50mm, ISO 400 1/15 at f/6.3

It’s at ISO 400 because that’s how the camera was set last time I used it. Some say it’s a good idea to use the only big difference between film and digital and set the camera to use variable ISO, automatically. Me I say phooey: do everything manually. But ISO shouldn’t make much difference in controllable lighting and with a static subject, right?

The camera is on a tripod, and the white sheets are for effect as well as to reflect more light. The gallery lights are on full, and there’s a white ceiling and a silver reflector camera left. It’s underexposed.

Also 50mm, ISO 400 1/15 at f/6.3

Attempting to get edgy with the framing, and have managed to place self between the subject and some of the light. Also, it’s soft. Soft at 1/15th means the focus is off, or in the wrong place, or both. Pinkiness in these is about getting the white balance out. Twenty or so of those little halogen light bulbs: do they count as fluorescent, incandescent, or daylight? If there are other bulbs too, it’s a mixture. It’s still underexposed, and pink.

85mm, ISO 400 1/100 at f/1.8

Camera further back using the longer focal length lens, so I’m not standing in the light, and at f/1.8 a narrow depth of field, with focus on the rim of the eye socket. There’s another reflector camera right: a piece of white card. Exposure is getting there, but the white is still very muddy.

Oops, shutter misfire. Same camera settings as above, but with hotshoe gizmo and synch cable attached to 400kw studio flash on full power. It’s what happens when the flash doesn’t synch, ie the light flashes at a different speed than the shutter.

85mm, ISO 400 1/250 at f/16

Synching at 1/250th. Blue fringing and cyan whites in background since again, with flash firing, the white balance is out. Can be corrected in post-, of course.

85mm, ISO 400 1/250 at f/16

Looking for sharpness now, and compositional shapes. Negative space here is to think about placement of other objects.

85mm, ISO 400 1/250 at f/16

White balance set at flash. If you’re using slide film, get tungsten.

85mm, ISO 100 1/250 at f/16

Magenta cast now. Still slightly underexposed.

85mm, ISO 400 1/250 at f/16

Better composition, still too much magenta. Too many shadows, and could find a more attractive or stylish bowl. Or no bowl. Miles away from being interesting, still.

Still life.

Assembled things need to say something. Traditional still life paintings of the schools of the Renaissance for instance, were laden and overladen with meaning. Objets as signifiers of the seasons, as metonyms for individuals, or for states, possibly literacy tools like barber poles and in-jokes and visual puns.

Death of an old year, whole-ness and abundance of a new? Maybe. Some chocolate euros, shards of broken glass and a few shrivelled rose petals didn’t get into these practice shots.

More tomorrow, in the beautiful soft light from a northern window, on a day full of snow. On film. Determined to get a few good ones for hand printing, or for making polaroid lifts. Will share.

Hope you’re all finally recovered. Slainte and namaste!Similar Posts:

• Photographing Snow
• These Fields Were Once All Houses [2]
• Help to Avoid or Minimise SAD
• Approx 4 to the £1 and 17 degrees
• Sub Aqua

If you can physically exhibit unfettered, unalloyed, bouncing, tingling, heart-thumping, enthusiastic JOY, joie-de-vivre, खुशी, Радость, Iloon, الفرح, in a public open space somewhere, a beach, a shopping centre, your choice, feel free to get in touch. It’s for next year’s minibook project.

And a couple of new pending collaborations are coming: correspondences, (with grateful thanks to Marcelo Brodsky). Oh joy!Similar Posts:

• The Correspondences
• DCAPS 2009: Humanising Photography
• Rainy Windows
• Glow 07 Last Days
• Electric Sheep

One of the (many) reasons I became fascinated by the backroom processes of photography, the darkroom with its quiet concentration and trickling water, the gadgets and the gizmos: Blow Up was a strange film starring the newly trendy David Hemmings and the mighty Vanessa Redgrave. Antonioni wrote and directed what appeared to be a murder mystery, the victim in the bushes revealed by the Hemming’s character’s zeal in the darkroom, with an enlarger.

Blow Up’s other theme is the rather sordid celebrity photographer’s routine cruelty and abuse of his female models. The character was allegedly based on the real life David Bailey, a reputed misogynist, misanthrope and all round bad lad. This same testosterone-laden behaviour is pretty much the day to day norm in at least one northern higher education college. Apparently “the trade is like that”. Is it really? If there are instances of sexual harassment in the industry, isn’t it incumbent upon the training establishments to make sure that they don’t foster an environment where this level of sexism is encouraged within their own walls?

Some of our institutions really do reside firmly within the Blow Up sensibility.  Surely our photography students deserve better  mores and attitudes than were being pastiched way back in 1967?

See it if you can: let me know what you think.

Similar Posts:

• Class of 2008
• Angelfish Photographic aka Emma Oglesby
• Picture Licensing Universal System
• Women and Photography
• James Dodd Didn’t Win Burn

Yesterday’s response from Michael Ormerod’s daughter on the competition winners we’ve featured here reminded me to post my 2008 entry. Click though to see a slide show.

Interesting visual serendipidy with the psychogeography post.

I like these photos. Maybe that’s the trick: to revisit your negatives in 12 months’ time. For the gadgetheads amongst you – it’s an elderly V series with turret finder, difficult to focus and helps you to take your time, which is always good. And it’ll be some expired Kodak colour neg, the yellow boxed stuff. Digitalab’s special discount £1 a roll days, probably. Cut price competition entering, then.Similar Posts:

• Colour film going cheap!
• No Caption Needed
• Where D’you Get Your Film Developed?
• Today
• Tangibles

Jonny Void has some coverage if you can’t stomach the Beeb. There are a few of these T Shirts left, collector’s pieces all. Click through the photo for the story and buying links.Similar Posts:

• Pretty Vacant
• Fuck Bush
• Last of My Kodachrome
• Schwag: the Metameme [2]
• Blogging Burma

None Found

Normal service will be resumed. Don’t forget to turn off the lights at 8pm.

EDIT: After successfully upgrading to WP2.5, the aftermath of the trials of a series of new templates is still being felt. Sorry about the mess: all will become clear during the course of the next day or so…Similar Posts:

• Hold Tight Folks….
• A New Topography of the Durham Coalfields
• Geek Help Needed
• Making Luck
• Make your own Jackson Pollock

Too much to do, too little time. Apologies to everyone I’m neglecting: here’s a quick roundup. Blue: let’s just get on and do it! and a potential soulmate has appeared. Pete: fingers crossed. Cake is being posted to people who didn’t make it, the cheque is in the post, and the police have been informed. If you think any of that applies to you, it probably does.

Mail outstanding: # packages of film, competition entries (x3), adhoc bills. Posts promised: solarisation, Type 55, bellows extension calculation, Velvia and the car park, the long-awaited advertising decision, Hugh’s Cornwall, Richard’s London of the 60s. Plus updates on Simon Norfolk, Susan Meislas, Seamus Ryan, Ashley Cameron and Richard Maxted.

My apologies. Not as late as the Aussies, but guaranteed 100% sincere.Similar Posts:

• Big List of the week
• Mask
• Links for First Half of November 09
• The Running Line
• Get Carter

Reminded by an education academic friend that reflection is a major part of the learning process, it’ll be a while before all the vast number of bits of pretty much random information gleaned this week are published, but it will be done in wee tranches. There is also a birthday party, with its complex advance critical path, and a training programme for artists, plus four projects to finish and at least the same number on the near horizon. It’s going to be a very interesting few months.Similar Posts:

• This Time Last Year
• East Durham Artists’ Network
• Found Family Photograph
• More Night
• Klezmer Paradiso

One of the things one mightn’t have expected to learn from Joe Cornish on Friday was interesting stuff about composition. As a consequence, everything static in the landscape is appearing to have three basic geometric shapes within: a globe or domed circle, a cube or rectangle, and a triangle or zigzag. This one has its circle too large for the space, and it’s too big: the dome would need to take up about a third of the frame with a comfortable space around it. And the zigzag is hardly present, but the warehouse window provides the right kind of solid cuboid of cliff-like darkness.

How many of these can be squeezed out of Greenwich and surrounds in a week, do you think? And there was this:

Posting very intermittently this week, but there might well be more Cornishing.Similar Posts:

• Nodnol and iBlogger
• Everything Comes in Threes
• Sarah’s baby
• Making a Darkroom
• Residential Studio Space at Number 7