CalArti

Several weeks ago I was wandering around eBay, looking for bargains in 120 roll film. I didn’t find any, but the search led me to look at cameras, and of course that led to trouble…

A particular type of camera really caught my fancy – antique (or classic) folding medium format rangefinders. A couple of years ago a friend gave me an old Kodak Retina-A folding rangefinder, and I really fell in love with it. The only interesting shot that I’ve managed to take with it is this one from Chicago’s Millennium Park:

The idea of packing a medium format camera that, once folded up, was only a little larger than the Retina A was just too compelling. Thanks to the Retina A I’m accustomed to zone focusing, so even working with that constraint is acceptable.

After a few weeks of searching and researching, a great camera came along on eBay – an Agfa Isolette III.

The specimen I bought looked like a beauty. The bellows looked to be pristine (turns out they aren’t) and the lens and camera overall looked very clean (which they are.) The lens focusing mechanism works perfectly.

Shortly after the Isolette arrived, I hightailed it the graveyard across the way to see how it worked. The graveyard is my honored testing ground for new cameras and lenses – the square stones give a good sense of how rectilinear the lens may be, and the rolling hills and trees give abundant opportunity to test a lens under different circumstances.

A roll of Agfa APX 400 was used for this test. The first frame was sacrificed to test the bellows – I just advanced the film, opened up the camera, and held it out in the sunlight for a while. After that I just wandered around a bit, and shot whatever seemed interesting.

Getting home, I souped the APX 400 in Rodinal 1:50. Pulling the film out of the tank, I was disappointed to see that the first frame was not blank I hoped. Despite appearances, the bellows is indeed fraught with pinhole leaks. I later examined the bellows in a dark closet with a very bright flashlight, and confirmed this myself – the leaks are pinholes, but definitely there.

Despite the light leaks, the images I took were not ruined. In fact, the ones where the film was quickly advanced shoe very little impact from the pinhole leaks. Studying these shots reveals a very sharp and contrasty 6 x 6 cm negative – which works for me.

So, the camera will have to go off to get re-bellowed. But when it’s refurbished it will be a great addition to my digital camera bag. I’ve tried carrying TLR’s with me, but they take up too much space in the camera bag. The folding rangefinder and a couple of rolls of film will fit comfortably into my digital camera bag, and it will be great to be able to switch over to MF film at any time.

Here’s one shot from the cemetery – yah, I played around with the curves to give it a bit of a solarized feel:

Things have been a bit quiet around here lately. I spent the first week of this month in Chicago, enjoying the urban life. It was great trip. Pam and I staying at the Congress Plaza Hotel, right on Michigan Avenue. Highlights included visits to the Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Field Museum, and, of course, The Dark Knight at the Imax.

Since vacations are supposed to be an opportunity to get away from old habits, I decided to bring a film camera. I finally used up the last of my Ilford XP2 Super – which was considerably out of date. I also shot over a dozen rolls of Fuji Neopan 400 and Adox CHM 400 film.

The Adox film is re-badged Ilford HP 5+, and used to be sold through J and C Photo. The expiration date on the box was 7/2008 – so shooting it in the first week of August, 2008, was right on time. Remarkably, aside from the XP2 Super and a couple of rolls of Plus-X, all the film I shot on this trip was fresh. I guess I’m still using up 35mm ISO 400 B&W film.

I shot 15 rolls of film during the trip, and have been slowly working my way through developing them. The film workflow is certainly a lot slower than the digital workflow, especially when you are developing it yourself.

For development, I mixed up one of my last bags of Micrdol-X, which I’ve been using at the 1:3 dilution. The development time for the Adox CHM 400 is easy to remember – 22 minutes at 22C. For the Fuji Neopan, I’ve been working with the 15.5 minutes at 22C.

So far, 12 of the 15 rolls shot have been developed, but only a handful of those have been scanned. Did I mention that the film workflow is pretty slow?

At home, other projects have been keeping me away from blogging. First and foremost, I’m trying hard to re-do this entire website. Really – it’s time for a new look and a structure that makes a little sense. So, I’m trying to hold off on adding to the current site while the new one is in process – so no new images in the Image Stream at this point.

Good news came my way yesterday, with the annoucement of the juror’s selections for Center For Fine Art Photography’s street photography exhibit. This is on the heels of having a couple works selected into the Center’s Macroworld exhibit.

The image that was accepted into the exhibit is “On Patrol” shot at Millennium Park in the fall of 2006. That was my last serious trip to Chicago for some street shooting . I keep meaning to head back for some more, but the few trips I’ve taken have been devoted to other things.

Well – everything in due time. At at least for now, this shot gets its day.

Last weekend I finished developing the film from my recent Chicago trip. I posted on this trip a few days ago, at which time I had developed 4 of the eight rolls of film shot during this two day exercise in urban street photography.

As luck would have it, those first four rolls were clearly the strongest of the shoot. The four remaining rolls were more or less just shots of details from the hotel room, a bunch of way mis-exposed images (not sure what I was doing with those) and a handful of images from the actual street.

Is it a sad state of affairs when a photo of a doorknob is the best you have to offer? If you define the value of a photo based on the content of the subject matter, what good is a picture of a doorknob (no offence to the folks who put together home improvement catalogs.) But judging a photo by the content of its subject is the most superficial of all assessments (and the most widely applied, sadly.) So – here’s a doorknob. Nice hotel room. I was sitting on the commode when I took the shot. It’s the only shot in this lot that I took the time to tone.

And then there was the closet in the hotel room. It was a great full sized closet, and like the rest of the room it had a ceiling way up high – 10 or 11 feet minimum. And there was shelf over my head (and I’m just over 6 feet tall.)

Most intriguing was the light. When I opened the door it was on. And every time I opened the door again it was on. At first I thought that the light was continuously on, and figured that at night the ghostly outline of the doorframe would haunt the room.

Well, I got more Jethro Bodine than Albert Einstein in me – as it turned out the light was hooked up to a button in the doorframe, and like your home refrigerator turned off when the door was closed. But still, that top shelf made a nice place to line up exposed canisters of film, and so at the end of the first full day there I snapped a shot of the four rolls of film exposed thus far.

I had to hold the camera over my head, and obviously could not see what I was shooting except in the mind’s eye.

I think some of those shots could have been the strongest of the series – but an unhappy accident during development ruined things.

I always develop one roll per tank, and I use the ‘double’ sized tanks (that can hand two rolls of 35mm film.), I also always use 600 ml of developer solution. Since a 36 exposure roll of 35mm film has the same surface area as a roll of 120 film (more or less) I reckon this leads to more consistent of results.

Unfortunately, I lost one of the little clips that holds the film spool in place. I used to just put an empty spool in the tank to make sure the spool with film on it didn’t slide out of the developer solution, but I got lazy and stopped doing that, and developed dozens of rolls with the spool unrestrained with no prblems.

Until now...

This particular roll of film slid on the center tube that runs down the middle of the plastic developer tank, and wound up at the top of tank – right where the developer and air space interface. The result was hard agitation marks in the center part of the roll.

I try to imagine how the developer could make those sprocket marks on the film – and I can ‘t figure it out. After all, the sprockets of the film roll are up in the plastic spool – so how does a perfect image of them get projected onto a few frames, just from the sloshing of Microdol-X in the tank?

Beats me – but then the effect is so bad, it’s almost good (but not quite)....

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Earlier this week I headed into Chicago, for a little bit of urban R&R. For this trip we decided to stay at the Congress Hotel, a venerable old institution just south of the Art Institute and near Grant Park.

I always look to trips to the city as a means of revitalizing my photography. The stimulation is twofold – first there’s the opportunity for some urban street photography, a real change of pace from the nature and landscape work I usually do. And then there’s the exposure to galleries and museums – a chance to see different approaches not only to photography but also to other visual arts as well.

For this trip, I added a third element and brought along Eddie Ephraums’s book, Darkroom to Digital. I’ve been picking at this an his Creative Elements book for some time, and decided it was time to sit down and actually read it.

It’s been almost a year since my last visit to the city. This trip was much shorter, and much less focused on just photography. Of the flip side, with the exception of the scorpion sting on my right foot, I was not hobbled and felt comfortable walking for hours on end.

So how did the three influences come together?

The verdict is still out on the actual photos I shot during the trip. For me, urban street photography is still solidly in the realm of film – fast traditional silver film, like Tri-X or NeoPan 400. For this trip I shot out the last of my store of Tri-X (the ‘new’ emulsion) and started working on my sizeable horde of NeoPan 400.

Before I left home, I mixed up a gallon of Microdol-X. I really like the look of grainy, 35mm film, developed in Microdol-X 1:3. Although the Microdol is a fine grain developer, at the 1:3 dilution the grain reduction is not as pronounced. What you do get is an even, consistent, and to my eye pleasing graininess that become more pronounced as the miniature 35mm negatives are enlarged.

Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate for much street shooting, as we moved in and out of one rain storm to another, sometimes just misting, sometimes pouring down. At this point I’ve developed 4 of the 8 rolls shot during the trip, and sample shots can be seen in the Image Stream, and punctuating this post.

Ephraums’s book made for a very interesting read. Its refreshing to read a book that discusses the whys of photography, and not just the processes and outputs. Unlike his Creative Elements, the photos in this book moved away from landscapes and towards found object still lifes – which inspired more than a few shots around the hotel room, which had enough historic ambiance to provide some interesting subjects.

While Ephraums’s book was not a technical guide to monochrome digital processing, it did get into some of the techniques that he uses. I’ve been using duotones and tritones to tone my monochrome prints for a few years now, and it was interesting to read about his techniques in this light.

I also found his used of extreme crops in film frames to achieve a certain effect. The photo of the abandoned light station – visible from the carnival setting of Navy Pier – is really inspired by some of his images and techniques.

In regards to inspiration from exhibits and museums, the Art Institute of Chicago had a large scale retrospective on Harry Callahan. Up till now, my exposure to his work was limited to a 1967 Hallmark Calendar of his photos, which I found among my father’s books. The calendar alone was a notable influence when I first looked through it. The photograph of leaves on the ground, simply entitled Chicago, 1950, (it accompanied the month of October in the calendar) was particularly notable, and as I looked it a few years ago my notions about simplicity of composition and a strong center of interest popped like soap bubbles.

One of the most instructive aspects of the exhibit was the inclusion of a couple of negatives on display, along with the final prints. I was amazed at how Callahan achieved his results through high contrast printing. Until now, I’ve been focused on preserving shadow detail, and that has driven my techniques for developing, scanning, and printing. That can result in a wonderful, luminous print. But it can also result in flat images that lack snap. So, in the post-exposure, post-scanning processing for the images from this current trip, I’ve put more attention on punching up the contrast, and to some extent printing down, perhaps sacrificing some luminousity in favor of more punch and snap.

I still have four more rolls of film to develop from this trip – so hopefully some more images and commentary will be appearing here soon. For now, the full set of images can be found in the Image Stream.

An Exercise in Street Photography

Last October I had the chance to spend a few days in Chicago. It was the end of the summer and I had spent the last several months working on natural history and landscape photography. I wanted to revitalize by doing something new, so a good portion of the trip to the city was devoted to street photography.

This essay is called Oedipus In Chicago, not because I had some terrible secret to work out with Dr. Phil, but because I injured my foot on my first day in town. It was minor enough, but I planned to do nothing but walk all day, every day, and by the fourth day my feet were as swollen and sore as the tragic Greek king’s.

I’ve never been a big practitioner or fan of street photography, so taking a turn at it was a good change of pace for me. I brought no digital cameras, and instead just packed a film camera and several rolls of black and white film. In fact, one of the motivations for this trip was to use up the stock of expired Tri-X and Ilford XP-2 Super that was cluttering up the freezer! I intended to stick to the discipline of a of 50mm ‘normal’ lens, but found myself drawn to the 20-35mm wide angle zoom for most shots.

As it worked out, the Art Institute of Chicago was hosting Paris: Photographs of a Time That Was. While not devoted to street photography, this exhibit had plenty of exceptional examples of the genre, from masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson. It was enough to make even the most reluctant street photographer inspired to wander the city, hoping to awaken to the decisive moment.

And so I hit the streets in Chicago, ultimately stumbling on painful feet. I’m relatively familiar with downtown Chicago – I attended Roosevelt University for several months in the mid 1980’s, and lived on Wabash Avenue, just south of the Loop. This was before my photography days, but I routinely walked up to the then dilapidated Navy Pier, and enjoyed exploring the neighborhoods and business districts in the big city. Up to that point in time, the largest city I had ever lived in was Ann Arbor, Michigan, which was a big place compared to my home town of Adrian, Michigan.

Chicago offers a wealth of excellent architectural and public areas that are excellent for street photography. I have to admit that I am not a big fan of the candid shot – snapping a photo of a person unawares, expecting that their expression or posture says something about them. In my viewing of most street photography, these images tell you more about the photographer and their perceptions (or precomceptions) than those of the subject. So, I stuck more or less to shooting the street itself, the buildings and odds and ends, with the occasional human figure contributing to the image but infrequently the actual subject.

Nonetheless, street photography is a significant change of pace for me. It’s relatively undemanding in terms of technical challenges - not as simplistic as shooting with a Holga, but close enough. Metering is straight forward, there’s no flash or other lighting controlls to monkey with, and I didn’t even both with a tripod. It was more or less ‘f8 and be there,’ as the saying goes.

So the callenge lies in composition, catching the moment when things come together, and seeing the shot in all the clutter of the city. For me, after a summmer of shooting bugs and natural landscapes, just gestalting the urban environment was a refreshing change.

The city itself was an extremely hospitable place. It was early October, blustery and cool on some days, but sunny and clear on a couple as well. People were out enjoying the last fleeting bits of warm weather. The faded summer plantings and flowers were just beginning to be pulled up, an ominous sign of the upcoming winter weather.

One particularly nice refuge was Central Camera - tucked away at 230 S. Wabash Avenue under the EL, just a few blocks from where I used to go to school (Roosevelt University.) It’s a great camera shop with practically everything you could want. I visited a few times, and even though Kalamazoo has a pretty substantial camera store, I found several items not locally available.

Central Camera a narrow tunnel of a store that keeps going, and going, and going as you walk deeper into it. While they are on top of everything modern and digital, this is also the place to get your Holga’s (I bought two during this visit) and re-spooled film in almost every format imaginable. I didn’t sit down, but I rested my aching feet for a while, talking with Albert Flesch, the grandson of the founder of Central Camera. Aside from discussing aquariums and other subjects, I picked up a camera bubble level and several rolls of Konica Impressa 50, along with the Holgas. Its a great shop and any photographer who winds up in Chicago should check it out. I still have the ‘History of Photograph’ shopping bag from the store - which has illustrations about past photographic equipment that even the most detailed textbooks lack.

After the trip I sent off the Ilford XP-2 Super to be developed, and worked my way through developing the many rolls of Tri-X. I had drawn from a supply of ‘old’ (pre-2003) Tri-X 400. The Tri-X was developed in Microdol-X 1:3, my standard developer for this film in 35mm format. I started scanning the images once I returned, but somewhere along the ling lost momentium.

It’s not like I wanted to tear my eyes out when I saw the shots, but I was disappointed. But then, I’m _always_ disappointed when first reviewing work. (If I ever get a good shot, I’ll hang up my cameras for good.)

Obviously, it took me a while to get around to editing these images - since I just sat down and looked at them in ernest here in May. I more or less forgot about them until I was cleaning off the hard drive on my scanning computer, and realized that the scan files were sitting on the disk, waiting to be reviewed and edited.

Since street photography is something different for me, I decided to take a different approach to the handling of the B&W images. I typically “tone” black and white scans in Photoshop, to produce an other than neutral appearance. In the past I’ve stuck to more or less emulating traditional darkroom paper tones, or toning processes (like faux Sepia toning.) For this batch of images I applied a subtle purple tone - nothing like traditional B&W processing (unless you consider what happens to poorly fixed prints!)

Hopefully the toning is subtle and not garish on your monitor - it’s amazing how much variation there is from screen to screen. But in any event, the purple haze effect seems to compliment the steely feel of the city, and it seemed to make sense to be consistent throughout the set. It certainly is more subtle than the magenta toning I use in digital infrared shots (like the chair on the beach at the top of this page.)

The full sized and full array of images and some additional comments can be found in the Image Stream.

Technical details: All shots taken with Pentax Mz-S, FA 20-35 f4 zoom, or FA 50mm f1.7. Film was a mix of Ilford XP2 Super, Tri-X 400, and one roll of Kodak B&W Plus chromogenic.