dimanche 24 octobre 2004

Take Three... Chateau Azay-le-Rideau There's always more than one way to photograph something... it doesn't matter what it is... animal, vegetable or mineral.... big, middling or small. The photographer's mind should be as fertile with ideas as the possibilities the equipment and accessories provide. For example, it is no use having shutter speeds (for those still using manual cameras), apertures, filters, etc., if they are not used with real imagination from time to time. Most aids and accessories are only used to do the basic jobs which they were bought for and are seldom used with any creative intentions. Automated cameras and computer programs share the same specification problem... roughly 80% of owners use only 20% of those features... if that! Basically most photographers simply record what they think they see... nothing more, nothing less. Such photos are accurate representations and can only be appreciated as such. But there is much more that can be done than simply recording. The word is create! Creativity only happens when you take over from the auto-controls of the camera and utilise them in your own way and to your own liking. Auto-exposure and Program camera modes may guarantee correctly exposed pictures but they do not guarantee good photographs. I have used the famous moated chateau at Azay-le-Rideau in the Indre-et-Loire department of France where I live as an example of what I mean. During the course of several visits there in the summer I took many straight shots which were just that... accurate depictions of a fine example of 16th century Renaissance architecture. The weather was the same every day, sunny, blue skies with fluffy white clouds, a photographer's happy-hour... but very conventional as is seen with the image above. I decided that my black-and-white coverage of the chateau needed a shot-in-the-arm so returned one late afternoon with usual tripod and cable release plus a torch and hot drink because dusk was approaching and night would fall fast. Many stately buildings, and the chateau at Azay-le-Rideau is no exception, produce excellent Son-et-Lumière displays during summer evenings which can be more photogenic than in normal daylight conditions. In colour these are indeed spectacles... but in black-and-white photography some extra imagination is needed to lend a helping hand. Night-time photography calls for a tripod to keep the camera perfectly still during long exposures. What I did first was to make an exposure long enough to record the chateau but short enough so as not to make the negative too dense which would have produced blocked highlights and made printing difficult... and I also made a note to cut the development time by a third to stop excessive contrast build-up. I bracketed the exposures for safety and to take into account the reciprocity failure of the film - the 45-second exposure negative gave me good printable detail plus a relatively bright dusk sky. This half-day, half-night effect was helped by the silhouetted foreground figures remaining almost still during the music and commentary. For the third picture, and an even more creative interpretation of the scene I used a multiple-exposure technique. My original Pentax 6x7 model didn't have this facility so I had to cap and uncap the lens 20 times during a long 100 second exposure. Each time the lens was covered I moved the shift lens' control ring by 1mm. By watching the sequence of brightening and fading of the artificial light display I was able to make a series of exposures with varying lighting contrast as the display progressed. I'm sure the Pentax 75mm shift lens (seen here coupled to a 35mm Pentax LX body using a Pentax 35mm-67 Lens Adaptor) wasn't designed with this special effect in mind... and I know the third shot here not the easiest of images to recognise immediately, but overall it has helped me to create a number of new images which I would otherwise have missed. The best image of the three is definitely the dusk shot where the small crowd of sightseers have remained fairly still for the duration of the long exposure I made. But it had to be made several times with varying bracketed exposures to make sure that I had something on the film at the end of the long session. It's all very hit-and-miss if you don't know what you're doing... if you do know you should still take three to make sure of a good one! 9:47:19 PM    comment []