Taking Pictures

Second, Jennifer gave me hell about it a number of months ago. Jennifer is a compelling argument even when she's not at her sharpest and, as with most of my strong, female friends, I'm not inclined to disagree with her.

So I write this page.

Subjects and Themes...

Photojournalism (and journalism generally) has drawn me for a number of years, and I'm finally in a position to do a little freelancing. As with most freelancers, I work primarily on the things that interest me. Because of professional and institutional ties, my primary photographic interest in this department could be best described as "emergency services at work"; however, because of ethical responsibility, I find I'm very uncomfortable photographing the victims. Although some photographers -- particularly professional photojournalists -- might view this as a weakness, I think my focus on the emergency personnel might be saying something else altogether: Victims come and go; the work doesn't change. Roger Ebert said something similar about the seemingly random plot in Martin Scorcese's Bringing Out The Dead, and while I can't even begin to aspire to Scorcese's skill, I like to pretend that I'm sending a similar message.

Tragically, due to time constraints and various other issues in my life, I don't do much freelancing these days.

(On the right: BC Ambulance station 115, in Port Renfrew. Tri-X 400, Mamiya C330, roughly f/11 and 1/500.)

Other interesting themes include a continuing attempt to illustrate isolation, solitude, and loss ("how quintessentially Canadian," as one correspondant put it), the patterns in natural and man-made worlds, and a vague, unspecified desire to capture moments in history that mean something to me as a person. For some reason I also can't really understand, I seem to end up shooting an awful lot of cemeteries -- this began back in the fall of 1998 when I hauled a 70-200/2.8 lens around Arlington National Cemetery in Washington and ran through about a half dozen rolls of Tri-X; as it stands, I make a point to visit cemeteries when I travel to new places and evaluate their potential for photography. Strangely, I have never photographed the cemeteries in Victoria -- never felt the urge, I guess.

... Materials and Methods

35mm

For example, this photograph was shot with the EOS 50E and the EF 100-300/4.5-5.6 USM lens. On Fujichrome Velvia. Handheld. With me standing in the middle of the street. These same friends who deride me for carrying such junky lenses spent ten minutes speculating about my methods when they first saw the print. As far as I'm concerned, it's not the tools, it's what you do with them. This would have been a much better picture with my 6x6 camera or a fixed 200 or 300mm lens on my Canon, and would have been vastly better with a 4x5 view camera, but I never would have had any of them with me while out walking. (It is worth noting that this picture illustrates another fundamental tenet of photography: It is difficult to take a picture if you're not there. I shot this while walking back from Gameworks in Seattle with my friends Sean and Liam. We'd gone to Gameworks for dinner and a few hours of wasting money and playing video games, and I'd dragged them down to the Pike Market for a walk. I would never have had anything bigger than my 50E with me, and I doubt I would have had the stamina to carry a 300mm lens all night. So I got this. It now hangs on my wall. I'm pretty happy. Although I was at first skeptical that anyone else would find this appealing, it is the third most popular picture I've ever taken (hard to tell, since the other two are basically a set and are tied)).

I've been trying to decide on a point-and-shoot to throw in my backpack or my laptop case or whatever my carrying device of choice is at the moment; most recommendations talk about either the Yashica T4 or the Olympus Stylus Epic. I'm sorrily tempted to go with the Stylus Epic -- partly because it's cheaper than the T4, and partly because it's 2/3 of a stop faster and the optics seem slightly better to my eye. But it's a tough decision, one I'm still working on. I need to buy a new light meter, first.

Medium Format

It is an incredibly solid camera. If I dropped it on the street, I'm fairly sure the concrete would dent. Bolted to the top of my Manfrotto tripod and ballhead (using the hex quick release plates), it could serve as a deadly weapon if I needed one in a hurry. I've read in places that it is remarkably easy to hand-hold a TLR, but I'm not so convinced: My hands and arms get tired, and it's hard to get a good focus. So it gets parked on the tripod for most stuff, which is just fine with me -- though it has become a photographic cliche, this slows me down and I find I get better pictures this way.

The Mamiya has really changed my entire approach to photography. Instead of firing off a couple of mediocre frames with my 35mm system, I now find myself thinking critically about what I'm shooting. I've had some sporatic luck doing this with my 35mm system (most notably when I went to Whidbey Island in January of 2000 after the woman I loved cruelly broke my heart; depression does a wonderful job at focusing the mind), but I can do it most consistently in medium format.

You need to make a decision about how big you want the negative to be in medium format; for me, it was kind of a gut decision. I knew I liked the 6x6 square format, and I knew I would like being able to defer cropping decisions until I got to the light table. Strangely, 99% of my images get printed full-frame, square, with no cropping -- so I guess I like the square look more than I thought I did. I can't really articulate what drew me to 6x6 better than that.

The 80 mm lens on the C330 is beatifully sharp. My only complaint is the lack of a coupled meter in the camera, but I tend to get around that problem either by guessing (I'm getting good at that) or by dragging my EOS body and a small, light lens along with me.

Digital (even though I don't own one)

My biggest problem with digital photography is that nobody seems to have solved the storage issue. I like coming home from a trip and dumping a bag of film at the lab, then sitting in the dark a few days later sorting through the good and bad images, preparing to scan them, etc.; I don't think I'd enjoy photgraphy quite as much if I had to edit in real time (i.e., every night back at the hotel). The local newspaper seems to have gone mostly digital; talking to the staff photographers at some events, their feelings are mostly mixed (they use the Kodak system based around the EOS-1n body).

Recently, Foveon announced they'd developed a 16 megapixel camera that produced images that rivaled medium format (or 4x5; the news reports were conflicting) and could be enlarged to something like 4x8 -- feet -- without showing any grain. Too bad the system is a laptop computer with a lens on the back end, and too bad the thing costs a small fortune. I'm still not buying into the system.

Since I'm a film-based kind of guy, the images have to get from film to hard disk to show up on the Web; for that, I used to use a Canon CanoCraft FB320 flatbed scanner. It worked fine, but only scanned prints. This past summer, I bought an Acer 620UT scanner that does negatives and slides too. I'm.. reasonably happy with it, now that I've figured out a lot of its quirks. It's not a perfect scanner -- for $220, what could be? -- but it gets the job done. Tweaking is done on my only Windows machine under PhotoShop 4.0.

(In case you were wondering, the major problems I have with this scanner involve Velvia and most color negative films. Velvia, when scanned by the Acer 620UT, has an annoying tendency to shift to blue; most neg films need a lot of color correction once they've been scanned in order to bring the colors back to something approximating normal. Strangely, the Porta 400NC shots above required virtually no correction -- but Supra and NPH pretty much need to have serious adjustment post-scanning, which makes it annoying from my perspective. Having said this, it does a shockingly good job with black and white, despite not having a default black and white setting. (I put it on "Transparency" and then desaturate in PhotoShop.) There's some correction that needs to be done there too, but it's very tradiational darkroom stuff -- burning, dodging, and altering the levels.)

Camera Support

Film

I had, for a long time, ignored Kodak in the color print film market; I can't really remember why. It might have been the withdrawal of Royal Gold 25; it might have been bad experiences with some of the consumer emulsions (big shock), but I experimented with -- and loved -- PJ400 and PJ800. True to form, once I found a film I liked, Kodak withdrew it from the market and replaced it with Supra. I had just started to figure Ektapress out when I had to switch; as of this writing (September 2000), I haven't used enough Supra to decide whether it's a good or a bad film. Part of the reason I haven't used a lot of it is because I need to order it from the United States; my local suppliers don't carry PJ400 anymore and are trying to get rid of their PJ800 stock (I'm helping), but don't yet have any Supra. So I'm being judicious in my use of the 8 rolls left in my fridge.

Aside from Supra, I've become very fond of Fuji NPH, exposed at EI 250 or 320 (250 is better, to my eye) -- a nice balance of contrast and grain, very neutral; it is my favorite color film for portraits. I'm not a huge fan of Kodak's Portra series, but back in April I managed to get some better-than-expected sports photos (!) with it:

I got religion about two years ago, shooting my first roll of slide film and falling in love with it immediately. Did wonders for my exposure technique. I still get a rush throwing the fresh slides down on the light table; all of my popular prints come from slides.

My "default" these days, for anything, is Fuji Astia, maybe the best slide film on the planet. (A prime example is at left; also from my C330. Exposure's probably f/5.6 and 1/30 or so.) Although I'm not a big fan of it for prints, Fuji Velvia's saturation and rip-your-eyeballs-out-of-their-sockets look is hard to beat, even though Scott Eaton derides it frequently on photo.net's forum, and for some things -- like those sunsets with dramatic interplay of light, color, cloud, and shadow -- it simply can't be beat.

Contrary to popular opinion, black and white it isn't as simple as clicking "Desaturate" in PhotoShop, not if you want decent results, anyway. I nabbed some of Kodak's T400CN right after it came out and fell in love with the smooth, fine grain and almost sepia tones; pushed to 800, caucasian skin became almost radiant, and I still think that for my first go at shooting in a nightclub, it turned out pretty good. It prints beautifully (although I don't do my own printing or processing, which is probably a mistake) and it's hard to screw it up. For some reason, though, I've fallen back on old favorites -- Agfapan 25, for its fine grain, and Tri-X, for its big grain. It's hard to not like the classic look of Tri-X in the 6x6 format. What can I say? I'm retro that way. Most of my portraiture these days is done in 6x6 on Tri-X, although I'm fairly happy with my results using TMAX.

Labs

Evolution

Why bother?

Because sometimes, it just all comes together, and you get something like my public market photo that makes you whistle. It's a great feeling. It's art. I've never been an artist before.

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