Conscientious

There is something weird about Infrared Photography I think. First of all, the photos aren't that spectacular really. Sure, stones and plants look a little bit different but that seems to be it. Plus, IR is an enormous hassle. Film is very expensive - if I remember correctly, that roll of film I have in my fridge cost me $13 - and extremely tricky to handle: You have to load the camera in total darkness. Exposure is very tricky, the best thing is to shoot an enormous number of bracket exposures. I can't imagine what a hassle it must be to get the stuff properly developed - given that most (US) labs won't even cross-process for you. And all that for some red (or white if you use b/w) trees? You can do the same thing using Photoshop in about five minutes. That doesn't mean that I am an advocate of Photoshop. Quite on the contrary. But I have to admit that Photoshop has its advantages. It's probably a question of what I'd call the hassle-result ratio: If the amount of hassle for a given result is way too big (IR photography) you might as well use an alternative process (Photoshop) where it's much smaller.

All you would ever want to know about what's now officially known as Ilfochrome but is generally still being called Cibachrome - a process to produce long-lasting photographic colour prints.

Marcy Merrill got a huge site with what she calls junk store cameras. If you're interested in toy cameras, old box cameras, just cheap old cameras, and the occasional gem (she dared to put a Rollei 35 on the page!) you should check out that site.

Pencam.org is a site with photos taken exclusively with a little digital camera which is about the size of a pen. I actually own that kind of camera and I like it but I never took pretty pictures with it.

I don't know what the future of Polaroid will be. They filed for bankruptcy a while ago. It'd be a total shame if they disappeared. It's more obvious, though, what their past looks like. The Land List has pretty much all you'd ever want to know about old Polaroid cameras. Particularly useful if you found an old Polaroid camera at some yard sale or on Ebay and now want to know what film it takes. The good news is that for some of the old models there's still film around. Karen (my wife) has been using old Polaroid cameras for a while and they're fun to use. The film is pretty expensive but the results are cool. The peel-apart film's development time depends on the temperature of your environment.

Mike Ware has a nice page about "alternative" photographic processes such as cyanotypes.

One of the cameras I brought with me to Pittsburgh on the plane is my Diana - a plastic camera made in the 1960s (or so). I guess there are two main reasons why the Diana and its sister, the Holga, have become fairly popular.

First, because of the fairly crappy lenses of those cameras the photos look... well... let's just try to be neutral and say they look different. Depending on what you like about photography, they look either totally shitty or great. They're somewhat soft-focused. What's more, light tends to fall off *a lot* at the edges of the lenses. All this makes the Diana/Holga a good camera for fine arts photography - provided you manage to get those light leaks under control.

Second, the Diana and Holga are fairly cheap. The Diana isn't produced any longer so you either get them at yard sales for really cheap (if you're lucky) or you buy them on Ebay for around US$25-40. The Holga is still being produced and you can get one for under $20. That makes those cameras perfect for aspiring and poor photo students. The majority of Diana/Holga fanatics would probably throw their Diana/Holga out of the window if only they had the money to buy an expensive camera but, of course, that's just me being cynical. It's probably not too cynical, though, to claim that the number of photographers who really know how to get good photos with a Diana/Holga is *much* smaller than the number of Diana/Holga users. But I guess you can say that about any camera. What makes the Diana/Holga people so irritating is the fervour with which so many of them proclaim how much they love their Diana/Holga even though it's completely obvious they'd rather use a Leica or some expensive SLR. If you don't believe me check out those photo communities on Livejournal, say (try "toycamera" or "photophile").

BTW, if you want to check out some really good photography with that kind of camera have a look at Don Brice's toy camera photography.

Anyway, I brought my Diana to do architectural photography. I figured the camera's "bad" optical properties would go fairly well with all those old and semi-decaying buildings here in Pittsburgh. One of the problems I ran into right away was that I didn't know where to get the film processed. Dianas/Holgas use 120 film and photo shops usually send that out to Kodak - which means you have to wait for around two weeks to get fairly shoddy prints back. I might have found a good pro lab now but I have to take some bus there so I can't drop off film that easily. And so far I haven't processed my own film. This past weekend, I had an idea, though. Why not shoot digital Holga photos? Here's how it might work. First, one would need to place a screen inside the camera at the position of the film. That should be relatively easy. Then, the camera's shutter needs to be removed and the camera needs to be fit into a dark box. One could then use a normal digital camera to take photos of the images on the screen. I am planning on doing this once our new apartment is set up.

How does the technical evolution of photography change the way people take photos? The BBC has a more or less interesting article about it.

If you read articles and opinions online it seems to me that in the fine art photography crowd there's a certain snootiness in the making. Lots - fortunately not all - of fine art photographers dismiss digital photography as basically gimmickry without any value. The basic argument usually always boils down to claiming that what takes hours to achieve in the lab is necessarily of higher value than what everybody might be able to doon his/her computer. This confuses art for the process of making art or for the materials involved. But what can you do? As I noted (in a similar context) before most of those snooty art-ists would probably drop their artsy equipment in an instant if they had the money to buy high-tech high-quality digital equipment.

I admit I don't know anything about Ansel Adams' Zone System. That's a shame. I guess. I don't know. Maybe it isn't. There's an awful amount of literature about it available and as I'm stingy I tried to find something on the web. This page by Norman Koren is quite good I think. At least it's short enough. I am under the impression that you have to be amazingly anal to be able to follow the Zone System.

It doesn't happen too often that you find an unusual camera at a thrift store. Lately, we've had good luck finding stuff - I mentioned this before - but today, Karen found something unusual, something I haven't seen before. It's a Ricohmatic 35. From the fact that there's no link you can already tell that I couldn't find any information about it. The only snippet I got is that the Soviet Zorki 10 is a copy of the Ricohmatic 35. The Ricohmatic is slightly different even though its basic design is the same. The lever to cock the shutter is at the lower left side - Rollei 35 users will know something like this - and it has a coupled rangefinder. I haven't figured out, yet, how it works in detail. It's not trivial. It has a selenium light meter which is placed around the lens. Well, there is one page here which has pictures. It's in Japanese, though. Anyway, that's the kind of exciting find I like. Even if it's not valuable I like it for the thrill.

Latest thrift shop find: An Agfa Isoflash Rapid, in its original box with the instruction manula and a box of unused film (expiration date: Nov 1968). It uses a film cassette format which I hadn't seen before. The cassette have no spools and are a tad smaller than the 35mm cassettes everybody is used to today. Pretty much like in medium format photography you need two cassettes - one contains the unused film and the other one takes up the used film. This page has lots of details on the Rapid format. Apparently it's some sort of competitor for Kodak's 126 format which also went into oblivion. The funny thing is that Rapid cassettes contain standard 35mm film - which I found hard to believe until I took some 35mm film and found that it does fit into the camera. So there's some potential of me using the camera. The negatives' size is 24mm x 24mm which potentially is pretty cool. The only problem is that I don't want to open the unused film box I have. That means I'll either have to be creative - maybe fit the 35mm film into the camera without using a cassette - or I have to buy a second Rapid camera and use the empty cassette of that one.
BTW, here is a cool subminiature photography website.

I went online to find what aperture the Diana's three settings correspond to and I even found them. They're f16, f6.3, and f4.5. The shutter speed is variable, of course, it's between around 1/30 and 1/200.

PS: On another site, it said the apertures are f16, f11, and f8 with a shutter speed of around 1/45. Well, that agrees for the "sunny" setting but for the other ones it disagrees.

PPS: I asked the experts on www.toycamera.com. Somebody said he used f16, f6.3, and f4.5. Of course, Dianas are no precision tools anyway so all this has to be taken with a thousand grains of salt. But it's useful to know. I think what I might do for photography under very low light (planned for an upcoming trip to Durham [UK]) is to use the "sunny" setting and "B" plus that light meter I will have to bring to use my Leica. I know I'm gonna be the freak of the week when I use a light meter for my Diana but hey! If the results come out the way I want them to come out I just don't care!

Hoax Photo Test for the snazzy readers of this weblog.

It's a bad time for professional and especially semi-professional photographers - unless you're well known already and have clients. The other day, I mentioned how I had talked to a local gallery owner who told me how slow business was. A couple of days later, I read a story in The Economist (the British semi-official organ of the Republican/Tory Party) about the advertizing industry which isn't doing too well. Business is slow, and nobody knows when money is coming back. And yesterday, I received an update from Desert Doplhin. Business is slow, sluggish, you name it. It seems even the big agencies are having troubles. The good thing about the guys at DD is that they're not gouging their photographers like certain other very big agencies. So I think I'm actually fairly lucky - despite non-existing sales. And I have no intention to explore other roads. I'm not going to prostitute myself as a photographer. There are way too many talented photographers out there doing "glamour" photography or related stuff (btw, RIP, Herb Ritts, I wish you hadn't wasted your talent the way you did it). But can you blame them? I don't know. People will always tell you how you need to make some money etc. so why not do those commercial assignments which add no value whatsoever to your portfolio? Well, I guess, it's everybody's personal choice. And the question of artistic integrity is a tricky one anyway. I'm fairly lucky I have my day job - which I really enjoy - and maybe some day there'll be some money made from photography. This is I'm not in it for the money. I actually wouldn't mind showing my photos in a gallery and not selling a single photo. Oh well, I'm rambling... Time to stop.

Most people have probably never heard of Polaroid's Instant Slide Film. Thing is most people will also probably never hear of it because I heard it is not being produced any longer now that Polaroid is heading for bankruptcy. It's a pity! By chance, I found the little processing "darkroom" for those slides at a local thrift store. I started looking into the film doing a Google search. I found a very nice page about the film by Mark Meyer. I also found a few dealers which claim they (still) sell the film. I think what I'll do is to try to get some film while it's still around and play with it.

Alternativephotography.com has all about cyanotypes and other "alternative" types of photography and/or photo development. It's a very cool site with lots of examples and also some pages with tutorials.

It is a matter of personal taste - as pretty much anything related to photography - but Polaroid transfers are probably the watercolours of photography. And this is not necessarily meant to be a compliment. Done well, Polaroid transfers are ... well, let's say interesting. Take, for example, Melinda Carvalho's gallery. Those are some very good examples of Polaroid transfers. It's easier to find plenty of not-so-good ones. One of the main problems of Polaroid transfers could be that most people seem to be too interested in the technique itself rather than in the actual result. Means they show you some Polaroid transfer and expect a "Wow! Cool!" - regardless of the actual photographic merit of the photo. It's like seeing the usual beach-lighthouse watercolour. But maybe I'm being unfair, maybe you could say that about many artistic techniques. Anyway, this is not to deny that Polaroid transfers are actually quite tricky to do. It's a steep and expensive learning curve. If you want to do your own check out Holly Dupre's (free) online manual (downloadable as pdf file).

"Neat Image is a digital filter application designed to reduce visible noise in digital photographic images. It is a tool for owners of digital cameras, flatbed and slide scanners; and is for use by both professional photographers, and digital image processing enthusiasts."
Of course, you can do all that with Photoshop but Neat Image just looks somewhat easier to use. I'll have to do more tests to see how good it really is but the tests I did looked all very promising.

Photos taken with various "toy" cameras

an unblinking look?in words and images?at the reality of warfare

The US Transportation Security Administration has just published guidelines about what to do with film on an airport. Excerpts:

If I still had the money I'd buy me one right away.

You can fake lots of things so why not fake taking photos with a Lomo? The obvious answer - true for many things you can fake - is: Because it's no fun. But that's a different story. (link thru thingsmagazine.net)

I just noticed that they put up my contribution on Images Against War. Unfortunately, they didn't print my little statement so, I guess, nobody will ever get what the photo is about. The photo shows the window of a deserted coffee shop near "Ground Zero" in downtown Manhattan in December 2001. It's cross-processed, hence the weird colours. I picked the photo as a sad reminder that those people who lost their lives in the "Twin Towers" are now only remembered for one purpose: To justify war, and thus more destruction.

If you want b/w slides/transparencies the obvious option is to use Agfa's Scala film which produces very nice results. However, there's another option I came across by chance just today. Through a process called "dr5" David Wood managed to turn regular b/w film into transparencies. Check out this fairly enthusiastic article about it. Information about the process, how to treat the films and how to reachthe lab can be found under dr5.com. I'll definitely want to test this process with Kodak's (very low-speed) Technical Pan film (for which I couldn't find a decent link).

I was curious what a Google search for photographic self portraits would result in. In the end, I didn't find too many photos I liked. Sabina Spaldi's ones are interesting (albeit too small to be really enjoyable). Gottfried Helnwein's self portraits are as weird as you can possibly get. And I found some by famous photographers Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts (which I'm just including to show you that famous photographers can do pretty bad work, too), Helmut Newton, August Sander, and Imogen Cunningham.

Something in me tells me that getting a super-precise pinhole made with a laser takes away a little bit of the fun. However, if you're looking for a place which can make you such a pinhole check out Lenox Laser's website. (thru cold marble musings)

The Orange Scourge (Vietnam - the effects of "Agent Orange") and A Depleted Generation (Iraq - before the latest war in which even more ammunition containing depleted uranium was used).

All you ever want to know (and much more) about jpg/jpeg compression can be found in this very cool article on photo.net.

photojapan.com offers stock photography of everything and anything Japanese (incl. vintage photos). If you feel like simple browsing and looking at lots of photos go and have a look!

African Aperture has some very nice galleries of photos taken in Africa. There are so many photos and photographers on there that it literally takes forever to look at all of it.

A photo essay about drag queens in Tokyo by Kyle Sackowski.
(thru consumptive.org)

"Do photographs bring us closer to the 'real' or push it further away? When is a photograph a document and when is it art?" asks Peter Conrad in an article for The Observer. The exhibiton he refers to I mentioned earlier.
(thru esthet.org)

iconomy has a link to Binh Danh's Chlorophyll Art . Seeing that I remembered having read an article about this before called Why didn't the Romans invent Photography? In that article, there is a little modification to what Binh Danh does: The article suggests to put the leave into a dark box for two days. Given it has been so sunny over the past few days I might even try this kind of photography!

I know lots of amateur photographers¹ who complain about a lack of inspiration or about a lack of ideas what to take photos of. Here's an idea. It's called 26 Things - The International Photographic Scavenger Hunt. The idea is very simple. 26 things are twentysix subjects, some of them fairly obvious ("a sunset"), some of them less so ("new"). The idea is to take a photo for each of the subjects throughout the month of July 2003 and then, on 1 August 2003, to send them the link with the page that contains the photos. For anybody looking for a project this is ideal: There is a deadline which is not too tight (procrastination, be gone!), there are topics to shoot, but the topics are defined broadly enough for everybody. I already started working on mine - I've got eight so far.

¹ Amateur photographers very often aren't really amateurs. Maybe it would be better to call them non-professional photographers.

"Seamless City is a continuous visual image of the city made up of sequential photos of a walk through the city shot from a pedestrian point of view."
(thru j-walk)
The most interesting aspect of this is to see how boring those streets, in fact most of those cities we live in, really are!

"The London Photographic Awards reveal an exciting, new program of web-based photographic competitions open to photographers world wide. [...] Now in its sixth year the 2003 London Photographic Awards (LPA) is faster, more transparent and easier to enter. What's more the competition format has been designed specifically to enable photographers' work to be seen by curators, commissioning editors and art buyers. The London Photographic Awards is unique inasmuch as EVERY ENTRANT, unlike any other awards, will have their work displayed in the entrants gallery within 24 hours of entry, making it visible to an international audience. At the end of the competition the entrants' gallery will be archived and used as a picture resource for industry professionals."

And they mean it! Check out the gallery of the PhotoArt competition.

Having looked at many hundreds of websites of professional (advertizing) photographers I made an interesting observation: Lots of European, especially German photographers have sections with cars in their portfolio. Lots of Americans have sections with what they usually call glamour - girls in bikinis. What an amusing world it is!

photo-genetic.com is a very cool photo site which has its own online magazine plus lots of links.

What is street photography? I had a look at the "about" section of in-public.com: "Street Photography is about seeing and reacting, almost by-passing thought altogether. For many Street Photographers the process does not need 'unpacking', It is, for them, a simple 'Zen' like experience, they know what it feels like to take a great shot in the same way that the archer knows he has hit the bullseye before the arrow has fully left the bow. As an archer and Street Photographer myself, I can testify that, in either discipline, if I think about the shot too hard, it is gone."
(this one recommended by fiatvera's Albert Song)

There's an amusing article on The Luminous Landscape about what all you need in your photo bag.

Stahl Art is a website by Harald Finster that shows photos of old industrial sites.
(thru what a few days ago was called a most curious marmoset)

"Madonna is being sued by the son of a French fashion photographer [Guy Bourdin] who has accused her of imitating images created by his father." (story) If you want to judge for yourself, check out this comparison of stills from Madonna's video and of photos by Guy Bourdin. The similarities are quite obvious; in particular since the poses of the models in Bourdin's photos are not your everyday poses. Needless to say, this lawsuit is particularly spicy in the light of Madonna's attacks on people who copy here music illegally. Nothing but some good old hypocrisy, eh?

Soviet-Russian cameras has a lot of information about cameras made in Russia or the former Soviet Union (incl., unfortunately, a silly rant about "Why I don't like LOMOgraphy": "It's a capitalist conspiracy.").
(thru consumptive.org)

"'We've all seen the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But these (new) images are not part of the iconography of the war,' says historian Joerg Friedrich, who compiled the book. [...] Mr Friedrich collected the photos from town archives across Germany while touring the country last year presenting a book about the Allied bombing. That book, The Fire, caused controversy both here and in Britain by suggesting the air campaign may have been a war crime. 'Can you show the body parts of bomb victims collected in bathtubs? The charred corpses of women, who crouched to the floor in a desperate search for oxygen?' asked Die Welt newspaper. [...] a cultural magazine programme on ARD public television wrote it off as a 'provocation' that sought to 'compare the air war with the Holocaust'. Mr Friedrich says the decision to publish the photos was not easy. In the end, the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl played a part in convincing him - with the proviso that British, Dutch, Polish and other civilian victims of air warfare also be portrayed." (full story; images)

Frequent readers of this weblog will have noted that I usually don't link to sites with tutorials on how to manipulate digital images. I'm going to make an exception today. This morning, my wife asked me how I'd restore old, faded photos. Even though I more or less knew how to do it I went looking for something online: Needle in a haystack! The signal-to-noise ratio of the web has become quite abysmal. For every useful page you're flooded with tons of ads and pages where people try to sell you some crap. Anyway, after a while I found this page and I thought I'd link to it here coz it might come handy.

Minox cameras are still made by the company. Actually, Minox makes more than just the little spy camera but when people say Minox they're talking about the "spy" camera. You need special processing because of the size of the film; an easy way to deal with that is to buy film and processing mailers through BH Photo. More infos about the various Minox models can be found on the Minox Encyclopedia of the Minox Historical Society.

In Flak Magazine, Noam Lupu argues that "the [ICP's] first triennial is a missed opportunity to bring to the fore questions about the nature of photography and, more importantly, how artists use the medium to evoke a range of contemporary issues." (article)

The other day, I was browsing through "American Photo" magazine - a somewhat glorified "special advertizing section": It's very hard to tell where the ads start or end. The latest edition has a special about pop star Britney Spears, featuring a series of photos taken by Mark Liddell.

Have a look at the product. You get all the ingredients of the fabricated human body - incl. missing nipples (2001) and changing breast sizes (compare the earlier 2000 with the newer 2003).

Here is a tutorial on how to do huge digital panoramas.
(thru 990000)

"Award-winning war photographer James Nachtwey and another Time magazine journalist are in hospital after being wounded when a hand grenade was thrown at U.S. forces they were with in Baghdad, a U.S. military official says." story

I'm not a big fan of war photography - the pornography of violence - but I do wish Nachtwey will be well again.

Stan Banos sent me the link to a very nice animation that the viewer canactually control him/herself. It shows a couple of spots during the day and you can make the time pass. Thanks, Stan!

A Picture's Worth is a website/project by David Chin " that aims to highlight the inspiration that can arise from a photograph and to capture it in the form of words which in turn can reveal the true beauty of a photograph". It's an interesting idea and you can participate by emailing David. Check it out, it's a nice idea.

PS: Funny, I thought I had linked to this already...