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I like film...(open thread)


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vor 5 Stunden schrieb Ernest:

Oh, yes, this field is wide open, colors and all! Thanks for sharing this short article on Josef Albers's "science of seeing," well-written and comprehensive for such a short overview of the technical aspects of "seeing" and "color." What color field artists took from Albers's Bauhaus mechanics then was to open the door from the science of seeing to the experience of feeling. Not to discount Homage to the Square, but it's so interesting to see how subsequent artists developed within this vernacular that Albers, Mondrian,  Malevich, and others of this period explored.

One of Susan Barry's quotes in her article drew my attention: "When Albers wrote that colors exist in terms of 'relationships with others' he was not only making a statement about perception or aesthetics. He thought of color, he said, as both 'an individual' and 'a member of society'; 'I’ve handled color as man should behave…. And from all this, you may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.'” This takes us into the area of the meaning of his work in terms of ethics and aesthetics being coincidental, like two colors overlaid, but, paradoxically, the resultant color is neither one nor the other. I have to think about this because I'm interested more about what a color construct might say in terms of metaphor, how to make thinking visual, particularly translating abstract ideas like "erasure" or "barrier." That's just me working my own narrow corridor.

You point out so well many of the variations that become possible in the photo-construct as opposed to paintings: the contrast of texture and the nuance of color that produce dimensional effects. I find the viewing distance from the screen and size of the screen also affects color/texture perception. 

Thanks for your thoughtful perspective; I am still more than knee-deep in the weeds, but I am having fun looking for that weed whacker.

Cheers,
Rog

This is how I envisioned Tabs Diptych V1 and V2, originally, and edited here. I think it's scrambled, still, but I'm experimenting.

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They fight a little bit on the left—but at least and finally they talk to each other...😉

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16 minutes ago, }{B said:

Leica M2 & 35mm Summicron - Fuji Sensia

West coast of Scotland - Early morning at Loch Leven seen from the Ballachulish bridge

 

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really gorgeous!!

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3 hours ago, Sparkassenkunde said:

Wonderful and very gentle portrait!

Thank you, Neill!

Central Park indeed holds a lot of opportunities for every photographer. Unfortunately I let a lot of these opportunities go away, as I failed in fitting in one roll of Ektachrome into the film spool of my M3. I realized my mistake after the film counter reached 40+ exposures... I am happy of my backup camera, the reliable Ricoh GR1. Regarding the tilt of mentioned picture, I checked it and think that the houses are perfectly aligned. The picture with the flagpole might need a little alignment, though.

Great colors, and the symmetry in the coast line is fantastic. Mother nature worked that out very well.

you are very correct - perfectly level indeed. The verticals are slightly off, but really impossible to perfect with a handheld camera.  It is a really lovely photo of a really lovely scene - one of my favorite spots in Central Park!

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On 5/2/2019 at 5:31 PM, philipus said:

What lovely colours and strong composition, Adam. I have a feeling that a computer screen doesn't quite do justice to the vast vista you photographed.

I'm learning so much from your studies Rog, thank you. One thing that struck me when I read for instance this piece about Albers's use of (imagined? apparent?) transparency and that rule was that it seems to be based on the premise that each field is one and the same colour. Perhaps it is a necessary premise, but to my uninitiated mind there is nothing preventing an artist from breaking or adjusting this premise. For instance, when I look at Tabs Diptych V2 it seems the grey field at right has more properties than just to desaturate, since it also 'lets through' the colour green while at the same time adjusting its saturation. And looking at V1 what's to say that the larger field at the right (the reddish brown) is evenly coloured? In fact, what is to say that it is even a two-dimensional field at all? It may be a three-dimensional field which is bent, curving up towards the viewer, at the left-hand side which, in turn, causes a darkening and the vertical band. Adding that third dimension to such studies may open up an infinite range of interpretations. 

Thank you, Philip, for the link to Susan R. Barry's incisive article about Albers' work. One thing confuses me, though. In figure 30 she concludes that "In each of the pairs, the upper member is easily seen as darker." I must be one of the 60%, as I clearly see the lower of each of the pairs as darker, both in the color and in the grayscale versions. Does anyone else see it this way?

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1 minute ago, M9reno said:

I tried Adox 160 Scala b/w transparency film for the first time a few months ago.  Development (especially second exposure stage) at home was tricky at first but I like the results.

M3, goggled Summilux 35 v. 1.

Bogotá.

 

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Brilliant. In every way.

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2 minutes ago, stray cat said:

luxor, egypt 1987

canon A1, FDn 50mm f1.4, kodachrome 25

Nice street photograph Phil, the head peeping around the door makes it! 

Good to see the power of K25.  Much missed....

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Somewhat abstract, taken through the window of a train.

B&W conversion of Lomo 400CN. Pentax MX 85mm f/2

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vor 3 Stunden schrieb M9reno:

I tried Adox 160 Scala b/w transparency film for the first time a few months ago.  Development (especially second exposure stage) at home was tricky at first but I like the results.

M3, goggled Summilux 35 v. 1.

Bogotá.

 

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Well done M9 Reno. The b/w suites  the subject  perfectly

How did you achieve the „ Duotone“-Effect? 

I developed b\w slides ( analog Powerpoint😁)  many  years ago—I still remember how it gave me the creeps to take the unfinished film out of the container and hold it close to the daylight—bulb dangling from the darkroom ceiling. Apart from that completely counterintuitive step, the process was robust; for my halftones slides even the temperature didn‘t matter that much. 

 

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3 minutes ago, Kl@usW. said:

Well done M9 Reno. The b/w suites  the subject  perfectly

How did you achieve the „ Duotone“-Effect? 

I developed b\w slides ( analog Powerpoint😁)  many  years ago—I still remember how it gave me the creeps to take the unfinished film out of the container and hold it close to the daylight—bulb dangling from the darkroom ceiling. Apart from that completely counterintuitive step, the process was robust; for my halftones slides even the temperature didn‘t matter that much. 

 

The effect is entirely Adox 160's own look - very rich, silvery and warm. It looks very much like this when projected.  Or maybe the FOMA developer is a factor.

I take the plastic reel and put it in a bowl filled with water, and rotate each side for 30 seconds.  I noticed reel-spoke shadows on the part of the roll wound deeper in the reel, so now I cut the roll in half and process only ca. 15 frames per reel.

The chemicals are easy to use (FOMA R 100 developing kit).  And the processing temperature is 20 celsius - a walk in the park compared to E6 requirements.

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vor 5 Stunden schrieb }{B:

Leica M2 & 35mm Summicron - Fuji Sensia

West coast of Scotland - Early morning at Loch Leven seen from the Ballachulish bridge

 

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I like the little  rainbow and the mood of the picture. Having done one or two hikes in Scotland myself, I know you are quite likely to get wet feet for these pictures , eventually....

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7 hours ago, Kl@usW. said:

They fight a little bit on the left—but at least and finally they talk to each other...😉

Yes, it's more than bothersome when the colors quarrel, even quietly, but the neighbors can't agree that they're actually talking to each other. The early Tabs sketch is much more restrained and polite, but this tandem construction is, well, all I can summon is the warning that painters usually abide: painters have a tendency to spoil the painting before they quit--it's knowing when to quit.

While I was improvising Tabs, I didn't have a clear notion of where it was going--just kind of adlibbing to see what would work. I started thinking about Kieslowski's film The Double Life of Veronique, a character with a double somewhere, the two of them not aware of the other "mirror" life. So then I wanted to try a diptych scaffolding with one construction above the other, like Phil's diptych from a while back. I just could not get this muddy palette tamed, though. I wanted to use the two separate ADOX shots of the green stucco wall, one vertical, the other horizontal, but that's really as far as it got. No cigar. Thanks for keeping the messiness honest. (Think Phil will like the alliteration in my first sentence?)

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First of all I wanted to thank all of you who have shown your sympathy to my latest works by clicking the button in the bottom right. I'm a bit scared, though, because right now one third of the favorite pictures are from me 😳 

Nonetheless I promised a flood of pictures, so on we go. The next couple of pictures again show some impressions from the Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival on 5th Avenue two weeks ago:

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Ricoh GR1 - Portra 160

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Terrific Marc. And fantastic colours.

22 hours ago, benqui said:

Kodak Pro Image 100 (first time that I used it), Contax T2

in the streets of Peking

Thank you Rog, and forgive me for now letting my mind off the leash for a moment. You've put your finger on what I in some way miss in Albers's intriguing works, well the ones I've seen so far at least; that they are about interaction of colours without any clearer further meaning beyond that. That said, I'm sure I'm wrong. Certainly that quote you mention suggests that. But it seems to my feeble mind too farfetched to suggest that just because colours interact - or even are 'forcibly' in some god-like way by the artist put in a 'relationship' with each other - to create an illusion of, say, transparency, they necessarily exist in some form of 'society'. It would need to be a very simplistic society indeed. I guess as a matter of philosophy, that society could be constructed based on a few very basic rules but I'm still not feeling that that is what the colour constructs are about. The link or the portal which the study is meant to open to that society is, to me, too tenuous, like barely glimpsing Cloud City from the surface of Bespin.

One thing that interests me in criminal law, and in particular international criminal law, is the mental aspects of crimes. Or to put it differently, why do people break the most important dictates and what they are thinking before, leading up to and during the crime? 

It seems to me that the subjects in the Albers colour society are very, very compliant. Could that be due to his own background? The part on "as a man should behave" stands out from that quote. Perhaps I'm wrong (again haha) but isn't his aim always to give an accurate illusion of transparency? If so, with such ever-present compliance one could even, metaphysically, wonder if the rules governing transparency exist, because isn't in some fundamental way the existence of a breach of a rule a condition of that rule's existence? And if that is the case, if the definition of the society hinges on the existence of a rule, but the rule is never ever broken, well then does that society actually exist? 

Probably just some silly questions on a Friday evening when I'm a bit bored, but it's still interesting to wonder if the premise of the ethnics-aesthetics dichotomy holds water. 

This is why I appreciate your studies so much; they open up to so many more interpretations because they invite the viewer to form his or her own interpretation of what the "society" is meant to be and what it means to them. The aesthetics lead the way, teasing or seducing the viewer into considering what the ethics of that society are. Cloud City appears well defined. A significant part of the teasing comes from the viewer's own impressions of the materials used for the fields, colours, nuances, textures, how the light falls on the fields, their mutual interactions, the transparency or translucency. The list is long. And becomes infinite when each viewer's own life and experiences are added into this colourful mix. After all, the most important thing is not what you see, but what you believe you see or even, to paraphrase Sherlock's scarletian observation, what you can make someone believe that they see. The connotations of the viewers' minds regarding the fields take over and form a completely different view of what the study shows, which is why I keep coming back to Gray Mean, (re)play III and, in particular, Mono III and Notation Tab, so far my four favourites of your exciting work.

16 hours ago, Ernest said:

Oh, yes, this field is wide open, colors and all! Thanks for sharing this short article on Josef Albers's "science of seeing," well-written and comprehensive for such a short overview of the technical aspects of "seeing" and "color." What color field artists took from Albers's Bauhaus mechanics then was to open the door from the science of seeing to the experience of feeling. Not to discount Homage to the Square, but it's so interesting to see how subsequent artists developed within this vernacular that Albers, Mondrian,  Malevich, and others of this period explored.

One of Susan Barry's quotes in her article drew my attention: "When Albers wrote that colors exist in terms of 'relationships with others' he was not only making a statement about perception or aesthetics. He thought of color, he said, as both 'an individual' and 'a member of society'; 'I’ve handled color as man should behave…. And from all this, you may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.'” This takes us into the area of the meaning of his work in terms of ethics and aesthetics being coincidental, like two colors overlaid, but, paradoxically, the resultant color is neither one nor the other. I have to think about this because I'm interested more about what a color construct might say in terms of metaphor, how to make thinking visual, particularly translating abstract ideas like "erasure" or "barrier." That's just me working my own narrow corridor.

You point out so well many of the variations that become possible in the photo-construct as opposed to paintings: the contrast of texture and the nuance of color that produce dimensional effects. I find the viewing distance from the screen and size of the screen also affects color/texture perception. 

Thanks for your thoughtful perspective; I am still more than knee-deep in the weeds, but I am having fun looking for that weed whacker.

Cheers,
Rog

This is how I envisioned Tabs Diptych V1 and V2, originally, and edited here. I think it's scrambled, still, but I'm experimenting.

Thank you for noticing this, Phil. Gullible as I am I just stood there looking and nodding my head when I came to that part. I clearly need a jolt to the brain. 

9 hours ago, stray cat said:

Thank you, Philip, for the link to Susan R. Barry's incisive article about Albers' work. One thing confuses me, though. In figure 30 she concludes that "In each of the pairs, the upper member is easily seen as darker." I must be one of the 60%, as I clearly see the lower of each of the pairs as darker, both in the color and in the grayscale versions. Does anyone else see it this way?

Al! Great to see you in this thread. i really like this photo, both for its vintage and even timeless feel based on the boys look and for the slight colouration. I need to try this film. 

9 hours ago, M9reno said:

I tried Adox 160 Scala b/w transparency film for the first time a few months ago.  Development (especially second exposure stage) at home was tricky at first but I like the results.

M3, goggled Summilux 35 v. 1.

Bogotá.

 

Haha it took me a few looks before I spotted the head poking out. It's like a picture of life. 

9 hours ago, stray cat said:

luxor, egypt 1987

canon A1, FDn 50mm f1.4, kodachrome 25

Excellent abstract Steve, I like it very much.

9 hours ago, Steve Ricoh said:

Somewhat abstract, taken through the window of a train.

B&W conversion of Lomo 400CN. Pentax MX 85mm f/2

What delightful use of leading lines towards the figure in this misty and atmospheric photo, Pritam. And the grey tones of the lower half are sublime too.

8 hours ago, Suede said:

Wintry, icy and all that.  [Tri-X]

 

Edited by philipus
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