what do you see like: 2012

Lovely, as ever. What were you using before? And what lenses do you tend to use? I know you're the master of the ultra-wide front-of-stage shot.

What struck me about the 5D2, when I borrowed it for a weekend, was how it seemed to just get stuff right - like tricky metering situations or bounced flash. A camera that's cleverer than I am. I need one of those.

beautiful, michael lambert.

http://i.imgur.com/s4xFg.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/3G3rg.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/PVtFe.jpg

Thanks guys!

The colours in that first photo are very nice, more NPZ800?

thanks!

no, its Provia 400x, cross-processed.

despite being hella expensive ($12/roll, plus professional developing+scanning since drug stores won't do it for you) its still my favorite way to shoot color-- ive posted a few other examples upthread i think.

man yeah they're lovely. there's something so funny w/slide, with the colours obviously looking too full on and vivid to be realistic, but also being really evocative of the texture and variegation of surfaces. the surf in the first picture, &c.

recent phots: not embedding because i think they're kinda big:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-tSUR8dbUpuE/UARkqDS6liI/AAAAAAAAAKA/GbnIwH4yvgI/s0/530.jpg
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-nya1rU7MTWs/UARkpxWKqtI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/VfZeqpBnyQw/s0/684.jpg
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-yAohmFQTtE4/UARkoBMdz_I/AAAAAAAAAJ0/-oJ_v6RbuhM/s0/554.jpg

(the last of these is kodak extra-colour, e-6 processed)

one more, same roll, more surf, less dude:

http://i.imgur.com/q0lzq.jpg

(pulled that off of facebook since i'm at work, so the quality might be a little bit shoddier)

A few more things I'm happy with, hope no-one minds...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8023/7578015304_5814e5253e_c.jpg
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8014/7585848960_36f5121d96_c.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7133/7585848106_c04164ee12_c.jpg

gr80 the one of the dude w the heart tattoo is mad ill

"What were you using before?"

5D vrs 1. the 2 came out about 9 months after I bought my 1 and I tend to go every other generation w/ my purchases.

"And what lenses do you tend to use?"

16-35 almost always. I have a 24-70 but I find it... unextraordinary. I'm looking at the 70-200

If you're interested in 5d3 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlpZCKYLvZk&feature=g-all-lik

70-200 is such a lovely lens. heavy-ass pita, but lovely and sharpness up the wazoo, at least the 2.8

yeah I know... it's like a 'why do I REALLY want this' kind of purchase

gr8880 i love the bw beach stuff and the colour. i got some provia 400x today and damn it's expensive
and i got two rolls of the 120 version thirty bucks a roll! insane

real bad. i was looking through photos yesterday & found some that looked nice, checked the negatives & saw they were Reala - was psyched to be so pleased by a readily available film before checking & finding it was discontinued, i think a year ago or something?, i hadn't heard. between that & the ^^^ expense of nice colour film it is getting p depressing.

telling you guys, this is why I just stick with the cheap stuff. it's all fuji superia or kodak max here. messed around with chromes for a bit but there's no way I'm going to spend that kinda money on film + processing! and def not gonna spend ~$6-8 a roll for portra or whatever either! the rolls I got back in portra or whatever never even looked all that much better than my superia stuff.

anyway...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8026/7601419628_78716cdcea_c.jpg

"portra or whatever" is my go-to reference point for expensive film I guess.

I mean to me...

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8160/7451776660_9a7a5ae37b_c.jpg

this looks pretty good for a $1.79 roll of film!

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2193030/fujifilm-discontinues-two-professional-films ;_;

it really does!, china, fwiw. but i just like the variety. there are times when it's great to be ready to shoot something & have the option to control the texture and feel of what you're gonna get back, like obviously with slide to be able to veer away from faithful depiction & into hyperreal stained glass colours, less representational photography. film has so many weird, brakhage-esque possibilities, separate from its original, documentative purpose, & i think they're an arm of the discussion about what using film means now, a tool - either in the kinda reductive way of using film to connote something based on its previous uses, like using a word in an old language we're already familiar with; or just to find a way to compellingly render what we see, like idk alex webb or robert bresson or whoever chose to figuratively, non-literally represent life as they saw it.

am really feeling the new deluxe american subsurbx credo on this, ft. szarkowski: "sometimes these new subjects are extensions of ideas that exist in latent form in the work of exceptional photographers of an earlier generation. Sometimes they are genuinely primitive ideas mothered by a new technical breakthrough or a new market demand."

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/6884/253wg.jpg

all of that said i am with you about using cheap film. (those phots are real nice). having used nicer film i have become surprised whenever i use agfa vista or colorplus* & get something good. but i'm sure a bunch of my nicest stuff is nice because it goes a little further, again usually away from the real, or in prettily rendering changes in colour.

* https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Q-Qe_QSVHg8/UAgvl4K3cmI/AAAAAAAAANE/cL98MgA4Ras/s0/689.jpg

guess I just think 'nicer' expensive film is pretty overrated. good exposure + good scanning will get very nice results. but I suppose I'm really setting this up as cheapo films vs. portra/ektar/fuji pro stuff etc. since I see dudes rave about those films and then their pictures look... kinda... ok? just can't see where the money is going with that.
as for having "the option to control the texture and feel of what you're gonna get back" this is where controlling exposure and scanning comes in!*

*except that chromes do look and work 100% differently but that's all just a cost issue for me.

also slides are super hard to scan!

ha ha this is gonna be a i pay $2 more so i can fuck up the exposure thing. kinda sincere, here; i think the difference between a roll of superia & a roll of ektar for me is that i get back ten nicer photos on the ektar roll, but i can't tell the difference between those and the nice superia ones. i just had to work harder for it i guess. i'm still learning to be thoughtful about all that stuff.

most of the thing above was just In Defence Of Slide really; i think it's def sad when any of the big poles of varieties-of-film are compromised.

i usually get slide developed for prints, which have always come out fine, so this hasn't been an issue for me, but my scanning's pretty primitive, so.

I think I tend to go into auto anti-expensive film rant mode pretty easily. probably not a good look, and probably just due to a perceived cult-of-fine-films thing that likely doesn't exist.
if slide film was cheap and I could actually make a decent scan of it I'd def use it more, but I spend like $20 or something per roll!

and by the way, that color plus photo is *beautiful*

aw thank you, man.
probably just due to a perceived cult-of-fine-films thing that likely doesn't exist.

no i think it does, i feel the allure, & even if its advantage is just being easier to get something out of then i understand why i'm drawn to it. i use an om-1 w/a zuiko lens, which i always thought was pretty 'naturalistic' in its rendering, didn't have the sorta weird remove that anything with a wider lens has, so finding that new film was a big determinant of how things came out was an epiphany for me, even just in terms of 1600 speed film letting me shoot in the dark, &c. slide even moreso. i think i go to weird roundabout lengths to do things that are do-able just w/technical know-how (like pushing B&W film to get high contrast, which you can just get w/well-exposed neopan 100 or w/e), but i eventually learn something, so. i just got Langford's Basic Photography to read up a little.

more nice Extra Color colours, just while we are discussin'.

yeah that's super crisp

yeah it's unusual for me to drop a hundred bucks on exotic colour film because who gives a fuck fuji drugstore 3packs are good enough if sort of close to properly exposed and sort of close to properly scannned but i dunno, the 35mmm i guess i want to x-process and defeat the purpose of buying amazing color film in the first place, and for the 120 i wasn't that happy with the medium format color film i tried so far.

i'm trying to track down that page of the same shot out the window/different films... where'd that go?

http://varial-artworks.com/projects/view/?page=12

film has so many weird, brakhage-esque possibilities, separate from its original, documentative purpose, & i think they're an arm of the discussion about what using film means now, a tool - either in the kinda reductive way of using film to connote something based on its previous uses, like using a word in an old language we're already familiar with; or just to find a way to compellingly render what we see, like idk alex webb or robert bresson or whoever chose to figuratively, non-literally represent life as they saw it.

yeah, this is otm. I think digital has really re-centered our conception of what lifelike, verisimilitude photographs should look like. and that's happened several times in the history of photography - from daguerrotypes -> b&w film -> high resolution etc. b&w film -> color film -> digital color. and anytime a shift like that happens, it throws into relief the constructed-ness or the un-realistic components of the previous standard. I think a real good way to trace these shifts is to look at newspaper photography.

I'll confess that after shooting film for a while, the 'digital-ness' of digital photos really jumps out at me. I look at AP photos or Lens photos and, despite the subject matter, I'm just really bored by the aesthetic representation of it vs. the content of the photograph, as it were. or maybe it's the benefit of history, only seeing the best of the best of the best of old photojournalism, and being inundated with so much chaff being in the present. I guess people in the 60s weren't that excited to flip through 5000 pictures of the democratic national convention.

funny you should mention that

i have been sifting through old photos, and i found an entire roll dedicated to pictures of the 1988 democratic convention
they were insanely boring!

i dunno pull out a yearbook from 1972 at random and compare it to a random yearbook from 2012 and I'm almost positive the amateur school photos shot on film will be more intriguing than the amateur school photos shot digitally

haha I love old photos no matter how boring they are. I just love seeing what people wore, looked like, how they had their hair cut.

one day twenty years from now, they're gonna be able to pipe in visual information directly into our brain's visual processing center, and that will make the digital photos of today look really 'artificial' or 'vintage'

is there a saying like, age makes any wine better? idk.

You guys are gonna pee when I start to scan choice photos from my yearbook collection, which dates back to the '20s and has representation for every decade except for the '40s (unfortunately). I'm starting in the 90s and working backward. If anyone cares, I'll post here once I get the show on the road.

! !

oh shit do you have a legit yearbook collection????

ive really wanted to start one, but a lotta antique shops ask for crazy money for them

what people wore, looked like, how they had their hair cut

yeah i guess this is part of it, not just ~the medium~

I don't know how legit it is, but I have a yearbook collection, yeah. My favorite is Clemente '77 (I think I started a thread about this once? Can't remember) The earliest one is from 1924.

I stole a couple of them from various places I worked and my parents, the rest I got at a big regional book sale. Most people only go for the ones with famous people in em. I like the ones with no famous people, just regular people.

This is one of my favorite (cropped) images from the Clemente yb
Seniors, obvs

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7047/6927623873_92a21d8fff_z.jpg

This is most of them, not including my grandma's yearbooks from college, which are inexplicably being stored under about 1000 other things in the basement. The 77 one is somewhere on my bookshelves for easy browsing and to show students because some of them went there.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8166/7606270264_2a8c0b499a_z.jpg

Awsomwst Bestest Thing That I Bought Today That I Wish You Could All Come Over And Look At

I remember that thread. It was before I had a scanner, and I felt like I should chime in, but I never did.

i fell in love with the 1970 yearbook from my alma matter and later found a copy (with nothing written in it) on ebay for $20-- its heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan and Medium is the Massage-- i should post scans-- its probably in my top 10 favorite books of all time!!

the most impressive part is probably that all the junior and sophmore photos are either candids or posed like a photo-shoot at places around campus and the FRESHMEN ARE ALL IN GROUP SHOTS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER like, holding hands human-chain style or descending a staircase

its amazing

That sounds great.

Vassar has a pretty good archive on flickr -- I like this 1982 maypole shot for some reason

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5163/5244216736_c9a123d408_z.jpg

yeah I think a lot of the film affection is pretty much nostaglia. we like stuff that looks old. the 'look' of film, even when shot now still signals 'old' and thus also kinda hints at 'important' and 'following a long traceable history and tradition'
a lot of mastery of film is I think tied up w mastery of a history-laden aesthetic. I think it also has a lot to do with a desire to send immediate signals that there is something honorable and craftsmanlike about the photographs that (film photographer) makes, compared to those made by (digital photographer).

In retrospect those of us using film will probably all look like people who were still working in pictorialism after Evans and Adams etc.

hah film doesn't necessarily signal 'old' to me - you can use a very modern film like the new portra or acros, tmax. there are hundreds of thousands of very futuristic looking scenes shot on tmax on flickr...

xp with the fracturing of all the arts brought about by ~the internet~ I'm not even sure if there will be a narrative of a tradition, a craft left 20 years looking back! or if there has been a 'the americans' or 'american photographs' moment w/ digital I'm not sure we know about it yet.

I think there's still something in the curves of film that signifies traditional/old. I don't think the kids are into it because of its great dynamic range.
I don't know what the tradition or narrative of photography might be in the future, but I doubt it would be along the lines of the americans, etc.... that seems like exactly the kind of 20th century tradition that a lot of film photography is meant to suggest currently.