PJ’s Blog

Photographers make images, it’s the same as saying that bakers made breads or policemen write parking tickets. It’s a simple truth that can be a problem for some photographers, who rely only on their images, and not on the presentation around it, or on the image they themselves project.

It’s a strange fact, but when you look serious, when you look successful, people will tend to beleive that you actually are serious and succesful, and will be more willing to give you commissions. I’ve seen discussions on forums about this many times, and it always comes down to the simple fact that you have to look serious about photography to be taken seriously. You have to shoot a wedding ? Dress the part, and try to have an impressive looking camera, this way people will instantaneously indentify you as the photographer and are more likely to collaborate than if they think that you’re just some unknown relative just buzzing about and being annoying. You have an opening for an art exhibit of your work ? Dress the part, be artsy, be outgoing, people will see you as an artist, will look at your work as art, and might even buy it !

It’s shallow, it’s silly, it’s just plain stupid, but it actually works. Myself ? As I’ve said before I have a tendency to be the outsider, to be the oddball, and even if in general I’m just a regular guy, I pride myself into trying to look different. I shave my head, I wear an ankle-length black wool coat, you know, stupid details that make me stand out in a crowd, at least when I feel like it.

It’s a little the same with my photographic choices. I always consider the “look” of a camera before I buy it. I consider if it looks serious, if it looks good, and if I identify myself with the look of the camera… Again, this is silly, I know, but sometimes looks are all that matter…

(image : Daniel Cavanagh)

I’ve been living in Brussels for a couple of months, and try to explore as much as I can the streets around where I live.

As you may know, Brussels was one of the main centers of the “Art Nouveau” movement at the beginning of the 20th century, and in some parts of the city there are many very nice Art Nouveau buildings. I happen to be a great fan of Art Nouveau, so my walks around Brussels are often punctuated by architectural stops to admire some house or another.

Oftentimes I’m taken by some detail, and would love to have an image of it, a real good 4×5 image of it, but I can’t, simply because I don’t carry my 4×5 with me at all times (maybe I should start doing that…). In fact nowadays I don’t have a camera on me at all times like I once did, and I really think I should start doing that again. Now, here comes the tricky part: I would need a digital camera to use it as a notepad, taking notes of what images I want to do with a proper camera and then come back later…

I’m an equipment junkie, so I need a camera with “numbers” that I like, but there seems to be a void around the numbers I like : no one bothers to make camera with the right numbers ! I’m probably just too demanding, and should just take the cheapest, smallest camera and be done with it, it’s just a notepad after all, right ?

That’s what happens when I don’t use my cameras enough, I think I need another one, you know, one that I’d actually use…

I’m sure I’m not the only one with this sort of dilemma…

Today I made photographs. I took the time to get my MF camera when I was playing with my son and snapped a few pics (MF is great for that, at 12 shots per roll).

Now, where are those pics, why don’t I show them to you ? They should be scanned and photoshopped and ready to go now, no ? it’s been nearly 10 hours since I took them ! (And my Picture-a-week project, whatever happened to that, I’m four weeks behind !)

Well, I guess my mind has been polluted by the digital revolution. I want pictures NOW ! Not in an hour, not in a week, NOW ! (I guess that’s one if the reasons I like polaroids these days…). I have now a full time job and a family, so the NOW factor, and the getting-out-taking-pictures factor are a little out of balance for now…

I do keep my 11×14 camera on the tripod in a corner of my bedroom, so It’s on my mind a lot these days…

Anyhow, I haven’t stopped taking pictures, they haven’t found their way to the net yet…

Classic cameras have special needs that need to be adressed to keep them happy, and in order to turn them from museum pieces to usable cameras.

Now, just to be clear, by classic cameras I mean wooden view cameras from the 19th and early 20th century, not more recent classics like the Nikon F… The issues here are about wood, brass, leather, and fabric, not about gears and circuits.

First off, one of the main problems with classic “professional” cameras, like my Century 11×14, is the lack of an extension rail. Since those are separate pieces, along the decades they often get separated from their cameras, and those rails are not really interchangable, unfortunately. From time to time an orphan rail will come up on e-bay or in shops, but you must consider that unless you buy an extremely common camera, like a Kodak 2D, that when you buy a classic camera, if it doesn’t have an extension rail, chances are you never will have one. This limits your choice of lens significantly, and can also limit your close focussing ability.

Now, the part of classic camera that is usually in the worst shape is the Bellows. Sometimes the only practical option is to replace it completely with a modern bellows, which costs usually several hundred dollars, so this has to be taken into account in the cost of the camera. There were two main types of outer covering used in bellows at that time : Leather and fabric. Both can be made very brittle by years of drying, and extra care must be taken when opening the camera and drawing out the front standard. Leather can be oiled and treated to recover some of its original suppleness, and so can fabric, but with a little less success. But the problems can stem from the drying out of the glue used between the layers of the bellows ad cause the separation of the inner core of the bellows from the outer covering, and the interleaving cardboard stiffeners are sometimes in a bad shape.

In short, duct tape is not an option…

Stripping the outer or inner layer only and replacing the inner stiffeners and gluing back a new layer might be an option, giving you an instant template for the new layer. My take on the Century ? It a fabric bellows, and even if the layers are separated, I think that my first attempt at saving it will be to fing a suitable outer covering and glue it in place on the outside of the bellows, using some fabric tape for the corner pleats. This will give a two-tone effect which will look like the Russian FK cameras.

Now, for the brass, be careful when refinishing it because some of the fittings of classic cameras are only brass-plated, which means that any scrubbing with most likely result in the removal of the brass layer.

Screws can cause problems when the wood hasn’t aged well, and loose screws are a common disease of classic cameras. There are unfortunately no miracle cures. And one strategy is to use slightly larger screws in order to get the necessary “bite” in the wood.

So, these are the problems I’ve encountered so far in the care of my beast, I’ll be happy to share my progress in the rejuvenation of this magical creature.

Here is a book that might be useful if you decide to undertake major camera restoring. It’s not necessairly an easy “made for dummies” book, but it covers a lot of restoring and repair issues regarding both cameras and lenses : Restoring Classic & Collectable Cameras, by Thomas Tomosoy…

Among the various opinion wars raging in the photographic hobby world is of course the digital vs film debate. But the kind of hardcore opinions that can be seen in various web forums on this subject is not a new thing. Other equipment debates have been going on over the years, and some are still going strong… One of those debate is the Canon vs Nikon war, which fans of either companies claim to be won by their favorite camera and lens maker each time a new product comes out. The Japanese vs German lenses debate is also still raging, with some people holding on very hard to the belief that German lenses are the best, either with the Leitz or the Carl Zeiss (Or Rodenstock or Schneider..) name on them… Some people would defend their Leica with their lives, or their Hasselblads, or their Deardorffs, or whatever mythic camera they own or hold dear… (please note that I didn’t use the word “use”, because a lot of the equipment debates are made on a theoretical level, on MTF cuves and lpm numbers…) The underlying reason is difficult to discern, a camera is a tool, right ? It’s just the mechanical and optical apparatus that takes the photographer’s idea and helps him expose film. It’s nothing more, right ?

Well, for some people cameras are status symbols, just like cars can be… When you use this or that camera, which either was used by some famous photographer or is really really expensive, it makes you feel like a better photographer.

Cartier-Bresson used a Leica, therefore if I want to make pictures as good as Cartier-Bresson’s I have to use a Leica… Most professional photographers don’t think that way, and usually use whatever tool is best for the job, but many of the photographers populating the online communities are not professionals, and some tend to be a little too religious about their “weapon of choice” …

Me ? well, I’m not completely immune, I have a Nikon F4, which is I think one of the best 35mm camera ever made, I have a Hasselblad (affectionnaly dubbed the “Swedish cube”), which is one of the most widely known status-symbol camera, and well, I shoot in large and ultra-large format, which I do in part because of the richness of the process, because I can do contact prints and use interesting and exotic techniques, and also because it is “exotic”, period.

This has been one of the central points of my life in the last few years: striving to be different, to be the guy doing strange stuff. Doing my Ph.D on Extreme environments, getting involved in historical swordfighting, getting involved in ULF photography, getting married at 24, selling my digital photography gear and going back to film, packing my stuff and moving from Quebec to Brussels. I like going against the current, but not too much. I’m also a big trend follower, I have a Mac and an iPod, I publish a blog, I try to be involved in the traditional photography community, I read “The Da Vinci code” and Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket…

I like being different, just like every one else…

If you don’t know Dan Brown’s novel “The Da Vinci Code” then you’ve been probably living in a world where there is no TV, no magazines and no Internet (which you don’t, since you’re reading this on your screen…).

You might have not read it, but you know the general gist of it and you might know that there is a movie on the way with Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou (the girl of “Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amelie Poulain”), you might also know that there are bunches of tourists running around in Paris, trying to see for themselves the stuff Dan Brown describes in his book.

You might also know that Dan Brown actually wrote a book before the Da Vinci Code, called “Angels and demons”, which features the same main character and which takes place before the Da Vinci Code. However, you probably learned this once you’d read the Da Vinci Code, in which cases there are some references in the latter book which you didn’t get, because they were talking about the first one…

By now you’re probably thinking that I’ve given up photography altogether and became a librarian, but here is the photographic bit:

You Probably know this image if you know a thing or two about photography, or ever taken photography classes. It was made by Ansel Adams in 1937 in Yosemite Park, and It’s an image that is often used as an example for print making, dodging, burning, that kind of thing. You probably know this image as an original and powerful masterpiece, a new product of Adams’ time, made possible by his amazing creative genius. And it is, no doubt about it.

But then you might not be aware of the work of Carleton Watkins, who went around Yosemite National Park with a bunch of mules to transport his mammoth wet plate equipment, and who made this image in 1865 :

They are not the same, I agree, but the explore the same landscape, and they come from the same general vision of showing the beauty of Yosemite National Park, which those two men knew inside and out.

Maybe you didn’t know the reference of Adams to Watkins work, it’s probably not relevant to the enjoyement of Adams photograph, but the fact that Adams’ image has so much more impact is in part because of the technological progress is the 72 years separating the two images, but it is also a tribute to the talent of Ansel Adams for rendering a scene in dramatic ways.

You might not have read Angels and Demons before you tackle the Da Vinci Code, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy the second book of the series, it’s good, no matter what came before it…

I just finished reading the whole Harry Potter Series, and now I know…

And if you haven’t read the books, if you haven’t seen the films, you don’t know what a muggle is, you have to idea who might Tom Riddle be, you have no clue how to get to platform 9 3/4… Those are all references that you would easily catch if you’ve read the series (which I suggest you do, because, well, they’re not bad at all, and make for good metro-tram-bus and weekend reading…).

There are many closed worlds like that in our modern times, and it has always been so. Among my own references are stuff like :

Dune, by Frank Herbert
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C.Clarke
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Ok, ok, I admit, I’m a science fiction fan, so my references of course cover many of the numerous Star Trek series and movies, the Star Wars mythology, and a lot of the work by Isaac Asimov. I am also a fan of fantasy, so I of course I know all the nooks and cranies of The Lord of the Rings, and could discuss at length of the ommissions and editorial decisions made by Peter Jackson is his films.

Now, what has this got to do with photography ? (not much, actually, photography was not invented back in the days of the hobbits…)

But seriously, culture is giving us a sort of reference framework inside of which concepts have meanings. If you don’t know the difference between hari-kana and kata-kana japanese script there is no use trying to present a piece of artwork that exploits that difference, you won’t get it… (I’m not even sure if i got the right names myself…)

It’s one of the strength of the famous Pepper no.30 from Edward Weston : it draws on a basic common reference. We westerners all know what a pepper is and what it looks like, we know how it grows, we know how it smells, how it tastes, we know the sound it makes when you cut it with a knife, we know the texture of it when we bite in a piece of it. We know peppers. If it had been potato no 30, we would have gotten it, lichi no 30, we would have been interested by the wierd fruit, but as westerners (as I think most of the people who saw the Weston image when it was made…) we wouldn’t have felt the same.

We know peppers, inside and out, that what makes this image so strong, because it shows that simple pepper in a new light, is uses an universal reference and presents it as a thing of beauty.

We know peppers. And somehow, for an image to tug and our heartstring, we need to have a reference point, we need something we can hold on to in order to try and interpret the image, in order to take it all in and digest it. Even if the image is of some exotic thing, place, person or fruit, we always try to fit it into our rigid reference framework.

We know peppers, and now I know Harry Potter too…

I’ve got my hands on “The Bride“… Deniz sent it halfway across the world and it arrived here today, styrofoam peanuts and all, and is now sitting happily (I hope) on top of my tripod in a corner of the room… For a 100-year old camera it’s in relatively good shape, but the fabric bellows is in pretty bad shape, with the outer shell ripped out at several places. It seems to be relatively light tight, though, from what I see at least by putting a lens on it and looking out the window… I don’t have a film holder for now, but I’ll try to be clever and find a way to make images with it without holders… Now, I’ve got a new job which takes a lot of my time so my daily blog entry might skip a beat or two once in a while, but I’ll try and keep on adding stuff… Now that I have bought a ULF camera, I’m a ULF photographer (or is it just that now that I have bought a ULF camera, I now own a camera…?)…

Groups of images sometimes rely on images that have no meaning by themselves but have one when confronted with the other images in the group. Those two images are from the “Good girl/bad girl” series which was discussed yesterday and don’t really stand on their own. I’ve realised that in part because in my physical portfolio I only have vertical 8×10 images, so the two horizontal images presented here yesterday are not in there. On the other hand I quite like the series so I kept these two in my portfolio.

People look through my portfolio, which is mainly model photos, both portraits and nudes, and my “nappa” series (bellybutton in finnish), and then, out of the blue, those two pictures of shoes…

And people just don’t get it. I kept the images there because in my mind they are still grouped with the two nudes, but for someone who doesn’t know those horizontal images, those two shoe pictures just look odd, like plucked out of a catalog or an ad campain, and lack all the strength given to them by their association to the two nudes…

Now, the question is of course if those images are needed at all in the group if they cannot stand on their own, and this is open for debate. Can individual images in a strong group be allowed to be weak on their own ?

Today’s images are a pair that are part of a four image set that I presented at my first “real” exhibition. It was one of the first time that I made the images with precisely this idea in mind. The set was called “Good girl / Bad Girl”. Not very deep, I agree, and not very original either, but the point is that even if either images are interesting by themselves, they are strengthened by the use of both of them together.

Now. It’s one of the basics of images presentation that people are usually taught in art school, but it took me a while to get to that point by myself. I still try to get images in coherent groups when I present them, I’ve tried to do that in the galleries on Mamut Photo, and on my personal website, and I am starting to think about my images in series earlier in my creative process, and I have now a number of possible “photographic projects” which involve a number of images and which will be put online or shown once the whole series is done. The polaroid nudes that I did a few weeks ago are along those lines, and I try to keep my eyes opened for new ideas.