The Tao of Film And its Delectable Hold on Me

I’m a digital man- converted from the world of living in the bush with no electricity, never mind a telephone connection. My friends and family couldn’t believe just how fast I changed from that wild, neanderthalic bush creature who hated anything to do with technology to the person who they all now turn to to fix their computers. Perhaps it’s a result of managing your own business, but I’m now connected 24/7, wireless is an afterthought, I write mails on the road, and am on international phone calls 80km from the nearest town, and I love it.

Jumping into the digital world of photography also made me get on top of the technology game. In the old days it was film, camera, lens.
Now its camera, lens, memory cards, Mac books, iMacs, portable hard drives, drobos, time machines, mobile me and a hoard of editing software to keep the images sanely in touch with reality. Managing all that makes one quite adept at working with technology and making it work for you. And when it works, well life is great- digital photography has made the world faster, more accessible and hell of a lot more demanding. Its common practise for me to do a shoot on one morning and have the delivered product in the clients hands the next day. Yes this is the digital world, and man it is fast…

Then.
After 7 months of fieldwork on the insect book, Easter weekend was one that demanded relaxation. We stayed in Jo’burg with good friends Hercu and Esther, two creative and inspirational minds who share many of the same ideas on life and more importantly, photography…-)
All of us have cameras, and so on Sunday morning we headed out in Hercu’s mint condition Mercedes 1964 220se fin tail. This beautifully restored car is probably the best way to cruise the Jo’burg streets. It has oodles of space to spread four people inside, speed bumps are a treat- you can take them at 50km/h and it feels like driving over a pillow… and it looks so beautiful through a FM2 with a 50mm lens.

Yes that’s right, while the others were using the latest digital SLR cameras, I pulled out my Nikon FM2 with a 50mm f1.4 lens. I thought I had to match the vintage vehicle with my 1982 model fully manual, legend of a camera. From the back of the fridge somewhere, I dug out a roll of velvia 50 film and whacked it into the open back of the camera. Just that feeling alone was enough to get me excited!
So there I was walking through the streets of Jozi with this camera thinking how not to waste film in each image I took. Initially, all I could do was just focus, meter, compose, focus, compose, focus, compose. I didn’t want to release that shutter until all was correct in the frame.

The mind shift had already started- I was concentrating harder, thinking more, working different angles, changing my depth of field; and hardly taking a shot.
I had stripped photography back down to the bare parts; enjoying the precision of the mechanical shutter, the security of the wind on button and the simplicity of the metering dial inside the viewfinder.
Everything was simpler, slower and more detailed. I can recall every exposure setting of every frame on that spool, as I can remember the exposure of many of my good images from the film days. Therein lies the beauty, the tao of film.
It slows the whole process, makes you consider more of what you are doing when you make that image. With digital we treat the cameras as glorified point and shoots. Are there better photographs now that digital has arrived? Ill certainly argue against it. Has the advent of digital made Cartier-Bresson and Karsh and McCullum’s images less impressive? Definitely not at all- if anything, I still go back to their works and read more of how much time they spent studying the arts and discussing the philosophy of photography with its many subtle leitmotivs. Images that are still revered today- 30 years on.

So am I going back to film, am I regressing? Well, the digital world is just so convenient and fast and instantaneously self-gratifying, it would be a very difficult move. You learn fast, you work fast and you deliver fast. But working with film again made me ask myself some questions. That’s what I learnt this last weekend. Film made me explore more, think more and challenge myself more to get the best image right the first time round. With digital, a sharp, in-focus image with a decent background is a good shot- but could there have been more in it?

With film you slow it down, relax, think, concentrate as if this was your only chance at this image- with 50-speed film it normally is, and make damn sure you have everything correct to make the most of your one chance. So yes, I will be shooting more film this year. I have even dusted off the old F100 and I have a stock of 100 Provia that I won in some competitions a few years ago to go through, so perhaps there is still more to come yet.

With digital it’s often an easy fix for a good photograph. The playing field is levelled with all the same cameras making the same easy everything type of image. With film, the playing field is skewed (sometimes skewered) towards failure due to the high demands of film and just how unforgiving it is. This creates a super awareness in you that you have to get it right, and get it right now. And that is where it all starts and where it all ends, right there in the camera, through the lens, with that exact composition in that light- right now.
The tao of film is being there in the moment; just ask Cartier-Bresson, McCullum and Karsh.

Images? Well they will come soon enough; the lab is still processing the film. Welcome to the world of film- it still beautiful slow.
For now, a couple of images taken with the digital camera. Thought I was a convert, didn’t you?

Oh and this is what happens when you have too much coffee in the morning…!

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Remember What's In Those Archives

I recently have been going through all my old RAW files to keyword and star rate them. Actually Zendré has done most of this so credit should go to her… For the hours put in while I am on photo shoots. My digital library extends back to 2004, which meant going through all those old files and rating them as well as describing the images so I can search for them in future.

What has this done? a lot really! I did a couple of star rated searches through those years and was amazed at what came up. Images I had a vague recollection of popped up as well as many images that I had completely forgotten about. It made me realise just how badly a collection can fall apart if not correctly managed. The process should take about another two weeks to get fully up to date, but until then, I will have even more images that I have forgotten about and not able to use or show you here!

Being a professional photographer, I need to have almost instant access to my images- this has just made me realise how important the old computer is that you sit in front of. I spend many an hour in the field happily shooting away, but if the process back at the office is not well managed and refined (and managed by good staff…) then it falls apart very quickly.

So just a quick word of advise in this entry. Get all your images sorted, key worded and rated very quickly. It will make your life so much easier in 20 years time when you look for that one great shot you remembered photographing 15 years ago when you could still get out into the field!

These are a few of the images from the searches I did over the last 3 years. Took about 3 minutes find, edit and export. Till next time and some more secrets of life,
adios.

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A Fish Eye for Insects

Continuing with insect photography and directly from the last blog, this entry is about how the real jewel in the collection came to be.
I loved the 105-macro lens as my main piece of kit for the book. However, as always, I wanted to get something different. I tried the 12-24, but it was a bit restrictive in its minimum focussing distance- what I wanted was something really extreme. I chatted to Greg du Toit and consulted with Thomas Peschak about a fish eye. I value both their opinions highly- Greg for his creative input and Thomas, because he has been there and done that with a fish eye lens (he is one of the worlds pre eminent underwater photographers). Both of them said it was the way to go if trying to get unique images of subjects that normally are seen in the narrow scope of a macro lens.

Also, and quite importantly, I wanted to show insects within their environment-, as that is what our book was about.
So the next step was the fish eye lens. Nikon Professional Services very kindly lent me a 10.5mm lens for a weeks use. Playing around at home was great fun for the gimmick effect of extreme distortion and close focussing, but it was in the field that this lens was to test my skills.

Working with fish eye is technically very difficult. It has an 180º angle of view. Sounds great, but try photographing in early morning light and you soon realise that the sun and your shadow are both within the 180º angle of view…Tricky if you have limbs like mine that lie all over the place. This limits you to photographing upwards, to get the shadow out of the image, however, any tilt in the lens causes extreme distortion on the horizon, and so you need to ensure that the lens is perfectly straight.

Then photographing the subject. The great benefit of the lens is its close focussing- about 10cm. Getting close to a baboon spider is half the problem, the other problem is not distorting the spider itself, so vertical distortion also needs to be kept in account!

With all these things in your head, you tend to forget the technical details of adding more flash and compensating your exposure for the darker foreground… Of course all this photography tales place with you lying prone on the ground, getting as low as possible!
What it adds up to is that it is an extremely difficult lens to get acceptable results with (on land…). I really enjoyed the lens though and also had great fun with it stalking mating elegant grasshoppers and dung beetles rolling their dung balls.

In the end, I worked through it all and managed to get some very acceptable results. The way I see it, I now treat the fish eye like fill-in flash. Using both correctly, the viewer shouldn’t be able to see that they have been used. If you can portray that, then you’ve made the equipment work for you.
In my mind, that’s what its all about. Hope you enjoy the fish eye views of the insect world! Hope these images illustrate it, but have a look at the insect image collection here for more images of these wonderful creatures. Also see Aprils essay on the “A Landscape of insects” was taken with a fish eye lens.

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Focussing on The Fine Details

Macro photography is traditionally a very technical aspect of photography. In the film days, it scared most photographers away, with the ones who did attempt it, spending a lot of time in studios and controlled environments. The trend for macro photography has been to use macro lenses, extension tubes, complicated flash and lighting set ups and huge depth of fields to ensure the whole subject was in focus. This set a certain standard, and images tended to be excellently lit with every detail of the subject in focus…

When I started out with my insect work, for the production of my book, I studied up on all these methods. I had some prior knowledge and experience of macro photography, but wanted to know more about new and different techniques to capture this miniscule world. I also knew that the food photography world had led the way with differential focus, setting the trend in that department. This is where very specific parts of an image are in focus- with the rest of the image a nice, clean blur. I didn’t see why it couldn’t work in the realm of insects too and it was one of the first things that I wanted to experiment with.

I’m quite an “Off the cuff” type of photographer. I see a shot, I select my settings quickly and grab the image. The longer I spend with a subject the more irritated I get, stifling my creativity. And when you are using natural light for your macro work and the wind is blowing the grass around, one does tend to get irritated…

So the first thing that went was the tripod.
I decided there and then that everything was to be handheld; then the flash with diffuser cup and the Nikon 105 VR macro lens to actually take the image. I mention this, cause without the Vibration Reduction; I doubt many of these images would have been sharp. Once the sun got low on the horizon, I spent much of my time shooting at iso1250- and that is only testament to the D300s good noise capabilities. I’m no techno guy, but when technology benefits me as much as what I’ve mentioned above, I have to be happy!

Anyway, I have digressed. The point of the blog is; I tried the narrow depth of field with insects and to me, it worked. Actually very well, So much so that I used it as my main technique while photographing for the book.
Hope these images illustrate it, but have a look at the insect image collection here for more images of these wonderful creatures.
Ever wondered where the science fiction creative guys got their inspiration…?

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