Sunny Days Are For Barbecues

In my part of the world we've been having a lot of the kind of weather you normally spend most of the year hoping for. I'm glad of it, it's good for so many things. It's just that photography isn't really one of them. That's not to suggest that brilliant warm cloudless days and worthwhile photographs are mutually exclusive. The above image was made on just such a day and I'm happy enough with it. It's just to say that if I'm looking for weather that will lend itself to interesting images, perfect is less than ideal.

 All of the images you will see in todays episode were made during a single afternoon jaunt down one of the many out of the way and relatively unknown glens the Niagara area is blessed with. The day was, by most standards, ideal - warm though not at all uncomfortably so and not a cloud in the sky. Take away the fact that I had come intent on doing a bit of photography one might have deemed the day perfect. The perfect day for a hike, or if that's not your speed maybe a picnic or a back yard barbecue. For photography though, not the kind of day I would have chosen.

Many of you will know what I'm talking about here and the images below should atest. Though I worked as meticulously as possible with the spot meter to keep as much shadow detail as possible without sending highlights into that irretrevable upper plateau of the contrast curve the images still look, I don't know, blasted. It's not a technical thing that can be managed. I could be wrong but I imagine that even if I was one of those photographers who used the Zone System in it's full form and had worked out an N-1 development I can't imagine it would have helped much. Harsh light is harsh light. The things that typically lead us to describe this kind of day as beautiful just don't translate well onto film and/or light sensitive silicon chips if that's more your thing.

These are all straight up quick and dirty, un-played-around-with scans. As I'm sure most of you would be quick to point out they are all long exposures made with a 10 stop ND filter. Long exposure images on film can be contrastier once reciprocity failure kicks in, but all images were 60 seconds or less shot on Fuji Acros which, as I discussed last time, is well within the pre-failure portion of that film's reciprocity curve so I don't think this has contributed to the overall sun-blasted look.

Now some of you may be thinking some of these images are pretty okay-ish. It might be interesting to re-scan one or two of these a bit more carefully and see just how much could be done with them. If these were images taken in some some exotic location I was unlikely ever to get back to I might be tempted to try. As it is I usually visit this place a few times a year.

For comparison here is an image made in the same glen on a different sort of day two years previous. The light wasn't completely bland but it has a feel I don't think could ever be extracted from any of the examples above.

And just to make the obligatory point that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to this sort of things there's that image at the top that I think is a keeper. It was made on the same day and in the same conditions as all the much too harsh image examples. Hard light has it's strong points, especially earlier or later in the day when it comes from the side rather than straight down from above. It's often what's behind those particularly dramatic effects, backlight, grazing light and whatnot. I think something like that happened in the image with the girl below the waterfall. (Every photographer should know a girl who is fond of waterfalls.) It was still mid-afternoon when this was taken but the slope of the north-facing waterfall seemed to be just such that it was catching the light at a bit of a grazing angle. This was helped along by the difusing gossamar like quality of the water in long exposure (it also helps when the girl who likes waterfulls is really good at holding still!)

In the end the message is that if you head out with a camera on a bright sunlit day you might come back with something more than just tan-lines. You might also want to wait for a day when your chances will be better. After all, it's the perfect kind of day for a barbecue.

Deathbed Vigil for an Old Favourite

Unless you're brand new to film photography you/ve been witnes to the buzz in the photographic community that comes with the announcement that a new film stock is about to hit the market, or more likely an old one is being re-introduced. Just as surely you've seen the the reverse play out when a film stock disappears from the market. While inevitably these announcements are accompanied by lamentations by some about how this is a sign that choice in the film market is drying up, the wiser among us realize that in the wider picture there is no such trend. Of course things will never be the same as they were when film was the only viable way to do photography, but that's a done deal now. For the most part anyone who was going to give up using film for digital has already done so. What we see today is not a decline. Films come, films go. They always have.

Of course it's a little easier to keep this perspective when the film whose immenent demise has just been announced is not one of the mainstays of your own working method. Sure it was a shame when the Kodachrome process was shut down for good, but honestly I hadn't shot with that particular film in the ten years prior to that. In the past all of these discontinuations came and went with me sad to see another emulsion go, but happily going on with my work no differently than before.

This time though, with Fuji's announcement that they will be discontinuing their Neopan Acros in all formats as of October 2018, five short months from this writing, it finally hits home for me. It has been roughly five years since I returned to shooting film for virtually everything creative that I do. Over that time, though I haven't kept count, I'd say at least half of the rolls that have gone through my cameras have been Acros, and it wouldn't surprise me if I were to learn that it had been a good deal more.

If you're not familiar with it's characteristics, Acros has all the basics covered. It's a 100 ISO black and white negative film with sharpness and grain that put it in roughly the same league as Kodak's T-Max. While it's almost purely a subjective thing, its tonality is something I find pleasing, and at the very least few find it objectionable. Acros has a few other tricks up its sleve though. It is uniquely good at handling highlight detail. This makes it particularly useful in contrasty situations. This also means over exposure is less of a worry, so if you're struggling with shadows you want to see detail in you can usually give it an extra stop and let that lattitude cover the rest. If one were looking to fault Acros you could accuse it of being so forgiving as to invite carelessness.

To me though shooting Acros comes with one over riding delight that beats all the others, and that is that reciprocity failure is something you almost don't have to think about (For those not familiar with reciprocity failure please see the excellent explanation by Mat Marrash on the FPP web site.) Given that I, like many photographers who share a love of the landscape, enjoy experimenting with long exposure techniquest, this makes it a very special film. With many black and white emulsions exposures as short as one second may require an exposure adjustment to compensate for the film's deficiencies with lower light levels. With Acros no adjustment is needed for exposures of up to two minutes.

Now I'm not above bringing along a reciprocity cheat sheet or even doing a bit of math in my head, so why worry too much about having to compensate? It's simply that reciprocity failure can quickly get out of hand, and the more prone to reciprocity failure a film is, the more easily this can happen. With some films for example, if after accounting for reciprocity failure I determine and exposure of 30 seconds at f/8 is appropriate, but feel the scene requires me to stop down to f/16, my new exposure time may become not 2 minutes as we might expect, but 7 or 8 minutes. And if the light may be changing on you over that duration of time the shutter is open any real chance at an accurate exposure may come down to little more than a semi-educated guess. For my money, its' best just to keep things as linear and predictable as possible.

Of course the final factor is simply that Acros is what I'm used to, it's what I've learned to handle. For me it is a known and predicatable commodity. In my case it even has an added bonus in that processing time in my developer of choice, PMK Pyro is exactly the same for Acros as it is for HP5, which is the film I usually turn to when I need a bit more speed, so I can just develop everything together.

Change is inevitable of course, but that doesn't mean we can't fight it. Even though I probably had enough Acros on hand to get me through the summer as it was I immediately put in a panic order as soon as I heard the announcement. Shortly after this Acros was nowhere to be found at any of the online outlets I knew or could find. This was probably due to a rush created by all the other fools who made the same panic buy I did when they heard. When they went out of stock I saw that B&H simply listed Acros as discontinued making me wonder if that was it, so when it was again listed as in stock earlier today, you guessed it, I put in another panic buy. I imagine there will be one or two more in the coming months, as well as the need to buy a larger freezer. I may be in Acros for a few more years yet.

Of course that's only prolonging the inevitable, but so is all of life if you think about it. What happens when it's finally gone? Seems I should have a while to think about it. By then there may be something new.

Through a Filter Darkly

Long exposure photography, where the shutter is left open long enough to blur even slower moving subjects in the frame, has been with us for a long time. In fact in photography's early days the poor sensitivity of photographic plates compared to the film speeds we are used to today made it impossible to do anything but, requiring portrait photographers to put to use braces to hold their sitters heads still less any small motion during the many seconds to minutes the shutter was open blur the image. As film sensitivity improved and it became the norm for photographers to truly be able to freeze an instant in time and long exposure photography became something of a special technique. Often this involved night time exposures such as the familiar images of star trails, where darkness allows the shutter to be left open for hours even with today's more sensitive materials. Sometimes though it would be desirable to leave the shutter open for long periods of time even in full daylight, for example to give a soft gossamer appearance to the flow of water in a fast moving stream. When simply closing the aperture down to its smallest setting isn't enough photographers wanting to achieve this effect have long carried neutral density (ND) filters to cut down the amount of light reaching the lens by perhaps three to four stops which might allow exposures to be stretched out to a full second or more.

It's hard to say when but over the past decade or so a growing number of photographers began to push the envelope of where these long exposure techniques could be applied. By extending exposure times even further, to minutes instead of seconds, motion such as the rolling of waves or the drift of clouds across the sky could transform the entire feel of a scene, achieving a new level of abstraction by viewing the world over a time scale much different from those at which our eyes operate. Suddenly, rather than three or four stops, photographers began seeking out ND filters that reduced light by ten stops. There are now many such filters on the market.

If you have never used a ten stop ND filter, you need to look carefully at a rather bright scene to be able to tell that they are not completely opaque. (It is not safe to look directly at the sun through a 10 stop ND filter however, or any filter not specifically designated as safe for this purpose. This includes looking through the optical viewfinder of a camera with a filter in place. Seriously.) The effect, as you would imagine, can be dramatic, altering the feel of a seaside image as radically as the use of infrared film can transform a photograph of a forest scene.

Having moved beyond a technique a photographer could pull out of their bag of tricks for special occasions, long exposure is now often referred to as a different kind of photography, its own genre. Photographers have built successful careers largely, sometimes almost entirely, through their long exposure work. I wouldn't dare be so presumptuous as to try to list the "most notable" long exposure photographers, but to give you a taste you might want to have a look at the work of Michael Levin,
Keith Aggett, Nathan Wirth or Paul Simon Wheeler.

Do so and you'll probably note the way bodies of water feature strongly in the portfolios of these photographers. While long exposure techniques affect the appearance of anything in the frame that is moving - windblown grass, clouds, humans - somehow it is water and the motion of waves that seem to create the greatest emotional impact, especially when the ethereal mist created by motion and time is contrasted with the solid unmoving presence of a rock, a pier or the wreck of an old ship. I imagine it would be hard to incorporate long exposure photography into your work if you lived out on a prairie.

Situated as I am among the Great Lakes, effectively oceans in terms of their photographic potential, I have favourable geography for long exposure photography easily at hand. It may seem a bit surprising, therefore, that it doesn't constitute a larger portion of my work. I should say first of all that this is in now way because long exposure isn't in line with any personal philosophy or ideal about photography. In my understanding the reason we might find photographs in particular so fascinating in a way that the actual scene photographed may not have hinted at even if we were present when it was taken is that the camera presents us with an image that is familiar and recognizable in a way we can easily relate to, but through an eye that sees the world in a different way than we experience it. We can make creative choices to record in a way that may be a little more or a little less like the way we see the world with our own eyes - motion versus still, colour versus black and white and so on. Often times we find the fascination deepens the more an image differs from the way our eyes see it. Add to this the photographic essence that anchors the image to reality and the fascination deepens. Long exposure photography then is just one more way in which the camera can see the world differently.

I hasten to add it is not an unreal way. If creatures somehow evolved to see the world changing on a time scale of minutes rather than fractions of a second what we see in a long exposure image might be a better representation of how the world really looks to them. To such beings the sort of everyday image we see now made at a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second might be as strikingly unusual as Harold Edgerton's images of a bullet frozen in motion as it emerged from an apple it had been shot through. While we tend to think of the way that we see the world as "objective" and any other way as somehow "unreal", these are accidents of the kind of beings we are. This isn't to say that how we see the world is irrelevant to the way relate to a photograph. I don't imagine an image of a scene made in radio frequencies would have much emotional impact. There needs to be that anchor.

In the end then my choice to stick with the usual sub one second shutter speeds comes down to the particulars of what my muse chooses to whisper in my ear at any given time. I choose to make long exposures sometimes, but not usually in much the same way I shoot colour film sometimes, but not usually. I just have to trust the muse, she's been good to me so far. (What, I can have a female muse if I want to.)

One reason I often don't choose to go with extended exposure time is clouds. If you've been following this blog for any length of time you'll know I love clouds. In fact the very reason I'm writing at this moment rather than being out there with a camera is that there's a beautiful cloudless blue sky outside my window right now - useless. The way clouds render in long exposure images, silken puffs rushing by like freight trains or sometimes extended into aurora like fingers reaching across the skies, can sometimes bring an ethereal sense of its own to an image, but that's not what draws me to the, at least not usually. I'm drawn to clouds for their form, foreboding, the play of light and the sense they give that the sky is a thing. Whatever an extended exposure times may bring to the way it renders clouds, much of the time these other things can be lost.

And so it was that last week I finally found myself at a beach on the shore of Lake Ontario I've been meaning to explore. The weather was terrible, and by terrible I mean just about perfect - blustering winds stirring up waves, dark threatening clouds with the occasional break to let the sun flood through. I walked the length of the beach with the big pack containing my Wista kit then, having shot all 12 sheets I had with me returned to the car and grabbed the smaller pack and did the whole thing again with the Bronica. I honestly hadn't given any thought to doing long exposure on this outing and while I had my 77mm thread size ND filter with me, there were no thread adapters packed anywhere meaning the one and only lens I could use it with was the 50mm Nikkor wide angle for the Bronica. It wasn't until well into the morning, when I came upon a large branch that had washed in from who knows where with what appeared to be a sort of cobbled together ladder I would guess once lead to a tree house still attached that I had any notion of getting it out. Objectively it seemed the clouds were just the sort I usually like to shoot just as they are (or as they appear to me) and the rough surface of the lake with waves that would curl then spread into a frothy blanket as the hit shore were ideal things to incorporate into the photographs I was taking but, you know, the muse.

I have two film backs for the Bronica and on this day one was loaded with HP5+ which is excellent generally and has the speed to allow me to hand hold when the need strikes, the other containing Fuji Acros which, among its other virtues probably the best film ever created when working with exposure times longer than a few seconds. As luck would have it the composition called for the 50mm, the only lens my 10 stop ND filter would fit. To this I added a Cokin graduated grey filter to save me having to burn in the sky later on and a pair of 90 second exposures were made. It seemed prudent to at least rattle off a normal exposure too so after switching backs, removing the ND filter and putting the grad filter back in place I did another shot on HP5+ at, I think, 1/30th.

The long exposure result is up at the top where it stands the best chance of catching the eye of potential readers. It is almost an entirely straight can of the negative though I burned in the lower right corner in Photoshop just a smidge. Now for comparison here is what I got without the ND filter:

For easier comparison here they are side by side. You might want to click to enlarge:

Your evaluation may differ, but even though I'd be happy with the normal exposure if that's all I had taken and your view of the situation may differ, I'll make no bones about the fact that I prefer the long exposure version in this instance. It's true too that I put a good deal more time in Photoshop with the standard version to get it to look as good as I think it could though honestly this is probably due at least in part to some vignetting imparted by the cheap no-name neutral density filter I've been using (even some expensive ND filters are prone to uneven expousre) doing some of the burning-in work for me.

Who is to day if I'll be making this sort of image more in the future. Maybe I'd use it more often if I had something better than a no-name filter. It's an investment I've been considering. (There's never a shortage of things one should consider investing in, is there?) At the very least I'll have to be more careful in future to keep my thread adapters at hand.

The Wiggle Wagon - Part II

The time had come to see what this Wiggle Wagon was all about. My new companions lead me out the back of Garth's Kitchen through a storage room stacked with odds and ends including a few appliances that might have belonged to the restaurant, though I guessed the shelves of milk crates filled with vinyl LPs probably belonged to the adjoining local radio station. Through the back door steps lead down into what would have been an alley way if there had been buildings on the other side but there was only trees on the other side of the crushed stone parking area that was empty except for the Wiggle Wagon, a sky blue Ford Falcon dating back to the early 60's.

Cousin Ken was explaining how he made some sort of deal for her but the details were pretty vague. He showed me where he had done a bit of body work he seemed rather proud of. You could see where he had patched up a spot between the door and the wheel well, but the rough surface and the paint that wasn't quite a perfect match wasn't nearly as obvious as the rusted hole I imagine had been there before the handiwork. Cars have never been a particular interest of mine, at least not since my teen years, but having been smitten with a camera that owes its classic styling to the same decade these past few months it was hard not to appreciate.

I started extending the tripod legs but realized there was no point. It was almost a perfect Sunny 16 afternoon, allowing me to use shutter speeds of 1/250th and higher even with the Acros 100 that was barely usable inside. I'm a landscape guy so I guess it was habit but the tripod would really just get in the way here, and having more freedom to go hand held was one of the reasons I got the Bronica in the first place. The whole idea was to branch out a little, to be open to the possibilities when the chance to work in a different way came along - and here it was. That's not to say I envision myself ever becoming a street photographer, my M.O. has followed the slow photography philosophy for too long now. Like anyone else though my photography is linked to my experience, one following the other, even becoming the other as my visit to Garth's Kitchen was now proving. 

I made a lot of other photographs during those few days in this part of the province, some of them pretty good I think. They, like the rest of the experience of being there, were the sort of thing I had expected. Cousin Ken, Des, and the Wiggle Wagon - who could have predicted those? That was the one part of trip that never could have been expected, the experience that will stay in memory long after the other details have faded. Maybe it's no coincidence then that these are the photos I most wanted to see, the ones I wanted to show you first.

The Wiggle Wagon - Part I

"Is that really 35mm?" one of the locals piped in, having noticed the Nikon FM I had set down on the table.

The place was Garth's Kitchen which I was told was the only restaurant Killaloe Ontario had since the old diner shut down, at least if you don't count the chip truck permanently located out behind the town post office. It seemed not so much like a dining establishment as a farmhouse kitchen writ large. Your waiter and the chef were the same person. There was no swinging door to insulate you from the reality of how your food was being prepared, just a little nook in the corner with a stove and a refrigerator where he worked. Normally there were three items on the lunch menu but they were out of a few things so donairs it was, made from meat that was sliced and done up in a frying pan fresh, right where you could see it if you weren't sucked into the conversations of the other patrons (as I was) or distracted by the featured wall of mirrors arrayed in an eclectic hodge-podge of picture frames.

Cousin Ken at Garth's Kitchen

The "local", I was to learn, was a musician who went by "Cousin Ken" professionally, and I suspect in just about every other sense as well. He seemed about my age, lean with a wiry Van Dyke beard and hair pulled back into a pony tail. I don't imagine anyone could speak with Ken for long and not get the impression he had a few tales to tell, the nature of which you never would have guessed other than that they likely don't involve time in the employ of a law firm or financial services company.

"Your camera there, it uses 35mm film doesn't it?" He sounded impressed, like just the chance to see it would make his whole afternoon. Well, I thought, let's see if make his whole day.

"Well this one's my 35, but my 120 is just out in the car."

The statement had exactly the desired effect. "Whoa, you have 120 too! What is it, a Rolleiflex or something?"

Rolleiflex was an intriguing guess. It's not what I have but like so many other medium format users I'm more accustomed to hearing the perennial "Is that a Hasselblad?" The interest was obvious and it would have been cruel of me to disappoint at this juncture..

"Why don't I go get it and show you."

His enthusiasm went up another notch. "Definitely! If you bring that in and your Manfrotto I'd love to have a look."

I rose to fetch it from the car, wondering if that last bit had been a lucky guess about the tripod, as though I don't own a Rollieflex, my Manfrotto 055 is the one piece of photographic equipment I still own that's been with me since the mid 80's.

"Hey," he added as I reached to door, "maybe I could get you to do a few shots of my Wiggle Wagon."

I had no idea what he meant, but couldn't imagine anything that went by the name "Wiggle Wagon" on which it wouldn't be worth spending a few frames of film. "Of course," I said.

When I returned Ken and his companion Des (or Desmo in his role as on-air personality at CHCR, the local radio station that adjoins the restaurant) moved in closer while I opened the photo backpack that contains my Bronica S2A kit. I realize I haven't said much here about the Bronica since I got it a few months back, but suffice it to say the same chrome paneled, Raymond Loewy inspired design that attracted me to the camera was a hit with this crowd as well. Ken, it was by now no surprise to learn, was at least semi-acquainted with the world of cameras, at least as it existed twenty or thirty years ago, though I'm not sure he had seen anything like the S2A before. He knew about my tripod, he finally told me, because he recognized the characteristic Manfrotto hexagonal quick-release plate attached to the bottom of my Nikon.

The classic selfie as it was meant to be taken, courtesy of Garth's wall of mirrors.

Once the tour of the camera was complete and conversation broadened I kept the camera in my lap, eyeing the waist level viewfinder, wondering if a candid portrait was in order. The Bronica has no in-camera meter but I guessed that with the lens wide open and the shutter set to 1/30th, the lowest I dare go for hand-held, I'd still be a stop or two under with the window light. I had HP5+ with me, but having accidentally left the dark slide at home there was no way to switch backs and so I was stuck with the slower Acros film I had loaded. Ken said nothing but I'm sure he knew what I had in mind, and perhaps knowingly obliging me turned to the window, throwing himself into the perfect light. Shadow detail be damned, I had to take it.

My initial task documenting the experience complete, curiosity couldn't hold out much longer.

"So, you were saying something about some kind of wagon...?"

When The Tourists Are Away...

In past entries I've noted how, as a local, Niagara Falls doesn't have the sort of magnetic draw on my camera lenses that seem to hold sway with visitors to the area. For the past several years however it's been my intent to visit during the much more photographically interesting and visitor sparse height of winter. Past years have not been kind to my plans. Last year I let the unusual cold take away my photographic mojo which only returned when things warmed up, and the several years prior to that were too warm for there to be a real dead of winter.

It didn't occur to me at a time but coated and weighed down by ice this tree reminds me of a Shetland Pony.

Though not quite so frigid as last year, this January has been accompanied by some solidly winter weather, and with my mojo fully intact I finally set out to ensure another year wouldn't pass without getting a crack at the area around the Falls. It wasn't so much the Falls itself I was after, though they too take on added interest in the presence of great quantities of ice. The real draw was the heavy glaze of ice that covers almost everything in the surrounding area. The mist rising from the torrent below that in warmer months drenches countless unprepared tourists begins to freeze on the surface of anything that doesn't move as the temperatures drop, turning trees and other fixed objects into virtual ice sculptures.

I brought what has become my standard kit - Mamiya RB67 Pro S with all four lenses for it I own, 50mm, 65mm, 127mm and 250mm, three backs loaded with Fuji Acros for black and white, Kodak Portra 160 for colour and a roll of 35mm Ilford Delta 100 with my home made 120 adapter for panoramas, Manfrotto 055 tripod, light meter, and the usual sundries like filters, cable release etc. I also brought along the Minolta Hi-Matic 9 loaded with some Fuji Superia 400 I've kept in the freezer for about ten years. As I write this I have yet to finish off any of the colour rolls I was shooting that day so images from those are yet to come. Also, as the 35mm roll in the RB67 back had been a partial roll, I was unaware that there was only one frame left and since it has to be unloaded in the darkroom when finished I was unable to reload in the field. 

These windows are part of an odd looking rail-car, the purpose of which I can't guess. It's enclosed in its own little fenced off enclosure suggesting it has some sort of historical value. It has plenty of character and I'd love to explore it with a camera more but the fence itself gets in the way. I was able to see a bit more this day though by standing on a show bank.

If rainbows in b&w are not your thing I did get a colour version of this which you may see once I finish the roll.

As anyone familiar with the RB67 will realize this is quite a load, but my middle aged, desk job soft self can still manage a haul of a few KM over reasonable terrain when I've got it all loaded into the big photo backpack. That's pretty much what I set myself up to do when as usual I chose the free parking at the Dufferin Islands park and walked the rest of the way. I might have saved myself some effort had I realized that not only was this normally heavily maintained area neglected in the off-season, and that likewise they don't bother maintaining the tourist premium parking rates closer to the Falls when there are next to no tourists arriving. Though I could have avoided the slog, it's over now and I burned off all those extra calories.

If I had it to do over again, and with at a good month or more of winter yet to come I guess I do, I think I would have been better served if I had left the Mamiya at home in this case in favour of a Nikon used hand-held. Shooting tripod mounted is almost habitual for me but in this case I felt it held me back from exploring all the compositional options I found myself confronted with. I was glad of the Hi-Matic I brought with me, allowing me to be a little more free-wheeling though with one of the Mamiya backs loaded with Portra I found myself wishing I had loaded it with black and white film.

The one panoramic image I was able to get on 35mm film adapted to the RB67. As I had no idea how many shots were on the partial roll to begin with there was no way to know that there was only one exposure remaining and as it had to be removed in the darkroom I couldn't put in a fresh roll in the field.

Matters of shooting style aside however, this was one day that using a waist level finder, currently my only option with the RB67, put me at a disadvantage. This isn't always the case, and in fact there are times when using a waist level finder has been a revelation. For example landscape shots featuring a prominent foreground object often require shooting from an angle low enough to have an eye-level finder user crawling on their belly to frame up the shot. Even when the shot doesn't require such low angles, shooting with a camera held at chest level rather than the same height we are used to seeing the world from can subtly add interest to images through the slightly unfamiliar point of view. Putting my armchair psychologist hat on the lower eye level implied may even be suggestive of a child's point of view, triggering whatever emotional responses that might involve for a particular viewer. This waist-level point of view has been noted as an important component in Vivian Maier's style. Perhaps the child's perspective would also make sense in the work of the word's most (belatedly) famous TLR toting nanny. 

There's a flip side to this of course, as obtaining a perspective higher than waist-level requires a step ladder or some reasonable substitute. For example, in image at the top of the post I was aware that the top of the tree intersected with the top of the falls and that I could remedy this by raising the height of the camera but as I need to look down on the camera from above to see what was in the shot, doing so would have left me shooting blind. Like most medium format SLRs the RB67 has interchangeable viewfinders and I have considered getting an eye-level finder for situations like this. Of course to really benefit I'd have to bring along both finders and switch as needed, adding yet another item to an already heavy pack. Not as heavy as carrying a step-ladder with me mind you, so I may yet do this.

There are more images to come. The images here are from the first roll of Fuji Acros that went through the Mamiya as well as the aforementioned single panoramic image on 35mm film. In addition to the colour images still in camera there's a second roll of Acros with images from that day that's also waiting to be finished. As always I'll keep you posted.  

Embracing the Elements

I expect things to slow down this time of year but somehow between the holidays and getting hit with that flu that's been going around it's been a month an a half now, which I didn't expect. With both of these things winding down now that just leaves the cold to contend with. The cold is an obstacle that last year all but brought my photographic activities to a halt, but it's also an opportunity so I've vowed that this year I won't let winter stand in my way, at least not to the same degree.

Winter changes everything. At least it does where I live and for most of you living at roughly similar or higher latitudes I presume it does for you as well. The land takes on a new character. Favorite subjects you/ve photographed too many times in the past can take on a new look. Scenes that might not have looked like much amid the cluttered overgrowth of warmer seasons are transformed by the barren cold and a fresh coat of snow. Even the snow and ice itself can become the subject for photographs that exist at no other time and may never appear quite that way again.

 If you're fortunate enough to live near one of the Great Lakes, winter offers another opportunity that exists in only a few other places in the world. The Great Lakes, any of them really, are a bit like little fresh water oceans. The the lakes are vast enough to be photographed as seascapes, but being fresh water, when winters are cold enough vast quantities of ice accumulate along the shore forming temporary desolate landscapes that differ from year to year.

It must of course change quite a bit over the course of a winter, but having always lived a few minutes drive from the shore I've never really gotten the sense of how it might change on a week to week, even day to day basis. This year then I resolved to visit the shoreline throughout the winter to see how things change, and of course take advantage of whatever photographic opportunities such changes might present. Only a few days into a cold snap following a green and rainy Christmas I made my first jaunt out to the beach yesterday expecting to see little more than the first hints of a line of ice clinging to the shore. Apparently I had the whole thing figured wrong. When I arrived at my usual haunt, the stretch of shore strewn with the ruins of the old Erie Beach Amusement Park, the ice had already created a new landscape of low wind blown hills extending perhaps a hundred metres out from shore. I had been hoping for less really. I had imagined getting images that included ice and water but the new shoreline was 100 meters further on across ice I knew better than to attempt to cross however thick it might appear.

After wandering around for quite some time and making a few exposures I didn't imagine would amount to much I finally found that it was possible to follow the old concrete pier that, back in the heyday of the amusement park had received visitors arriving by boat from Buffalo NY. Here I was able to get my seascape compositions complete with ice in the foreground I had in mind. The greater than expected volume of ice at last seemed like a bit of a bonus as it gave an Antarctic feel to the scene.

I don't put much stock in long term forecasts so I'll take the winter as it comes, which is my default plan for most things anyway. In any case there is more to watch than just what happens along the Lake Erie shore. There's also the Niagara River including the Falls and all the surrounding things mist might freeze to. Then there's all the streams, creeks, woods and so on. It just takes the time and, when the temperature starts to drop, the will.