photograph an allusion to extracurricular real estate, an invitation to add that which is missing, to imagine the whole from only its fragment? The invitation to a mystery as you put it. Click.

[logan2z]

Leica M-A, Summarit 35mm/2.4 ASPH, Tri-X 400

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[erl]

inspired/urged by Phil (stray cat), earlier this week I visited the NGV (National gallery of Victoria, Aust.) and shot two rolls of HP5+ @ 1600iso, dev. Xtol 1+1.

Camera: M7. Lens: 75mm Summicron.

 

When I got to galleries etc., I shoot the visitors rather than the artworks, which I use only as a backdrop to my 'people gazing'. I will start sharing some of them here. Scanning is finished but I still need to adjust levels to optimize the images as I go.

 

THE HAT

 

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[erl]

THE FLOWER ROOM

 

This room is interactive in that visitors are asked to add a paper flower to the display.

M7 with 50mm /2.0

 

 

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[erl]

ONE WAY CONVERSATION

 

M7 and 50mm/2.0

 

 

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[erl]

CHILDREN'S DAY OUT

 

M7 and 50mm/2.0

 

 

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[erl]

FOOT TROUBLE

 

M7 and 50mm/2.0

 

 

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[erl]

MISSING THE BIG PICTURE

 

M7 and 50mm/2.0

 

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[erl]

More later!

Gotta play tennis now.

[david strachan]

MISSING THE BIG PICTURE

 

M7 and 50mm/2.0

That's a beaut picture. A clear message-feeling, and excellent capture-processing.

 

...

[SunnySixteen]

Sunrise in Colorado

Portra 160

M6

Summicron 50

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Hallo,

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[stray cat]

ONE WAY CONVERSATION

 

M7 and 50mm/2.0

 

inspired/urged by Phil (stray cat), earlier this week I visited the NGV (National gallery of Victoria, Aust.) and shot two rolls of HP5+ @ 1600iso, dev. Xtol 1+1.

Camera: M7. Lens: 75mm Summicron.

 

When I got to galleries etc., I shoot the visitors rather than the artworks, which I use only as a backdrop to my 'people gazing'. I will start sharing some of them here. Scanning is finished but I still need to adjust levels to optimize the images as I go.

 

THE HAT

 

 

John, I couldn't be happier that you decided to use some film at the NGV because you have come up with this wonderful collection of pictures which you are able to share with us on my favourite thread! These are really great examples of astute people watching and moment-selection. "One Way Conversation" is my favourite because of the two distinct expressions - her unbridled, joyous enthusiasm contrasting with his insouciance. But they are all terrific shots. And the use of film gives it that "edge" that digital will so easily allow you to take away - the acknowledgement that - yeah, it was dark and that required me (meaning you!) to work pretty diligently and smartly - to know my (your) craft - in order to pluck these pictures from a chaotic reality. The grain, the slight blur, shallow depth-of-field - all these could be achieved (I'm guessing) with digital, but with these pictures there is an emulsion involved and the pictures have that immediacy - that link to photojournalism from a golden age - that is compelling.

 

How do you see it? You'd have used digital too - what are you happiest with? What did you have the most fun with? And, yes, of course it's OK if the answer is digital!