CalArti

Good news arrived a couple of days ago when I learned that one of my photos, Spent, was accepted into the 2009 West Michigan Area Show, hosted by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. After a two year hiatus in having work accepted into this show, it’s nice to get a piece in.

This image is one that keeps popping up on this blog, mostly because I like it. It was shot on film with a Holga in October, 2007 and where-else but the Allegan Forest. This was previously exhibited in last year’s Your Best Shot show hosted by the foto foto gallery in Huntinton, NY

The 2009 West Michigan Area Show runs from February 28 – April 26 with a reception on March 1, from 2-4 pm. This year’s juror is Larry Fink.

Almost two weeks ago now, some good news came in the mail. One of my Holga shots from last October was accepted into the fotofoto gallery’s “Your Best Shot” exhibit. I didn’t do a lot of Holga work last year, but “Spent” was the best shot (in my mind) that I did get with the toy camera – so I’m glad to see it head off to a show. I had the photo boxed up and in the mail a week ago, so it should be there now.

Definitely an October image - and here it is, a beautiful May morning…

Link: http://www.markcassino.com/galleries/stream/stream09.htm

My Holga has spent the summer, and now the fall, sitting neglected under the passenger seat of my Subaru. I don’t mean to neglect it, but demands for my attention invariably push something away.

It spent several months there with the same roll of Neopan 400 film wrapped onto its spools. Like a clock – or perhaps a bomb on a timer – the film slowly advanced as the days went by. It must have been the changes in temperature in the automobile. Every time I’d pick it up the carefully aligned frame number would be absent from the red window.

When I did use it I was rusty and out of practice. There’s not much to fumble with a Holga – no aperture or shutter settings – but invariably I’d leave the lens cap in place or focus set to minimum. These discoveries would be made long after the subject and moment had moved on – so the empty squares caused by the creeping advance of the film would be next to empty frames caused by leaving the lens cap on.

No matter. I finally pulled the Neopan out of the camera, mixed up some HC110, and coaxed the latent images out on the film. Two shots caught my fancy.

Spent was taken in the Allegan Forest, of course. It’s not uncommon to find piles of spent ammo on the ground out there – it’s probably more uncommon to look down and not find a shell or two. But the cologne bottle? I’ve seen lots of weird things that people bring into the woods to dump or shoot at, but never a bottle of men’s cologne… This is of course a double exposure – one of those happy accidents that only the Holga can bestow.

Link: http://www.cameraarts.com/2007_web_extras/CA58-krappy.php

For all those interested in Holgas, pinholes, and toy cameras - Camera Arts magazine has included a web edition of the 2007 Krappy Kamera Contest on their website.

Follow this link to see 'all that krap.'

http://www.cameraarts.com/2007_web_extras/CA58-krappy.php

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about experiments with multiple exposures with the Holga toy camera. I’ve been continuing with these experiments – “time and motion studies” – with mixed results.

My goal with these shots has been to utilize the Holga’s multiple exposure capacity to create a single image that captures an extended period of time. I’m not interested in putting together a few recognizable images, juxtaposed on top of each other. Rather, I’m interested in putting together lots of exposures (25, 50, maybe 100) with few if any individually discernable images being present. The idea is to build up an image through the successive exposure of the film to varying (and weak) light sources – so that the resulting exposure on the film is not representative of any specific image, but rather is the cumulative effect of many exposures. A “layered exposure.”

Ultimately the photograph is a temporal composition – the combined effects of light and time, as opposed to light and place.

Well – that’s the theory at least. I’ve encountered a few challenges in terms of pulling it off, but the process is still new.

The first challenge is finding the right window of ambient light to work with. Without using a neutral density filter, multiple exposures outside on a sunny day will very quickly block up even the slowest film. As a result, I’ve confined this project to twilight hours – snapping away in the mysterious gloom that separates day from night. (I suppose this project could be taken indoors – the multiple exposures would be much easier to manage in a dimly lit building or interior. But that would be limiting – it would be too tempting (or even unavoidable) to take shots of the same place.)

I tried for a few more shots in this genre last week, and the results are something of a mixed bag. “Rotary”, above, is a series of mad snaps taken while whirling around a rotary, shortly after sunset. The result is interesting, and I like the dynamic, but it really is a composite of several individual shots of streetlights, and not a layered-exposure, since so many areas of the frame are dark.

Another shot from the same evening is in the Image Stream - and rest assured, more shots exploring this concept are on their way...

One nice thing about the Holga camera is that you can take as many multiple exposures as you want. That’s one of the camera’s nicest features.

Don’t as me why, but I’ve been avoiding that feature. I keep the lens cap on the Holga, not so much to protect the lens, but to prevent accidental multiple exposures. Looking back, I’m not sure why I was so worried about that – after all, randomness and the happy accident are where it’s at when it comes to the Holga.

Driving into work the other day, I wondered about putting the whole commute into one image. It was a dark morning – the sun is barely up when I leave and the heavy clouds made it all the more gloomy. I didn’t count the number of exposures I took – probably about 20. It was raining and the raindrops on the windshield made for an interesting patina to the shot. The wiper blades should have appeared in some of the shots – I don’t know why they didn’t, but they didn’t.

I like this shot – kind of moody and blue, low on impact and graphic elements, but still engaging to my eye. I plan to continue to work with this technique – ideas for other multiple compositions are coming to mind already.

For those interested in technical matters – this shot was taken on JandC’s Pro 100 film, developed in Agfa Rodinal 1:50 for 1 hour (very low agitation.) Well – even with 20 exposures it was still pretty dark out.

"And all I see are little dots
Some are smeared, some are spots..."
-- Talking Heads

Late winter and early spring can be the doldrums for outdoor photography in the Midwest. It’s dark, it’s dreary, it’s not really cold enough for snow and ice, but the fields and trees are still bleak and barren. I wind up plinking away with the digital cameras, taking useless photos.

And what for? After all, I could just be shooting away with toy cameras, where even the crappiest shot is made even crappier by lens distortions and light leaks.

A toy camera (or two) is a standard item in my car these days. The Holga is ever present, and for a change of pace I grab a $1 Special Moments Focus Free camera loaded with 35mm film.

So today I cobbled together an update for the Image Stream, consisting of images taken with toy, krappy, and other than standard cameras. A handful of shots are featured here, the rest of course are in the Image Stream.

Maybe I’m just in a minimalist mood, but the simple shots “LIttle Dots” and “Night Driving” strike me as the most interesting. When you think about photographs, very often the subject matter of the shot is the first thing that comes to mind. For a lot of viewers, subject is king – and there is an interest in seeing shots of specific subjects – people, places, or things.

Do spots of light qualify as a “subject?” Does it matter if the spots in Night Driving are streetlights, while the dots in Little Dots are just sunlight on window curtains?

I don’t think so… The toy camera kitsch of course is a plus, but I just like the dots. Maybe connecting them is the challenge.

For those interesting in film and developing - Holga shots were taken on Classic Pan 400, developed in HC110 Dilution H. The 35mm Special Moments shots were taken on Fuji Neopan 400, developed in Rodinal 1:25. All exposures were pushed 1 stop.

More toy camera shots, and more info about the shots shown here, can be found in the Image Stream.

A few years ago I uncovered a Holga 120 camera from my father’s photo collection, and I’ve been a devoted user of it ever since. The sheer simplicity – no real aperture settings and one fixed shutter speed – makes it a compelling camera. You can forget all about all that technical stuff while you are out shooting, and then try to compensate in the development and printing stages.

These days I’m in a heavy digital camera mode – and as I was playing around with a new digital SLR last week, and started to wonder if it would be possible to fit the lens from a Holga onto the DSLR.

The Holga lens popped right off the body, with just a quick twist. At that point it was just a question of figuring out how to mount it on the camera body.

The first attempt was to put the Holga lens on an extension ring. I wasn’t sure how far the lens should be from the sensor to achieve optimum focus, so I taped the lens to the smallest extension ring available – a 12mm ring – and gave that a try.

Unfortunately, that was way too much extension – and while it would be good for close ups, it would not work out for general shooting.

So, onto plan B – chop a hole into the center of a body cap and mount the lens onto that. The back of the lens assembly (which includes the aperture) actually extends just a bit into the body cavity.

Here was a setup that worked – after testing it out with the lens taped in place, I glued in onto the body cap with superglue, and then waited a few days to take it for a spin (didn’t want those super glue vapors settling onto the digital camera sensor.)

This setup worked out great. The lens seems to be close to it’s optimum distance from the sensor, and object that are more than 10 or 12 feet away come into focus – if you can cal it that – quite well.

The effect of the lens is interesting – not as interesting as a real Holga, but fun still.

With a real Holga there is a ‘sweet spot’ near the center of the frame that is relatively sharp. Along the periphery of the image, the lens introduces significant distortions. A real Holga also has had significant vignetting – especially if you remove the film insert.

With the DSLR, the sweet spot fills most of the sensor area, so you lose the great distortions that would appear along the edge of a 120mm exposure. You also lose the great vignetting that a real Holga produces.

In addition, the 60mm lens is a moderate telephoto on an APS sensor DSLR. IN 35mm terms, a 60mm lens on small sensor DSLR is the equivalent of a 90mm lens. The same lens, on a medium format camera, is the equivalent of a 30mm on a 35mm camera.

Well – what are obstacles but things to get around. The lens distortion is there, and the digital sensor seems to accentuate color distortion, chromatic aberration, and flare even more than film – so there’s a fair trade off. Vignetting can be crafted post exposure in Photoshop. A while a wide angle might be more interesting than a telephoto, it’s just a function of seeing and composing a little differently.

At the end of the day – I like the results of the Holga lens on the DSLR body. Whenever the sun comes back, I’m looking forward to trying some digital infrared shots using the Holga lens.

I ‘test drove’ the Holgified DSLR yesterday and today. Yesterday I hit the lake Michigan shore line and the lighthouse at South Haven, along with the Allegan forest. Today I wandered around the hinterlands, stopping off at a remote country cememtery and also snapping a fading evangelical billboard.

The cemetary was a weird place, since there were lots of small American flags lying in the dirt all around the headstones. At first I thought that it was vandalism - but then I saw so many flags dangling from their sticks by just a few threads. You’d think that people would show a little more respect for their country, and have the foresight and sense of responsibility to take down their flags when they are ratty and falling apart.

For the full set of out takes from the test drive - take alook at the Image Stream.

Although late fall and early winter is a definite off season for outdoor photography in Michigan, I still carry a Holga or other toy camera around in the car. It’s more or less drive-by shooting – when something of interest catches my eye I either hold the camera up to the window, or hop out of the car, and grab a quick shot.

Here are a few recent (late October – November) shots. The full set is in the image stream.

“Waiting for a Train” is probably the best of the batch. Probably because I had so much time available to work on perfecting the shot (I really was waiting on a rather long train.). There’s something appealing about the basic sense of perspective in a shot like this.

Scanning the film introduced a few annoyances, though. I often marvel at the ability of the film scanner to pull detail out of the thinnest of negatives. In this case the lower potion of the train is all but clear on the film – there’s nothing there, not light got in and hit those silver crystals.

But still the scanner tries to pull more detail out. In this case the result is a lot of noise mucking up what should be the dark, near silhouette of the train. Well, maybe a re-scan will help things along….

The skeleton is, of course, a Halloween decoration. In this case it was hanging blandly on the front door a house near a stop light. The original capture on the Holga was OK, but boring. So it was transformed from a junk-camera shot, to a junk-manipulated digital image. Of well, you gotta do something to keep from being bored in the cold dark months…

Some enlightenment philosopher – I forget which one – noted that humans were stuck in an existential trap, caused by artificial needs. Well, he didn’t use the word ‘existential’ but his point was the same. In our consumerist society we are all pumped up to acquire crap that really does nothing for us. It may assuage our anger, briefly, or seemingly justify the sacrifices we make to jobs or debt, but at the end of the day most Americans are just living to participate in the ‘crap cycle’ – consume crap, produce crap, consume some more…

It’s all about wanting more. As Bob Marley put it – “Now that you got what you want, do you want more? You think it’s the end, but it’s just the beginning….”

There’s not much that I want. I want Time, and I’ve taken Time. Having a nice car is something, having a big house is something more, having a boat and time share – even more. But all those things just hitch back to the yoke. If you want to be truly extravagant – take a year, or more, and do what you want to do. Time is the most precious thing…

But to do that requires a little re-calibration. One way I recalibrate is to drive my cars for a long time. A really long time. And so last week I was in the local garage, getting routine maintenance done. I was lingering in the parking lot after dropping the car off – the garage was closing, I was waiting for a ride home, the late afternoon sun was dazzling in the clear blue sky.

Good Used Tires. Edtir. Somehow the rack caught my eye and imagination. I don’t need much. Give me some good used tires and the light of the sun, and I’ll be ready to roll.

…

I’m not sure how good a job the mechanics did, though. A week later an unusual snow storm swept through the area. The first snow usually doesn’t stick, but then the first snow usually doesn’t come in early October, and usually doesn’t lay down several inches of wet flakes.

But the first snow also brings an almost visceral response. Maybe it’s a holdover from childhood, but there is something exciting about every snowfall, and the first snowfall is more exciting than any other.

So on this day I drove to my job through the driving snow, only to get the and find steam pouring out from the hood of the car. A loose radiator hose – fortunately, I had hung a show a few days earlier, and my picture-hanging toolkit was still in the back of the car. A few turns of the screwdriver and the radiator hose seemed to be on nice and tight and new.

Just to make sure, I stole away and test drove the car, firing away with the Holga (I only took two shots of the used tire rack).

The photos of this year’s first snow don’t covey the sense of excitement that I felt at seeing the snow fall. But to be honest, that sense of excitement was tempered – in part by the freakish timing of the storm. But also there was the sense of drudgery and loss – another winter is coming, the summer photography season is for sure over. It’s hard, in Michigan at this juncture in time, not to feel a sense of malaise as the economy remains stuck n neutral, or slipping into reverse.

And so the shots of the first snow may not be as upbeat as I actually felt at the time – I was happy to see the snow, and happy that my repairs to the car worked.

Well, maybe later shots will be less jaundiced – at least the snow motivated me to clean out the garage and clear the space where I take snow crystal shots. The sheer simplicity of a snow crystals transcends all, right?

On a technical note – these shots were taken using J and C’s Classic Pan 400, developed in Rodinal1:50 (and wow the grain you get from that combo!)

As always, full sized images (and one additional shot) can be found in the Image Stream.