Shooting On Film In The Gulf

Yes, it is possible. Yes, it is different.

Photography Is Different Here

Photography in general is different in the middle east. Like the rest of the world, photography has exploded here due to the digital revolution and the whole cellphone camera phone ubiquity that the rest of the world experienced. However, there are still social rules that make for some unexpected challenges.

Example: innocently including a private dwelling in the frame might get you in serious trouble depending on the owner of the building. Example: photographing people even indirectly without explicit permission may be seen as extremely offensive. Example: any form of "creative" photography involving non-typical-tourist subject matter or equipment may be viewed with great suspicion.

Technology Is Different Here

In the Gulf modern technology is a more recent arrival than in the parts of the world where these technologies originated. Qatar, where I live, was a very sleepy and quiet place a mere twenty years ago which has adopted an almost hyper-modern mode of existence at an absolutely breakneck pace. As a result, technology is viewed more linearly. Once a new technology has come out, it is difficult for people to understand any reason for someone using something more "old fashioned". As a result, when film was superseded by digital here it left no survivors.

The Weather Is Different Here

Or rather, it isn't. Summer consists of 100% sunny days. Sounds nice, right? We're talking about the kind of sunny day without a cloud in the sky, with a white rather than blue sky and with temperatures of over 120 degrees on average. Golden hour? The sun rises and sets rapidly during summer through a haze that totally obscures what should be the best light of the day. In a word, frustrating.

The Landscape Is Different Here

When I was preparing to come here I thought I knew what to expect. Rolling sand dunes, rocky outcroppings. Well, Qatar has a little of that in two small areas. Apart from that, the whole country is basically one large sand bar. Due to the salt and humidity all the ground consists of beige coloured dirt so hard packed that it gets excavated with jack hammers instead of shovels. I often see building sites with holes in the ground several stories tall with no reinforcement to the sides of the pit. The ground is that hard.

Mountains? Rivers? Lakes? Forests? Meadows? No, no, no, no and no.

What To Do?

Well, I'm a great believer in lemonade. As in, "when life gives you lemons..." I'm sure I have grown as a photographer in this environment.

I have learned to be very sensitive to light, season and nuance. I look at the sky constantly. I discount nothing as a potential shooting opportunity. And I have learned the value of trusting my instincts. Since there are not many "scenic" locations I carry a camera and tripod constantly. Some of my best pictures have come from happening upon something and being prepared when the light or moment was there. These lessons are helpful in every situation.

I once took a week long business to Cannes in the south of France. The abundance of beautiful surroundings and soft gorgeous light nearly made my eyeballs ache. Coming from the sparse environment I live in I had grown super-sensitive and the beauty of the place was like an overload to my senses.

I have learned to improvise. I use labs in the US for my E6 and develop my own C41 at home. When I first started shooting 4x5 I had only a cheap flatbed that could scan one strip of 35mm because the tranny adapter had only one thin strip of light. I made myself a sliding holder/mask which I used to scan the 4x5 film in four overlapping sections which I then stitched in Photoshop for each piece of film. I made a way.

I don't know what my future holds photographically speaking. I do know, however, that my time here has really helped prepare me to make the most of whatever that will be.

Camera Personalities

God gave you free will. That is why wisdom has value. Some choices are better than others.

Can you drive a nail with a screwdriver? Can you turn a screw with a butter knife? Can you walk through snow in flip-flops?

Of course you can. But there are better tools for those jobs, and better uses for those tools.

But this is a photography blog. So let's talk cameras.



I finally replaced my useless and buggy cheap Samsung with a decent camera phone. Prioritising having a decent camera with me over any other feature I went for the only camera with more megapixels than a Nikon D800e. Yes, the Nokia Pureview 808. Understandably my non-photographer wife now wonders why I even bother bringing a "real" camera anywhere. But really, as impressive as the specs are it is simply a sketchbook in photographic terms. If I want to create anything lasting and meaningful I still need my easel and oils.



But what are my various cameras' personalities. What do they want to do?

Well, the easiest to characterise is my Nikon F4S. It is a lot like a Range Rover. As ready for a farmer's field as for the valet at the Ritz. Heavy but hardy, precise in all its actions, utterly reliable. The fast autofocus and magic matrix meter takes the worry out of any fast moving situation. Responsive controls allow quick manual intervention whenever needed or wanted. The price being weight and complexity.



If we continue the metaphore then I suppose my Nikon FE is a bit like a well kept Land Rover Defender. Still quite respectable but much more simple. It is not quite as ready for any task but the tasks it does do it does with even more bullet proof reliability. Because it lacks the features of the F4 the controls are simple and immediate. Feedback is quick and sure. Through its simplicity it becomes utterly predictable. This allows it to "disappear" in use in a way that a more complex and automated device cannot.



The last of my 35mm cameras is the simplest. Being basically, even in its day, merely a well built tourist camera; the Kodak Retinette is simple in the extreme. I would liken it to a single barrel shotgun. With no sights. It is the last thing you would want if you need to frame precisely or perfectly nail the exposure. However, if you need to quickly blow a hole in something, a shotgun is very handy. The Retinette does not try to meter or focus or anything meaning it is always instantly ready. You simply set the exposure you expect and the focus distance you anticipate. When the time comes you simply point in the general direction and pull the trigger. Response is always instant.



Moving into more specialised territory, we hit my medium format system based around my Mamiya M645 Pro. This camera is something like a Corvette. It is clearly superior in image quality and ability to any of the mere 35mm cameras. But it is no Ferrari. That title would have to go to the "premium" members of the medium format fraternity like the Hasselblads and Rollies. However, like the scrappy Corvette, it approaches the superior abilities of the more exotic and expensive premium makes. However, like the Corvette, it lacks the finesse, build quality, and ultimate satisfaction level of those machines. It is the performance machine for a fast driver on a budget.

The Mamiya is a tool for professional use. You can start it in gear. It does not have anti-lock brakes. If it backfires while you are kick starting it then it will break your leg. If you leave the lights on when you shut it off it will leave you stranded at the trailhead later that night. If it doesn't start right away then you will flood the engine. It is much easier than the 35mm cameras to get wrong. Using it properly takes more steps. When things go wrong, it is less obvious what you are not doing right. But then, doing the week's shopping is a bit of a chore in a Corvette also. People buy them for what they do well and that is go fast. The Mamiya, if properly driven, spits out frames that no 35mm camera can touch.



What would the Crown Graphic be analogous to? It is definitely my most extreme machine. I guess it would be something like a semi with a flatbed trailer. Can you move the contents of a shipping container in a normal car or truck? Well, sure. If you don't mind making 100 trips. However, it is much easier and more sensible given that requirement to simply load it on the back of a semi and drive it to where you want it to go.

Would you go shopping in a semi? Would you race it or drive it off road? Well, you could. But you wouldn't. The Crown Graphic is a bit like that.



Analogies over, I find that for my uses the Crown Graphic is always my first choice for anything suitably "epic". As a witness to any amazing natural view with magic light the camera I would most want to have with me would be the Crown Graphic. And yet, since it takes time to use properly (and punishes careless use), it is really best suitable to things that are slightly predictable or can be waited for.

One highly predicatable situation is formal portraiture. The "shock and awe" that the awesome resolving power of that fat piece of film gives really adds power to a good portrait.



The Mamiya is good at these things as well but lacks the firepower of the Crown. In compensation it brings a higher rate of fire, cheaper "ammunition" and some automation such as built-in metering.

Lacking the punch of the big boys, the two Nikons fill in with all the photographic tasks that require good quality but lie outside the core strengths of the big cameras. Like an SUV compared with a semi they are well equipped to do an excellent job at most things that the semi could not even contemplate. Super telephoto, super wide angle, macro, automation. All things the Crown lacks. Ready for immediate use, one hand usable, good results without a tripod? Not the Crown. But the Nikons do all this and more with ease and aplomb.

So where does all of this leave my new cellphone camera?

Well, at 41 megapixel it theoretically places itself able to resolve more than the 35mm cameras and close to what the medium format camera can do. It is certainly faster and more portable than any of the other cameras in terms of speed of deployment. But in use, it is quickly clear that this is really more of a bicycle than any of the other cameras. As quickly as it can produce a usable image in many common circumstances it is capable of greatness in almost none. It is here let down by its sheer abundance of automation. It cannot be precisely controlled. As detailed as its sensor is it lacks the dynamic range of even my old Nikon D80, let alone the huge range available to any of the others when shooting modern colour negative film. Want to focus on that spider on his web? Nope. Can't. Need to lock it down for a low light or long distance shot? Nope. Need full control over the exposure? Nope. Want to change the lens or even the aperture? Out of luck again. How about something fast moving and you need the shutter to go off right when you press? Well, the only digital cameras that do that are DSLRs.

And what do you want to do with the pictures? Do you intend to work on them further? Perhaps print them? Well, I hope you like JPEGs because that's all you are getting. In fact, pretty much the only thing it surpasses at is capturing life's impromptu moments and sending them to Facebook as well as "sketching" passing things that catch the photographer's eye. It is a little like shooting instant film. What you get may be nice but whatever it is, you can forget about working further with it. It is what it is.

Do I sound unhappy? I am not. The 808 is just what I wanted. It is no worse for failing to be better at what my other cameras already do well. What the 808 does well, the other cameras can't do at all. That makes it a perfect addition to my arsenal.

It's About Feeling

I sense a wonderful thing, these days, in photo land. I sense that people are finally reaching the realisation that maybe good art cannot be bought by simply tacking on fancier tools. I see more discussion about aspects of image quality beyond mere megapixels and ISO. Good.

One of the things I love about film is that it is resolution independent. It is colour space independent. Heck, if we are talking about negative film even the ISO is somewhat flexible. And a proper film camera leaves you only worrying about the things that matter: your focus and your exposure.

I was trying to express what I like about analogue-sourced images when my eyes settled on this photograph. It is of a quiet hidden bay of a wild lake in southern Washington state. It is dark, quiet, peaceful. I look at the photograph and I can feel the surroundings. A digital capture of the same scene might be more technically accurate but it would fail to "put" me in the scene in the same way. To me, film images speak directly to the heart. Good ones do. And this is where a lot of people misunderstand photography.

When I started out in photography I started out like, I think, almost everybody else. The initial impression is that a photograph should express some kind of literal objective truth. It is only as one gets more involved in what choices one makes to achieve an image that one slowly learns that there is no such thing. After you learn that image making is a never-ending sequence of active choices you start developing the skill and hopefully confidence to make these choices deliberately with a certain goal in mind. Make no mistake, everyone makes these choices. If you are not aware of that then you are making the choices randomly or abdicating them to automatic processes somewhere along the line. That doesn't make your images more honest, just more random and unfocussed.

And what is the point of all of this? You are creating an image. It has the same goal as any other work of art. It should make you feel something!

Sunset On The Lake

I took a few shots on the lake last summer in Washington state. This one sticks with me.

There is not much to say about the technical aspects of the picture. Allowing the trees to fall in value to a near silhouette creates a graphical quality to the picture. Often, simplicity is a virtue in photographs.

Seeing What You Can't See

A shot like this is not something you will ever see at the time. Our brains and eyes don't see in terms of minutes and hours. We also cannot see at the time as much detail as the camera will pick up on a long exposure.

To achieve a picture like this you have to see it in your mind's eye before hand.

There are some tricks that you can use. Experience will help you to judge the things that will appear in a long exposure. For the stars you should be able to find the North Star or Southern Cross. The stars will spiral around this point and you can design the composition to feature this with a little forethought. This picture is also assisted by the leading lines from the tree trunks. Taking the picture with a very wide angle lens has helped to create the impression that all the trees are aimed at some distant point.

The technical details are not nearly as important.

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark

There is an old truism about determining correct exposure. The exposure meters in most cameras will do an excellent job in most situations but there are certain scenes like a white cat on a snow bank or a black cat in a coal shed that the built-in exposure meter will be guaranteed to get wrong. This is because the camera cannot really understand what it is looking at.

When we start taking pictures we often lack the confidence to make our own decisions, especially when they contradict the recommendations of the camera. But it is only by making your own decisions that you will really start to take control of the images that you create.

Good Enough Isn't

Some images you will work harder on than others. Your better images are more important to get right because they are the ones that really have potential to affect people. Some images just don't have anything going for them. However much work you put into them you are essentially, as they say, polishing a turd. For the good ones, however, it can take a lot of work to get it close to where you think it should be. But it should always be as close as you can make it.

This can be quite a burden. Sometimes an image is taken as far as it can go and you later learn something which it suddenly occurs to you will let you take a certain image an important step forward. You return to the image and now you find that the only way to improve the image is to do all the work again this time incorporating whatever it is that you have learned. This is almost always considerably more work than whatever considerable work you already invested in the image. The temptation is just not to bother. It's good enough.

There is no "good enough" in art.

The above picture is now much closer to where it always should have been. It is my hope that I will always have the courage to return to images that need it.

Be Free

You can crop.

Don't feel obliged to leave in whole swaths of picture area that aren't doing anything. It's not always something you can avoid at shooting time (for instance if you have a fixed lens camera). Of course get it right at shooting time if you can but if you can't just crop.

The above is a one megapixel crop from a six megapixel image. More than enough to tell the story.

Sunset On Russian Hill San Francisco

Taken with a small 1950s tourist camera.

The Ansel Adams Moves

I read a recent article on www.luminous-landscape.com by Alain Briot. He was arguing for greater artistic interpretation in "art" photographs, particularly landscape ones. He described such things as were possible in the darkroom and perfected in the work of Ansel Adams as the "Ansel Adams moves". He went on to cover local geometric distortion, cloning elements and selective colour shifting etcetera as the further alterations that were appropriate now that they are possible.

The gist of his article was that we are all living in the past and should not feel bound by what was done before. After all, what was done before was largely as much as could be done within the scope of the tools available. And, of course, Alain Briot is an artist and does (unlike many luminous-landscape writers) have some attractive and impressive work to back up his words with. Still, it got me thinking if he was right.

I'm not so sure. I feel quite an affinity for the so-called Ansel Adams moves. I feel that art gets power from certain limitations. Is a six string bass always better than a four? Is a synthesizer better than an electric guitar because it can span more notes and make more different sounds? I would say not always, maybe even not often.

Photography is not painting. It defines itself ultimately through the concept of seeing the world through some lens or other. There is a certain implication in a photograph that the picture is related in some fairly simple way to the actual light rays that came in through the lens and formed it. We are happy for a guitar to be distorted, for instance, but not for one of the strings to sound like a piano and the next string like a harp.

The above is a recent picture of mine. It probably has the most "processing" done on it of any photograph I have taken recently. However, they are all "Ansel Adams" moves. It is my hope that the picture still looks natural. As Ansel Adams himself says, once the work that is done on a photograph reaches a level where it is obvious it looses all its power.

Show Me Some Skin

Human skin.

I think it is the most difficult thing to get looking truly natural.

We, as people, are just so highly attuned to what it should look like. We know what colour it should be and we are very highly attuned to any distortion of that colour or any colour casts across the range of tones on the skin. We also know what texture it should be. For us it is a key indicator of health what a person's skin looks like. Sloppy retouching can give a plastic sheen to skin that leaves a person looking ill or even simply unreal.

This is a large format portrait I took a while back of Sarah, who is both beautiful and awesome to work with. I am constrained, currently, by having to work with a rather cheap and cheerful scanner for my large format work. It is difficult, therefore, to get a good scan that preserves all the nuances of tone. As a result I struggled with this particular image for several days. The other versions were not terrible but they were all let down by poor skin tone (colour, texture or both).

I think I've cracked it with this version.

Feel free to disagree in the comments.

Just Shoot!

The scene: Amazing sunset

The problem: Crummy unclean hotel window in the way

The solution: Choose a largish aperture and shield lens with hand

Find The Essence

I love my large format camera. It makes me think. I went on a trip with a friend to the north of Qatar. He was shooting birds, I was along to share time with a friend and fellow photographer and see a new place. I shot about twenty frames of 35mm film that day and one sheet of 4x5.

It was this.

I found a loop of old barbed wire on a rock. It was entangled and entwined with an equally thorny plant. It immediately put me in mind of the crown of thorns that the Roman soldiers put on Jesus when they mocked him as "king of the jews".

But there was no shot that really got to the depth of the thorniness that included the whole shape that drew me in in the first place. What really summed it up was this.

Get Close

When I bought my Crown Graphic the first thing I needed was a lens. Naturally, I started with a "normal" length lens. In 4x5 film camera terms this means around 150mm. Of course, one of the things I wanted to do with the camera was portraiture. And I like tight head shots. At first this seemed like an oversight.

I decided to persevere. A view camera doesn't really have any practical limits on how close you can focus the lens. The limits are the length of the rails and the maximum draw of the bellows. But when I tried it I was shocked how close the camera had to be to my subject to achieve focus.

And now I love it. A good picture draws you in. I think these do.

Drum Roll Please

Got some awesome scans done by Tim Parkin in the UK. You can find him at www.cheapdrumscanning.com

It's Hip To Be Square

One day I would love to own a Hasselblad. Or a Rollieflex. Or some other of those great classic medium format cameras that natively take pictures in a square format. I think there is a special elegance to the square as a border for an image. It by no means suits every image bit when it does the image is endowed with a certain strength and solidity.

In his later years the great Ansel Adams shot with a square format Hasselblad camera but almost always with an eye to cropping a final rectangular image out of the frame. Cropping after the fact is always an option but most photographers feel the most fulfilled when they are able to take the frame they see through the viewfinder and nestle a particular scene perfectly inside.

The above picture was taken using my Mamiya M645 Pro medium format camera. It, like all my other cameras, shoots normal rectangular images. The square crop suited this image. I didn't see it when taking it, only later when editing.

The magic of a particular format, however, is that you start to see like it sees once familiar with it. If I want to start taking truly great square images I need a camera that "sees" in square.

Some day.

Fortune Favours The Bold

There's always time, right? Wrong!

I really like this shot but I almost didn't get it. The bulldozers took this structure away forever just a week ago. The time is now.

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.