samedi 6 novembre 2004

Manual or Auto... You have the choice Once upon a time there was no choice: you pressed the button and Kodak did the rest. Roll-on a century and it seems there has been a relatively small change in the overall photographic process compared with, for example, the change from horseless carriage to space shuttle for transportation during the same period. It occurs to me that perhaps we are being conditioned to approach photography with a similar lack of choice. For the simple photographic process offered by George Eastman in 1889 to work his camera "The Kodak" needed to be programmed. You could argue that it was loaded automatically, focused, pre-set in terms of shutter speed and aperture, unloaded and the results returned process-paid. Not a very different situation from some of today's offerings. With most cameras today you can go out and literally take "perfect' pictures. Perfect pictures, that is, in terms of exposure... and with both traditional film and digital. (Before long I guess we'll all be saying digital is traditional... and film will be an alternative photography process practised by a few die-hards.) I admit I've bought cameras in the past and used them completely on auto-everything for a few weeks before exploring the camera's other controls to see what they could really do. The first camera which seduced me into this casual way of photography was the first professional auto-focus Minolta 9000 which was actually just as easy to control yourself because everything was so ergonomically right about it. Several other very ergonomic cameras have been produced since including the Nikon F100 and Olympus E-1... yet how are the average buyers of such cameras going to use them? Mainly in their auto-everything programmed states of course. Dumb question... dumb answer! What confounds me is why I followed the crowd in the same way when at the same time I'd been exposing one third of every roll of film I put through my other fully manual cameras to an 18% Grey Card. Twelve shots from every roll made up a Zone scale strip which I tested for development and exposure accuracy to a tenth of a stop using densitometric methods. At the time a third of my thoughts were obviously in control of my methods... but the other two thirds were being controlled by the camera, so I felt very close to the trap that George Eastman had set where I pressed the button and a Japanese company's computer algorithm did the rest. I know that I personally had good reasons to use that camera's many user-friendly functions to produce technically sound photographs... I was supposed to be a working photographer and writer publishing my thoughts and findings. Yet it was always a struggle to get through to most photographers... maybe 99% of whom do not know the true speed (exposure index) of the film they use or why (mysteriously?) it varies from camera to camera or with meter and developer changes. The knowledge is available to all from books and magazine articles... but it is obviously not de rigueur since the majority of photographs you see today fail to exude the quality of works by past established masters such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston, John Paul Caponigro, Fred Picker, et al. These photographers have a seeing eye, a unique vision, yet their equipment is either simple, off-the-shelf, or both... and their process is the same silver-gelatin one used by the rest of us film fanatics. Most amateur photographers assume that to produce great photographs they need a lot of equipment... and assume the talent comes with owing that equipment. Many good working photographers will tell you a different theory... that it's 10% talent and 90% hard graft. The photographer who truly knows his craft continually re-examines it to see if he can become better and, quite importantly, avoid becoming stale. There is no passive acceptance of anything done previously by the masters. As Edward Steichen said after he'd photographed a white cup and saucer against a grey background many, many, many times with a large-format camera... "The experiment was to a photographer what a series of finger exercises is to a pianist. It had nothing directly to do with the conception or the art of photography." And all that at the height of his acclaimed career! I too have taken many exposures of a grey scale on many monochrome films, not because it told me how accurate the shutter and aperture settings on that camera were, but rather to remind me how caring I was trying to be in my own approach to photography. It was my finger exercise, my mental and visual exercise, a chance to see my own grey scales, those pictures of nothing except tone which reassured me that all that was technically feasible was actually being achieved with whatever auto-everything box of tricks I was using. Actually I've given up such testing except once a year maybe for fun... I've found that film can so forgiving it's become a challenge to not use an exposure meter nowadays. My three "user" cameras for the past 10 years have been a Leica M3 and a couple of Nikon F2 bodies... all meterless. And I haven't missed the facility except on a few occasions when bracketing exposures covered my ass anyway. I think it's very important we become the masters and not the slaves of our cameras. We're being offered different versions of "The Kodak" of the 21st century but must not be brainwashed by the advertising hype which tries to tell us how best to use them. I feel that cameras are increasingly designed for particular income and status groups rather than for photographers. The glossy brochures, the occasional TV ads plus a personal experience of photographic retailing bear this out. It's only when you learn how to use the camera's controls that personal photographic statements can properly be made. By trying out the very things you are encouraged not to do you may just find new ways of expressing yourself. If you don't allow yourself to experiment, you'll never enjoy any real control over the medium. It may still be true that only one per cent of all films sold are black-and-white... but the big film manufacturers ensure there's a choice of premium monochrome papers for the discerning photographer. The choice is there today, believe it or not, with modern cameras (except for the Nikon FM2, Leica M6 and Japanese made Bessas) they may all be multi-programmed, but many have manual settings which, if ignored, don' stop you from taking pictures, but which if used properly allow you to make photographs. That sounds like a subtle difference but the implications are important... you have the choice. Captions : If you're wondering about the top image... it's a self-portrait from some years ago when I had a Marc Bolan hairstyle. My personal shooting mode hasn't changed much... I still prefer Manual and Naked! Lower image : Yes, I really did see this woman shooting within the Stonehenge circle of stones with a Viewmaster stereo camera... to emphasise this odd apparatus and the woman's hands I fitted a Nikkor 15mm super-wide-angle lens to my Nikon F2, held it at arm's length as close to her as possible and clicked away unnoticed. Re: the main image... it is not difficult to find nudity on the net... but it is more difficult to find on the net than "sex" - explicit or otherwise. There are not many images around of normal nakedness... so occasionally I will undress to redress the balance, so to speak. Here are some more examples of "Self-Portrait Nude" photography on this weblog which I have taken relaxing in a French courtyard overlooked by a convent, lying on a brass bedstead in a dark-chocolate coloured room with honey-coloured floorboards somewhere in the North of England, cooling off again in a French garden by taking an impromptu hose pipe shower... and reflected in a French hotel bedroom wardrobe mirror... snapped whilst cooling off in the breeze from an open window during a break in art-studies during the summer of 2006 when it was too hot to be outside in the sun. There's also my article on "The Penis in Art" for those so interested. June 7 2007 Update Here's my latest "art nude" self-portrait in a misty shower taken whilst testing an Olympus E-1 camera to see if it was showerproof as claimed. 9:45:57 PM    comment []