photo-breezing

(Hong-An Tran)
she is good I think. she came up before somewhere? I think maybe Michael knows her a lil.

Yeah, she's a (mostly online) pal. We met years ago in South London and again last year in NYC. I really like her work. She's recently got herself a Pentax 67 II, so she's shooting a lot more medium format of late.

yeah, i feel like maybe slightly-outta-focus phots would exist more easily seen very large, because it is maybe hard to see them on the page without the kinda learned, technological reflex of it's out of focus, this being a failing. i have recklessly spun the focus wheel over the past few months & am waiting to see what it came out like.

re: eggleston sky photos:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51wnnNGXhDL.jpg_SX350_BO1,138,138,138_SH30_BO0,100,100,100_PA7,5,5,10_.jpg

seeing his occasional lilac-suffused sky photos is always intoxicating to me. it is funny you mentioning Newtime Photo trends, because sometimes i feel like i am having to work back toward some of those things, having kinda binged on & exhausted them early on. like whenever i see some kinda Ed Ruscha nighttime convenience store shot, or a Meyerowitz New-England-light shot, i have to remember that long exposures are an actual constitutive technique of photography, & not just One Neat Trick for outsmarting the stars & revealing their secret motion while vacationing somewhere cloudless.

i think if i was going to see the Chromatics i would be really worried they would be all too human. Ruth's voice not being like whispering in my ear definitely sounds like some kind of jeopardy.

how is the video goin, cv? i had a big plan to start a cellphone video thread a while ago that i never pulled the trigger on. i have shot a lot of stray video i like & which feels entwined with shooting stills, to me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrsAqmhSnFg

& Michael did we see your nyc shots, y/n. i find it hard to go there & not just fall into stars-&-stripes documentation.

Not sure if I posted anything from NYC 2012 or not... Here's some...

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7224/7373160904_f92ac454ec_z.jpg

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5345/7187924709_f0bfae2467_z.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7105/7187953337_0e493f7b53_z.jpg

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8156/7577536308_a1aa1221b5_z.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7219/7187942963_9c2f6f61e3_z.jpg

all I've been doing so far with the video is getting a bit buzzed and watching it. lots of road trip footage, lots of friends horsing around, attempts at filmmaking, special effects experiments. and just tons of shots out car windows. more of that than anything else. I don't really know what to do with much of it, but there's some entertaining stuff there.

speaking of cellphone videos, I think I've benefited over the last year from remembering to pull out the phone a bit more often and I've got stuff that I'd be up for putting online. I like that thing you posted, and that's often the most meaningful kind of video to me: a bit bumpy, on-the-go, but with a strong sense of the air.

maybe I'll start a youtube channel when I've got a little more time.

ha, i can imagine all video shot 2003 - 2010 just being fried by Special Effects Experiments. car window shots sound great! i am resisting the temptation to post some of my cool Train Journey Window footage here but it is totally alluring to me. i was cruising the website of the photographer Grady posted a few days ago & saw some video she made, which i have a couple of things kinda in the same ballpark as; crushing together cellphone footage & just paring things down until you have the spare frenetic moments bouncing off each other fluidly. i all seriously don't approve of there being music on top but it is satisfying to do, to me, to learn how to edit as much as for anything else, as much as for giving it a home. diarism is such a strong pull to me, &, like what you said about remembering to shoot stuff with a phone or whatever, it is pretty powerful to momentarily inhabit somebody else's historic very slight moment through that kind of footage or film.

some breezing:

- watching the Francesca Woodman documentary
- sometimes I go to the library & look through her books, her work is arresting, weirdly it is often the lightest/cartooniest stuff I find heavy
- & my camera is fucking up, just in small ways but several small ways simultaneously. I have never been a gear person & I wondered, before I just picked up another olympus, whether anybody had other-brand recommendations for something in the same ballpark. I'd be trying to get a kinda lateral equivalent of the OM-1, <$100, &'d be trying to pick up a 35mm lens or something similar. go-w-what-u-know is my reflex here but if anyone was particularly effusive about some canon SLR or w/e I would be receptive

http://instagram.com/p/eZtmo6GGXN/

i love that dude to death but every time he gets on instagram it's like 30 pictures in a row

take away his camera

it's missy elliott on twitter all over again

these are the nathaniel dorsky nyff programs that i was endorsing btw:

http://nathanieldorsky.net/post/61132469758/kodachrome-dailies-from-the-time-of-song-and
http://nathanieldorsky.net/post/60005803288/song-and-spring-will-play-twice-at-the-new-york

http://25.media.tumblr.com/0fcf25247cdc249c1b23802f336e7d83/tumblr_mt2x8hZ3Uu1s6z4s9o1_1280.jpg

I think most 60s 70s SLRs are pretty interchangeable. Just check to make sure everything's working. See if you can luck out on a nice Nikon or something maybe

i read some Rangefinder Guys Forum discussion last night & it sounded that way. i will get something & like its light meter less than i like the om-1s but it seems okay. it sounds like nikons are pretty tough, & i like being able to treat things badly, so that's a plus maybe. unless anybody is effusive about retailers this is a purchase i am going to make on ebay between 12 - 2am at some point in the next couple months i think.

Guys any tips on a good & chrap manual focus Nikon lens 30-35mm range, big appurature?

cheap*

Ebay's been good to me but of course then you can't test the thing. Do you get many Craigslist listings in your city?

That was re SLRs. Dunno about Nikon lenses.

yeah totally, was just wondering if there was a specific lens anyone wanted to steer me in the direction of

oh xps

Sorry. Only ever used my gf's Nikon with its old slow lenses.

nikon lenses are weird to price because they hold their value pretty well? since they never changed the mount. i dunno i could be talking out of my ass

i just walked past this:

http://butterfliesandbuffalo.com/theproject/camera/

would any of you guys have any idea why the buildings here are increasingly out of focus moving left to right? what would cause that? they're all the same distance away pretty much...

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2879/10028949374_0b6429e0ba_b.jpg

i really don't know the answer to this (& they don't look too-jarringly-different, to me), but is it the amount of ambient light, which is kinda abundant on the left & minimal on the right? i want to talk poetically about air purity like hearing joel meyerowitz talk about taking photographs of light in cape cod but i don't really have the stats to back this

tilt shift?

could be that they're actually not all the same distance away. with aperture at f/2 your DOF is gonna be fairly narrow, esp if the focus is not at infinity

there was a TOP post that mentioned stuff about air purity & c. here http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2013/09/leica-on-high.html

huh i guess yeah could just be that--aperture, etc. maybe ill test it out again. i noticed it and then the first person i showed it to noticed it and now i can't not notice, oh well

was for a few reasons (work stuff, friend stuff, a first date that didnt go very well, etc.) feeling really crappy on sunday. got myself out of bed and wandered around town. still feeling all bummed and sorry for myself when this happened. background is that domestic helpers, mostly from the philippines, work extremely hard, are separated from family for years at a time, are treated very unfairly under the law here in hk, and generally get only a few hours a week (on sunday) off. yet, they remain for the most part the warmest, most cheerful people. anyways, they all get together on sunday. walked through a big group. i just held up my camera and flash and shot off 3 pics quickly. this is the third one. just..this was the spontaneous response and captures the exact moment i felt better...best ppl ever:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7432/10119561994_095c6f51da_b.jpg

aw <3

that is fucking awesome

that's so great

i watched a bunch of jonas mekas films at a retro, here, having always felt like i kinda got JM & admiring him a bunch & liking the lithuania film without loving it, & i am really just knocked out, now, like by how much of a template he is for diaristic art, & then also just by his occasional - as in not constant, & not immediate - skill as a filmmaker. there are parts of walden that resemble the best of saul leiter's photography, i think, & parts of as i was moving ahead that are as good at recording & working with images as any of the like top shelf still photographers i can think of. brutally underserved by youtube's colour rendering here (& i'm trying to link directly to 1 hr 7 min & 49 seconds through, which it mightn't), but his recording & frenetic reediting of a snowball fight is such a powerful, reverberative glimpse into something that happened forever ago & still just pops from the screen,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD1CfCV1rPw?t=1h7m49s

road surfaces and slide film, the dream combo

does anybody who has ever had a prolonged internal moral debate about the ethics of cropping feel like sharing their thoughts, here? i have never wanted to crop. or zoom. jesus christ. but I have a fridge full of photographs that I took with a lens I was too distracted & dilettantish to realise was pretty beat up, the photos which were taken through bearing the slight scars of. one edge, when i've shot toward light & focused a long way away, has a slight clustering of a few lines, eating into the sky & ruining its uniformity. it only occurred to me while i couldn't sleep last night, after being kinda bummed about this occasional distraction that: oh yeah, i could just crop. & robert frank cropped! & before that i'd been trying to find comfort in how beat up some peoples' photos are anyway. or thinking about jonas mekas' film work, which is usually pretty jagged-edged, sixteen mm camera frames not usually absent of some kind of interference.

cropping. what do you think about it. i play with the frame a lot i think. but also sometimes maybe it's more important to concentrate on serving the thing you took a photograph of?

99.5% of the time i don't crop

I crop a lot. I just checked the last 100 images I published out of Lightroom in some form, and 60 of them were cropped from the original 3:2 ratio. Some were product shots I had to crop square, other times I was going for some cinema-still effect, other times it's just sloppiness by me not getting close enough to my subject. I'm not remotely precious about it because I'm not good enough at composition.

When I've shot weddings I'm mindful of the fact that ppl may want 3:2 prints (6"x4" being yr standard high street lab print), so I lock the ratio and only crop in 3:2.

Cropping is fine don't let anybody tell you otherwise

Plenty of famous photogs cropped

Just don't let anybody see the uncrops

I think that HCB's 'puddle jumper' was in fact a crop but being HCB the original exists nowhere

As for film - no, I don't crop. For some weird reason I can't bring myself to crop a scanned frame. It is what it is.

http://i.imgur.com/xP2Qwaz.jpg

The original puddle jumper

THe part on the left was part of the fence he was shooting through

http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/derriere-la-gare-saint-lazare/

Apparently one of only two of his photos that were ever cropped

Like we could prove otherwise though

He probably burns all his contact sheets

And of course the version we all know now crops out the bottom 1/3 of the picture as well

http://i.imgur.com/gHIb5hd.jpg

Gordon Parks shoots the Invisible Man, Crops

the most reproduced portrait of all time was cropped

http://i.imgur.com/sHiyNhL.jpg

Cropping was arguably better in the film days

You'd just move the enlarger head closer

Bigger grain yeah sure but you could sometimes get more detail too

Cropping digital is okay if you have a large source file and you're gonna show at 1024x768 or some other web resolution

when i see something that visibly doesn't conform to a common ratio i am raising an eyebrow

bigger grain would actually probably be an argument for cropping for me

the same way deep overexposure + then scanning can get you something you can't get otherwise

Fucking hell, the original negative

http://i.imgur.com/8Ib5avK.jpg

I'm glad to see HCB underexposed too

You can think of anti-cropping people as being photography's rockists

But given all the other ways we manipulate images

Color balance curves printing big small whatever

Intentionally overexposing underexposing shooting expired film cross processing shooting movie film

Cropping is just one more tool in the kit

Nobody has to know

It can be your secret

Take it with you to the grave

Destroy your hard drive when you die

On my tombstone it will say

He was a cropper

I am not ashamed