Category: Medium Format

Breaking the Rules

May 11, 2011 · 6 Comments ·

A good rule of thumb is that when shooting a portrait when you have very shallow depth of field, you should make sure the eyes are in focus. This image, taken yesterday during a session with a model for my Women in Camera series, breaks that rule. The camera is in focus, but the model is out of focus. Although this particular image likely will not be the final selection for the series, I do like the effect and the resulting mood of the image, and the model made a great wardrobe choice with the hat, to give me the vintage look I was going for.

I suppose one could say the lens, or “eye” of my Voigtlander Avus folder is in focus so in that sense I’m not cheating 🙂

Photography As a Live Performance

May 9, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

Posts haven’t been very frequent lately, as I have been very busy appearing in a community theatre production of My Fair Lady here in Toronto. (By the way, tickets still available for this weekend, just click on the link). The thought did occur to me backstage this past weekend that in some ways, film photography is like live theatre; there is always an element of chance involved, and one is never quite sure how things will turn out, and unlike digital, where the LCD screen acts as a security blanket, in film you never know if you’ve been successful until the film is developed after the fact. Along with knowledge and skill, you have to rely on (as Alfred P. Doolittle would say) “Faith, Hope and a little bit of luck”. Today’s picture of a bike in downtown Toronto, taken with a defective Rolleicord Twin Lens Reflex camera (sold for scrap after shooting only one roll successfully and replaced with a better example) to me is an example of this idea. The picture isn’t perfect, but I got just enough luck to make it work. 🙂

The Paper Matters Too.

April 18, 2011April 18, 2011 · Leave a comment ·

Another cyanotype this time around. This picture was made at the Riverdale Zoo in Toronto, again using my Rolleicord Twin-Lens Reflex. I created a digital negative and then made the cyanotype below. The paper has a fairly coarse texture, and I like the effect it has on the image. Just one more reason why it matters to see a print in your hands, not just pixels on a screen.

A Different Brush

April 10, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

Yesterday I went out for the first time with my Rolleicord V, a twin lens reflex camera I bought last week. It shoots 6 x 6 cm images on 120 film.

Looking down to focus, on a ground glass with a laterally reversed image will take some getting used to, but that’s what I like; different types of cameras inform the photographic process in a different way.

The lens has interesting characteristics; quite sharp (at least in the centre), but in some of the images the out-of-focus backgrounds have a very vintage look. Quite distinctive, and another step away from the sameness I find that one can get using DSLR’s.

The Same But Different

April 7, 2011 · Leave a comment ·

This image is thematically related to the previous post, but different in many ways. It was shot at home, on a film camera, rather than on digital on a tropical island. Since the original was in black and white, I didn’t need to run the image through an expensive plug-in to get the effect I wanted; I just scanned the negative, and applied some very basic brightness and contrast settings to give the lighting the stark look I was looking for.

The Corridor

March 25, 2011 · 4 Comments ·

In Virgin Gorda we passed this stand of trees every day, and every day it caught my eye, as it seemed like a corridor in a cathedral. I took many pictures of it, and I think this is the one that best captures the impression it made on me. For this image I used my Mamiya medium format camera, 55 mm wide angle lens, and Ilford Delta 100 film.

A Happy Accident

February 13, 2011 · 4 Comments ·

In film photography, so many accidents can be fatal: the accidental exposure of film, “developing” your film in fixer first, even loading a roll of film backwards so that no exposures result :-(. Occasionally though, a technical issue can result in a good image. The image below is from a roll that I developed yesterday morning, and there was an issue with the fixer chemical, leaving a fog in some frames. When I scanned the negative, however, the fog in this image resulted in a blue tinge/haze over much of the frame. Even though it was a black and white image, I scan my negatives in colour, hence the blue.

Since the subject matter is ice, the blue really fits in well. I am going to have a go at refixing the negative (since it will just get worse) over time, but in the meantime, I am enjoying this happy accident.

A Clunk In a Forest of Clicks

February 4, 2011 · 3 Comments ·

This past Wednesday I (and about 50 other photographers) attended the dress rehearsal of a ballet in Markham (Actual ballet pictures will follow, once we get through a rather Byzantine approvals process). Most people in the room were shooting digital only, although I was shooting both film and digital. There was one other person there though shooting film, using an absolutely gorgeous Hasselblad 500C medium format camera.

As the ballet took place, the room was alive with the sounds of shutters clicking, including the sound of one shooter who felt he or she needed to shoot 8 frames per second to capture a dancer spinning. But every now and then, out of the din of digital shutters, CLUNK. It was the sound of the Hasselblad shooter firing her shutter.

It was a beautiful, authoritative, absolutely analog sound, and it was interesting to see other photographers turn their heads at the unfamiliar sound. Without trying to wax too poetical, the sound of the Hasselblad shutter firing expressed the soul of photography, more than the tinny little click of a DSLR shutter ever could.

A Twist On Time-Warp Tuesday

November 23, 2010 · Leave a comment ·

I am going to put another twist on Time-Warp Tuesday this week. The image below is not an old image; in fact it dates from just this past Sunday, when I was at the Beaches in Toronto. What qualifies it for Time-Warp Tuesday is that it represents a mix of old and new technology. First the old: the camera I used, my Mamiya M645J medium format, dates from the late 1970’s. The film format it uses, 120, dates from the first decade of the 20th century. Finally, the developer chemical I used to process the film, D-76, dates from the mid 1920’s.

The new is represented first by a couple of great iPhone Apps that had a part in the making of this image. First, since the camera is a completely manual model with no built in light meter, I needed something to calculate the exposure. Instead of bringing along a traditional light meter, I used a great (and free!) iPhone app called Pocket Light Meter, which takes advantage of the light meter built into the iPhone’s camera, and it did a pretty good job, better in fact than my “real” light meter as a matter of fact. The second app I used was in the dark room, and is called Massive Dev Chart; it combines an encyclopaedia of development times for various film and chemical combinations, with a specialized timer that makes timing the various steps of the development process a snap.

I think one of the greatest things about photography is the ability to mix the old with the new; you can go completely digital start to finish, or at the other end, use completely “obsolete” processes, like wet plate collodion. With the hybrid workflow, you can find your spot anywhere in this technology spectrum, using whatever fulfills your vision. These are exciting times.

My Third Eye

John Meadows Photography Blog