Nothing Says Big Like BIG

As I get to know the Crown Graphic one thing becomes more and more clear to me. The images are BIGGER. I don't know how to explain that, really. I mean, once I upload it to Flickr or whatever the images are no bigger or smaller than if I had taken them on an iPhone. But somehow that BIGness comes across.

Take this image, for example, which I took on a recent outing with a good friend. In some ways it could have been taken with any camera. However, I just know that if I had been shooting with the F4 or the Mamiya I would not have come away with this image.

No profound explanations this time, just an observation.

On Shadows and Reflections

[I've been thinking about what to do with the blogspot blog for some time now. Given the rate at which I post updates it would seem the decent thing to do would be to let it die. However, I just love the large image format. And I love the back catalog of posts here. So here goes. We're keeping it.]

Part of developing as a photographic artist must be developing your own style. I would have to say the tastes of the day are really towards increasing punchiness in images. Today, an image must leap off the page, upturn your cornflakes and upset your dog just to stand out from the fire hose of images most of us are subject to. I don't exempt myself from this observation. If anything, I'm a real sucker for a punchy composition and nose-bleed colour. However, there is still something to be said for the subtle and unobvious.

Above, you see a nice detail of a screaming red Corvette. It's nice enough and seems quite simple. However, it rewards a repeated glance. That second set of tail lights? It's a reflection in the shiny chrome bumper. And what is that subtle shape on the left? Why, it's the shadow of my Crown Graphic. Look deeper still and you can even start to see the texture of the paint.

Nice. Subtle.

What Is Special About Large Format Portraits

There are many things that are special about pictures taken with a large format camera. Amongst just a few of the advantages are:

1. Huge film area means a huge canvas for light to play on. Huge detail, huge tonal range, tiny grain
2. Full camera movements. Tilt, slide, shift. You choose the plane of focus. You craft the image
3. The ground glass. You see exactly what the film will see. Ability to frame exactly. Ability to judge focus and depth of field exactly
4. Uncompromised lens design.

Actually, the list goes on and on. But for me a lot of the magic happens when you put a real living person in front of that big camera.

What do you see in this image? Softness and sharpness? Smooth tonality? An extra sense of reality? All of that and just a sprinkling of magic.

And this picture you are looking at is the very worst possible presentation of this piece of film. It is scanned on a terrible scanner using a very DIY technique of scanning the film in four slices and sticking them together in Photoshop. The film was even scanned still inside its plastic holder. Despite all of that the magic shines through.

Large format photography is the essence of photography and has been for more than a hundred years. The DSLRs of this world can never match it because they will never have a sensor spanning four inches by five inches. I look forward to creating more magic with this camera over the coming year.

Capturing The Essence

How do you capture a place? Sometimes it is easy. London? Houses of Parliment, London Eye or Tower Bridge. Seattle? Space Needle. Portland?

Hmm....

From a month's visit this was the best I managed. I was trying to get some of the more recogniseable buildings into the frame as well as some of the trees and the stream of cars heading up Burnside Road. To emphasize the road I kept the shutter open until I saw cars travel the whole length of all the visible road. To get the skyline nice I shot this just after sunset when the sky was getting nice and rich and dark blue.

LDR

Look at these soft delicate tones. Even this ugly utility box looks magical. This is overcast morning light. Flat light. Low Dynamic Range light. Here are some more low dynamic range scenes:

Sunsets
Sunrises
Portraits
Scenes in "Golden Hour" light
Forest scenes

In other words. Most actually beautiful scenes.

HDR

High Dynamic Range. Sounds good, right?

This is a an example of one of the few sorts of scenes I can really imagine wanting to take that actually has a high dynamic range. This is taken straight into a glaring sunrise with the foreground in complete silhouette. It was deliberately massively, mind-blowingly overexposed so that I could retain some of that foreground detail which, honestly, it would have been difficult to see clearly with my own eyeballs in that light.

Most scenes that are high contrast are unattractive and make bad photographs. These sorts of scenes usually look ugly in real life so it is the height of optimism to expect them to magically look great in a photo. In cases like the above where a scene has very high contrast but DOES look good we normally want to convey that high contrast feeling in the photo. This usually means letting a foreground darken to a black silhouette or letting the brightness of the bright parts burn to white.

Most HDR photographs that are successful celebrate the unreality that usually comes from excessive use of HDR software on massively high dynamic range scenes. This is, in fact, it's own artistic style. It's not a style I like but it certainly has quite a following.

I mostly shoot negative film. This capture medium has the capability to capture huge dynamic range in a single exposure. It also has very good properties at the extremes of its range. It "rolls off" organically (like our eyes do) and never "clips". This particular film, Kodak Ektar, may be the highest dynamic range capture medium on the planet which is why there is so much detail available in this crazily over-exposed scene. But most of the time, this extra latitude is best used to remove the worry about missing a shot through incorrect exposure. I do shoot carefully but with negative film I feel an extra confidence that when I press the shutter the shot is in the can.