Wallace Koopmans Artlog

When I visited the Museum of Anthropology a few months ago I took my Zeiss Icon medium format camera with me.  The reason for the camera choice is that the distortion of the antique Zeiss lens adds to the vintage look, which is what I was after. 

Carver: Mungo Martin 1951

Carver: Bill Reid with Doug Cranmer

Carver: Bill Reid with Doug Cranmer

Inside the MOA great hall

 Wuikinuxv  house post from Rivers, Inlet B.C.

And finally here is a picture of my Mother from 1961 in Victoria.  I believe that the man in the hat in the background is Mungo Martin although I don’t know where the pole being carved ended up.

“Day 452: I haven’t seen another  living thing for days now and I’m down to 2 litres of water, but on the bright side I still have film!”

Hopefully this is enough “good” film to tide me over until social order is re-established, too bad all the digital cameras stopped working, who new.

As I shoot through my first pack of Fuji FP100c I hope to learn what works and what doesn’t with this film and camera (Polaroid 330)   My initial reaction is that it doesn’t lend itself to taking close-ups or landscapes.  The best shot so far has been a Portrait and maybe that is where the strength of this combination will be.

There is nothing quite like actually seeing an original platinum or gum print but I wanted to try to evoke the aesthetic of pictorialism with this digital image.

In this detail you can see some of the processing that has been done. There were a lot of steps to arrive at this but the primary ones are that the image was toned and reduced in contrast followed by the addition of grain and scratches from a scanned negative. I then applied some surface texture as if it had been printed on a rough paper. There were more adjustments and a few dead ends in the process.

Pictorialism was a photographic approach that created atmospheric images that were more about tones and creating a painterly look than capturing detail and reality. It developed during the late 1800’s in somewhat of a response to the growing proliferation of amerture photography and in an effort to raise photography above this. For more information see Pictorialism on Wikipedia or for a longer look the book Truth Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945

My favorite from this book though is a quote from Edward Steichen in 1903

“Some day there may be invented a machine that needs but to be wound up and sent roaming o’er hill and dale, through fields and meadows, by babbling brooks and shady woods – in short, a machine that will discriminatingly select its subject and by means of a skilful arrangement of springs and screws, compose its motif, expose the plate, develop, print and even mount and frame the result of its excursion, so that there will remain nothing for us to do but to send it to the Royal Photographic Society’s exhibition and gratefully receive the Royal Medal.”

I believe I downloaded that app.

I really like the pastel colours I’m getting from my Polaroid Spectra film.  The garbage container is a bright green and the truck is some sort of pink undercoating but the film has softened them both.

This completes another set of 10 original Polaroid Spectra integral films, so I’ve pulled more from the fridge leaving me with 30 exposures.

Remember for best results: Take pictures.  Great advice!

 I’ve been playing around with editing some digital files on the iPad even before I have uploaded them to my computer.  One of the things this allows is the freedom to go over the top with the processing, just as most of the images on social sharing services have digital filters applied, editing on the iPad seems like a license to do it there as well.  Would I want all my images to be square and highly saturated? No, but there is a certain appeal to it.  

Or should I say cross possessed? The film base and all the images took on a sickly green cast after being processed in C41 chemicals. That’s somewhat OK as despite it being positive film the processing results in a negative. When the colour is inverted it results in a strong red hue. I found that I got the best results with these “negatives” by scanning them as slides and then batch inverting and processing them in Photoshop. So really what you see is a combination of the cross processing and my choice of how to handle them digitally afterwards.

I should mention that these were all shot with my Yashica Electro GX a fine camera I must say.

I’m writing this on an iPad that is using my Android phone for it’s Internet access. The image has been converted in camera from a DNG raw file to a jpeg and then loaded to the iPad using the camera connection kit’s SD card reader. The point of all this is really just to test out the usability of the iPad as a photographers tool. It does allow the importing and viewing of the RAW file but the camera provided the most convenient way to convert and resize the image. The key test for me though will be how easily I can import the files to my computer using iTunes as I use my own file locations and work flow.  

UPDATE  with windows 7 I am able to download my DNG raw files directly from the iPad through Lightroom and all the exif data remains untouched.  This is good news and means that in addition to being a great way to view images it can be used as field back up too.

One thing to note if you are importing to the iPad is that you will be prompted to delete the images from the card, personally I like to have a backup so I decline the delete.

For reference 31 RAW files from my Pentax K-7 took just over 3 minutes to import into the iPad.  This is from a 30Mb/sec Extreme III card and the “New” iPad.

The day after this shot all of these flowers were gone, as the maintenance crews cut them down.  “capto flores“