Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Recently Fuji announced a new digital compact camera, the X100, that has many styling cues from the past.  It’s an attractive camera and has garnered a lot of attention from photographers.  I’m interested in seeing this camera in person when it comes out in 2011 but until then I decided to give one of the Fujica’s I already own a spin.  The Fujica 35 Auto M has an unusual 47mm f2.8 lens.   Another interesting feature and perhaps one of the first cameras to have it is complete auto exposure with both shutter and aperture controlled by the camera, this can also be overridden making it a very versatile camera.  If looking at the camera leaves you wondering about advancing the film and cocking the shutter, the lever is  on the bottom and easily done with a thumb.

And now the sample images.

I have to admit I like buying art supplies.  I like it even more when they are on sale.  I added a few new pigments to my palette and bolstered several others that I was running low on.  If this isn’t reason enough to do some more painting then maybe I need some new brushes.

I like the term Contre-jour it sounds more sophisticated than “Back lit” but really it does refer to photographs taken where the primary light source is behind the subject but not necessarily directly behind it as I have done here.

These images have me thinking about how often I use this technique, so I have just gone through some of my images to find other examples.  This is by no means all of them but based on the number of images I had to look through to find them I can safely say I’m not being repititious when I do take an image like this.

UPDATE:  Ok I found another one that I really like.  It’s funny because until I looked at it again I had forgotten how a friend and I had  rushed ahead so that I could capture this and we would still be able to make it back before dark.  Based on the date this was 19 years ago.

If you spent the last month doing what I did then you will know who you are.  Unfortunately I didn’t take the time to speak to anyone afterwords and I would have liked to, now that I’ve had a decent nights sleep and eaten a meal without garlic.  Please email me at wkoopmans@shaw.ca

If your reading this and you have no idea what I am talking about I’m sure I will post something new soon.

You can modify the look of clouds and water with long exposures making them soft and ethereal, but what if you can’t achieve slow enough shutter speeds?  That’s were using multiple exposures come in.  In this case I have used 9 exposures combined in the camera (a Pentax K10D) each exposure taken with a small delay of about 10 seconds in between.  This means that any single cloud will have moved a similar distance as a 90 second exposure, which would be unachievable in daylight conditions even with a strong neutral density filter.  The image bellow is toggling between the multi exposure image and a single image taken just after.

The Yashica Electro 35 rangefinders are wonderful cameras with an electronically controlled shutter and aperture priority.  The f 1.7 lens allows plenty of light for low light shooting, however there is no shutter speed indicator beyond the basic over exposure and slow shutter warning.  If you can live within those limitations it provides  sharp well exposed images.  I shot these images using Kodak professional plus-x.  Kodak describes the film thus ” PLUS-X 125 Film offers a combination of sharpness and fine grain that makes it the ideal film for beautifully printable negatives in moderate-to-bright light.”  I would agree and because it has been used for so many years it has a particular look that many people expect when they view a B&W image.

Here is a detail from one of the images.

I walked past this door as the long shadows of morning stretched across it.  I took a quick shot with my cell phone camera for reference with the thought of doing a sketch and possibly a print later.  So here is the sketch done in charcoal on toned paper.