Cell Phone Tower

Apparently, the times are changing. Emphasis below mine.

Meanwhile telephones become cameras, desktop printers morph into mini-printing labs, and high-definition screens threaten to dislodge the venerable photographic print from gallery walls.

Guess that’s why my printer was so cheap. Is an inkjet print venerable? Or only traditional process prints? Should I have bought a couple of those really nice Mac Cinema Displays instead of a printer? Can you get nice linen bound albums for a Cinema Display? How do I send a Cinema Display to a friend, a relevant question since I can’t trust them to have Cinema Displays of their own. Lots of questions. Not many answers.

I bought a refurbished R2400 last week ($500 shipped from Epson’s online store). I unpacked it Saturday after a late lunch, but by 2:00PM I already had a half dozen great B&W prints. I think Kate’s reaction to this sums up my first impressions of the printer: “Wow, that many prints from the old printer would have taken all day and a hell of lot more cursing.” This is true. The old HP was a pain in the ass. The Epson, so far, is not.

Although I’m sure my printing skills will improve, straight out of the box the prints are better than anything I ever managed in the darkroom. And on comparitively el-cheapo Epson Ultra Premium Luster no less. Now the question becomes, what the hell do I do with all these prints? I owe a couple of people prints - a few of which are embarassingly overdue - but after that, what do I do with the rest. How do people display these things?

A few prints will end up on the walls, but I’d like books or albums of some sort for the majority. And a source for mats and frames. A cursory look around the internet suggests that most of this stuff is aimed at folks that print much larger than I’d ever go for. Six by nine on a 8.5 by 11 sheet already seems huge, but I’m seeing books designed for 13 by 19 prints. Do people really print that big? I guess you can with digital, but whatever happened to 5 by 7? Or even 8 by 10 for that matter? 5 by 7.5 prints on 8 by 10 paper would be a bit more suitable for handling than these super-sizes.

Guidance appreciated if it anyone has it. And let me know if you want to swap a print.

Can you spot the lunch bag?

The Camera Bag as Lunch Bag

As I’ve written before, I have a complicated relationship with camera bags. In part this relationship can be expressed by the following formula:

(Desire for expensive camera bags + Contradicting desire to not be encumbered) / Feeling of guilt over useless purchases = Lunchbags

Yep, lunchbags. That’s what all those expensive camera bags get used for around here, and some work better than others.

Billingham Hadley as a Lunchbag

The Hadley is quite the snazzy looking bag particularly the black one that I’ve got. Kate uses it as her lunch bag as it goes nicely with her black wool coat. With the padding removed from the main compartment, it’s got quite a bit of room for lunch indeed with enough leftover for a hardback book, a notebook, and the miscellany that always seems to float at the bottom of a bag. Without that padding, though, the bag lacks structure. If you don’t pack carefully, your pbj will get crushed by your book when the bag deforms to your body.

As you would expect of a $200+ bag, the materials are excellent. That Billingham coated fabric really is entirely waterproof, both inside and out, as Kate found out when her water bottle popped open inside the bag, creating a mini lagoon in the bottom of the bag. Her voice recordermaratrix spent a week drying in a bag of rice after that, but it’s now as good as new.

Domke 803 as a Lunchbag

Although the Domke is smaller than the Billingham, all that canvas makes it a fairly heavy bag, which is why it doesn’t work that well as a camera bag; packed full of lenses it’s just entirely too heavy. Lunches are decidedly less dense however. I carry the 803 most days with my lunch, one camera with attached lens, a small paper back, and a collapsible umbrella. Load like this the weight is fine for the 40 minute walk to work.

The Domke’s structural padding and heavy canvas - two weight-increasing features that make it a poor camera bag - make it a pretty darn good lunch bag. The provided insert (stripped of extraneous padding) keeps my hard-edged camera from squishing my PBJ or my banana, while the overall rigidity of the bag prevents bag deformation from making a gooey mess of all my treats. In this respect, the Domke is far superior to the Billingham.

Where the Domke fails is size and water-resistance. Because of the limited interior space, my copy of the mamoth Joan Didion collection, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live can only come with me if I’m eating a burger and drinking a beer at Murphy’s; my bosses might have a problem if that was on the agenda everyday. Beer and Didion are enough to keep any sane person from getting back to the office on time. A paperback slipped into on the front pockets has to do. The Domke’s other lunch bag failing is its sponge-like quality. Water resistant canvas, ha! That brown canvas is perfectly water resistant when you try it out at home. In the world outside, however, it actually pull moisture out of the air until the bag ways approximately 30 pounds. Why did photojournalist ever carry Domkes?

Conclusions

Both these bags are foolishly expensive for lunch bag use, but once you’ve spent the money, you’d be a fool not to use them for something. In almost all respects, the Domke makes the better lunchbag, albeit a smaller, heavier, and less stylish one than the Billingham.

Signpost in the creek. Discovered on a too dark night. Remembered on a snowy day.

It’s snowing again today, 18 inches by noon if you believe the forecaster. Which means it’s time to bust out the snowy day shot list. I’ve started to keep a list in my head of photos that I want to go back to when the light, climate etc are right. One is the snow covered barbeque. There’s something incredibly forlorn about a weber grill and lawn chair covered in snow, a tableau of working-class/grad-student poverty and distraction. I’ll get it today. Last snowday it was the kicked over paralleogram of a decaying garage on Springfield. Getting it meant trudging around on my lunch break in 5 degree weather and a foot of new fallen snow, but that one is in the can.

If I’m lucky I’ll even get a shot of the view out the tower windows at work. Last snowday I didn’t have a wideangle, so I missed the shot. Today I’ll carry the 35.

If the sign says it, it must be true. This is a “lost” frame discovered while I was doing some backups; I could have sworn that I posted it before, but I couldn’t find the post.

Not through any design, other than sheer laziness, I tend to do my backups in cycles. When I start running out of room on the internal drive(which keeps happening ever more frequently with all those Battlestar Gallactica episodes clogging up my iTunes directory), I make a compressed copy (jpgs) of all the scans and archive the originals (tiffs) off to an external drive. When I get time, I go back and burn dvd’s of the tiff and offsite the jpgs to my webiste. In this process I usually find a couple of good frames that got missed during the first round of editing. In this case, so far I’ve got the frame above (wouldn’t that look great in my office?), a neat picture of some shoes dangling from a power line, and a sort of American Gothic meets the 21st century portrait of Kate and me.

There’s not really a moral to that story. Just explaining why the image numbers suddenly jumped back 30 rolls.

OK, fine, you want a moral. Keep everything. Do your backups. And revisit your old stuff occasionaly.

A recent discussion on Stills got me thinking about the importance of waiting for the right - decisive - moment. I think many of us often assume that some of greats of photography worked in a very intuitive sort of way, to the extent that there was very little delay between the conception of photo and it’s execution. There it is! Snap! While I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some part of their work happened this way - particularly in the case of Winogrand - I think it’s also fairly likely that many of the most striking photographs were the prodcut of seeing raw potential that could only be fully realized at the right moment.

Lets take the case of the following image by Cartier-Bresson:



To quote one of John Ellis’ comments from the aforementioned discussion, “there is no way he got that except by saying to himself, I like the view from here and now I need a cyclist.” If you look at the way the angle of view is restricted by the buildings on either side of the frame, I think it’s clear that something like that must have gone on. It doesn’t seem possible that he could have seen the view and the cyclist together, and in the same moment brought the camera up to take the picture. It would have all happened too quick. He must have seen the view and waited for cyclist to fill that just right spot in the frame.

Waiting for just that right moment can be one of the most exhilirating aspects of photography. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a great street photographer of the reactive type. I’m too timid, and my reaction time is far too slow. I am, however, great at waiting, a skill perhaps developed during my early and abortive landscape phase. Contrary to popular opinion many of the ‘unique’ moments of the street are actually quite repetive and cyclical; if it happens once, it will probably happen again if for no other reason because people are creatures of such powerful habit. Take the following shot - this time my own -as an example of this principle:



I first noticed the young man on the right as he was making googly eyes at the little girl. My camera was in my lap, but I could never have caught the fleeting expression in time. Instead, I preset my focus, double checked my exposure and waited for it to happen again. I had to waite 10-15 minutes for the episode to repeat, but eventually the two interacted again. This time, ready for it, I brought my camera up and snapped a few frames. Luckily they had locked eyes the second time just as the train had pulled into to the sation, making the chances of a shot not ruined by the low shutter speed much more likely.

For me this kind of situation is one of the most rewarding in photography. Seeing the raw potential for a great shot, knowing enough about the dynamic of the situation to know when and if it will happen again, and eventually finding just that right moment to make something out of that potential strikes me as far more intresting than reacting instantly to what’s happening around me. Perhaps this is why I prefer HCB to Winogrand, and it probably explains why I don’t share Colin’s or John’s view that the above HCB photo is too contrived or forced. I like it so much because it is contrived in the original and non-perjorative sense of that word; it’s planned with clever intent to create something that wasn’t there before he waited for that cyclist to ride into frame.

I took my first family photo when I was 13. The occasion was my grandparents’ wedding anniversary, and the whole clan of aunts, uncles, cousins and such had assembled. Something like 30 people in all. I wrangled everyone into position, put the camera on the tripod, framed up, set the self timer and ran. The result was a blurry mess. I’d forgotten to focus.

After that auspicious start, I’ve gone on to botch a number of family photos in often entirely predictable ways. Heads cut off, lens not fully attached (a particular problem with one of my Hexar RF bodies), shutter above the flash sync, DSLR left at 1600. You name the newb mistake, I’ve made it. I only seem to do this with my family. I’ve done plenty of fine group photos of people not related to me. Establish a blood tie, and it’s all over.

Family candids I’ve got down pat. I’m the HCB of Alofs’ family candid photos. Realy, I am. See:


Can’t you see the cross generational love? It’s just the posed ones that present a problem.

I’ve recently begun to suspect that this less to do with my skill as a photographer, and more to do with how I relate to my family. Sure, I could use more practice doing group photos, but this stuff isn’t rocket science. My family are lovely people, generous, kind, inteligent and witty, and they have always supported my photography. But I’m the baby of the family, and they’ve gotten used to me needing help with things, so they also try to help in the one place I’m probably OK. “Wouldn’t the light be better outside?” or “Shouldn’t I close the drapes?” or “Don’t you think you should take the lens cap off?” etc etc. Peppered with suggestions, I invariably crumble. Sometimes with catastrophic/hilarious results. Such as this:


Never tell your older sister that her smile is too goofy . . . even if it is

I’m not sure Mom is going to want that one for her Christmas cards. For the sake of the family, I’m leaving my tripod behind when I go home for Christmas.

I hate carrying camera bags. I’ve tried a ton of them, enough to have bought at least one really nice lens if I add up what I’ve paid for all of them. Pretty much all of them are junk. Too heavy. Too big. Too small. Too hard to get stuff into. Stuff falls out. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Beyond complaints about the bags themselves, over the last couple of months I’ve slowly come to the realization that I really can’t handle all the options implied by a bag. Surely a bag must contain extra lenses, filters, perhaps a second body which may even be loaded with a different film. I’ve often carried a Domke 803 or Billingham Hadley with 2 bodies (one for B&W and one for provia), four lenses (28, 35, 50, 90), filters (red, yellow-green, and ND), a small flash, a synch cord and an incident meter. If you add up all those combinations you get . . . well, it’s sure to be far too many for me to manage while actually trying to take a picture. I’m just an English major after all.

After too many trips spent with sore shoulders and back, dropped lenses, and just far too much photographic stress, I’ve recently taken to carrying just one camera and one lens at a time. I’ve taped a film canister to my camera strap to hold an extra roll of whatever I’m shooting that day. If I really want to be prepared, I shove another roll and an extra battery into my pocket. Digital goes much the same, although with a 2GB SD in the D80 I rarely would need an extra card or battery (yes, I’m still shooting jpegs). Not only are my shoulders happier at the end of the day, I find that I’ve produced better photographs. I don’t know if it’s the reduced stress or just the act of focusing on the tool at hand, but I’m a much better photographer as a bagless wonder.

It’s something of an old chestnut that you should pick one lens and one film if you really want to learn your craft. I’m not advocating that. Use as many lenses, cameras, films and formats as you want. For example this week I’ve used three different cameras, 5 lenses, two types of film, and digital. Some days just scream for a 90 mm and a couple of rolls of Provia. Other days you need to the 35 and Delta 400. Just not both at once. What if you choose the wrong lens/film for the day? You are carrying B&W and the fall colors are gorgeous? Make it work, or leave the camera on your shoulder and enjoy the day. More often than not, enjoying the day will lead to making it work.


the camera of the day, loaded with delta 400, sporting a biogon 35

Try leaving the bag behind for a while. Eventually, you will find that you can do a lot more than you thought with just one camera and just one lens.

Way back in the way back machine, I worked as proof reader, researcher and indexer for a couple of volumes of Tennesse Williams’ letter. It was alternately tedious and fascinating work with long hours divided between reading backwards - an old proof reader’s trick for catching mistakes when your eyes are going numb - and scanning microfilm archives like someone from a 70’s newspaper drama. It paid well, I set my own hours and I got to read as much mid century American drama and fiction as any young English major could hope for. As a result, I’ve read almost everything Williams’ ever wrote including unpublished letters, journals, half-finished plays and more versions of the Orpheus Descending story line than anyone should ever have to sit through. Out of all that reading there’s a couple of images that stick incredibly vividly in my mind. One is the image of the stairs to the roof in the play of the same title.

Stairs to the Roof for those fortunate enough not to have read it, is a fairly early stage in the evolution of The Glass Menagerie. As a play its turgid, overly fantastic and disasterously sincere. But the image of the stairs to the roof - where succor from the industrial world awaits the protagonist - stuck with me. Along the way it got blended with the image of the metal fire escape stairs that feature in The Glass Menagerie, stairs that had their own associations with escape from social and familial responsibilities. In my mind the stairs were always metal and rusting, slightly bent and held to the buidling with crumbling bolts. Rickety in the extreme and the kind of place an unlucky person would manage to catch tetanus in an instant, they held promise none the less. The promise of a life beyond the Celotex interior or, to update the reference, a life beyond the cubical walls.

That image stuck with me as I took my own journey through cube land and eventualy beyond. The stairs remained always rickety and rusty, until I saw this picture of Rex’s over on Stills. I immediately saw the stairs to the roof. The materials are entirely different from what I’ve always imagined, but those are the stairs. The decay and decrepitude of them are utterly perfect. I can almost smell the mold, a far richer smell than the one exuded by the formerly rusty metal stairs.

I offer this as a data point in the ongoing debate regarding the purpose of art and the broad question of what art is and is not. A fairly common line of thought holds art as a communicative act. If art is communication, then how do concepts like intenitonality and message figure in a case such as this where a work inspires thoughts that the artist could have had no knowledge of? If we judge a work on its ability to communicate a message, then what kind of metric are we left with when the association is one of chance? Admittedly, this particular photo is quite good, even if you don’t have your own vivid mental associations to go with it. But with those associations its elevated to the sublime.

First, don’t be mislead by the post title. Zinio is by no means an unsung great, although it might well be unsung, this post not withstanding. Convolutions aside, what’s Zinio? It’s a way to get magazines online. I stumbled on it while living in Korea. As a way of getting magazines that would have been prohibitively expensive over there - like $25 an issue - Zinio seemed to fill a real need. So I spent the $6 to get a year’s subscription to American Photo. AP is not a particularly distinguished periodical, but it’s entertaining, and a guy can only read so many issues of the Joong Ang Daily. You pay your money, you install a reader, it goes and downloads your content. The content is something like a PDF, I think. Text is clear and readable. Photos are about what you get on the web, although they are a little small for the most part. They even go to the trouble of putting in those subscription cards everyone tears out of the magazine; unfortunately, the reader software doesn’t include a way of tearing them out. Maybe for version 4.

On to unsung greats. This month’s issue of AP features a number of unsung great photographers. It’s an interesting read, and look. I recognized a number of the photos, although I didn’t at first recognize any of the names, until I got to Leslie Krims AKA Les Krims. If you don’t know Krims’ work, do yourself a favor. Stop reading this. Turn on your speakers. Go to Krims’ site: http://www.leskrims.com.

Are you back yet? Good. Leave Krim’s site running in another tab. That music is catchy. While you listen, check out another unsung great, William Gedney. A thread on photo.net a couple of months back got me onto Gedney, and Alec Soth recently mentioned Gedney in a blog post. So perhaps he isn’t that unsung. Great none the less. Check out Duke’s Gedney archives: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/gedney/. Gedney strikes me as easily the equal to Frank, Cartier-Breson and Winogrand.

Know any other unsung greats? Leave a comment.