jeudi 11 novembre 2004

Self-Portrait at 30... It sure would have been easier to take digitally I've been a 35mm user continually for the past 35 plus years, and although I get a certain amount of satisfaction from using sheet-film with 5x4 and 5x7 Lotus cameras it's the smaller format that wins hands-down in ease of use. For those who want the highest quality - and place their camera on a tripod as part of that process - then they may as well place the largest camera on that same tripod end enjoy the advantages of larger film format as well... there's no substitute for square inches. I remember celebrating 30 years of photography and had just filed my 9,457th film... which is about 300 films a year, or thirty frames a day, or close to a third of a million frames in all - and I wondered what I was getting out of it all. Since then I've scaled down my shooting and in the past five years (discounting one really bad year recently in France when I can't remember picking a camera up a camera up) am currently averaging one 35mm film every three days. [Since May 2006 I haven't used a film camera at all... evaluating whether a Nikon D200 will recharge my photo-creativity... and will obviously keep you posted.] It's surprising how rusty you become when you don't practice (photography, golf, sex... I guess they're all the same in that respect!) and Mike Johnston the former Editor of "PhotoTechniques" magazine once told me that Henri Cartier-Bresson used to get through a couple of rolls (film not croissants) before breakfast and that Joseph Koudelka and no doubt others did similar throughout the day in order to keep in practice. I used hear stories in the 70s and 80s about studio photographers throwing away the first few rolls of a fashion shoot because they knew that neither the model nor themselves would be warmed-up or in the mood. Shooting digitally will have certainly changed that attitude with the commissioning editor and art director viewing each shot immediately on a hooked-up Mac. It will be interesting to see how the change from film to digital will make one see images differently. I've taken many self-portraits over the years - mainly as a record of where I've been, who I was or was not with, places I've stayed at or lived in... many posed or still... others on the move. Because they were personal, as only self-portraits can be, I cared very much about how I was taking them and whether they would re-live that moment for me years afterwards. Of course using film you don't know until you come out of the darkroom clutching a dripping wet developing tank. But with digital you can see what you have taken within a second or two on playback... or if you have your digital camera hooked up to a laptop computer you can see everything, every detail in glorious colour on a 17 inch or so screen... which I now know sure as hell beats squinting through a loupe at 35mm trannies on a light box! I sure would have liked that facility back in 1974 when I took the above S/P. It was late summer and the only sunny area in a friend's small apartment in Twickenham was a smaller niche in his bathroom... by positioning myself leaning slightly and increasingly across the bathtub I was able to enjoy an hour or so of contemplation and topping up my tan (I haven't changed that habit in the past 30 years) and I knew the situation would sound slightly bizarre if I had to relate it so I absolutely had to have a photo illustrating it. The snag with S/Ps is that if you want to get them right (damn it, did I blink, did I smile, better do it again) you have to play the averages... which means having more than one shot at it. My contemplative mood was therefore not genuine as soon as I started jumping up to rewind the film, reset the self-timer button, replace the camera on its precarious position on the window ledge, etc, etc, etc. However, I knew what I wanted and to this day it has been one of my favourite S/Ps because it summed up exactly how I felt at the time... thinking about my lover that year, Caro, and after 30 years maybe I think of her too often. But back to reality... the image also reminds me of how I used to regard a 20mm lens as my "standard" lens with a 15mm being "slightly wide." I don't use or have either focal length today as I strive for more, or see more, normality in my photography. Maybe that's just a fashion or phase I'm going through... some things always change whilst others hardly ever do. [2006 Update: I now have a Nikkor 12-24mm zoom for the D200... a lens which equates to an 18-35mm zoom on a 35mm film camera.] My current phase is that I more often than not use the "safe standards by which others are judged" such as that 50-year-old perennial Kodak Tri-X developed in D-76 or ID-11 at 1+1. It's a combination rather like a Leica rangefinder camera... if you work out what all the bells and whistles of more modern equipment and film and developer combinations do... and then discount what you don't actually need, use or want of them, then what you are left with is a classic. Despite the advances in technology that are brought to us every year classics like the Leica-M and Tri-X are still manufactured, and bought, in solid numbers... by photographers, like yourselves perhaps, who like to do things properly for themselves. Those standards will probably not change for a long time... and indeed may get stronger and more popular as digital takes a greater hold on the photographic world. Those standards may be adopted increasingly as a reaction against the digital world... watch this space... but don't hold your breath! [As I update this page the Leica M8 digital rangefinder camera has been announced and is being talked about non-stop on photo forums by those who have purchased and those who want to... times change... standards change.] 8:15:21 PM    comment []