Shiny Hills
Stephane :: Aug.30.2009 :: Pictures :: No Comments »
A Dream Combo?
Reading about different film/developer combinations, I came across a post on Flicker discussion where Philip Leser mentioned that he really liked Neopan 400 in Diafine. He made extensive tests with several films in Diafine, including plotting characteristic curves. He came with this curve for Neopan 400 in Diafine:
This is very very good. So I tried and indeed, Neopan 400 in Diafine creates great negatives. Grain is moderate. Much marger than Acros, of course, but invisible on a 12×16" print from medium format.
I wonder if I need anything else for my RZ67, really.
Stephane :: Jun.14.2009 :: Film, Gear :: 2 Comments »
SoFoBoMo: I don’t Get It.
I don’t get it. At all. To the point of feeling thick about it. I mean, last week-end, I spent 8 hours outside, with the single purpose of photographing. Light was fine, sky interesting, Spring at its best. I took 4 pictures, of which one would maybe qualify. I did not see anything else that I would feel really good about photographing. I could have taken way more, of course, but in my opinion at the cost of purpose. To me, a photo book’s main idea is to present the best we can do. Either as a given period ‘best of’ or our best shot at a given subject.
But SoFoBoMo is none of that. Indeed, on the project’s home page, it is explicitly written that photos don’t have to be good to qualify. The goal, and the only goal, is to produce a book in a month. Fill it with what you can produce in whatever little time you have in a month. Provided you complete the book in a month, it is a success.
That runs counter to everything I believe I take photographs for.
Consider this paragraph, taken from sofobomo.org:
"There’s no requirement that the photos be good. (but we suspect you’ll be surprised by how good yours are if you participate). There’s no requirement to have any text at all. And there is no requirement on quality of layout. There’s just three constraints: all the work must be done in one 31 day stretch that falls completely inside the two month window, the book must contain at least 35 photos, and you have to generate a PDF of the book. That’s it."
Can you believe this? They literally state they want to produce paper for the only sake of producing paper. Well, a PDF, which at least limits the waste.
And what completely baffles me is seeing photographers of whom I deeply admire the work doing that thing to the letter. They indeed produce a book in a month, but from what I have seen, a good part of the pictures in the book are below their usual excellent standard. In my opinion anyway.
Stephane :: May.11.2009 :: Artists, Photography, Pictures, Random Thoughts :: 6 Comments »
Film Again
After about two years and a half doing 99.9% of my photos with digital cameras, I am left with mixed feelings. Mostly, it is great. I did get what I missed when I was using solely the Rollei SL66 and later the Arca-Swiss 6×9. However, as I should have foreseen, I also lost a few things:
- Ability to cope with specular highlight in an aesthetic way
- Dynamic range
- Production of a tangible, durable object
- The large viewfinder
- Flexible depth of field management
I won’t go back to everything this or that. But I started last summer to use my Leica again, with great joy and nice results too.
For Christmas I received a beautiful present: an old Mamiya RZ67 with a standard 110mm lens. It is big, heavy, slower to use than the E-3, but the large negatives are a pleasure to work with. And now that I found again a proper development procedure, I get instant quasi-HDR on every negative.
Stephane :: Jan.06.2009 :: Film, Gear, Scanning :: 1 Comment »
