dimanche 16 janvier 2005

Opportunity Missed? Traditional or Digital future? I thought tonight's weblog was to be my 100th... hurrah! But having taken the precaution of recounting the days / evenings / nights I've been here the total came to 102... or as I write this 103 and with over 90,000 words! So trish and I ate the rich, creamy, chocolaty, mouth-watering'y gateau on the wrong day... still, day 100 would have been the day after I was trying to gather my thoughts on why I'd collapsed so a celebratory cake would have been the last thing on my mind. I awoke this morning to another hard frost... by dawn the remnants of flowers I hadn't dead-headed in our small French garden were more beautiful than at any time since late summer. It isn't even a month since the Solstice yet the sun is now just higher enough in the sky to clear part of the building overlooking our courtyard to shine in and backlight some parts of the display with beautiful, if transient, effect. I know that at this latitude in France the earth spins at around 600mph on it's axis... and I also know that if I stand and stare at a beautiful visual effect created by Nature... then time will pass me by and I'll miss a good photo opportunity. As happened today... I was practically spellbound, not just from watching the sun slowly move around to highlight the crisp frosty outlines of the spiky Rosemary (which has been showing it's pale blue flowers again... in January), then Sage, then the sad droopy Foxglove leaves followed by the wooden gable-end finial recovered from a disastrous fire which destroyed the stately house in the grounds of Spye Park in Wiltshire many years ago... but I watched as the warmth of the sun's rays melted the frosty rime and puffs of steam rose into the still air like wispy cigarette smoke. You all know the scenario... you see something out-of-the-ordinary... go to load your camera... and when you come back it's gone! Nature is like that... also in Wales I used to watch the sun turning the dew on Nettle leaves into vapour... and when I had my camera ready it was too difficult to record. Perhaps scenes like that are not meant to be photographed... simply experienced, observed and remembered. They are transient moments... and therefore personal moments... for yourself... and if you have to relate them to someone perhaps better to do it with descriptive words carefully chosen. I think as a photographer I am dumb much of the time... missing photo-ops is good for me because it makes me think and talk for a change. Photographs aren't worth a thousand words really... photography has become too easy whereas writing is becoming a forgotten craft or talent. However, in wanting to describe this morning's frosty scene... and I do have to include a photo in a photoblog... I flipped through my files and came up with an image of equal beauty of backlit dew on a swathe of Nigella Nigella damascena flower heads from our previous Welsh garden (the thicker stems were onions which had gone to seed). But, having started to write after dinner as usual, and having little time to dive into the darkroom, set everything up with fresh chemistry, etc, etc... I thought of trying for the first time the roll-film adaptor on my Canon 9900F flat-bed scanner. What you see above (top image) is a completely unadjusted scan for brightness, contrast, levels, etc... just slight sharpening and an added double border... from approximately a 12 percent area of an Acupan 200 (rebranded Foma) negative developed in D-76 and taken with a Mamiya RZ67 and 180mm Sekor lens. I've tried to print one of these similar negatives before (several times) and been largely unsuccessful. I know the transmission brightness of an iMac flat screen is different to the reflected brightness of a glossy print... but the ease and speed at which the Canoscan extracted a "keeper" first time, in under a minute... whereas in my darkroom I'd have still been framing and focusing the negative in my Durst L1200 Multigraph... and then been the darkroom for the best part of an hour perhaps? It this leaves me with a troubled mind... I feel too traditional to try digital (that's a neat tongue-twister... try it a couple of times!) and yet I can get better results - well, maybe not better overall, but noticeably different and equally pleasing as such - using an inexpensive flat-bed scanner with a tranny adaptor. I note that Canon have recently discontinued their dedicated Canoscan 35mm scanner line... obviously the newer higher-spec flat-bed models are better. How technology marches onwards... but is it an opportunity I've missed? 8:51:03 PM    comment []