Portrait of a man, probably by the river. I took it with a Daci Royal, which was on long exposure and got waved about slightly to produce this mistiness.
July 30, 2008
July 29, 2008
Portraits
It looks like a project is developing over this. Personally I don’t like self-portraits with much of me in them and never have; I don’t know what other people see in them but it definitely isn’t what I do. Perhaps this is a self-perception issue, or maybe even a matter of habit; I’m happy to give it a go but the net is unlikely to collapse under the sheer volume of traffic generated as I release vast numbers of images.
In general, I find the whole thing with portraits a bit like the issue of ‘pictures depicting time’ – sometimes portraits show you the surface of a person, and the way they react to a camera, but it seems to me that the way the portraitee looks fits a pattern, a familiar path through the field of portraiture. Certainly you can get some truly unique and remarkable ones – and I’ve seen some around flickr, and can’t hope to better them – but also you can get ones that seem very focused on the outer message of a person, and I want what’s in them.
Here’s another one. You’ll be surprised to learn that this one isn’t from Flickr, and that isn’t me. Elizabeth I sits with her back to the Armada, seemingly waiting unhurriedly as they meet their doom, contemplating her status and power and looking a great deal better than she did in real life, apparently. According to this link, she ended up getting younger looking as the years went on, neat if you can do it! http://www.shafe.co.uk/art/early_stuart_02_-_jacobean_painting.asp
The clues are all right there – crowns, globes, death and turmoil amongst the fleet, and the opulence of her surroundings, and I love it of course, these are
fantastic artefacts alone, let alone considering the marketing and artistry that went into them. But clearly, it’s political, and subtlety doesnt’ really figure here. It’s like having a man standing there with a placard saying ‘The Queen is alive and well, incredibly well off and ready to defeat your nation if you dare to differ,’. Not much subjectivity to be had.
I’m sure, though I can’t remember it clearly, there used to be a group on Flickr for portraits or self-portraits where the person being regarded wasn’t even in the frame. That’s the kind of thing I’m after I suppose. It doesn’t have to be that extreme, but I want something that shows me the inside of people, a bit more insight in to what they’re experiencing internally, or what they believe. Not all ‘external’ portraits are as extreme as this one of course, but even so, I want to be able to read what it says about the heart of the person, or what they think about while the portrait is being done.
And like the time pictures, there are techniques that spring to mind. Pinholes, lack of focus, contrasting focus, doubles…and particular cameras. Here are a couple I tried much earlier :)
Helpfully in this one I resemble the Grim Reaper, and you can’t tell anything else much about what I’m like from my appearance. You would have to use the clues – unfortunately this was not ’set up’ to be a conscious self-portrait, being too opportunistic to provide real inference, so you might get a bit misled! But if something like that could be done less randomly, it could work.
And in this one, I have taken something of a squashing from the pinhole camera (an oatmeal tin with layers
of black tape). I enjoyed the distortion, and there’s promise there. I would like to look less hungover though, especially as I hadn’t even drunk anything! I like the way my eyebrows are sprouting like forests. But really I like the way pinhole takes you away from direct, surface ‘reality’ of what’s being seen, and leads your eye to what else there is to be found.
Time
A fascinating photograph about time (in my view) which shows the measuring equipment but encapsulates the timescale of distant memory as well as ‘real time’.
dreams of mountains and distant industry [5]
Monkeyinfez pinholes, and thinking about landscapes and personal meaning. Well worth taking your time over.
July 20, 2008
Strange but true.
This weekend’s learning:
1. You can use screw top brown bottles, perhaps wrapped in newspaper, to store chemicals in. This gives you an excuse to purchase and consume lots of German wine.
2. If you have acquired a Jobo unit, use the damn thing properly or your friends will laugh at you :):)
3. Pour out the developer about fifteen seconds before the end of the development time (and get a bigger container for it).
4. You can make stop bath out of red wine vinegar. Very nice too.
5. Fixing for about five minutes instead of ten (for my current film situation) is fine, and it didn’t work the first time because the fixer was crap, because I didn’t use stop bath, probably.
6. Washing after fixing at about 25degrees is still fine, only do about half an hour unless you have one of those tubes which takes the water right into the tank. If you do, it’s about fifteen to twenty minutes instead.
7. If you keep using the developer, add about ten percent to the dev time after the third or fourth use.
July 19, 2008
salt grasslands
I took this on immensly cheap colour 35mm film, and did not develop it myself. It is a pinhole shot which overlaps a bit. I thought anything very close to the pinhole would still be in focus, as the detail further away is. I guess the nearness means any shake by either the grasses or by me produces a relatively big movement of light across the film plane, while further away objects do not….so similar to Darren C.’s shot below. Interesting.
July 14, 2008
Ways of depicting time
I have a problem with it, besides the obvious (partially). Making images about time is one of those things that can get so blatant, so superficial that your viewing public (and your own imagination) packs up and goes to watch telly instead. It’s not like I’ve cracked it, you understand, I’m just thinking it through.
There has to be something more that just the equipment of measuring time involved, something which implies or suggests something more – like f/1.4’s image below. The measuring equipment isn’t just measuring equipment, it’s a forgotten remnant of a past age, buried in the snow of God knows how many winters. There’s ‘immediate’ time, seasonal time, eras. Audience gripped, concept established fully.
And it’s pinhole; just the most basic of physics, light and the time the energy takes to register on whatever surface you have. Anything from a few seconds to six months – technology and symbolism combined. This one took two months http://www.flickr.com/photos/sengstrom/234995738/ and this one six months (and more detail) http://www2.uiah.fi/~ttrygg/project.html …and for these images, the measuring equipment has gone. Is that like portraits without the person actually in them?
When I posted this long ago, someone said they felt that pinhole cams play with time, and made recent past look nostalgically like revered past. They implied that the technology does this, rather than the length of time itself. This is different again from recording the passage of time; it’s placing it in a context, which might be nothing to do with the actual time it was taken. f/1.4’s image seems to me to cover recent eras, but set in the future, and although it’s pinhole it doesn’t suggest distant past, which is in keeping with the meaning entirely (as I read it anyway). But unless he has a handy time machine which he is about to patent and become a squillionnaire, I’d say that’s not really the case. It’s carefully set up, carefully positioned.
For depicting time:
You can change technology to add visual context, and through that you can place your image in time and add personal context.
You can cover personal context by splicing yourself with an image of ‘personal distant memory’, using ancient looking and distorted pinhole technology (I saw it here http://flickr.com/photos/25667683@N04/2413886771/ ).
You can risk making it more obscure by removing some of the most familiar cues to the subject (clockfaces) or by making the image less familiar – less straightforward, more distorted and unsettled.
You can try and link short actual time to longer perceptions of time – a personal second seeming to last an hour.
Buildings. People moving and leaving ghostly images (though it’s been done, need something new). Countryside without buildings visible? A bit too empty.
More to come.
Pictures about time ‘Pinhole Dusk’
Still not by me, this one by Darren C. (flickr again). The exposure captures a minute, and the most obvious movements that happen in it, according to the change of position of the car in relation to the camera. You can see how much ‘brighter’ the light trails appear on the left, where the light from the car doesn’t move across the film surface so much. I might not go to work any more, I might just stay here and look at pinholes….
Images about time ‘The Clocks’
This beautiful image is not by me, it’s by flickrite f/1.4. How do you depict time, and the scale of it; human lifetimes, or geological? I love this idea, and also the other thoughts he mentions in the write up. Check out the ‘artefacts of an uncertain origin’ set.
