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I like film...(open thread)


Doc Henry

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Absolutely gorgeous, Gary.  You're upping the ante with your other stellar photographs of these elegant beings. 

 

Nothing flash Adam. Cold, frosty Saturday morning. New toy which I wanted to trial (lens and camera). Hopped on the bike, but the fingerless gloves meant my pinkies were all but frozen off by the time I got home. These are just a few of many horses close by the house, we are surrounded by them (it is a thoroughbred farm after all).

Foggy as well as frosty morning was the icing.

Gary

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Thank you, Rog, yet again for your generous and considered thoughts on my photograph. I always intuited that it was a reasonable picture but completely lack the academic rigour to understand why. Your incredibly astute thoughts certainly serve to illuminate wider issues (of, for example, art, perspective, culture) that even these most simple of pictures are able to evince. “I never thought of that angle.” Indeed.

 

And again your questions raise more questions. "...instigating the photograph that is here from the photographer who was there!" Yes - precisely! Let us not forget that a photograph only exists because the photographer was there (well, OK, not strictly always but whatever). It represents a GPS co-ordinate in space and time of where that camera was being held by that photographer. Like a painting, a film or a novel that is "of its time" that photograph is precisely of time and space, and of all those things that aligned to put the photographer there, camera in hand, in front of that scene. That's a pretty cool concept.

 

I guess I'll have to attempt Barthes again! I've had Camera Lucida since the seventies and still haven't quite managed to get through it with any feeling that I'm quite getting it, but I'm inspired now to try again. The same goes for On Photography which I bought the same day in 1979 or whatever. I'm pleased you were able to pick up a copy of Mary Ellen Mark's book, especially one signed by her. At the workshop I attended she spoke a little of photographing on movie sets, but said at a previous workshop that all one attendee had been interested to ask her was "What's Johnny Depp like?" So I never quite raised the gumption to ask her about her experiences on the set of Apocalypse Now! which I would have loved to have done. Oh well. She was a very wonderful person and I feel so privileged to have met her.

 

I now understand far more clearly what you meant with your question of whether a photograph can evoke emotion and the tension between images and words. The questions you raise are of course unanswerable, and only by referring to works by masters such as the ones you mention (interestingly, Franz Kline's (whom you mention) work seems to share many of the qualities with the work of Bruna Stude of whom you have made a wonderful portrait in the "Portraits" sub-forum) can we have a reliable base to contemplate them (I'd add Atget, Edward Hopper and Édouard Manet to the list, among others). But in not finding answers, if indeed there are none (perhaps I'm wrong about that - it has been known!) we explore areas which, once illuminated, can and practically must help to further our own work. Is black and white photography really fictional perception? I thought black and white are the only colours of photography (apologies to Robert Frank!).

 

I'm so pleased you revisited Alphaville after many years - it is a wonderful film. I think I may have done my children a great disservice by showing it to them at too young an age - even now as adults I just have to mention Alphaville and a kind of disdainful, distasteful glaze comes over their eyes. Same with Le Cercle Rouge though, thankfully, they both love Le Samouraï. And Blade Runner.

Awesome! Thanks for giving a few pages from the catalog of your wide-ranging experience and eclectic interests. If I were back in college, I would be the first to sign up for your seminars. So lucky are your children to have the kind of cinematech experience you provided! The fact that they're Jean-Pierre Melville fans, Alain Delon, at least, says much. There you go, again, sending me back to my Criterion shelves for Le Cercle Rouge and Le Samourai!

It was a treat seeing Jean-Pierre Leaud playing a bit part in Alphaville.

 

I hear you lamenting about the missed opportunity to talk to Mary Ellen Mark about shooting Marlon Brando. Years back, I was hired to write a screenplay by a producer who set Edward Dmytryk to direct the film. I worked one-on-one with the Dmytryk for about three weeks to polish the screenplay, but I was never so bold as to get his view being one of the blacklisted Hollywood 10. I just didn't think it would be professional to fill up time with chit-chat when I had a job to do. Cutting to the end of the story, the film didn't get made, but I still got paid.

 

By the way, applause for your prickly awesome "Christchurch Botanical Gardens" diorama shot that you pulled off, no doubt, just before Hiroshi Sugimoto came around the corner.

 

I will mention your Franz Kline connection with Bruna when I see her in Kauai next month (Gallery 103). She's doing some "pushing-the-envelope" stuff with her photo-abstraction. To give you an idea, here's her own account of her experimental process:

 

"You have seen Squid Ink and Octopus Ink series from the Suite Empty Ocean that I print on fragile Haini Kozo at 72inches x 40 inches. Even Arkady Lvov (NYC master printer, in printing world: creme de la creme) thought it is an impossible task to print platinum on that type of paper large scale, and when he realized it is a actually 6 foot print, he thought I was crazy. I could not believe when he invited me to work with him in his NYC studio.

 

I would like to be able to create assembled images that transform entire space by staggering large prints vertically and horizontally like a tent or a maze...in the quite large space.... This Haini Kozo paper can take humidity...so though I would be able to create something exciting anywhere with these enormous prints - enclosed space of course.... BUT semi-sheltered (out of wind more then out of the rain) outdoor installation would be magical. The paper would allow natural light to penetrate it and the translucency of the paper itself when natural light hits it at the right angle, would reveal another composition in places where the work would overlap. Light breeze would add to the experience...It is an idea of water-over-water (from water to water?) and light-over-light (from light to light?, as my work is all about water and light and it came from it. . . Having funding to create work and to allow it to disintegrate ...that would be pure beauty...and I know it is completely unrealistic at the point of my career I am in...But one can dream on...

 

My developing process is quite a bit unique as I work outdoors (it is what one is NOT supposed to do when developing a photograph!) but because the prints are so large, I have no choice but to work outside. Since the Sun is an enemy - I work at night or build a tunnel from Sintra sheets to transport my prints in a developing tub. My rinse process is done with the garden hose.

 

I also use a juice from the lime of my own lime tree in my chemical mix to achieve deep blacks... leaves flying around and decomposing in my developing tubs change chemistry and are accidental natural matter that most of the time adds to my work and every once in a while is a disaster.

 

RE: my other work

 

The long series of prints that were 40 inches high and 150 inches long that you saw 2 years ago was a suite Black on White, those were 40x30 inches on Arches Platinum.

 

Suite Empty Ocean incorporates the following body of work:

 

Squid Ink

Octopus Ink

Black on White

Waterline

Turmoil

90 Degrees East

La Linea

Seascapes (Man-Made)

Cityscapes

 

I also experiment with photograms and mixed metals printing. / fragmented installation of Native Ferns. I have produced extremely salaried photograms with the image of the plant that was exposed on coated paper instead of being a ghost reads as a photograph, not a negative. That was not a part of my proposal but it is one of my projects that I would like to complete in much larger scale later on. Our late museum curator Jay Jensen from HoMA encouraged me to do transformative installation in large formats... but then he passed away before I was able to put in a proposal. I will keep an eye on the emails if something is not clear...and probably a lot is a bit gibberish...but wanted you to have it asap.

 

Thanks, again! Bruna Stude exhibit at Songzchuan International Photography Biennial in Beijing"

 

This gives you an idea of what she is doing with the camera/photographic process and calls into mind our discussion about object and representation.

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Phil said: "Is black and white photography really fictional perception? I thought black and white are the only colours of photography (apologies to Robert Frank!)."

 

I mean that we don't perceive our world in black and white like film records, naturally, so black-and-white perception is a constructed convention that's fictional. We buy into it. Were you talking about color photography in terms of the Technicolor process using three cameras shooting black-and-white stock, then printed in color? (Gone With the Wind)

 

Also, I want to add Vermeer to your list of artists above, as well as Albrecht Durer, who produced the first artist book in 1498, The Apocalypse, and consider Ralph Gibson's photography and book design.

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Konica Auto-Reflex @ half frame, Hexanon 52/`.8, Fuji 100 expired

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Thank you again, Rog, and please express to Bruna Stude when you see her in beautiful Kauai the appreciation I have formed for her work and her passionate consideration of our oceans. Those works shown in Beijing at such an enormous scale must look staggering! And anyone who does Platinum/Palladium printing - and stretches it beyond its assumed limits - gets huge respect from me.

 

The Criterion Collection! It is because of these exquisite releases that I got to know so many of the films we have talked about. In fact one of my sons for some time wanted to study film restoration as a result of realizing the incredible difference that arduous, frame by frame restoration can make to a film. What an incredible experience you had working alongside such a great director as Edward Dmytryk! Should you be willing to divulge the titles of any movies you worked on that did get made, I'd certainly be interested to see them. On chatting with Mary Ellen, I found the most useful times were over dinner, or walking through the streets of Oaxaca back to the hotel. She had many stories to tell, including about many of the greats of photography. One night, after I'd explained to her that I wanted to buy an old local numberplate as a souvenir, she led me through a whole bunch of streets until we stood in front of an antique shop. It was closed of course, but I went back next day and found all manner of incredible stuff.

 

Hiroshi Sugimoto - and here was I thinking I'd been original with dioramas! Actually, I was well aware of his wonderful work - call it plagiarism or an homage to a master. Dioramas make incredible subjects, and present interesting compositional dilemmas - how much to include and what to exclude, whether to show part of the extended bit that gives it away - much like the pictures we've been seeing on this forum from you, Wayne and others that show fragments. The world needs more dioramas.

 

I hadn't considered Gone With the Wind, though that is a really interesting point - I think the Kodachrome process is roughly similar, although dyes were added at some stage. Factually, we do see in colour of course (as long as we have "normal" vision) - but the camera does not (as long as black and white film is loaded). Or rather, it may see in colour but not register in colour. So it is not fictional perception to the machine, although it is to the one who (supposedly) makes the decision. But in making that decision, in the knowledge that you have Tri-X loaded, are we not sublimating (or subverting) our colour vision to the service of the medium? So in adapting our natural (colour) vision to the preponderance of a black and white result, could it be said that our perception is not fictional, it's derivative? I am not trying to argue - heaven forbid! - but these things occurred to me when you described black and white as fictional perception, and I'm wondering if there is any basis for thinking otherwise. It's actually probably quite an important consideration for photographers (especially film photographers, or users of the Monochrom digital camera).

 

By the way - thank you for your mention earlier of Bill Jacobson, whose work I didn't know. And your recollection of Jean-Pierre Léaud being briefly in Alphaville will cause me the pleasure of watching The 400 Blows again.

Edited by stray cat
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That sprocket again

SWC

Tri-X in R09 @ 1:50

Epson 4870

Gary

 

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Leica M5 + 50mm Summilux f1.4 ASPH + Kodak Portra 160

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Leica M5 + 50mm Summilux f1.4 ASPH + Kodak Portra 160

 

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Thanks for your perspective, Philip.  It just floors me that such an expensive machine does not come with a dust removal feature.

But it does - the FlexTouch filter that is found in the Textures window. I rarely use it, as I find that if I scan a film as soon as it is dry there won't be any dust accumulated on it. A bigger issue for me is the fact that a new batch of powdered C-41 chemicals will still have tiny particles if I use it the same day as I make it up. Wait a day and all is well, but waiting is hard.

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Dogs; the need for perfectly hung doors: two things protecting mankind from obsolescence. :)

 

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Agfa Ambi-Silette (I think,) Agfa 50/2.8 Color Solinar (I think,) Fuji Superia 100 expired

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Thanks, Steve, and you are probably right :)  I took this during the narrow period of weeks in the summer when the sun falls right behind the SOL as it sets.

Wowsie! I feel God must have had a hand in orchestrating the light for you.

 

Ha ha, no discounts for sure !!  Thanks for the funny comment, Rog! 

You will now be getting a call from the United States Post Office to begin talks regarding rights to the image for the next Forever stamp. Congratulations. Of course, you will still have to buy your own stamps. No discount.

 

Thanks, Gary :)

Lovely, lots going on here with the colours, lovely.

Gary

 

It very well may, but it aint the ICE that comes with the Coolscans and as far as I have read it ain't worth very much, which only exacerbates my shock!

But it does - the FlexTouch filter that is found in the Textures window. I rarely use it, as I find that if I scan a film as soon as it is dry there won't be any dust accumulated on it. A bigger issue for me is the fact that a new batch of powdered C-41 chemicals will still have tiny particles if I use it the same day as I make it up. Wait a day and all is well, but waiting is hard.

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Pentax LX, Schneider Retina Xenon 50/1.9, Cinestill 800

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Rolleiflex F - Acros 100

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Street scene, Barcelona. Leica M7 with 28mm Summicron on Ilford Delta 400.

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I understand your reaction, Adam, and initially I was also surprised. But I realised quickly how very much can be achieved with the excellent Ilford Antistaticum cloth and general cleanliness around the workspace. It is very easy to wipe the film holders (which are bendy flexible and magnetic) once they've been attached and this effectively removes most dust. 

 

As Chris said, Flexcolor has a software-based dust removal feature called Flextouch and it is remarkably exact with negligible effect on image sharpness unless one goes over a certain limit. The drawback is, I have found, that it doesn't have the certainty that digital ICE gives (because it uses IR light to actually light up the particles) which means that I still need to look over the image at 100% so little time is saved. 

 

Not having digital ICE might put you off from buying one but there are many many other aspects to a Flextight which are well worth the upgrade.

 

I bought mine used and as a few of the members here know I was a little bit unlucky with it due to poor handling in shipping (they're large and heavy precision machines), but it is about to be sorted on warranty so all good. It's the only one I've ever seen used. 

 

In case you're considering one I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.

 

Thanks for your perspective, Philip.  It just floors me that such an expensive machine does not come with a dust removal feature.  Did you purchase your X1 new or second hand?

 

Phil and Rog, I just wanted to say that I thoroughly enjoy your continuing discussion about photography and cinema -- my two favourite hobbies and areas of interest -- even if it makes me realise how excruciatingly little I know... 

Thank you again, Rog

 

Awesome! 

 

This is like a still from a movie, Wayne. Very nice indeed.

attachicon.gifimg987-2.jpg

 

Konica Auto-Reflex @ half frame, Hexanon 52/`.8, Fuji 100 expired

 

Sprocket away Gary, I like these a lot.

That sprocket again

SWC

Tri-X in R09 @ 1:50

Epson 4870

Gary

 

Excellent compressed perspective with strong composition. Just the kind of image I like.

Leica M5 + 50mm Summilux f1.4 ASPH + Kodak Portra 160

 

This is very well exposed in difficult light.

attachicon.giffachleute.jpg

 

Rolleiflex F - Acros 100

 

Very atmospheric Patric, like a timeless movie still. And that cellphone photographer's reflection adds a certain current-day mystique. 

FM3A / Kodakcolor200 / 50mm 1.4 

 

Staten Island Ferry - view on Manhattan. 

 

tumblr_pbnvsyaacd1vjphu4o1_1280.jpg

 

 

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