Thanks to an old Polaroid film holder I’m giving instant film another shot–and dusting off the Speed Graphic for my first foray into large-format cameras.

I’ve almost finished my first film pack and have already learned (or re-learned) several things:

• Carry a thermometer and for Pete’s sake develop for the correct time.
• The negative is salvagable and has better shadow and highlight detail than the print, but is grainier and has a ridiculously tiny tonal range.  Pick one and optimize it.
• It is definitely better to forget to remove the darkslide than to forget to put it back in.
• ‘Okay’ is no longer good enough in the matter of tripods.

The Speed Graphic was my grandfather’s.  He bought it to photograph paintings and do similar copy work.  I’m using it as baby’s first field camera.  Large format work is wholly new to me, but I think it owns bones and it could be a very productive mode of photographing.  Once I’ve acclimated myself to the camera, I’ll move on to using full-size wet-dev films and take it to the limit.

Taken 4 April for The Imps of Marge and Fletch.  They send you a photo postcard, you send back a photo with the postcard, and a good time is had by all. Check out their site here; they do some great work.

Not the only photo I’ve shot this year, but one of the less boring ones.

I am standing at the main intersection of town, an old Kodak on a tripod occupying both hands.  A small hawk alights on a dead sparrow four paces up the sidewalk in front of me and ruffles its breast.  I freeze.  It freezes.  We stare at each other for a moment, then the hawk wings by at head height, taking its prize down the block and around the corner.

Reason photo not taken: Hawk was not messin’ around.

First, method.  I used a basket of films that I shoot or am interested in shooting: Fuji FP-100C, FP-100B, and FP-3000B instant pack film; Fuji Provia 400 and 100 slide film; Kodak Portra 400, Ektar 100, and Tri-X negative film; and Kodak Ektachrome 100G slide film.  I also used formats within the range of those I shoot or am considering shooting: 35mm, 6×4.5, 6×6, 6×7, 6×9, and 4″x5″.  The unit was the single roll, in the case of roll film; the 10-exposure film pack for instant; and the smallest available box for sheet film.  The prices were taken from B&H’s online retail store.

Cost per square centimeter of exposed image area per frame stayed in a range between $0.01 and $0.02 excepting only a few films.  This is a much narrower range than per-frame costs between formats, but that kind of 200 percent (or more) jump between lowest and highest doesn’t happen until one compares roll film to sheet film.

The roll film-sheet film divide persists when costs are normalized, though: sheet film hangs out around $0.02/cm^2/image; most roll film stays between $0.01/cm^2/image and $0.015/cm^2/image.

As one would expect, normalized cost is about the same across all the medium formats (120 film).  It’s the same film, just framed differently, so larger image sizes are balanced out by fewer frames per roll and vice versa.  Net exposed area is about the same.

Here’s a shocker, though: 35mm offers great per-frame cost with 36 frames on a roll and rolls at less than $6, but the cost per image area is about as much as that of 4″x5″ film!  That’s pretty high, considering that 35mm frames are tiny (with worse tonality and more pronounced grain than larger formats) and there is less exposed area per roll than medium and larger formats.

Medium format is definitely the best bargain of the three formats when normalized.  The costs are low ($0.01-$0.015/cm^2/image) but the negatives are good-sized, the cameras are easily portable with fast lenses, and the film is in a convenient roll.

One ‘real steal’ emerged from this process: Kodak Tri-X.  The classic silver b&w film ran around $0.01 per cm^2 per image across all 6 formats that I examined.

As for my choice between large instant pack film and small instant pack film–the big kind is 25 percent more costly per area than 4″x5″ sheet film despite being 9 percent smaller.  I think I can live with the cheaper but not-really-that-much-smaller 3 1/4″x4 1/4″ format.  Now I just have to procure a holder…

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Postscript: A really quick check suggests that the 8″x10″ format is the reigning champion of normalized costs (and wrecks the pattern) because the film is just so darn big:  in this format Kodak Ektar 100 costs 2 one-hundredths of a cent per cm^2 per image.

My camera often fails because it’s pointed at the wrong thing, which for some reason was invisible to my brain while I was out shooting but which becomes quite clear later on.

-Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer, 16 March 2011

Professional photographers today, much reduced in numbers, work for larger, more homogeneous markets, and often for clients they have not met. Photographers are for the most part creatures of their environment, and it would be unreasonable to criticize them for having so often failed, in recent decades, to photograph what we would have wished, and for having instead made endless numbers of virtually indistinguishable photographs of generic love godesses, or of fringe royalty holding wine glasses, or of politicians shaking hands, or of the displaced young attempting to look simultaneously uninvolved and avant. There is no end of such stuff, but good photographs of commercial fishing (or wheat farming, logging, mining, teaching, keeping house, keeping books, etc.) are distressingly rare. This is partly because photographs of such subjects are more difficult to make, but it is also true that there has lately been little economic incentive to photograph anything except those subjects that are interesting to everyone.  Such subjects tend to produce photographs that are not very interesting to anyone.

….

We are now engaged in a new industrial revolution, characterized by magnetism and electronic connections. Some of its prophets have suggested that this new technology (light on its feet, quick reflexes, enormously pliant) might make it again possible to publish work of serious ambition (including photographs) for audiences no larger than a company of infantry, or a symphony orchestra. If this should prove the case, then photographers might stop dreaming of a universal audience, and try again to describe life on their own street.  Or on their own river.

-John Szarkowski, A Maritime Album: 100 Photographs and Their Stories (Introduction), Yale University Press, 1997

The actual act of making pictures didn’t fare quite as well.  I was out of the game for most of the summer because of work.  I shot four fewer rolls than in 2009 – not much, you might say, but I don’t shoot a lot anyway, so every rolls really counts.  I shot more medium format as well, so the number of individual frames shot is less than in 2009 by about a third.

Taking that view seems kind of dumb, like distilling baseball to player stats, but there’s a point when quantity does count.  It takes a certain number of shots to get into the groove, for instance.  I’m early in the learning process, where more shots translate directly to more experience.  I make shots when I go out to shoot, and conversely, when I’m not shooting I’m not out engaging with the world either.  Now that I’m germinating concepts that guide my photography, I need to develop the techniques that support those concepts and a body of work that illustrates them.

I’d say these represent the best photos I made in 2010 as currently considered.

These are all right, I guess.  They are not awful to look at, though there isn’t a lot to them.  I need to shoot a lot more, though, for consistency’s sake.  What I’m getting now is a discontinuous lot of photos, most of which just aren’t good enough for anything and the better ones too few and far between to have any kind of coherence.

I’m not really interested in the stream-of-consciousness or slice-of-life style of making and presenting photos that the digital camera and photo-sharing website have given us, and while I appreciate the single ‘great images’ that seems to be a legacy of painting, it doesn’t bear on what I want to accomplish with my photos (not that they are strong enough for that purpose anyway).  I’m consequently quite frustrated that my photos to this point are all basically useless, and will remain so until I have made enough of the right kind that I can edit and organize them into thematically coherent bodies suitable for a photobook or something.  That’s where I’d like to go, but I certainly have a long trip in front of me.  Maybe I can move a little farther along in 2011.

Where do the limits on photographers’ rights appropriately begin?  Why?

Aside from civil liberties wonks and photographers themselves, I don’t think these are questions the average person cares much about at all.  When ‘photography’ is something to do on vacation, or a way for artists to make some art, then what’s the big deal?  Who needs ‘rights’ to take photos of the grandkids, or a sunset?

Well, okay.  But what if you are photographing a crime scene while on assignment for your local paper and an officer obliges you to delete your photographs and come back later if you want to get some shots, as the British Journal of Photography reported?  What if you are harassed by law enforcement for photographing infrastructure from a public place using an un-stealthy un-threatening view camera, as happened to Mitch Epstein while working on his American Power project?  Do you need rights then?

Damn right you do.

People too often forget that photography isn’t just a hobby or an ‘art thing.’  It is a means for recording viewpoints which may then be seen by many people other than the eyewitness photographer.  As such it is invaluable for–and in this day and age, integral to–shaping and adding to the public discourse.  Think of Lewis Hine’s photographs of child labor, or the photos and footage shot by journalists in Vietnam during the war.  Judged solely by their consequences, those images mattered.

Of course, people in positions of power and privilege have learned this by now, and try to do what they can to keep control of the narrative.  The US military embeds journalists.  BP bars photographers from cleanup scenes.  Police officers turn away reporters, delete their images, and seize the cameraphones of bystanders as evidence (or “evidence”) without warrants or other legal niceties.  Et cetera.

The trouble with this is that those people happen to be public figures, major business entities or agents of a representative government.  By virtue of their stature they warrant as much scrutiny as the public cares to give, and if they find this objectionable they must simply deal with it.  To make a distinction between things that are said or written about them (positive, negative or neutral) and images made of them (ditto) because one is Speech and therefore a Sacred Right, whereas the other is a stupid hobby/terrorist spying/who gives a shit anyway, and may be freely suppressed, is hogwash.

So where should the limits on photographers’ rights fall?  If society values free expression as much as it claims*, then photography in public should enjoy all the same protections that other public speech does, full stop.  This includes every Joe and Jane Cameraphone as well as credentialed journalists and ‘pro’ photographers.

Conversely, if society values free expression as much as it claims, then the citizenry must loudly and ferociously stick up for photographers’ rights as it would any other rights it especially enjoys.  When so many people have a camera with them all the time, the odds that any person is able to make an image of social significance is certainly higher than it has ever been.

Steppin’ back off the soapbox, now.

*I am cynical enough to expect that society values free expression less than the lip service implies–not to dampen the rhetoric or anything.

For the record, I have been shooting in the time since my last post – a little off-the-cuff landscape and nature (I prefer to see it as “micro-scape”) work.  It’s nothing spectacular, but I’m just glad to have squeezed some photography into the 50+ hour workweeks and job hunting that have dominated the past month.

After decades of idleness and two years’ downtime awaiting repair, my father’s grandfather’s Rolleicord  is back in action, and I love it.  I can’t wait to take it out for another shoot.

I’ve also tentatively decided that Kodak Portra VC will be my go-to color negative film.  It approximates my impressions of color and captures subtle changes in color under different lighting conditions in a way that I like.  That it comes in slow and fast versions is also a plus, because I prefer low ISO but know that it’s not always feasible to use.

Two other things, of equal importance to the small amount of actual photography I’ve done lately:

• Found, bought, and started reading a real-book version of On Being a Photographer by David Hurn & Bill Jay.  I’m only a fraction of the way in and I already have considerable food for thought about creating bodies of work and subject vs. self in one’s photographs.

• Begun re-mounting my father’s slides he made in the mid-late 1970s – in other words, when he was as old as I am now.  It wasn’t long before I realized that I need to start spending more time on the road.  I’m no vagabond by nature, but photography is all about going out and seeing–and the amount of that I do is pitiful compared to the amount I should do.  I have a passel of obligations not related in any way to photography, some onerous and some delightful, but I feel it downright imperative that photo-related travel get its due share of attention among them.  (I am aware of the quote about a photographer with fully-attuned vision never making it past the end of the block.  My response: I’m a newbie and I need to do a lot of seeing if I want to achieve a one-block degree of attunedness.)

So: new photos, new thoughts, new plans, new approaches, and a new job which (hopefully) will free up more time for photographic pursuits.  All in all, not too bad a month.

Here I am, after missing last Friday.  Why?  Well, partly because I’m short on photos to head posts with.  Not that I don’t have them – but I can’t edit the ones I’m scanning because neither Photoshop Elements nor GIMP can handle files with 16-bit channels.  Pfeh.

(I’m going to bite the bullet and start using draft scans, contrary to my maxim that I never show anything that’s not ready to be shown, but not today.)

I’m not out photographing much either.  I presently have two rolls (well, one roll and one Fuji instant film pack) uncompleted, and I only just finished a roll I started a month ago.  I’m making show progress, with a photo expedition here and there, but the circumstances just aren’t right for photography.  Excuses, excuses; but–

For me, photography is part and parcel of exploring and engaging the world.  I’m most inspired to make photographs when I have an unencumbered mind and unencumbered time ahead of me.  Days when I work, unfortunately, are not like that.  It’s not easy to travel afield with no itinerary when I have a hard timetable for getting to work looming, iceberg-like, a scant few hours ahead in the North Atlantic of my day.

I’m doing what I can to improve this situation, but in the meanwhile, new photographs will come slowly.  Halfway through the year, and I’ve only shot nine rolls.

On a more positive note, I am using that Fuji instant film I mentioned previously.  I’ve had a pack for FP-3000B, a fast black-and-white film, in the Polaroid 330 for the past week to check the camera and my modifications.  It works fine, I’m pleased to say, and apart from accidentally flinging the camera out of my bag and onto the ground, which has caused some odd vignetting (could the film pack be out of alignment?), I have had a great deal of fun using it.  The applications for instant film are limited, but the ability to have, in your hands, a print larger than a standard trading card less than a minute after you tripped the shutter, is something unto itself.  I can’t wait to get out the 230 and try some of the color film.

Work on the Model 1 continues as well – I’m putting together the film roll holders and new film advance knob.  It’s nothing too complicated, but I have to bridge the roughly one and one-half-inch difference between the film the camera was meant to use and the film I’m going to use in it.