mardi 25 janvier 2005

Contre-Photo and Contrejour Go against the Rules A week or so ago I was building myself up for a celebration... on reaching a hundred thousand words for this weblog. Every time I logged a piece onto Salon I selected "Edit -- Writing Tools -- Word Count" on my iMac and noted the number of words for that piece as well as the running total for the three months plus and 111 articles I've uploaded since being here... ...and then I missed doing the count because of a connection failure which wasn't fixed for about 12 hours... so I also missed the midnight Pacific Time deadline for getting that evening's offering onto this site... and so not only missed having a glass of something red to celebrate with but broke the continuous run which I'd promised myself I wouldn't break... because even if no-one reads what I have to say or looks at any of the images at least it has got me out of my state of "stuckness" which had prevailed for approaching something like four years since abandoning my photo magazine publishing venture. In that time I hadn't written anything creative nor bothered to look too hard at the bulging stock of hidden images spanning thirty years or so in my filing cabinets. Looking back I didn't even illustrate that first weblog piece because I didn't know how to upload an image to the page (since amended with my first S/P Nude)... and after two hundred plus images in the last hundred plus evenings I'm still rather surprised and relieved when everything pops into place! But that's the age I am... However, on checking back the hundred thousand word count was reached on the "outage" day... and I didn't actually miss a day of uploading to this site because although my "screen calendar" said the current day (Paris time)... it was really the previous evening for the Salon server (Pacific time). Anyway, I'm happier now and having a drink... à la tienne! The more I see the light the more I shoot into it. It goes against one of the basic rules of photography... because you need light to illuminate a subject it stands to reason that light has to fall on it. By pointing your camera towards the light you are not seeing the side or surface of the subject receiving the main source of light so how can the photograph come out? The answer is either badly or beautifully... although there's a lot of variation in between! Because you're going against the rules by going against the light you have to take over from the camera to a certain extent. It isn't difficult... you have to switch out of "automatic" mode and change to "manual" mode. You do this with your brain and with the camera's metering system... you brain comes first because that is what you are creating with... the camera is simply recording what you want to see and not what the camera's exposure meter wants to record. I have to admit that some cameras have become very clever in the past decade... I remember when the Nikon F4 was announced, a section of the technical brochure given to the Press explained at length how a number of Japanese photographers had spent many months in numerous locations and situations shooting tens of thousands of frames of film... which were then analysed to see how the camera's exposure metering system had coped with the differences in lighting and contrast. All of this information was fed into a computer and a set of algorithms established which were programmed into one (or more maybe) of the Nikon F4's four built-in computers (I kid you not!) which were able to recognise a typical scene's lighting and contrast... and as fast as electricity flows through a microchip be able to calculate the perfect exposure for that typical scene. But the Nikon F4 was a professional photographer's camera... and professional photographers don't want perfect exposures calculated by an algorithm... nor do they shoot typical scenes! Admittedly the F4 would not have sold in greater numbers had it been a "manual-only" camera... although having said that Leitz did OK for a few decades with their manual, meterless M-series Leicas... but it was one of the first occasions when doubt started to cross my mind on how and where photography was going... and now that it's largely gone digital I'm even more unsure of how and where I'm going with photography and whether I want to be part of it. However, there are, as I said moments when I see the light... and shoot into it against the basic advice... against the algorithms calculations... and more frequently than a good average would suggest come out of the exercise wiser and with better images. The selection here were taken on a couple of rolls of film... on the same morning... within twenty or so walking paces from each other... shooting into the light... snapping on different lenses... trying Diffusion, Yellow, Orange and Red filters... ignoring the algorithm-impregnated computer-driven exposure-meter of the F4 (believe it, or not, I really liked that Nikon!)... using my brain to decide the exposures and then "bracketing" them either way so I would have a choice of images from light ones, normal ones and dark ones... and by going against the conventional way of taking a picture I think I got better results as a result. The four I've chosen are... Calendulas and dew-covered Parsley flowers that had gone to seed in our previous Welsh garden (200mm Macro-Nikkor)... Creeping Ivy and it's shadow as it slowly creeping across our kitchen window (50mm Micro-Nikkor)... an outdoor lamp (500mm Reflex-Nikkor with orange filter)... and an out of focus Sun with the silhouette of a Russian Vine crossing it (same 500mm with red filter). 9:58:01 PM    comment []