Wallace Koopmans Artlog

What is this?  If you said a canvas or a blank canvas you are partially correct.  If you said a blank canvas with a wide aspect ratio then we’re on the same page, so to speak.  I bought several canvas’ with 2:1 aspect rations and need to get myself thinking outside the 4:3’ish box.  So what better way than to do a little photography exercise.   Fortunately I seem to have a camera for any occasion and so from my shelf I pulled what can only be described as a photographic anachronism, the Minolta Vectis S-1.  What is it? It is an APS (advanced photo system) SLR camera with interchangeable lenses.  If you recall APS  is the small negative format film that digital has made effectively obsolete.  What is unique about this camera and film though is that it provides for panoramic pictures.  While not a true panoramic in the sense that the panoramic image is just the central area of  the larger image it does mask the viewfinder giving you a 3:1 view.  Now for the narrower thinking, you can’t walk around looking through a camera viewfinder, unless you want to fall and hurt yourself,  so it becomes necessary to  try and envision how the world around you looks in this “narrow” view.  Here is where the expanded vision begins, as you look around you will see new compositions and inter relations between objects that don’t work in the normal smaller box we are accustomed to.  Lines that enter the frame in unfamiliar ways, new points of interest, it is an opportunity to explore and see things in a different way.

If you want to see the images in their original aspect ratio, you will need to click on them individually. An interesting side effect of the square thumbnails is that it’s apparent that several of these images work well as squares, possibly even better.  But I will let you be the judge of that.

At the recent Vancouver camera show I aquired a Fujica 35 SE rangefinder.  I had an opportunity yesterday to shoot a roll of film through it and am very impressed by the sharpness of the images.  It has a f=4.5cm 1:2.8 Lens.  The coupled exposure meter doesn’t appear to be accurate but because it is fully manual I just used my best available exposure meter (guessametering).

Fujica SE 35 rangefinder

I made the animations smaller for slower Internet connections.

The Nishika N8000 was  designed for making lenticular prints.  The type of print where the image appears different depending on your viewing angle.  In order to do this is has 4 30mm lenses spaced across the front that all have  shutters that trip at the same time.  The outer two lenses are spaced apart about the distance of human eyes and give a stereoscopic view.  However what you can do is scan the 35mm negatives in and build the resulting files into an animated GIF.

I have been going past this garage for some time now, and have wanted to take some pictures, so today I took the opportunity.  On a regular week day the parking lot would be full of vehicles but that isn’t how I envisioned the image.  I’m not quite sure what it is about the signage that drew me to this but it may be because it has the look of so much of what was around when I was a child.  Without vehicles perhaps that distortion of time is made possible.

Going beyond the initial intended image I took several others that are of a different character.  The image of the signage with selective focus is substantially an exercise in photographic technique while the one of the garage bays is an abstraction simply for it’s compositional aesthetic.

I have been going through some old negatives and scanning them.  I’m not sure where the compunction to be an archivist came from but it’s something I seem to need to do.  Besides I like looking at pictures I took as a teenager.  I took this image somewhere in Oregon in 1989 when I was driving down to California and camping , beyond that I really don’t remember.  I suppose that may be the reason I’m organizing the past in order to preserve my memories.  After awhile it seems that the memories of many events become nothing more than snapshots anyway.   Hopefully I will satisfy my need to go through this old stuff soon and can begin creating anew.