Saturday 28 May 2016

Shooting below the belt.


For most people it seems photography is something that takes place at eye level. It's almost an ideal - the camera as an extension of the eye. So it is that the vast majority of cameras made over the last several decades have been designed to use by being held up to the eye. In this way photographers can expect to photograph the world the way they naturally experience. The thing is, sometimes the whole point of photography is to see the world in new ways, to find in the world of familiar experience aspects of the unfamiliar. While cameras designed to mirror the way we look at the world everyday may be the norm, it doesn't have to be that way, which is probably why I, like so many other photographers, have become a fan of the waist level finder.

These days cameras with a waist level finder, or WLF, are an uncommon enough phenomenon that I should probably take a moment and make sure everyone is clear on what I'm talking about. In the most general terms if a photographer has to look down at the top of the camera to frame up the image this is called waist level viewing. camera is designed such that the photographer frames up the scene by looking down at the camera to view the image this would be a waist level finder. In the years after George Eastman brought photography to the masses waist level viewing was common in the cameras of the day by virtue of mirrored viewfinders such as you will find in nearly any old box camera. These offered a handy reference for roughly what would appear in the image but the straight-through viewing of a view camera or a rangefinder were employed when some aid to focusing was required. The waist level viewfinder photographers from the mid 20th Century on came to know are the natural result of the introduction of reflex cameras, twin lens reflex (TLR) and single lens reflex (SLR). In a reflex camera the image from the lens is redirected by a mirror to a focusing screen at the top of the camera. A TLR uses a separate lens matched to the primary taking lens, while an SLR mirror redirects the image from the taking lens for focusing then flips out of the way during the exposure. A waist level finder is simply an aid to viewing the image on the reflex focus screen directly by providing a shade for the screen that normally collapses out of the way when not in use, and which will often incorporate a flip up magnifier to aid with critical focus.



But while waist level finders are a mainstay of TLRs, they are rare in 35mm SLRs and to my knowledge unheard of in DSLRs (which after all, are just SLRs that happen to have digital sensors). Instead, a special five sided prism, a pentaprism, is employed, redirecting the image to the back of the camera, correcting as it does the mirror reversed image that occurs when a reflex focus screen is viewed directly. Since this viewing arrangement using a pentaprism allows the photographer to bring the camera to their eye, effectively looking right through it from the back, these are often referred to as eye-level finders. Whatever you call them they are a built in feature on the vast majority of 35mm SLR cameras, meaning that despite their reflex design this class of camera adopts a straight through, "extension of the eye" viewing style more natural to other camera designs such as rangefinders.

But while waist level finders are a rarity in the 35mm SLR world, this is not so when it comes to my usual weapon of choice, the medium format SLR. Once the mainstay of professional wedding and portrait photographers these cameras typically feature a more modular design that usually includes an interchangeable viewfinder system, While photographers could opt for a more expensive, and therefore often considered premium eye-level finder, this did not automatically make them everyone's first choice. For a variety of reasons waist level finders are a much more practical option with medium format cameras than is the case with 35mm. To begin with the focus screen is physically larger, matching the negative size, which makes direct viewing much more comfortable. A definite weakness of the WLF is that they are rather awkward when the camera is turned sideways for vertical shooting, but many medium format cameras are either designed for square formats where there is no vertical, or feature rotating film magazines that allowed a switch between vertical and horizontal shooting without the need to rotate the entire camera. Thus while some saw the more economical waist level viewers as an entry level option many photographers stuck with them throughout their careers despite having the option to easily upgrade.

Vivian Maier and her Rolleiflex. The kids today could
learn a thing or two about taking selfies.
There are a few reasons commonly sited for this. In discussions of the work of Vivian Maier for example it's frequently conjectured that her work benefited from the fact that  that the waist level finder of her Rolleiflex camera made it less obvious to her subjects that they were being photographed since she was looking down at her camera, diminishing the sense that they were being observed. That's all well and good for a street photographer but given my bent for landscape subjects it's hardly a reason for me to be a WLF fan. In simplest terms for me it comes down to the way this kind of viewfinder simplifies and encourages the use of lower camera angles, everything from chest level all the way down to the very ground itself.


From our usual eye level vantage point of perhaps 1½ to 2 metres our attention is most easily drawn to things at a similar height, most especially other people which is fair enough, but it does make it easy to overlook what's going on closer to the ground. There's a lot of interesting things to be found near the ground, almost (so the joke goes) as if they were drawn there by some mysterious force; rocks, seashells, sun bleached antelope skulls, creepy old dolls, forgotten and discarded, once loved by a little girl now in her mid thirties. And yes, we could photograph all of these things by standing over them an shooting down as they lay at our feet, but I hardly think I need to explain why this approach is so unlikely to lead to anything that is interesting photographically. It's just a patch of ground with something laying on it.

Get down closer to the level of that whatever it is though and everything changes. There is context, meaning, story. That seashell stands alone against the expanse of sand water and sky from whence it came, the unfortunate antelope amongst the scraggly vegetation struggling up from the cracked dry earth,  a victim of its harsh surroundings. That creepy doll that somehow found its way to the base of a knotted old tree in the sinister gloom of a misted wood where.. my god, did I just see it move?

You could of course photograph all of these things using a camera that has some sort of straight through camera. For the lucky there will always be a spot of dry ground to shoot from, and for the intrepid one can simply endure going belly down into the wet, the muck, the unidentified vegetation that to the best of recollection isn't exactly what poison ivy is supposed to look like and that bit of a mound that, if it's home to fire ants, you'll know soon enough. But even granting such acts of machismo might be your thing that eye level finder is hardly drawing your attention groundward, inviting you to explore the world from a new point of view and encouraging you to explore the visual world from this new perspective. For that, there's the waist level finder.

Of course my weapon of choice is the traditional medium format SLR where this style of viewfinder really shines. There are WLF alternatives for some 35mm SLRs. For vintage aficionados they were sometimes standard in early SLRs of the 1940's and 50's, but if you're after something more recent all but the most current members of Nikon's F series have interchangeable viewfinders and while uncommon there are WLFs for these cameras out there. Alternatively however a right angle finder that fits over the eyepiece of the prism viewfinder is available for a greater variety of 35mm cameras giving many of the same benefits while rotating versions eliminates the limitation of horizontal only shooting. These of course can also be the ticket if you shoot with a DSLR, though you can bet that if I were a digital shooter I'd chose a camera with one of those nifty articulated live view screens.

Admittedly there are times when waist level finders are not the ideal thing. They are good up to about chest level but no higher, and sometimes either to get the needed perspective of just to shoot over a fence this is a severe limitation. Once or twice in a pinch I have turned the camera sideways, standing at a right angle to the subject, just to be able to use it at eye level. For my Mamiya and Hasselblad systems however I have prism finders that can be swapped in for the waist level versions. These might actually get used, if I'm being generous, about 5% of the time and if I leave them in place after using them I inevitably replace them with the usual waist level finder in the next shooting situation because the eye level view just isn't working for me.

The 'Blad with waist level finder attached, optional prism finder to the right is ready when needed.

There are times when 35mm would do just fine but I still bring the medium format gear not because the bigger negative is suddenly important to me, but because I know the eye level finders I have on all my Nikons will almost certainly bring me to a choice between belly crawling on some questionable terrain or not getting the shot I want. And while I'm fully kitted out for 4x5 I'll still nearly always go for the medium format gear bag on the way out no so much to avoid the extra heft (though there's that) or the extra expense (thought there's that) but because, again, there's that straight through viewing. There are things on my photographic horizon (to be discussed in future episodes I'm sure) that have me thinking hard about shooting those big negatives more often. There are right angle viewers available for 4x5 cameras... It seems the wish list never quite ends.


Tuesday 3 May 2016

Pinhole Day 2016

It's a darn good thing somebody goes to the trouble of organizing the annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. I wrote about the tribulations I experienced during the 2015 WPPD while I was still shaking out some of the bugs involved in using the 8x10 pinhole camera I had built the previous autumn, the details of which you can also find back in the September 2014 archives of this blog. Consisting of a box with a teeny hole at one end, the camera itself wasn't the real issue so much as the here were no real issues with the camera itself on that day so much as dealing with the resulting exposures, namely the contrasty, highly scratch-prone x-ray sheet film employed. I was trying something new so it was the usual case of learning a few lessons and making a few adjustments. The trouble is that with everything else going on in my photographic life I didn't get around to trying out those new adjustments until WPPD 2016 came along and lit a fire under it.

My choice for entry in the WPPD 2016 on line gallery - image #1234 as it happens.

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day itself is an event simply to celebrate photography in arguably its simplest form and to raise awareness of the power and expressive potential of photography done with traditional materials and tools. It's also a great educational opportunity. Grade school children can build pinhole cameras from materials as simple as a shoe box, baking foil and a bit of tape, load it up with a sheet of photographic paper then after making an exposure develop the image using a simple darkroom setup, all in the course of an afternoon. It's science and art all rolled into one. For me though it's simply a reminder that pinhole photography is something I have in my photographic repertoire, or it's supposed to be anyway. I shouldn't need the reminder, but there it is.

While WPPD falls on the last Sunday of every April my day job allows little consideration for weekends, so as had been the case with the previous two WPPD's I participated in I did not have the full day to work with. Just as well perhaps as with two 8x10 film holders to my name I was limited to making four exposures. I had a few locations in mind that weren't too far from where I work so it was a cinch to get it all done on the way home.



Making the exposures was the easy part though. I still had to deal with getting those large finicky x-ray negatives developed. I wrote about my results from last year in Pinhole Day Misadventures so I won't reiterate the issues I ran into here.  This year however I had the hangers and tanks at my disposal so I wasn't expecting negative scratches to be an issue and as it turns it wasn't. My second concern was the excessive contrast I have been getting from x-ray film with standard film developers. Though it can be developed by inspection under red darkroom lighting, the Xtol I used last year resulted in empty shadows despite developing until the highlights were as dense as I dared. My current standard, PMK Pyro, is a compensating developer and would probably give much better results. The 8x10 tanks however require a full 5 litres of solution, and while I probably had enough on hand to mix that much it would have left me short in short supply for other purposes. Having raw ingredients on hand I did a bit of research and decided on a particular Caffenol formula called Delta Micro. Formulated for low speed, high resolution micro films which have similar contrast requirements it seemed right for the job, and what do you know, it actually worked as well as I'd hoped.

Developing by inspection again I found that, unlike the Xtol which brought up a clearly visible image in about 15 seconds, it was several minutes in the Delta Micro before I could see anything happening at all on the film resulting in just a little bit of panic, holding the dripping film hanger up to the safelight to satisfy myself I saw some sort of image forming. Though I didn't time anything it seemed about 10 minutes until they appeared ready to move on to the stop bath. The negatives looked good, displaying a nice range of tones similar to those I expect from standard negatives. The only trouble I , could see were some areas, mostly towards the middle of the image, where they seemed to suffer from a sort of hazy fog. Maybe this was the result of having x-ray film, with its notoriously short shelf life, sitting in film holders for the better part of a year, or maybe it was all that close examination holding the developing negatives up to the safelight. Future experimenting will be needed to sort that one out.


It wasn't horrible but the negatives were denser and lower in contrast in these areas, creating a challenge in the darkroom, especially since I was contact printing which made it a little harder to judge exactly where to burn. For the most part they contact printed well on Ilford MG-IV RC with a #3 contrast filter which was replaced with a #5 filter when burning in those denser areas. The results were okay-ish, but I gave in and did a bit of extra work on the image of the railway tracks in Photoshop after scanning in the contact prints to help even things out a little more. There is still a little of the effect visible in the image below of the graffitied overpass pillars as it occurred to me the fogged area just happened to fall on exactly the right area of the image to resemble a slight mist, though no such mist was actually present.


Each participant can submit only one image each year to the WPPD online gallery. It's not a competition, there are no prizes, images are not judged or ranked in any way and there are not sort of minimum standards to be met other than that images must have been taken on the day of the event with a lensless camera of some sort. I would have been happy with either of the images here, but the perspective and foreground details made the railway bridge shot an easy choice. I filled out the online submission form and uploaded the image. In 2014, the first year I entered, my image came up as #888, and I was pleased it was something so easy to remember. This year I have image #1234. If I'm going to be lucky like that, why can't it be the lottery. (Answer: Because I don't play.)

There may be a few kinks left to iron out but with these results I can see the potential for achieving a unique look that is desireable and can't be matched using standard lenses. Yes I have plenty of other pots on the go, so to speak which I'll no doubt be writing about with equal enthusiasm in the weeks and months to come. Still, there's no shortage of things I hope to do and explore with pinholes, and there's still plenty of x-ray film in the freezer. Hopefully it won't take WPPD 2017 to get me out with it again.