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.

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.