Today’s image is another street shot taken with my Voigtlander Vito B. It was around 5 pm on a weekday at Yonge and Bloor here in Toronto, and a mass of people were going home, like a tide going back out to sea.
In Motion
Today’s image is the first of a couple I’ll be posting from a shoot with model Tara on Friday evening. The shoot featured steampunk elements such as the goggles, and in the image below a parasol that I tried to give a brass effect to. In this image, I asked Tara to spin the parasol, while I used a very slow shutter speed. I think it worked 🙂
Coming Home
I think I’ve found the perfect street photography camera for me, and ironically it is one I have had since the early 1970’s: my late father’s late 1950’s Voigtlander Vito B. I have not put a roll of film through it since early 1977, and I am happy to report it still works just fine 🙂
What makes it great for street photography in my mind is a feature it lacks — it has no built in rangefinder, just scale focus. This lack forces me to trust zone focusing and hyperfocal distance, getting it ready ahead of time, and then just bringing the large, bright, unencumbered viewfinder to my eye. For today’s image, it was maybe 2 seconds to see the scene, and quickly fire off the frame.
I have left this camera sit idle for far too long; it’s nice to be home.
Facial Landscape
The first two images I posted of model Theresa in High Park were to some extent dominated by lines and background. Today I return to more familiar territory: the amazing landscape of human facial expression.
(Mamiya 645 Pro TL camera, Tri-X exposed at E.I. 800, developed in Diafine 3+3)
A Gift of Luck
If you shoot lots of frames, you are bound to get lucky, in terms of getting more in an image than you expected. After two days of being more or less housebound due to back pain, I made it out this evening to have dinner with my two daughters, and on the way home I quietly snapped a frame “from the hip” with my iPhone and the Hipstamatic app, at Broadview Station. When I looked at the frame I was struck by a dividing line that bisects the image, through the woman’s head. I like it!
Complexity
Today another image of Ren from the Steampunk shoot the other day. This image is very different from the one I posted last time: there is no anonymity imposed by dark goggles. Instead, an intriguing, complex expression. Ren is a complex person — creative, driven, certainly not shallow, and hungry to experience everything life has to offer. I think that comes through in this image.
Steam Punk Polaroid
Expect to see more steam punk images over the next little while! Today’s image is of Ren Brockhouse, who I know through a Toronto theatre group. One of the things that appeals to me about steam punk is how it celebrates technologies that were accessible: things you could build, repair, change or hack with the right tools or know-how. So much of technology today is hermetically sealed away and abstracted; we seem to know so little about how things work, and that is a dangerous state of affairs!
From a Distance
I think I’ve mentioned before how so much of my portrait work is close-up; I am addicted to the biography (indeed the landscape) that is the human face. I have to force myself to pull back ever now and then, and let more of the setting into the story, or even become the story, as I think it does in this image of model Theresa in High Park.
Lines
A wavy fence in High Park really caught my eye, and I had to work it into a portrait!
Shreeti, Part 3
Today’s image is the final one from my recent photo shoot with Shreeti. The first post featured a colour digital image. The second was a negative scan from an instant print. Today, traditional black and white film. I feel each different technology captured something different from the shoot. For me, black and white does the best job of capturing the detail of the lovely clothing worn by Shreeti.
(Mamiya 645 Pro TL, Ilford Delta 400, negative scanned and post processed with Nik Efex pro)
My Third Eye 