lundi 29 novembre 2004

Sequence... Time for Tea From Tea-Towels to Tea Stains From "Time of Day" to "Time of Year" I'm going to the other extreme today with much shorter timing. I can't remember the exact sequence of shots which made up this montage nor the time lapse between shots... but it's probably enough to say it was all over in less than thirty seconds. The subject was slightly oddball and in it's own right nothing memorable... a line of laundry drying in the wind. I guess the memorable bit was having to iron it afterwards. I used an old motor-driven Nikon F loaded with Kodak Tri-X, the body being fitted with a 20mm f/3.5 UD Nikkor and red filter. Trivia note: The "UD" designation doesn't signify an "underwater" lens - which would not have been out of place with drips flying about from line - but denotes the number of elements in the lens following Nikon's original use of the Roman letters "U" for "Uns" (1) and "D" for "Decem" (10) thus an older Nikkor lens with the letters "UD" signifies 11 elements. The situation was interesting... a spinner of tea-towels twirling around in the wind... bright white linen flapping against a blue sky on a perfect drying day. I positioned myself within the circle described by the three arms of the whirligig... squatting down so the ever changing shapes flashed by my face, camera and lens as I fired off a roll of Tri-X in fits and starts of one, two or three shots. I used a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second with the wide-angle lens stopped well down so that the barely moving lines, pegs and tops of the objects were recorded more sharply and with definition... whereas the lower flapping pieces of material were blurred as they flicked about and spun backwards and forwards. As I said, it was all over in less than 30 seconds... a 36-exposure film doesn't last long even when you lift the shutter firing finger as frequently as you squeeze it down. The fun really began in the darkroom. I processed the 35mm film normally and after realising there was nothing on it to get excited about I made a set of twelve small 6 x 9 cms enlargements on 5 x 4 inch sheets of high-contrast Kodak Ortho Film type 3. I processed these sheets in a dish using print developer diluted at 1 : 3 instead of the recommended lith developer which I didn't have in stock. Although it's usual to develop lithographic film under a red safe light I find it difficult to judge the negative image build-up with my ageing eyes. However, here's the trick I pulled... half way through development in the big dish I switched on the overhead white light for a second to "solarise" the individual pieces of film. Doing it this way is a very hit and miss affair... but I was in a carefree mood and hoping for something different... as Man Ray discovered once to his advantage. After the sheets were processed, fixed, washed and dried I trimmed them to size and taped the best nine into a matrix using an old roll of Dymo tape... this was not too wide and had very straight, blemish free edges when pulled taut. Of the many contact prints I've made from time to time three are illustrated here. The top image is a straight black-and-white contact made in the darkroom... the second image is a "sun print" made on standard bromide printing paper exposed in full sunlight for an hour so that an image appears without a chemical developer... and the third print was similarly made in the sun but then toned with a pot of strong Kenyan... well it was Time for Tea! 8:17:00 PM    comment []