Category: Artmaking

Film formats and lens lengths

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I’ve got some relatively set preferences for lens lengths, but as I shoot more formats, I’m discovering that I have sometimes very different tastes for them.

For straight 35mm and 6×6, I don’t like anything longer than "normal": 80mm on 6×6 and 45mm on 35mm. (I actually find 50mm a bit long on 135 and prefer the 45mms on my Contax G2 and Hasselblad/Fuji XPan, and 28mm (44.8mm equivalent) on my 1.6x DSLR.) As I’ve written before, long lenses in these formats are pretty much strictly utility items for when I physically can’t get close enough to something. I’d rather go wide, sometimes very wide—I’ve been drooling over the 38mm 6×6 Hasselblad SWC for several years.

On 4×5, I find the "normal"-to-slightly-wide 150mm utterly boring and uninspiring. A Fuji 150/5.6 was the only modern large format lens I had until about two months ago. I did shoot a couple of frames I’m happy with with it, but I found its field of view so blah that I barely bothered to shoot with it at all. I recently bought a 210/5.6, which is getting there, but I was surprised to find that it’s still not long enough! I don’t know whether it’s the 4:5 aspect ratio, or because of the way I see when I have movements available, but my inclination on the format is to go long. (I have to be 2.5-3 feet away from my subject to shoot a head-and-neck shot with the 210mm, which is just too close. I feel like I breathing down their necks.)

It may also be because I’m just beginning with premeditated portraiture, and I’m doing it with this kit… I’m sure I’m in for loads of surprises with that. No interest in going wide so far. I have seen some spectacular LF wide angle landscape photography, but that’s not the kind of landscape pictures I’m interested in making right now.

I also recently picked up a half frame 35mm Olympus Pen FT SLR, which came with a 40mm, close-focussing lens. It’s kind of long on half frame (which has the same aspect ratio as a normal 35mm frame), but it suits me fine. I got a 25mm for it, which I’ve mounted and looked at stuff through, but haven’t felt the need to take a single shot through it yet.

Portraiture with 4×5 is making me want to try 150mm on 6×6, though. I think the only long lens I have for the format, a 350mm, is probably just too much for me.

I’m about to take the plunge into 8×10, which has the same aspect ratio as 4×5, but I’m curious to see if any surprises come out of that. With a viewfinder with four times the area, who knows? It’s bound to change the way I see in one direction or another.

My evolution of comment-leaving: running out of words?

Nicolai Grossman 9 Comments

I’ve participated in comment-driven photo community sites for about three years now, a year or so on fotolog when some friends put me onto it, and then a bit over two on Flickr. This was before I’d Gotten More Serious About Photography and both my picture-taking and my commenting were more social in nature. I was doing more straight photoblogging, that is blogging what was happening in my life with more documentary-style photos—this is where I am and this is what I’m doing—than trying to make "good" pictures or talking about the artistic side of things. (Of course everybody’s got their own definitions, but I don’t think there was any "art" in what I was making at the time to discuss. Maybe a designer’s composition aesthetic, at times, but arting wasn’t so much on my radar.)

The comments I left on other people’s photos weren’t really about the photos themselves, they were about the life situations they referenced if they weren’t completely unrelated social chatter. Then my father died and I got his two Hasselblads, and I reckoned I should at least try to become worth of them, so I started paying attention both to what I and others were shooting. I started looking at posts more as photographs than as "this is my day", and my commenting shifted into the same gear. I began examining how different quantifiable and concrete attributes of photos affected my perception, how they contributed to creating feelings and impressions. I think I was starting to work my way through the mechanics of connecting intellectually examinable image qualities to gut experience, and it was probably obvious in what I said to others about their work.

This seems like a good point to pause for a digression about how I learn things with strong technical and creative components. It’s not a plan so much as a pattern I’ve noticed in myself: I start out by assimilating as much technical information as possible and experimenting with it. As I get a better feel for things, my focus shifts from "so this is what I can make with that" to "this is what I want to make, what can I use to achieve that goal?", and I start caring more about the creative potential than learning the technical stuff for its own sake. I think I’m more judgmental in my thinking about "right" ways to get there, which is probably a reflection of my residual uncertainty about how the whole thing works while I’m still in a more intense learning phase.

Eventually I reach a point of not caring about the technical stuff at all other than as a means to an end, and I get a lot less rigid in my thinking about how to achieve a given goal. Chatting shit about the technical side stops being fun or interesting, leaving me focussed on the creative side, which is of course a lot more elusive and difficult to talk about. It’s happened this way with audio engineering, graphic design, cooking, and computer programming (in which there’s a lot more room for creativity—although it’s creativity of a different kind—than might be immediately apparent).

I’m not trying to imply that I’ve mastered the technical (or any) side of photography. There’s always more to learn, and I probably have more to learn than most. But my brain has stopped finding it interesting on its own, and I’m consequently in a place where it’s harder than ever for me to talk about art, because the stuff that’s easy to talk about like focus, density, highlight and shadow detail, etc., feel empty right now. It’s not that I think that I’m past them or anything, they’re just so far removed from my experience of a photos I like right now that talking about them seems irrelevant. (See previous post, Don’t Break the Spell.)

When something moves me, I usually want to tell the person who made it. But what do I say now? Lately I find I’m running out of words. If I feel like I want to say something about a piece, I’m inclined to only talk about how it makes me feel rather than what the photographer did to encourage me to feel that way. And that’s hard. It takes a lot of time, sometimes days or even weeks, to work out how I feel about a compelling piece, let alone how to verbalise the feeling. I’m leaving more and more useless comments like "I don’t have the words to tell you how or why, but this set my arse on fire" or a simple "holy shit!". Up there with "great capture!"—brilliant. I may be completely rocked by something, but I feel like I’ve got nothing to say about it other than, "that was great, thank you for sharing it with me".

How then do you participate in an online community when you’ve got very little to say? One of the things I’ve always liked best about this sort of thing is the opportunity to talk to the people making the things I like. It’s what I liked about [pre-mall] punk rock: you could hang out with a band before and after the show pretty much just person-to-person, rather than having the weird dynamic of star and fan, if you were even "lucky" enough to get close enough to say hi in the first place (I’m not a big fan of star-fucking or putting people on pedestals). I’m finding that I want to get to know the people who make that work as whole people, not just to talk about how they way they framed something creates an engaging tension. It’s the art that serves as a doorway rather than a complete avatar or proxy for the person who made it. And I think any increase in that sort of holistic knowledge of a piece’s creator informs the way you experience the piece itself, which takes the whole thing full circle. (Did I just talk myself into thinking that genuine artist bios are actually a good idea??)

This art thing is starting to remind of this Douglas Adams quote, which begins: "There is an art, it [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."

Sorry I’ve failed to provide any sort of conclusion, but I think if I actually have a point here, that may be it: I really don’t know how to talk about any of this. And maybe, in the vein of "talking about music is like dancing about architecture", that’s to be expected.

Seeing through vertical viewfinders

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I picked up an Olympus Pen FT 35mm SLR at the end of February [2007]. Because it’s half frame, the viewfinder is vertical rather than horizontal, and I was really curious to see if it would affect how I see through it. I’ve been using it as my primary normal-lensed camera for a few months now, and—big shock—it did.

The camera did remind me of how much I don’t like the normal 3:2 aspect ratio of a normal 35mm frame. For me it’s usually in an uninspiring wasteland, being too long for square or 4:5 (which I’ve grown to really like) and too short for a panorama.

Past that, it’s been an interesting experience. The corners of the viewfinder are rounded, which seems like a small thing, but it really affects my mindset when I’m shooting. It reminds me of the prints that were popular when I was a kid, and it gives me a feeling of temporal ambiguity by association.

I still find myself taking just about as many horizontal shots as I used to, but now it’s much more deliberate, and it feels like that’s spilled over into normal viewfinder shooting as well. Seems like one of those things that makes me see better, even if I don’t use it all the time. I highly recommend the vertical viewfinder experience!

Past and presence, another take on wide vs. deep?

Nicolai Grossman 4 Comments

I’ve noticed an odd trend lately: most of the people I know who aren’t geeky in any way (aren’t technically inclined, aren’t particularly curious about how things work, and, not wanting to be bothered with technical details, tend to favor point-and-shoot or fully automatic cameras) seem to be really into classifying things. When some of my not-so-geeky friends see a pretty flower or bug, hears a bird song, or whatever, the first thing they do is try to figure out what it "is" (what it’s called, what family it’s in, if it’s native or invasive, etc.). Whereas I think most people would say I’m really geeky in my general approach to life, and I couldn’t possibly care less; to me it’s just a pretty flower, and thinking about classifying it actually interferes with my enjoyment of it. And this seems to be generally true of the geekier people I know, the computer programmers, the food science-inclined cooks, the web site builders… I’m not saying one way is better than the other, but I am more than a little surprised it’s not the other way around.

I, and many of the geeks I know, seem to have low latent inhibition in certain areas. When I look at a lens, I don’t see a single round thing, I see all the elements, the shutter mechanism, the raw materials being mined, processed, and delivered to the factory, the glass being formulated, the lens designer sitting in front of their computer weighing the trade-offs between manufacturing cost & difficulty, size, weight, available materials, and optical quality, and wonder what sort of person they are, if they’re happy, and what they had for breakfast. When I see something I know nothing about, my brain has a much harder time falling down all these rabbit holes at once. Yes, when I look at a pretty flower, it can chew on photosynthesis and cellular reproduction and thigmotropism and all that, but these sorts of natural phenomena get to the "and this is where the magic happens" end of the trail of my real comprehension much more quickly. And when that occurs, when I’m really there with it in the present rather than untangling the hair of its past, I can see the pretty flower for what I believe it to really be: nothing short of a fucking miracle.

And that, of course, completely changes how I’m inclined and able to photograph things. I’m out of the rigidity of literalism and into mystery and—dare I use this awful, wanktastic word—wonder, and there’s a lot more room for personal impression and interpretation to come through—at least there is for me—and those impressions and interpretations are of course vastly different, too. (Again, it’s not a matter of better or worse, just difference.)

I haven’t completely thought this out, I’m just typing through it, but it seems like this ties into the wide vs. deep thing (how your familiarity with a place affects the photographs you make in it) that Colin Jago and Paul Butzi have talked about. I’m not sure how, maybe it’s another kind of wide and deep, or maybe it’s a different axis altogether. I don’t know.

Don’t break the spell

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I was just reading the current (May 2007) issue of EQ magazine when I came across an interview with high-end microphone designer Klaus Heyne. In it, he very nicely summed up what I’ve been trying to verbalize about photography, image manipulation (be it chemical, optical, or digital), and good "straight" lens rendering in general (sharpness, macrocontrast, microcontrast, etc.). Of course he was talking about music, but it works just as well for photography:

My definition of a good mic is: the musical experience never wanders away from my pleasure center to my intellectual side, to where I might think, "Oh yeah, I can really hear the cymbals, they’re right over here. I can ear the second violinist tapping her foot." I regard that as intellectual wanking. I won’t want that. I want to be there. I don’t even want to think. I want to be in the music, so I can have the experience of dreaming and imagining, rather than analyzing how the setup is.

What I get out of it is: don’t break the spell. I’ve seen extreme manipulations that don’t and subtle ones that do, so I don’t think it’s a matter of degree, rather whether it reinforces the experience or distract from it.

Seeing with long lenses: results

Nicolai Grossman 2 Comments

About a week ago, I took a walk in a local park with a Hasselblad 501C/M and a 350mm lens to see if I could get down with long lenses, which I generally don’t like very much (see previous post).

I didn’t feel like I’d done very well at the time, and the film I got back from it yesterday confirms that I was right. As I’m not used to shooting with long lenses, I’m not surprised that I didn’t really feel like I was shooting as myself. At times I felt like I was trying to look through Vicky Slater‘s eyes, but doing a crap job of it.

I should also note that I have a really hard time connecting with landscapes through "normal" (sharp, even coverage) lenses in general.

As promised, here are some of the results, shot on the new Kodak Portra 400NC-2.

 
 

Peach Hill photo: split tree

Close to something, maybe, but no cigar.

 
 

Peah Hill photo: orchard tree line on hilltop

These are the lab’s proof scans. I think this shot has the most potential, if I can pull more detail out of the trees when I re-scan it. I’ll reserve judgment until I see it.

It feels kind of pretty, in a really classically conservative way. Which I think may be my problem with long lenses and "clean" landscapes in general: when I like them, they usually feel very reserved and forced into a box. I may find something aesthetically pretty in what I’ve shot after the fact, but it’s not how I generally see, especially not landscapes.

 
 

Peach Hill photo: branches and high tension tower

This isn’t great, but I suppose it’s passable as geometric masturbation, which is a type of photo I love to make but don’t think necessarily makes for compelling viewing unless it’s done extremely well. Kind of like playing a 20 minute jam with a band: really fun for the people playing, but not something you’d inflict on anybody else.

 
 

Peach Hill photo: valley and power lines

Depth of field test with a long view/burn frame at the end of the roll. Safe crap.

Seeing with long lenses

Nicolai Grossman 3 Comments

Yesterday started out beautifully. It was almost 80°F in the sun, which was a welcome change from the cold New York winter, and I went to Peach Hill Park, which is an old apple orchard. I haven’t fixed the light leak in my one particular copy of a Spartus that’s my favorite landscape camera (it’s not the cool kind of leak, it washes out the whole frame), and I didn’t have time to load film holders, so 4×5 was out, too. Instead, I reached for my Hasselblad 501C/M and noticed the 350mm lens that I’d only ever shot maybe 3 frames with. (For the record, I inherited both from my father; I’m not in the habit of buying Hasselblad lenses only to leave them in the closet for years.)

I’m not a big fan of long lenses. Not that I hate them or anything, but they don’t do much for me unless I physically can’t get close enough to what I want to shoot, like at a show or a wedding. I tend to go for normal to moderately wide, even finding the standard "normal" 50mm on 35mm film to be a touch long. 350mm is generally outside of my visual consciousness. I figured I’d give myself a challenge and took only the one camera and lens to see what I could learn.

I walked around and shot for about an hour and half and packed it in when it started raining. I took my time, shooting only 24 exposures, framing probably five shots for every one I took, really trying to get a feel for what this thing lends itself to. I think I failed. Other than being unweidly—the camera, lens, and hood together are longer than my forearm—I had no grand epiphanies. I don’t feel like I even got my foot in the door, but I’ll keep at it for a bit longer. For better or worse, it sure is different.

UPDATE: photos are here.

The over-educated eye?

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Gallery owner Edward Winkleman has an interesting discussion going on at his blog about whether being too well-informed interferes with appreciating/enjoying art.

I’m with Winkleman: I say no. I have no problem blanking my mind and going for the ride. It’s only once the experience has run its course that I may try to figure out why it was the way it was, and it’s just as likely to be influenced by my state at the time as by composition or density range.

Food, on the other hand, is another matter for me. It may be because I’m probably a better pastry chef than I am a photographer, and having spent a large part of my youth in a commercial restaurant kitchen, have spent a lot more time paying attention to the experience of eating than I have to the experience of viewing art, but it’s difficult to go out and enjoy a meal. Dessert? Forget it. 9 times out of 10, I’m not even going to bother. It’s not that I go looking for food to be unenjoyable to boost my ego or anything, I simply can’t help but notice it. It’s like trying to watch a movie in which you can see the crew walking around in the background and the boom mic bobbing up and down at the top of the screen. (Oddly, this happens far less with home-cooked meals than it does at restaurants. Maybe there is something to that whole context thing…)

Who knows, maybe I’ll feel differently when I know more and have more experience looking at art. But for now, it’s not a problem.

Art is mystical shit

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Stuart Davis is an artist who kind of defies categorization: he’s a [kick-ass] musician, painter, potty-mouthed mystic, and a bunch of other shit. He wrote:

I was conversing with this intelligent presence (no body, no form) which was fluent in Is (the language I’m constructing). It was quizzing me, basically, saying "au-VAIH-sool, what does that word mean? do you remember?" I was like…

…

au-VAIH-sool would be more like Insight-Eureka-Enmorphature (?), a subject released from a bind or chimera (physical / emotional blocks, mental patterns, spiritual limits) by dying into its next-self-birth (the one slightly bigger, slightly more inclusive). It’s perception at new depth, discovering anatomy which was previously undetected (due to insufficient awareness), and this newly accessed item facilitates un-stuckness (the difference between dhukka, or stuck-wheel, and sukkha, or un-stuck wheel). But the critical thing here is that the Insight-Eureka-Enmorphature is never repeated, never duplicated, so even though the subject arrives at a deeper depth, a higher level of being through au-VAIH-sool, one cannot simply repeat the formula at the next level of course.

I don’t want to jack his entire post on the subject, so go finish reading it, paying particular attention to the sentence about the safe. Then think about how this applies to making art. It’s short and worth it.