photo-breezing

Oh, definitely prefer flat light to blazing sun but it's difficult to have a golden hour when there's been no gold all day.

Right, back to the 251 images I shot at a kids' sports event in the local park yesterday. Gotta find 10 good ones for their website. I was cycling between three primes, never sure what I should be doing, forever in the wrong place.

Schlump... guessing these means a lot of unprocessed stuff huh? That's a good feeling to think of the potential of all those roll.

Right so I'm prob not shooting as much as you, but I still do about 20-30 rolls every month (or so). So I guess .5 to 1 rolls/day, but the way I shoot kinda means 4 days for 20 shots and then like 5 rolls in 3 cameras in 4 hours on some day. And I only develop every couple of months now and I find that that makes me waaaay pickier about what I qualify as useable.

My new Friday tradition this summer seems to be getting a slight buzz then trying to burn thru rolls in soho or the lower east side. The (illusory) single life creates strange and fun habits.

I used to hate blazing sun for photos but now I can dig it. But only if I'm shooting b&w. I don't have so much luck w color.

I decided to do a Flickr set for the near-daily photos of the sky I take on my rail commute with the iPhone thesedays:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pernfors88/sets/72157634338728956/

stuff piles up, for sure, but I'm in a pretty good routine with it, like atm I'm scanning through stuff from mid-March; I think cause in February it was minus thirty out, & actively painful to take photographs, I shot less, so got to catch up some. writing down how much I shoot did take the edge off my macho sabre-rattling some, sure (& I think if you're shooting that much ~ on the street ~ that's almost another thing altogether, a lot of my stuff being p domestic or less in the moment/risky). it isn't like a Winograndian two rolls a day or anything. it's just that I scan & publish/"publish" really pretty much all of it that makes me feel prolific. the mixture of time before seeing & spending time scanning should have a very positive effect on the editing process but I kinda like the digital-esque maximalism right now. btw I feel like I have maybe said this frequently since beginning to scan negs but I'm such a superia convert; it scans so nicely, I have a really nice set of grainy winter 1600s that whenever I see make me want to pick up some more.

yr downtown routine is so classic! feel like this is gonna make you into a manhattan stock character, like a cross between dennis hopper in apocalypse now & the bird lady in home alone ii.

, lost in new york

psyched to check yr sunset sets, Michael, I've been digi-snapping a lot myself

yeah these are really nice

did you ever see those Abbas Kiarostami photos, Roads and Rain,

http://guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/may/19/abbas-kiarostami-photography-exhibition

Oh wow, I love those. The iPhone freedom is a great thing; not self-conscious about snapping out of packed trains and the happy accidents of reflections and imperfections - the sort of things I'd delete an SLR shot for - are just grist to the mill.

Oddly enough it was my mum that told me the Maier programme was on, having talked about her work before. Not watched it yet, will do over the weekend. Although I've done one or two black and white rolls this year, I think the colour film I dropped off last night was the first this year - a drop off from last year, but even then I was only one a week or fortnight, nowhere near schlump or chinavision! levels!

Not sure if here or "Let us discuss..." is the place, but just home from Glasgow, went to the opening of an exhibition of some of Steve Gullicks's 2000-2006 work, with a talk between Gullick and Stevie Chick. Once they warmed up it was a really interesting chat about his career, his approach to portraiture and dealing with musicians/reluctant subjects and how he goes about his work. He darkroom prints all his own work, colour and black and white, it's all beautiful. Really nice, kind of inspiring evening. Had a couple of brief chats with the man himself, an absolute gent.

that's really nice, Michael. I blank on a lot of contemporary guys, particularly w portrait stuff, but remember him. he did all of that careless talk costs lives stuff, right? was it at GOMA?

tonight:
- sitting by the scanner internally singing "chopping negs" to the tune of poppin tags
- coined sassy photographic religion, see display name. I'm still working through looking at photographs, it's so consistently mind expanding

Yeah, he did CTCL and LLSS, most of the exhibition was work for those magazines and a few others. It was at Static Collective on the Saltmarket, a pop-up gallery that use disused retail units.

https://www.facebook.com/events/452830751474850/

got drunk on bourbon and watched william eggleston in the real world last night. seemed appropriate.

ha ha. I like the kinda realitytv vibe, just watching eggleston chill in hotel rooms, cruise with his son. I tried to find some of Winston's photography after but couldn't (did anyone ever see any of Emmet Gowin's son's photos. they looked not so hot to me. like sparklehorse album covers). lol at eggleston's drawl being subtitled throughout. the last, kinda mystified conversion between MA & WE is so great. really inspirational. I like that doc about Andy Goldsworthy that's similarly kinda non-expository, like he doesn't know why he's doing stuff or have some grand allusive purpose.

I have one of the other couple of WE docs to watch, soon, I'll report back

Watching the Maier doc on iPlayer, drinking a beer.

http://www.altairnouveau.com/A-30.jpg

still going at it with the slide scanning

weird cross-cultural vince cable cameo:
http://i3.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article1207683.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/British+Business+Secretary+Vince+Cable+speaks+at+the+Global+Investment+Conference+2012+in+London

yes despite the decades they all just read as 'politician' which is sort of comforting for the sake of continutiy

and universal language

http://www.altairnouveau.com/A-95.jpg

I would murder people for a streetscape like that one. new york is all wide roads and cars.

I could live there and never leave the block

fred herzog on kodachrome,

"Kodachrome was the best film and the most reliable development, but it was far from reliable. I was so frustrated at times I sent film to Palo Alto or to Rochester, just to get them developed right. And of course that entailed an extremely long wait. You’d take the pictures today and they would come back in two weeks or something.”

“But Kodachrome was the best film. I have to thank Kodak for making that product. Without that product, we would not have the pictures. Pictures that were taken on other films have suffered more than Kodachrome. Kodachrome was thought to last 50 years, and it has.””

think you have to take your infrastructural yearning to one of the city threads. I have been looking at more street photography lately (just as a consequence of looking at more photobooks in general, lately; the deserted-through-summer library is really delightful - I have chromes coming, soon) & while explaining to myself why I am not making profoundly interrelating street tableaux of modern day society have just been attributing this to the relatively modest amount of time I spend outdoors anywhere as crowded or populous as New York. not sure where your slides are taken but it goes both ways I think. maybe somewhere smaller you'd be schlepping a tripod around & Robert Adamsing deserted cityscapes.

well I think the photo above was taken in Vienna (but let me check the notes)
and, yes, plenty of good photos to be had in nyc (except lately, with gray skies, and much work in the office), but I'm talking from the urban planning perspective.
which, ah, yeah, that's sorta suburbs thread appropriate.

but foreign environments are great. after a while I find myself just setting the camera to a reasonable shutter speed/f stop setting, prefocused to about 10 feet, sometimes 8, or 6, etc., but basically I just end up doing snaps of people I'm walking past. It's not that compelling! the composition is rudimentary, and the subject matter is just kinda, you know, normal stuff.

it's easy to get dull in nyc too. a change in location is always good.
my photos look really flat to me lately.
I want to, like, go to paris or something for two weeks.

$$$

man, what a rut

I prefer the scan of my uncle's snapshot above to just about anything I've taken in the last few months, pictures of my girlfriend excepted, of course.

the red car, the intersecting lines at the top etc.

I watched the Maier doc on my phone over the course of two commutes. Amazing. I was inspired enough to switch my 40D to B&W JPEG, ISO 400, and shoot a bunch of things. This lasted about five minutes until I realised I was late for work.

but foreign environments are great. after a while I find myself just setting the camera to a reasonable shutter speed/f stop setting, prefocused to about 10 feet, sometimes 8, or 6, etc., but basically I just end up doing snaps of people I'm walking past. It's not that compelling! the composition is rudimentary, and the subject matter is just kinda, you know, normal stuff.

yeah i feel you. it's interesting seeing how photographs change over the tenure of living somewhere, too; partly because you burn out on certain fixtures and styles & partly because you're so fresh at the start. i have some nice pictures of montreal i took from the cab when i moved here, & they're very different in character from what i take now. it's funny, sometimes when i go to new cities i notice that i haven't taken any photos in the first little while, walking around, maybe, & it's like i don't speak the language, or have the same kinda crutches or instincts. but that's a good thing too. i guess i am delineating street stuff as being something p specific & winograndian in its aims, here, though, in which landscape is secondary.

i went to paris awhile ago & have barely touched the film i got back, i'm p psyched to. the vienna slide you posted is nice, & it's kinda tantalising having glimpses of something that would be alluring in its novelty. have to thank you for your slide posts, btw, i started on the kodachromes i have last night. i might try not to talk about them too much because i'm not sure if i'm really at liberty to share them, & i assume just describing the wonders they contain is going to be frustrating in the vein of black and white '70s paperbacks of colour masters, but just: they're pretty beguiling, & there are some areas of just aqueous, soft-focused radiant colour that remind me of stephen gill. really transportive.

wow I forgot that I wrote that last night! this summer is doing weird things to me.
I'm not as down on my current shooting as all that, but I would love to have the money to afford a trip abroad! and I *am* tired of a lot of the passing-strangers-in-the-streets photos. but I think my recent increased pickiness has been good, and I've been thinking less and less about my photos' online lives and more about what *else* I can do with them.
man, I listened to some great music and had a blast last night, and over the course of the day I've been remembering a few other things I did as well (nothing bad).

I suppose I'm not totally sure if the slides I'm scanning are really really supposed to be for public consumption, but I've been telling myself that's why I'm only putting low res versions on this site only, and then only ones that show landscapes or strangers. no relatives or acquaintances.

and I get the same feeling about initial photographs in a given city as you, schlump. I've learned the reliable patterns too well. but on the other hand I think I've gotten better as a photographer when I really muster the effort. I think that's part of the problem: I know that I've become better, so I don't work as hard. some early successes are the result of me pushing in new and uncomfortable ways.

i started thinking about other stuff to do with photographs, lately. once in awhile i am on somebody's blog & there is for sale their $3 printed & folded one-sheet pamphlet collecting not-necessarily-totally-showstopping b&ws, & it feels kinda appealing, the smallness of uniting & finalising some photographs you took, like the old editions of four of photographs or even records. i feel like maybe there should be some kind of healthy, complaisant counterpart to shooting & editing which even gently tries to engage, some, or to propogate one's photos (i was just reading this rad khaela maricich piece about the lines between art & audience) somewhat. for me at the moment this is just website stuff but i'm sure i could be doing cool inventive things with my photos. printing them onto mugs.

in other photo breezings i am still so into reading szarkowski atm. i'm reading his essay on winogrand from the big book. very curious to see some of the later work realised; sorta almost disgusted by some of the contact sheets excerpted, which i think reflect drives in which he's shooting & winding & shooting & winding non-stop (leaving a third of a million LA-era exposures unseen, apparently), but some of the late stuff is really democratic & interesting. also his grain still just makes me swoon. szark referred to the expressive ugly gray scale of '60s art movies as influential on those guys.

It was the Crystal Palace Overground Festival last weekend; two years ago I was one of the official photographers - stumbling around with my hired lens, trying and failing to find parents to sign waiver forms when I found I'd snapped an unidentified kid in one of my crowd shots, generally making a bad job of it, etc.

This year I noticed a LOT of L-glass around, like our little local-bands-foods'n'craft in the park thing had become a big deal and pros were documenting it in glorious detail. Most interesting to me was the guy with an Auto Graflex 5x7 with Pentac lens (he was also shooting with a 5D2 and a Hasselblad) - gorgeous stuff...

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3774/9175102820_cc05a55896_z.jpg

http://uploads8.wikipaintings.org/images/balthus/th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se-1938.jpg

http://uploads7.wikipaintings.org/images/balthus/the-white-skirt-1937.jpg

http://a397.idata.over-blog.com/550x442/4/50/71/33/oeuvres-contemporaines/balthus.jpg

http://uploads2.wikipaintings.org/images/balthus/the-cherry-tree.jpg

i have chromes from the library; it is just unreal,

http://www.duncanwhyte.com/Images/Layout_Production/Eggleston_Chromes/pages/Eggleston_Chromes_1_Fin_Page_13.jpg

http://www.pacemacgill.com/gfx/images/rf/robert_frank_730.jpg

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-tU1axBJcRjw/UebKYZky29I/AAAAAAAABks/aOFQUhtRDNQ/s0/jf.png

grumpy breezing
one time when gawker had one of their general calls for new writers, I semi-drunkenly sent a letter that instead said that they should have a new heavier photography thing going on, and that I'd be into working something like that. I never expected a response (it wasn't convincingly written) and didn't get one, but man, within a few months (maybe a little longer I guess) they unveiled that dodge and burn page, and let me tell you, it suuuuuucks.
if you like boring pictures of things that ought to be interesting it's cool though I guess. ymmv I guess but I don't get it.

I guess

do any of you like hedi slimane's stuff? http://hedislimane.com

i'm not a photogapher; i'm into it

also, if you know of anyone else who does shit sorta like his, i'd be interested in checking it out!

http://24.media.tumblr.com/63e201e46e7617b00e121a1b90b8114f/tumblr_mrwj2uFz8F1snq421o1_500.jpg

i feel not very interested in focus anymore. even focusing my eyes.

http://ruinista.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/blurry-street-1.jpg?w=720&h=480
(hong-an tran)

huh. lots of nice photos there.

home along, drinking nothing but vermouth (blanc) and scanning. catching up on summer. the weather has cooled down, I'm getting a breeze in the place, and am in a techno zone at the moment.

my girlfriend just texted me with a vague fuzzy picture to prove that antony from antony and the johnsons is at the restaurant she's at.

this is breezing.

she is good I think. she came up before somewhere? I think maybe Michael knows her a lil. she does a lot of things I generally think of myself as immune to nicely. peaceful modern landscapes. shallow focus restaurant-table photos that make me think about qualities of lens glass.

I am scanning spring too. may second right now. I just finished the first roll cluttered with pictures of the sky. I was kinda bummed out last week & walking along this one long road in Montreal with an uncluttered horizon & watching the gradient slowly change, I feel like photographing the sky is simultaneously totally useless, & impotent, & then also kinda beautiful, to be moved to just sloppily document something so blunt & obvious & huge, in spite of its bluntness, obviousness, hugeness. I know my spring photos are just going to be pictures of the sky & flowers. like that Emmet Gowin interview where he talks about some photographer he liked who thought his late work of skies was his best stuff. I like ageing into unavoidable cliche.

hey btw, have you ever seen any Nathaniel Dorsky films, China? ccing dayo here, some are playing at NYFF & they are precious photographic research ime, like he owns his own wavelength.

not aware of dorsky, but looking up now. looks like he got a really nice NYT writeup.
could it be steichen who's sky photographs we're thinking of?

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.55.29

they're some of my favorites, although I don't think they come of as well online. in a book or on a wall though they are really great. I've got a big stieglitz book in which that series (equivalents) is printed pretty small on the page, and pretty low contrast.

http://sandrakontos.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/alfred-stieglitz-equivalents/

whose not "who's"

I need to learn to proofread before posting.

cheap film in candlelight

http://altairnouveau.com/631-19.jpg

just realized that's the lawn mower above is a paul graham

Where are u on earth

New York

kodak gold 1815 yen a roll. basic fuji was 200 yen more. just slightly more expensive than this second hand konica mg/d. i haven't bought film in a while. i spent the afternoon trying to find the most credible analysis of film price jump. settled on it being artificially cheap + supply chain as the most credible.

https://storage.googleapis.com/urbo11/urbo11/dasak1.jpg

Wow that’s pricey. Make each shot count !

It's all wildly expensive now. I have a briefcase full of 10-years-expired film; I'm not likely to get good results out of most of it, but I'm not going to buy any new film either.

People were giving analogue/manual stuff away 15-20 years ago. Everyone caught on to the vintage lens thing pretty quick; I'm hunting for a Canon FD mount wide angle (to adapt to EOS R body) and the prices are a little too high for me (and very high if you want 24mm).

not a canon FD expert but i've seen some of the SSC marked ones go for four figures. my understanding is that cine houses buy them to convert to cine lenses that they can rent out. they will pay top $ for wide angle fast lenses.

i've got a olympus om 21mm/2 that has sold for as high as $3-4k on ebay recently... i'm very tempted!

also, it seems like prices right now are not that far out of line compared to pre-digital prices. seems like prices took a real dive after digital took off.

https://mikeeckman.com/2021/11/a-look-back-at-the-prices-of-film/

here's a price list from 1995:

1995 Film Prices (April 1995 Popular Photography Article)

In the April 1995 issue of Popular Photography, the magazine declared this to be the “Golden Age of Color Photography” with more options available than ever before. With such a huge selection, picking which film was right for each occasion was likely confusing, so the magazine put together a five-page comparison of 101 different color films.

Lets stop for a moment and think….wow, 101 different color films! That’s not even including any black and white films. Boy, times have changed.

A majority of the article is in chart form, separating Color Print and Slide films in different sections and the available films sorted by speed, slowest to fastest from ASA 25 to 3200 color print films, and ASA 12 to 1600 slide films. Prices are listed next to each, although they don’t state where they come from and do not include processing. All prices below are 36 exposure 35mm unless noted. Emulsions from Kodak, Fuji, AGFA, 3M, Polaroid, and Konica are listed and a short sentence of each film’s strength is given in the right most column.

Here are some highlights:

Agfacolor HDC100 – $6.79
Fujicolor NPS 160 – $7.84
Kodak Vericolor III 160 (predecessor to Portra) – $7.84
AGFA Optima 200 – $8.11
Kodak Gold Super 200 – $7.57
Fujicolor 400 HG – $8.19
Kodak Royal Gold 400 – $8.82
Fuji Super HG 1600 – $10.56
Konica SR-G 3200 – $12.00
Kodachrome 25 – $11.31
Fuji Velvia 50 – $12.22
Kodak Infrared 50 – $23.09
Kodak Ektachrome 64 – $11.34
Agfachrome RS100 – $12.05
Fuji Provia 100 – $12.55
Kodachrome 200 – $13.86
Fuji Sensia 400 – $14.00
Kodak Ektachrome P1600 – $15.83

you don't need an inflation calculator to see it's in the same ballpark as what film costs now

A three-pack of Kodak Gold 200 is £55 at CameraWorld (UK chain, branches in SE England).
That was the absolute bog-standard film back in the '90s, £2-3/roll - often issued free when you picked up your prints if I remember!

You may well be right about the more exotic transparency films, but the most basic of negative colour film is about 6-8x as expensive as it was 20 years ago. I guess lots of things are...

And I can well believe digital cratered some of the prices above; certainly wasn't paying (equivalent of) $12/roll for Velvia 50 last time I bought it new 11-12 years ago.

Ah, and good to know on the Canon cine conversions!

The SSC stuff is pre-1979 (all "new" FD - the bayonet mount without the floating ring - was multi-coated anyway, without that designation), so in theory should be cheaper, but who knows.

Bit of a hole between 16mm and 50mm after selling a lot of stuff... a nice cheap 28 would be fine (ideally a fifth of the price of the one I sold :) )

here I was thinking I'd try to get into film photography but I don't think I can if it's this pricy...not to mention developing and turning it into digital so I can uhh use it?

just thought of the photo breezing thread since my brother's renewed interest in cameras has caused me to 1) take out my leica, load it up, and start shooting again, and 2) finally develop about 15 rolls from 2016, a mix of color and black-and-white. I'm relieved to learn that my scanner still works, after a software update that has forced me to relearn how to scan. might post more once I have some good scans. it's funny, since I've shot many many thousands of photos in the intervening years, but nearly all digital (and often work-related), now remembering how I shot 8 years ago, and getting the feeling back with the leica. holding it, I really do feel inclined to take very different kinds of photos! I also had no clue that film had gotten so expensive, and was happy to discover a bag of about 15 or so unused rolls, mostly Kodak Gold, Portra, some Ektar, and Tri-X etc. I can't believe how expensive this would all be if I were buying new rolls, paying for scans, etc.! Why do the kids do it??

the thing for me on film cost is that's the only barrier. it's jarring to come back to after not buying film but not to the point that it puts it out of reach if not ripping wildly through it. otherwise i don't mind. i don't have much to compare it to since i never got an updated digital camera. so apart from my phone, if necessary i still use a canon eos from the very early 2000s. it's good but it does require some effort to operate and make good pictures (less than shooting on film and developing, since it does just plug into a macbook still, but with more room for error and the chance of taking pictures all day and coming back with nothing).

70mm zoom lens is my business … and business is good!

I haven't taken a good photo in about 6 years. Except for microscopic tidepool shots with the little Olympus TG5.

https://i.imgur.com/EdLhOvO.jpeg

lookin good! philly?