It allows people to input details of their developing “recipes” and then link them to photos (that were developed in that recipe) on Flickr.

It’s not got a great deal of data on there yet (around 50 recipes) but with a little more take up could prove to be a really useful resource.

Feel free to add your own recipes and/or tell your (film developing) friends.

That link again: FilmDev.

Untitled, by Superape

One of the things about the square format I find difficult is the sense of compositional challenge - without a long side to draw the eye, what do you do?

Superape has evidently overcome this challenge, as evidenced by this wonderful picture of a bike shop’s workbench.  The strong diagonals in this, the wonderful red tones, as well as the authentic and textural clutter of the work surface made this one an instant favourite for me.

Check out the rest of his Rolleicord pictures for more quality.

I’ve just come back from my local camera club (’York photographic society’) where we had an ‘exhibition’ - actually a couple of CD-roms of prizewinning entries to a couple of competitions. The first was the FIAP: ” FIAP 23rd Colour Slide Biennial 2004″. Now, Ok, this is a few years old now but I thought it might be interesting.

Wrong.

Well, kind of wrong. During a 34 minute show, with each image being on the screen for 4-5 seconds, I think that there were two photographs which I considered good. The rest were bog standard postcard images, or just plain bad (i.e. horizons which were 3 degrees out of level, verticals which weren’t etc. Y’know, basic technical stuff).

It was interesting only because of the - to my mind - staggeringly low-quality.

Then there was the something like ‘the tropical photographic competition’ - run out of Florida apparently. This time the show was 30 minutes of ‘creative photography’ from 2007.

Well.

You know when you first play with Photoshop? You load in a picture and apply the ‘watercolour’ filter? Or perhaps the ‘posterize’ filter. Perhaps you’re really avant-garde and use edge-detect. You look, and say ‘hey wow’, and then you get over it?

Apparently not. I reckon about 80% of the pictures had been posterized, or watercoloured, or had edge detection applied (or turned into an oil painting). Of those that weren’t, the rest had had a really neat ‘page turn’ effect added. Cool! Or perhaps ’selective colouring’ had been used. Woo! Way to go. For those photographers with more time on their hands, adding some motion blur to the background was the way forward.

In short, I was not impressed.

I had a discussion with another member of the club afterward and he basically said that if you enter competitions, you enter to win; and to win you submit pictures which you know the judges will like. And that means you look at what has done well in the past and recreate it.

So, it seems to be a recognized ‘prize-winning photographer’ (at least at the club level) you need to lose all shreds of creativity, and just follow the herd. There is no reward for genuine creativity!

That’s not for me. I’ll still enter the competitions, but I won’t be upset when I don’t win - who knows, maybe one day I might even get some useful feedback.

(Incidentally, this is identical to the stuff which has annoyed me about music creation over the past few years; everyone seems to think that slapping a fistful of samples together over a beat which sounds kind-of-like-something-that’s-in-the-charts constitutes writing a track. Worse still, this gets perpetuated and soon all of the creativity has been squeezed out of music. The same applies to so-called manufactured bands - a couple of safe covers, a number one single and then it’s back to the dole queue for you my lad. If it’s any consolation I now feel sufficiently fired up that I might even start doing some more music that, of course, no-one will like).

I feel that individuality is not only frowned upon, it’s actively suppressed - often, it appears, by self-censorship - until one day we’ll wake up to find that the world is uniformly bland and all of the joie de vivre will be gone.

Sorry about the rant

ps: with regard to ‘photoshopping’. I have no problem with it per se, but it does annoy me when people print out their latest abomination and cheerfully remark that they wouldn’t be able to repeat the picture since they ‘were just messing about’. That’s not art, that’s mindless button-pushing. A monkey could do that (an infinite number of monkeys would be able to do rather better I fear)

For thirty-five years now, I’ve been a strong advocate of the virtues of gelatin silver photographic prints. Until 2005, all of my prints have always been fiberbase gelatin silver, archivally processed and toned in a traditional wet-darkroom. Even as the publisher of the LensWork Special Editions and LensWork Folios I’ve used language like “No inkjet compromises!” and “Nothing can replace the depth, tonality or presence of fiberbase silver photographic paper.” We used such language to clarify that the LensWork Special Editions were not the “inferior inkjet prints” we feared people might assume they were. Our mistake was thinking that the inkjet technology of late 1990s was not going to evolve. Boy were we wrong!

Jensen goes on to argue that ‘inkjet’ is the wrong term in any case - the inkjet is the process not the medium - and settles instead on ‘pigment on paper’.

I am now offering inkjet images – the correct terminology is actually “pigment-on-paper.” I refuse to call these giclée – a term I’ve always thought was meant to disguise rather than to elucidate. Gelatin silver and platinum/palladium prints are so designated because they indicate precisely the nature of the imaging chemistry and/or substrate. Neither of these are defined as their mechanical means of production – “projection prints” or “contact prints” although these would both be technically accurate terms that are occasionally used as supplemental descriptions. Similarly, “inkjet” is an accurate term describing the mechanics of delivery used, but pigment-on-paper describes the material – chemistry and substrate – and is a better equivalent for comparison to “gelatin silver” or “platinum/palladium” prints.

He also has some interesting things to say about pricing and editions that chime well for me .

While I don’t limit my prints, I do know that a clear and precise provenance is important to some people and may have historical importance long after I am gone. All of my prints now specify the date of their production, the source (negative or digital file), the precise number of copies I made that day, and which is the number of this print. Here is an example of that text.

A typical First Edition, First Printing will be three to five copies, sometimes as few as two, on rare occasions as many as thirty. Time marches, we change, our creative vision does, too. It is not uncommon for me to see new ways to interpret an old image. I am not opposed to improving an image when I see a need to. Each time I fuss with the digital file, usually to change it a bit to more closely match my creative vision, I call this a new “edition.” It’s a different interpretation of the raw data, so to speak - a new “performance” in Ansel Adams-speak. Sometimes that might be a little tonal adjustment, sometimes a contrast change, sometimes a dodge here or a burn there, sometimes I’ll crop something or digitally remove a bothersome spot, occasionally I go all the way back to the negative and re-scan or back to the original in-camera file and start over. In one way or another, the new “edition” is a new artistic rendition of the image.

Contrary to the contemporary zeitgeist, therefore, the later editions are the ones I would generally consider the more valuable because I perceive them to be the more mature interpretation of the image. Having said that, additional editions may also be a result technology improvements.

The designation “Third Edition, Second Printing” would mean that this is the third time I’ve worked this image from a creative point of view and the second time I’ve printed a batch of prints from this third rendition. The print # is simply a count of how many prints I’ve made from that digital file on that day.

I produce and sell my prints on a first-come, first served basis. Orders are filled in Edition/Print Number order. Obviously, editions are not reprinted except where identified as a later printing.

I also reserve the right to withdraw from sale any image at any time.

1) From Jerry Nevin’s “Readings” Page this interview with Garry Winogrand.

2) From O.C. Garza’s site, his recollections of being taught by Winogrand.

Winogrand is fascinating to me because of his ideas about context (it doesn’t really matter) and his ambivalence to directing the viewer (see the first link particularly).

I have these ideas at the forefront of my mind recently because of a comment I saw on flickr, along the lines of someone liking a picture because compositional rules were broken “consciously” and not in “blissful ignorance”. I can’t help thinking that the first, and most appropriate reaction to an image should be “Do I like it?” Whether the author of it intended the outcome or not seems entirely irrelevant, and to only like those where the outcome is a result of conscious decision seems to me the worst sort of unthinking snobbery.  Winogrand’s conception of the photograph as something that exists separately to photographer, subject &c fits my current ideas, although he goes somewhat further than me.
Anyway, with spleen venting over, I have two things for you from Alec Soth’s Blog;

1) Why Bother?

In which the author muses on vernacular and found photography, and wonders if he’ll do anything with that impact - the comment thread after the article being almost as revealing as the article itself.

2) Photography Careers

Ever wanted to make money from your hobby? This guide will show you how.

One problem with this one however -”The exhibition will be of paintings, drawings and prints. All 2-dimensional work will be acceptable, with the exception of photographic prints and reproductions.”

They obviously don’t recognise photographic prints as being originals - a bit of education needed perhaps?

Crazy Doll Lady vs. Something Awful

The original site, triggering this wonderful e-mail correspondence, is here.

Be warned though - these images are not for persons of a nervous disposition.

So the use of photography is different. It is not the decisive moment frozen. It is a more measured purposeful encounter - the creation of the physical object. This is what I consider to be the “art”. The screen image or the photographic print is the object, the document of my process where the image becomes an image of itself. An event takes place but the viewer doesn’t experience that. They experience the idea of that. And ideally the viewer will have an experience where they will respond to the pictures - think about their own memories, perceptions and premonitions.

What I love is this process that you can go outside right now and capture something and then transform and present them as an idea, my imagination of the experience rather than the experience itself. There is a lot of imagination in reality. You just have to look for it.

They started life as ORWO slides. ORWO was an East German film with I think an ASA of 50. It produced incredibly saturated colours if slightly underexposed. Unfortunately, as light levels fell, you had to underexpose even more to keep the saturation. That coupled with very poor processing standards (miscut, mismounted, watermarks, scratches, creases) meant that my fascination with it was short lived.

Coming back to these slides some 30 years later, I find the slides have not just faded, but physically deteriorated too. They have developed mould spots and in places the emulsion is coming away from the film backing. I have started to scan them without, for now at least, doing much in the way of post scan processing. That is boring though, so I can’t resist working on them. The problem of course is that time spent in digital restoration is time in which the decay continues.

I found - by accident to be honest - that the best looking images are monochrome. Brenda called them ‘recreations’ but that isn’t my aim in making them mono, they just look better that way. The fading has left a strong blue cast, that my limited digital skills heve been unable to remove and this is of course lost in the mono versions. In making the mono versions I have tended to go for darker images than the colour originals.

I am not losing the colour versions however - I restore as far as I can in colour and then start again in mono. The spotting and scratch removal is done at a magnification of at least 300%, zooming in and out to make sure no inadvertant artefacts are created. At the time of writing there are I think 8 images in the set but I have another dozen or so to finish spotting, scratch removal and conversion to mono. with perhaps another 70 still to scan. I have no idea what the unscanned ones will turn out like, but I would be surprised if more than half are usable, either because the image is a near duplicate or doesn’t work or because the slide has suffered too much damage. Everything is scanned though, regardless of condition.

I have to confess that this particular image is not really original, although it remains one of my favourites from the set. I saw the same composition first in the Guardian, taken by either Don McPhee or Denis Thorpe (both masters of newspaper photography) and I recognised it immediately when I walked across the top of the street.

I’m looking forward to having the full set assembled. I have it in mind to make a video with them (like this one) and I would love to see them in a more conventional gallery display. I can’t afford to get gallery prints done though, and inkjet prints of mono images are not entirely satisfactory unless you have a dedicated mono printer.

EDIT: The proportions of the embedded photo are slightly askew - it is too tall relative to the width and being new to Wordpress I can’t work out how to correct it.

EDIT2: Fixed by manually editing the image size in the HTML code. Is there an easier way?

It’s an interview with Simon Galley, one of Ilford Photo’s directors.