Author: johnmeadowsphotography

An amateur photographer in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

GoodBye Kodachrome

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The deadline came and went yesterday: the cut-off for Dwayne’s Photo-lab accepting Kodachrome for processing. Apparently there was a huge surge of film being sent in to beat the deadline, but no more will be accepted now.

For seventy-five years Kodachrome has been used to illustrate the storyboard of much of humanity; what a priceless legacy!

The image below is one I captured on the Kodachrome Photowalk in October of this year. Nothing special about it, but as one of countless millions of Kodachrome images created in seventy-five years, it shares in that collective legacy.

Thank you Kodachrome. In a century where so much of the technology developed was for the express purpose of killing each other more efficiently and in larger numbers, your technology was made for creativity, truth and beauty.

And as a tool of creation, you are more powerful than any tool of destruction.

 

johnm012

Portrait of the Artist: Daniele Rossi

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Normally TimeWarp Tuesday is for old photographs, but today a different angle on that theme: a new photo involving a very old process. First, the subject of the portrait is my good friend Daniele Rossi, artist, web designer and podcaster. He is a mix of old and new: on one hand, as an artist he applies pigments to a flat surface, a form of artistic expression almost as old as humanity itself. On the other hand, as a podcaster, web designer and social media denizen, he is about as current as you can get on the latest technology.

Portrait of the Artist: Daniele Rossi

My image is also a mix of old and new. The original image was created with a 30 year old Nikon FM SLR, using the classic Kodak Tri-X film, developed at home. New technology then got into the picture, as I scanned the negative using a film scanner. Then using Photoshop and an ink-jet printer I created a full-size paper negative. Then, back to traditional techniques: I applied baby oil to the paper negative to make it more transparent, and contact printed the negative using the Cyanotype process. This process dates back almost to the dawn of photography, as it was invented in 1842. Exposure to the sun (or other suitable UV source) hardens the emulsion. In the case of this image, it was exposed to the sun for about an hour. The print was then “developed” by rinsing in cold water, then soaked in a weak Hydrogen Peroxide solution to bring out the brilliance in the blue tones of the print.

I have fallen in love with this process!!

 

Time-Warp Tuesday: Ghost of Christmas Past

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Christmas memories, and how times have changed, so for Time-Warp Tuesday this week I have a Kodachrome slide; I made this image, a close-up of an ornament on the family Christmas tree sometime between 1980-82.

Tree Ornament, 1982?

This slide looks pretty much like it did when I first took the image; the colours and sharpness have remained true. So much else about Christmas has changed though: relatives have passed on, and at the same time a new generation has arisen to be part of my Christmas memories.

My late mother was very proud of her Christmas tree ornaments, and her tree decorating. If such a thing as Yuletide Feng Shui existed, she was the master. Now the collection is spread out amongst various family members, so we will never see a single tree like that again. All we have are images like this one, capturing the memory of Christmas treasures.

 

Portrait of the Artist: Randell Rosenfield

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Another in my Portrait of the Artist series today:  Randell Rosenfield is a founding member of the Toronto-based early music enable Sine Nomine. My wife is a also a member of this group, and in addition to recording their Christmas concert last Saturday night, I was also able to take pictures of Sine Nomine as they warmed up and got in final rehearsal for the concert. In this image Randell is playing a vielle, a forerunner of the violin.

The Vielle

 

From a technical point of view, it was a challenging shoot. I was using a Nikon FM film camera with a 50mm f1.4 lens. I was shooting sans flash, so even using Kodak Tri-X film pushed to E.I. 1600, I had to shoot at 1/30 of a second, wide open. Because of the slow shutter speed, I had to time my shoots to coincide with the short pause at the end of each upbow or down bow, in an attempt to avoid blur. I am quite happy with the results; there is a luminosity in black and white film that is just not there in digital black and white.

And of course, when taking images of a group that performs medieval music, using a digital camera would have felt wrong. 🙂

 

Sometimes Being Polite Doesn’t Cut It

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No picture today, just a comment on something that disturbs me: On at least two separate photography podcasts recently, I’ve heard people talk about the rights of photographers to take pictures in public places, and the clash of photographers exercising that right with various authority figures (police, security guards etc.) harassing, threatening, arresting and assaulting them to prevent the taking of these pictures. These authority figures (either through ignorance of, or worse, disregard for the law) make up their own rules about what it possible in a public space. In Toronto, we only have to look back to the G20 debacle for this kind of misuse of power.

What disturbs me is when people say, yes you have the right to take a picture in a public space, but do you really want the confrontation, and wouldn’t it be better just to back off and go take pictures somewhere else? In the next breath, photographers who don’t back down but stand up for their rights are negatively characterized as confrontation junkies, who just want the thrill of getting in the face of “the man.”

When people suggest giving up their rights so meekly, they are insulting everyone who in the past fought and suffered for every right we take for granted.  Would they have suggested to Rosa Parks that yes, she had the right to keep her seat on the bus, but wouldn’t it be simpler if she just gave up her seat? Would they have suggesting to Ghandi that while India deserved independence it would have been better to avoid confronting the soldiers and police (the ones with the guns).

There is a time and place for being polite, and when confronted by someone trying to take away your rights, going ballistic at the start is not normally the best way to go; but neither is meekly surrendering those rights. Sometimes manners aren’t enough and you have to get in someone’s face if those rights mean anything to you. Our rights are like gardens: constant attention is needed to prevent authoritarian weeds from growing and choking our rights out of existence.

As a photographer, there is no middle ground here; where do you stand?