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  • Red v. Green

    Red v. Green

    This article discusses the making of the film Forty-Seven Photos of Rain, which was posted to this site earlier in the week. For those seeking to protect their index fingers from the wear of needless navigational strain, the film is also available at the bottom of this article.

    New visitors to the ULTRAsomething site will likely expect me to jump right into the nuts and bolts of this undertaking, but veteran ULTRAsomething fans know better. They know my photos are rarely the result of a linear thought process, which means any article discussing these photos will contain enough character development, plot twists and story arcs to insure only the hardiest make it to the end. What can I say? Knowledge is pain.

    So settle in — it’s going to be a torturous, agonizing ride.

    RED

    I suspect most of my readers are at least tangentially aware of the Red Digital Camera Company and its Epic and Scarlet professional cinema products. I also suspect — given the fact Red cameras are bulky, expensive and marketed primarily to high-end filmmakers — that many of you haven’t burned too many precious web hours researching whether or not Red is a viable candidate for the coveted distinction of “next camera purchase.”

    But for me, new or old, cheap or expensive, if it can shoot an image then I’m crawling all over it.

    And the more I crawled all over the Red, the more intrigued I became by its possibilities. Not because I’m a filmmaker of any great repute — one viewing of my Pavement film should prove that — but because Red cameras are designed for both motion and still photography. Red even designates their cameras as “DSMC” devices, which is an acronym for “Digital Still & Motion Camera.”

    It’s completely beyond the scope of this article to discuss they whys and wherefores of Red’s technology. What’s important is the end result — a camera that captures high-resolution RAW images at high frame rates. “Big deal,” I hear you mutter from the cloud. And “big deal” are the same words I first uttered, too — until I realized this technology completely obliterates a wall that’s always existed in the digital photographic world: the wall between still photography and motion photography.

    Prior to now, photographers had to gather in one of two camps — either they needed a high frame rate (likely because video was the intended delivery medium) or they needed high resolution (likely because single, still images would be the intended delivery medium).

    Video guys are probably saying “Hey, all my frames are shot in HD, so I’m already shooting at high resolution.” But all you still photographers know better. You know that any frame extracted from a video stream is limited to a maximum of 1920 x 1080 pixels, and that those are going to be some bloody ugly pixels. That’s because each frame, aside from containing only 2 megapixels of image data, is compressed, dithered and pre-baked into a quality level just suitable enough for the eye to view for a period not longer than 1/30th of a second. It certainly isn’t going to result in an image you’d hang in the Museum of Modern Art or deliver to Vogue.

    Meanwhile, all you still photography guys are probably saying “Hey, my camera has a continuous shooting mode, so I’m already shooting at high frame rates.” But now it’s the videographers who know better. They know that a little 10 frame-per-second burst here and another 10 frame-per-second burst there will result in some rather lousy motion video. Scenes of only 1 or 2 seconds in length, shot at 10 frames per second, are certainly not going to result in a film that debuts at Cannes, Sundance, or even network television.

    In the last few years, the advent of still cameras with built-in video capabilities has had a profound impact on the industry — finally, you could buy one camera to fulfill two purposes. But even then, the two purposes were separated within camera: either the camera worked in video mode, or it worked in stills mode. Digital Still and Motion Cameras (DSMC’s) remove these differences. They remove the need to compromise resolution for the sake of motion; or to compromise motion for the sake of resolution. The Red Epic, for example, has a sensor roughly 14 megapixels in size. That’s about 7 times greater than an HD video camera. It can expose all those megapixels at 120 frames per second (12 times greater than the Nikon D4). If you’re willing to drop your resolution to, say, 9.4 megapixels, then you can increase your frame rate to 150 fps. Want to shoot 200 frames per second? Drop down to shooting 5.3 megapixel images, which is still 2.5 times the resolution of HD.

    For the video guys, the benefits are obvious — they finally get to shoot video that (on some levels) equals or surpasses the capabilities of 35mm motion picture film. But what of us still photographers? We’ve long had digital cameras that (on some levels) surpass or exceed the capabilities of 35mm film. What do we gain? Frame rate. Once again, I hear you mutter “big deal” at your monitor screen. And it is a big deal, because it means that a single push of the shutter can deliver a burst of images, hundreds possibly, rather than just a single shot.

    This has numerous implications for the still photographer. For example, high-end fashion photographers and photo studios (such as Smashbox in Los Angeles) have already begun to incorporate Red cameras into their workflows. And why not? In a world where image is everything, the ability to shoot 120 frames per second and then select the one frame where hair, clothing, light, shadow and expression coalesce into their most potently marketable combination has tremendous financial benefits for all involved.

    But what of the documentary photographers? The photojournalists? The lifestyle and event photographers?

    V.

    The more I thought about Red, the more I thought about how this technology has the potential to fundamentally alter the way documentary photographers work. In a single forward technological leap, every skill I’ve spent a lifetime honing — the ability to spot, anticipate and shoot optimal instants — would become obsolete. The selection of so-called “decisive moments” would no longer occur behind the camera in hostile real-time conditions, but in front of a scrub wheel and a computer screen in climate-controlled comfort. The realization that I might soon become as obsolete as a telegraph operator in a railway station provided a certain motivational impact. I needed to get my hands on a Red. I needed to develop these techniques myself before the new breed of DSMC-wielding photographers sent me out to pasture.

    There were only two problems with my plan: 1) The Red is a big, bulky, street-hostile camera, and 2) it’s freakin’ expensive.

    In reality, for now, these are good things. Because as long as they remain true, the world won’t yet be powering up electric vehicles to cart my ilk off to the glue factory.

    Canon, sensing the same paradigm shift as I, recently unveiled their new EOS-1D Cinema camera. It’s a sort of “mini” Red in a traditionally-styled pro dSLR body, which is capable of shooting 8.8 megapixel RAW files at about 24 frames per second. It’s still not small. It’s still not inexpensive. It’s not as well spec’d as the Red cameras, and it’s not even available yet — but it’s a harbinger of things to come.

    “What if,” I pondered, “Leica were to come out with such a camera in a more compact, photojournalist-friendly, M-mount body?” The answer, obviously, is that it would change the world of documentary photography. So how exactly would I, a hard working documentary-type photographer, put such a camera to use? Since this product currently exists only within my mind, experimentation would require a bit of good old-fashioned ingenuity.

    GREEN

    I suspect the majority of my readers are at least tangentially aware of Lomography cameras. I also suspect — given the fact they’re rather cheaply built, dubiously appointed and marketed primarily to hipsters — that many of you haven’t burned too many precious web hours researching whether or not a Lomography product is a viable candidate for the coveted distinction of “next camera purchase.”

    But it’s this very cheapness that makes them ideal “guinea pigs” for photographic experiments. Besides, as I discussed in Shooting Through the Wormhole, I have a certain fondness for non-literal photography. This actually makes me predisposed to like various Lomography cameras.

    Last year, Lomography introduced the LomoKino 35, a plasticy little hand-cranked film camera that could shoot 144 frames on a strip of 36-exposure 35mm film. I gave it the bare minimum of attention. “I’m not a video guy,” I reasoned… but that was before the Red obsession.

    Digital video specs are less concerned with the number of pixels in the total frame than they are with the number of pixels in the width of a frame. That’s why Red cameras like the Epic are known as 5K cameras — their sensors capture a video frame that’s 5120 pixels wide. Canon’s new EOS-1D C Cinema SLR is known as a 4K camera since it sports a sensor that’s 4096 pixels wide. It soon occurred to me that the LomoKino 35 camera would essentially become a 3K camera once I scanned its frames on my flatbed. Considering that the entry price for a 5K Red system equals a high-end performance-oriented luxury car, and the entry price for some 4K Canon EOS-1D Cinema paraphernalia equals a nicely appointed commuter car, the fact I could get a LomoKino off Craigslist for the price of breakfast at my local diner made the decision entirely painless.

    I quickly dubbed the LomoKino my “Green” camera — not because of its eco-friendly nature, but because of its wallet-friendly nature. In my hands, a Red Camera would result in nothing but red ink on the accounting logs. But a LomoKino? A field of soothing, pastural green ink. In fact, I just spent more on milk and cereal from the corner grocery than I did on the LomoKino.

    PROOF OF CONCEPT

    The idea was simple: I would walk around with the LomoKino, and when I wandered into the midst of something interesting, I’d simply start “rolling.” As luck would have it, Vancouver was belching rain on the day I decided to experiment — a perfect environment for the LomoKino’s moody plastic lens. I wandered into the middle of a crowd at one of the summer street festivals, and began to slowly crank the LomoKino’s film advance handle. Since my goal was not to make a linear video, but to find visually compelling “stills”, I would simply stop cranking when things got a bit uninteresting. I’d resume cranking when my eye liked what it saw.

    Back home, after rather harshly developing the film in Rodinal to try and accentuate the grain, I cut the negative into 6 strips of 24 frames and scanned each strip as a single “image.” Using Photoshop, I then extrapolated each of the 144 resulting frames into single images. Now all I had to do was select one or two frames that “told the tale.”

    You might as well have asked a mother to choose her favorite child — I simply couldn’t decide. Out of the 144 frames, I liked dozens. So I shifted gears, selected 47 of the frames and sequenced them into a slide show, which I thought would more accurately convey the day’s mood than would a single frame.

    Ultimately, I think the experiment is a success. Not only did I prove I could find compelling images by scouring motion sequences for individual frames, but I think I might have inadvertently stumbled upon a new way of documenting certain events or happenings.

    So, Leica, should you secretly be planning a 4K M-mount camera for a bold new era of photojournalism, please send one my way. Thanks to my little Green camera, I will soon be quite experienced in the school of DSMC shooting techniques, and I will have done it without going in the red for a Red.

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: All rain photos were shot within a 2 minute period using a LomiKino camera loaded with Tri-X film exposed at ISO 400, aggressively developed in a 1:50 solution of Rodinal then scanned on an Epson V600 flatbed using VueScan software and sequenced in Final Cut Pro X against a custom score, which was improvised in real-time into Ableton Live using numerous software-based synthesizers. The LomoKino “product” shot was done with a Ricoh GXR, using the 28mm lens module.

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • 47 Photos of Rain

    47 Photos of Rain

    It might be a film. It might be a slide show. It might be a music video. Or it might just be me trying to grunt and babble my way to a new visual language. All that’s really known is it’s a collection of 47 moody, melancholic, phantasmagorical photos of rain, sequenced into an ebb and flow and supported by a suitably elegiac musical score.

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: All photos were shot within a 2 minute period using a LomiKino camera loaded with Tri-X film exposed at ISO 400, developed in a 1:50 solution of Rodinal then scanned on an Epson V600 flatbed using VueScan software and sequenced in Final Cut Pro X against a custom score, which was improvised in real-time into Ableton Live using numerous software-based synthesizers. That answers the “what.” The bigger question is “why,” and it’s answered thoroughly in the article, Red v. Green.

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • Term Limits

    Term Limits

    (A Diatribe in Three Harumphs)

    PROLOGUE

    I see him hovering in the fringes of my peripheral vision — analyzing me; analyzing my camera; analyzing my subject. He begins strolling toward me. I take a deep breath, grit my teeth and wait for the inevitable…

    “You a photographer?” he asks, nodding at my camera.

    “Aren’t we all?” I grumble, hoping to quickly diffuse the exchange.

    He nods in agreement, oblivious to my response. “So you a pro?”

    “Only when someone pays me,” I reply.

    “Me too!” he laughs, failing for a second time to decode my cunningly crafted verbal hints. “Well, I don’t actually do it full time, but all my friends tell me I should go for it. I was the second shooter at my sister’s wedding last year. They hired a wedding photographer, but I actually shot more frames than he did. Everyone thought the pics were great, and I didn’t even own a Nikon then.”

    He thrusts the camera toward my face as if to prove his point.

    “You shooting street?” he asks, without waiting for an answer. “How long you been pro? What kind of camera is that? You on Flickr?”

    “Sorry, man… gotta go. Late for a client meeting,” I lie.

    “OK. Nice meeting you. Maybe we can work together sometime…” his voice trails off in the distance.

    HARUMPH 1

    What are we? How do we define ourselves? Convention says we’re photographers. I call myself a photographer. You likely call yourself a photographer. When someone takes a series of photographs we admire, we all say “now that’s a photographer!”

    The last time I looked, Leica had 173,000 fans on Facebook. Discounting the 7 brainiacs who are actually optical physicists and another 4 who thought it was a site about Laika, the first dog to orbit the earth, that leaves… well… 173,000 people unaccounted for. Flickr states over 6 million people visit their site each month, and DPReview claims that more than 80 million of us land on their pages in a year. Heck, I’ve even got a pocketful of people subscribing to the RSS feeds on my ULTRAsomething site.

    Who are all these people?

    They are photographers — one and all — each suggestive of the fact that the word “photographer” has become an utterly meaningless label.

    The most frequently repeated conversation in my life occurs in coffee shops, where the barista asks, “The usual?” and I reply, “Yep.” The second most frequently repeated conversation in my life occurs when people tell me that they, or their friend, sibling, co-worker or spouse are “good enough to be a professional photographer.”

    What does this mean?

    Besides further confirming the obvious — that nearly everyone in the world is now a photographer — it also illustrates that most people don’t have a clue what it means to be a professional photographer.

    The word “professional” is not an adjective. Well… OK… actually it is. But it’s not a synonym for “great,” “talented,” “brilliant” or “awesome.” It doesn’t mean your photos are in focus and properly exposed — if it did, there would be billions of professionals. It doesn’t mean you have an expensive camera and more lenses than a politician has enemies — if it did, there would be millions of professionals. It doesn’t mean you take interesting, compelling and appealing photos — if it did, there would be tens of thousands of professionals.

    Being professional simply means that you are paid to take photos, and that you are paid enough to call it a “profession.” And this is precisely the reason why there aren’t many professional photographers any more. How could there be? Now that everyone identifies themselves as a photographer, why would they actually pay someone else to take a photo? In fact, I’ll go so far as to proclaim that becoming a professional photographer has less to do with one’s ability as a photographer than with one’s ability as a salesman. It’s been said that a good salesman can sell sand in a desert — certainly a desirable skill for anyone wishing to sell photographic services to a world full of photographers.

    HARUMPH 2

    “Photographer” is a vestigial term — presently misinterpreted by historical connotations that we all still apply in spite of the fact they’re no longer applicable. A photographer is and always has been, by definition, “a camera operator.” Period. 100 years ago, when not a lot of people could operate cameras and the whole photographic process required considerable training, knowledge and expense, being a photographer implied something more substantial — it meant you paid your dues, learned a set of skills, and offered a service few others could perform.

    Calling yourself a “photographer” today is as trivial as calling yourself a “looker.” After all, the vast majority of mankind is perfectly capable of looking at something, just as they are perfectly capable of photographing something. And no one would ever hire a professional looker would they?

    Actually they would.

    People hire private investigators whose anonymity allows them to look more discreetly at something of interest. We hire nannies to look after our kids so we can go look at something else. We hire lawyers to look at legal documents that are too confusing for us to decipher. We pay police to look for clues we’re not trained to see, doctors to look at ourselves (even though we all have perfectly good mirrors), and security personnel to look at our luggage before we board a plane. We hire real estate agents to look for our houses, chemists to look for alternative fuel supplies, and pest control companies to look for bedbugs. Every one of these people is a professional looker — but none of them are dumb enough to actually call themselves “lookers.”

    No lawyer refers to himself as a “loophole looker.” Nannies are not “offspring lookers.” Everyone is capable of performing the simple act of looking, so the term “looker” is of absolutely no value in defining one’s profession. Instead, the various “looking” professions are distinguished by what one looks for and the services that they provide.

    With this in mind, those of us who rely on a camera — whether for personal expression or for next month’s rent — need to neologize the word “photographer” right out of existence. It’s an albatross with lead feet and two broken wings.

    HARUMPH 3

    I am a man who observes human behavior. I endeavor to anticipate the precise moment at which a human’s actions are the most poignant, ironic or meaningful, and then push a button on a mechanical device to record that moment for detailed examination by sociologists, humanists, historians or the just plain curious. Most would call me a photographer. On a more granular level, they would qualify me as a documentary or street photographer.

    Some people travel to beautiful locales. They endeavor to find the precise coordinates at which the region’s beauty is at its most aesthetically appealing, and then push a button on a mechanical device to record that scene for the purpose of informing all those who could not make the journey themselves. Most would call these people “photographers.” On a more granular level, we would qualify them as landscape photographers.

    Curiously — aside from the fact we both ultimately push a button to complete our tasks — the combination of skills, vision, temperament, equipment and mechanics required to perform these two missions have almost nothing in common with each other. Yet we’re both lumped together as “photographers” — the implication being “if you’re good at one, you’re good at the other.” You might as well toss in fashion photography, astro photography, lifestyle photography, forensic photography, spirit photography, and “here’s a picture of my cat” photography.

    Do people believe that if a coworker writes a cohesive email, then that coworker is perfectly capable of becoming a novelist? Of course not. The skill required to write a novel is much different than the skill required to write an email, technical document, legal brief, poem, comedy sketch, or an editorial capable of challenging people’s minds and perceptions. Each of these disciplines is performed by a “writer,” but no one has delusions that writing a thank-you note to Granny qualifies them to bump elbows with Hemingway. People have been writing for a lot longer than they’ve been photographing. And therein lies the problem — photography is still new enough in the context of human history that we haven’t yet learned to disassociate the word “photographer” from the word “artist.”

    Many working pros are angry that the Instagram crowd has stolen their photojournalism jobs; or that the CEO’s nephew absconded with the corporate website photo assignment; or that everyone’s Uncle Mike is taking jobs away from wedding photographers. These pros, struggling to define the difference between their work and the dilettantes, proclaim themselves “real” photographers, as if to imply all these other people are not photographers. But they are photographers. They are camera operators — the same as all of us.

    The reality is that 95% of the time, the photojournalist will take more compelling and contextual pictures; the trained corporate photographer will deliver more powerful and persuasive content for a business website; and a dedicated lifestyle and event photographer will create a more memorable portfolio of someone’s wedding. But since society still applies the term “photographer” to each of these disciplines, they’re perceived as tasks that can easily be performed by anyone who’s labeled a photographer — which is just about everybody.

    We need to fit the term “photographer” with a pair of concrete shoes, and drop it in the nearest lake. Those of us who believe we have a unique visual communication skill need to define ourselves by what, exactly, that skill is — and not by the equipment we use to realize it.

    A novelist is not a “fictional typist.”

    A hair stylist is not a “topical scissorist.”

    A sommelier is not an “articulate drinker.”

    Photography is no longer a unique ability — but the numerous tasks we can accomplish with photography are still unique. And this uniqueness is how each of us, moving forward, must define ourselves.

    EPILOGUE

    I see him hovering in the fringes of my peripheral vision — analyzing me; analyzing my camera; analyzing my subject. He begins strolling toward me. I take a deep breath, grit my teeth and wait for the inevitable…

    “You a photographer?” he asks, nodding at my camera.

    “No. I’m a momentist.” I reply.

    “A what?” he asks.

    “A documentary poet. A snarkicist. An encapsulator.” I reel off a string of alternate terms, watching for one to strike a chord.

    “Wow, what is that?” queries the fellow.

    “Technically,” I answer, “I’m a Human Proclivities Visual Artist, specializing in Wily Human Observational Recording— a W.H.O.R. for short.”

    “Cool, replies the Nikon toter. “I’m hoping to specialize in Ego Inflationary Face and Body Re-pixelation myself, but that’s obviously going to take me years of practice and study.”

    “Best of luck,” I reply, “Gotta go… I’m late for a client meeting.” And this time, I’m not lying.

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: “Stultified Bride” was shot with a Leica M8 and a CV 35mm f/1.4 Nokton Lens. “Businessman” was shot with a Leica M8 and a 28mm Summicron lens. “The New Cool” and “Several Red Flags” were both shot with a Leica M9 and a v5 35mm Summicon lens. “Lookers and Photographers” was shot with a Leica M9 and a v5 50mm Summicron lens. “Makeshift Mask” and “Makeshift Wig” were both shot with a Leica M9 and a 21mm Elmarit-M (pre-ASPH) lens. “The Zone” was shot with a Leica M9 and a 90mm Elmarit-M lens. “Hitchcock Fanatic” was shot with a Leica M6TTL and a v4 35mm Summicron Lens, using Tri-X at ISO 400, stand developed 1:100 in Blazinal.

    This article (along with many of its associated comments) first appeared on June 27, 2012 in my f/Egor column for the Leica Camera Blog.

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • Pavement

    Pavement

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • Hatch Battening

    Hatch Battening

    A half-dozen years ago, I began making the journey back to my photographic roots: black & white. For many photographers in the current digital age, “black & white” has become little more than a special effect, created after-the-fact through controlled desaturation of a color image. This process of selectively filtering certain colors to either accentuate or diminish luminosity variance is identical to what we did with film. The difference is that, with film, the color filtration occurs before the image is shot — meaning the photographer must possess the ability to pre-visualize the effect, and that the effect is permanent once the film is exposed. With digital, the filtering occurs after the image is shot — meaning the photographer can see exactly how a filter modifies the final image, and is free to alter it as often as necessary to achieve the desired effect.

    Most photographers believe this to be ample justification for using color digital cameras whenever black & white is the intended output. Sadly — and although life would be so much easier if I were — I’m not most photographers. There are, in fact, many reasons to shoot “in” black & white, rather than simply converting from color. Besides the somewhat intangible benefit of discipline, which comes from the psychological knowledge that true B&W won’t give one the luxury of fixing the contrast later, there are perceptible benefits as well. My most common argument is that digital color cameras struggle with high contrast scenes, and (to my eyes) produce a far less pleasing tonality. No matter how much post-process color-channel mixing I do, I can never get the black & white tonality of my digital images to match the aesthetic appeal of my film images. It’s not that digital black & white images necessarily look worse — they just look different.

    Which brings me back to where this article began — a half-dozen years ago. Back in those halcyon digital days, I was painfully aware (in spite of the obvious advantages of post-filtering images) that I wasn’t completely happy with the look of digital black & white photos. I identified this as a two-pronged issue: First, film has a non-linear response to light that creates a wonderful rolloff in highlight and shadow regions — regions that tend to either clip, posterize, or simply degrade into noise with digital. Second, properly exposed film displays a seemingly bottomless pool of grey tones — tones that appear somehow coarser and more dithered in their digital cousins.

    Based on these observations, I soon surmised that what I wanted was a monochromatic sensor that recorded light in a non-linear manner, and thus mimicked the response curve of film. Of course, I had absolutely no idea if this was technically feasible, so around 2006 I began to read everything I could find on the technology behind digital cameras. That’s when I first realized that most digital cameras already contained monochromatic sensors, and that the color information they recorded was actually a software interpolation derived algorithmically from a color filter array placed in front of that monochromatic sensor. This, as most hardcore photographers now know, is the ubiquitous Bayer filter — a repeating array of green, red and blue filters, which create a mosaic that the processor inside the camera (or the computer’s Raw converter) interpolates into a color image.

    From the moment I learned of this, I knew what I wanted — a camera with the Bayer filter removed. Granted, such a device would still fall short of my own personal utopia (a digital camera with a sensor that had the luminosity response of film). But by removing the color filter array and the subsequent image interpolation requirements, the camera would likely produce photos with greater dynamic range and an increased potential for richer grey tonality. As an added bonus, the lack of color interpolation would theoretically create even greater resolution (which was already one of the fundamental advantages of digital photography — at least when compared with 35mm film).

    The production of such a camera seemed, to me, to be a “no brainer.” And when I expressed this opinion to a smattering of fellow photographers, they readily agreed that it was indeed a “no brainer,” but that I was the one with no brain. “Just learn to use Photoshop,” they said (unaware that I’d been a skilled Photoshop user since 1991). “Absolutely no advantage to such a camera,” said others (uninterested in my theoretical musings). “Prohibitively expensive to manufacture a monochromatic sensor,” claimed still more (who failed to realize that the sensors were already monochrome). I soon found a smattering of like-minded photographers posting similar desires on internet forums. They too were quickly dismissed by a collective flurry of taunts, bullying, snark and name-calling usually reserved for UFOlogists, Elvis impersonators and Uwe Boll fans. I realized that mine was a futile wish — unlikely to ever be granted.

    So I did the next best thing — I started shooting film again. This two-hatted technique liberated me. If I desired ease-of-use, high-resolution and complete post-capture control of the contrast relationships within an image, I’d shoot digital. If my photographic desires leaned toward tonality, extended dynamic range and a certain ‘richness’ in the greys, I’d go with film. I had the best of both worlds, and I nearly forgot about my once passionate desire for a black & white digital camera.

    Flash forward to May 10, 2012. That’s the day Leica announced their new M-Monochrom camera — essentially a re-engineered version of the Leica M9 with the Bayer filter removed. Not only is this the technological manifestation of my earlier dream, but it’s even packaged within the body of my all-time favorite digital camera — the Leica M9. I know serendipity when I see it, so I knew nothing would prevent me from obtaining this camera. Then I saw the price. Ouch. Funding the new M-Monochrom would require that I sell a significant portion of my current photography equipment. Is it worth it? I don’t know. Leica has yet to release the camera, and what few prototypes exist are held very tightly to Leica’s collective chest. Since May 10th, I’ve made several requests to Leica for a review sample. OK, it’s really several hundred requests — I’m hoping that if I annoy them enough, they’ll just mail me the darn thing so I’ll shut up.

    On one hand, I can’t wait to get my hands on this camera. On the other, I’m dreading it. What if I love it? What if it really is the camera I’ve been wanting for 6 years? What will I have to sacrifice in order to get it?

    To protect myself from these fears, I’m using the weeks prior to the camera’s August release date to “batten the hatches.” Specifically, I’m in the process of doing everything I can to persuade myself I don’t need this camera. I’ve been trying to shoot photos with the M9 that I don’t think would look as good (or at least the same) with the M-Monochrom — hoping to convince myself that post-capture black & white conversion is “better.” Similarly, I’ve been shooting photos with all manner of film cameras, using all types of film, which I’m developing in all sorts of chemicals — just to remind myself that the M-Monochrom will not, in any way, achieve the same sort of response curve as these shots. And just to give myself some breathing room, I’m making sure to take a lot of jumpy, scale-focused street shots — my “bread and butter” photos — which by their very nature are likely incapable of capitalizing on the obvious resolution advantages that the M-Monochrom is sure to exhibit.

    In short, my goal for the next two months is to take photos that shouldn’t look any better if I’d used an M-Monochrom instead of my existing equipment — thus saving myself the anxiety of Craigslist, and the endless stream of nitwits trying to lowball me on price, or failing to show up at the appointed time.

    But there’s another angle that has me on guard. In theory, the M-Monochrom should depict images with a look uniquely distinct from either film or color-converted digital. I’ve long maintained there’s no reason one camera technology needs to supplant another — that film and digital give different results, and thus can and should coexist happily. As photographers, we should seek to expand our visual vocabularies, not limit them. So what happens if the M-Monochrom renders an alternate tonality every bit as viable and useful as both film and color digital, yet completely and pleasingly different? Then what? Will I be shooting three formats soon?

    So it’s all-hands-on-deck in the great ULTRAsomething hatch battening exercise. Will my efforts prove successful? Or will I succumb to the temptation to finally own the digital camera I once only fantasized would ever exist? There’s only one way to be certain… I need to shoot with an M-Monochrom for a couple of weeks. So, Leica, consider this my several-hundredth-and-one request. I’m waiting patiently for its delivery and to learn, once and for all, if all us crackpots who cried out for a Bayer-less camera were actually sane all along?

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: “Bottom’s Up” was shot with a Leica M2 and a 21mm Elmarit-M using ADOX CHS 50 Art film, developed 1:100 in Rodinal. “Photography’s Other Half” was also shot with a Leica M2 on ADOX CHS 50 Art film and developed 1:100 in Rodinal except, in this case, a v4 35mm Summicron-M lens was used. “Corridor, Portland OR” and “Waiting for the M-Monochrom” were both shot with a Leica M9 digital, using a 28mm Summicron-M lens. “Tornado Potato” was shot with a Leica M9 and a Voigtlander 50mm f/1.1 Nokton lens.

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • Glam Cams

    Glam Cams

    I don’t get my hair cut at a salon. My clothes do not come from a couturier. A sommelier’s assistance is not required to help me choose whether I would prefer a Guinness or a Bitburger with my pub grub. And when I travel, I’m more likely to crash in a motel than rejuvenate in a resort. Therefore, a boutique is probably the last place you’d expect to find me shopping for something so utilitarian as a camera.

    So where was I last night? Hobnobbing at the grand opening celebration of the new Leica Boutique inside Broadway Camera in Richmond BC, Canada! Why they didn’t go the extra mile and refer to the celebration as a soirée is beyond me, but my sense of semantics is completely discombobulated now.

    But that’s Leica. They’re a puzzling paradox of conundrums. They build rugged, bomb-proof cameras with flawless optical capabilities designed to satisfy the highly-specialized needs of some of the poorest, scruffiest, most demanding and driven photographers in the world. They then sell the majority of these cameras to collectors who make absolutely no use of the very capabilities for which the cameras are so desirable. It’s a curious contradiction. But in the eyes of many, greatness equals “luxury.” And luxury products are not sold in stores. They’re sold in boutiques.

    My income is somewhere south of ‘part time waitress at a truck stop,’ so I have an uneasy relationship with the Leica image. It used to bother me when people, seething with hatred, would see my Leica and sneer, “gee, it must be nice to be that rich.” Particularly when I knew, full well, that I was standing there in socks older than they were. But at some point, it occurred to me that I really was rich — not with money, but with a purpose and a passion and a desire that motivates me and compels me to actually sacrifice everything in order to achieve my goals. And that is, without a doubt, my definition of luxury. So why shouldn’t I shop for my tools at a boutique?

    Fortunately, due to a last minute cancellation by a guy who took a photograph of his cousin having coffee with the nephew of David Hasselhoff’s accountant’s brother-in-law, there was an opening on the Leica Boutique’s “minor celebrity” guest list. I accepted instantly.

    In truth, there were three reasons I chose to attend: 1) The possibility of snacks; 2) The possibility of seeing, handling and shooting with the recently announced M-Monochrom; and 3) the possibility of meeting legendary Canadian photojournalist, Ted Grant.

    Of these three possibilities, I managed to succeed at only one.

    I had assumed the presence of snacks would be a sure thing. And, frankly, with food being one of the numerous things I sacrifice in order to be a Leica M-series shooter, my very first order of business was to scout for hors d’oeuvres. There were none. Zip. Not even a bowl of peanuts or a plate of carrot sticks. I suspect Leica — knowing this particular event would be attended by several of us hobo-like photojournalist types — simply had no desire to help extend the longevity of its poorest customers, since we do tend to spend an awful lot of time monopolizing sales staff with very little actual sales resulting.

    After the failed snack scouting expedition, I got on with the next order of business — scouting for an M-Monochrom. And there one sat, inches from my grasp but locked inside a glass case. I asked to shoot with it. I was forbidden. I asked to touch it. I was forbidden. I attempted all forms of devious trickery and sleight of hand, but could not diminish Leica’s resolve. At one point, a store employee reached into the case to remove an S2 and accidentally brushed his hand across the M-Monochrom. I watched in horror as Brian Bell, Leica’s National Canadian Sales Manager, bludgeoned the poor fellow to death with a nearby chrome M9-P, then deftly wiped the blood from the camera before returning it to the shelf. Immediately, a team of dark-suited, red-tied “cleaners” descended on the scene, whisking away the body and any evidence of the crime. At least I think that’s what happened — I was feeling a bit faint from hunger at that point. In any event, I decided I best give up trying to get my hands on the M-Monochrom.

    My third order of business was to meet Ted Grant, and at this I was successful. Ted’s sharp wit, charm and charisma were infectious. I was particularly honored when Ted pulled me away from the crowd and into another room, where he extracted his latest book from a cavernous pocket within his photography vest and handed it to me for my perusal. I spent a good thirty minutes looking through it, and each time I paused to admire one of Ted’s excellent photos, he would tell me a little about the shot — how he got it, and the circumstances surrounding it. For a documentary-style photographer like myself, there is nothing better than having a wiser, more experienced and better documentary photographer share his stories — particularly one who’s as sagacious as Ted Grant.

    Returning to the noshless soirée, I pointed out the M-Monochrom to Ted and was nearly blinded by the twinkle that formed in his eye. He wanted this camera as much as I did. I watched — like a pupil watches his master — as Ted sidled up to Brian Bell and unleashed a flurry of wit, charm and subterfuge in an all-out attempt to convince him to extract the M-Monochrom from its glass coffin. No dice. Even Ted Grant, the “father of Canadian photojournalism,” couldn’t puncture the impenetrable wall… but it was still an honor to watch him try.

    If you’re a serious documentary photographer then, in all likelihood, you will eventually succumb to the lure of the Leica. Standing there in the Leica Boutique at the back of Broadway Camera, I realized that no matter how jaded one is — or how manly, ragged, rugged, cynical or insolvent — each of us will one day find ourselves walking incongruously into a space we never expected to be — a boutique. I suggest we all just “go with it.” It’s actually a rather pleasant place.

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THIS STORY: There is a slight possibility that, for the sake of entertainment, some events may have been fictionalized ever-so-slightly in the telling — but only a tiny bit.

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: I can tell you that these shots were taken with a Leica M9 using either a 28mm f/2 Summicron or a v5 50mm f/2 Summicron. I can also tell you there weren’t really a whole lot of shots to choose from. Ostensibly I was there to shoot photos for the Leica Blog, but I had so much fun talking to Leica sales personnel, Broadway Camera staff, various customers and, of course, Ted Grant that I sort of neglected that responsibility. Oh well, it’s not like they fed me or anything…

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • A Derelict Memory Lane

    A Derelict Memory Lane

    For many years, I’ve harbored a secret conviction that digital cameras delude us into believing we’re much better photographers than we really are. Snapping up-down and willy-nilly with a blithe disregard for focus, exposure, composition, context, pathos, ethos, irony or significance is a sure-fire way to take a lot of crappy photos. But digital cameras allow us to take so many photos and review them so effortlessly that, inevitably, even the worst photographer manages to accidentally stumble into the occasionally compelling shot. Such cavalier technique works on the “stopped clock is correct twice a day” principle. But with the Delete button so close-at-hand, and without contact sheets to remind us of our failures, we retain only the “good” shots — thus deluding ourselves into believing we’re every bit as wonderful as the legendary photographers who preceded us.

    I’ll admit right here — before the eyes of my peers — that I was wrong. To state that digital cameras delude photographers into believing they’re much better than they are is, itself, a deluded idea. Photographers were, in fact, deluded long before digital cameras were but a twinkle in Steve Sasson’s grandfather’s eye. It’s not the technology that deludes us — it’s our own egos.

    I stumbled upon this humbling realization on a recent trip down memory lane. “Memory Lane,” as I define it, is “a long strip of acetate with a silver halide coating.” I consider my film cameras to be miniature time capsules. My past self records a person, scene or event that it thinks my future self will find interesting. Some film cameras, like my Leicas, are short-term time capsules — so frequently used that they reveal their images within a day or two after capture. Other, more “casual” cameras (like my medium formats or panoramics), are long-term capsules — often retaining negatives for 6-months before my future self gets to develop them. Curiously, the longer a roll of film sits in a camera, the more convinced I am that Pulitzer-caliber shots reside within. With each month that passes, my future self grows more certain of my past self’s ability to find, frame and shoot moments of sheer magic.

    So imagine my delight when, during a recent cleaning expedition into some long forgotten drawers, I found an old Diana camera with half a roll of exposed film inside. I vaguely remember entombing it several years ago, when I decided that the camera (for which I paid a mere $10) wasn’t really worth the cost of the film it shot. I had no idea what kind of film I’d left in the camera, nor any recollection of what those half-dozen exposed frames might contain. I knew only one thing — those exposures sat within the camera for so long that they couldn’t possibly contain anything other than masterpieces!

    This discovery set me on another expedition — to see what other film cameras were sitting around with half-exposed rolls. My Widelux, which I last loaded in August, still had a few frames left to shoot. So, too, did my little Rollei 35T. My Yashica Mat was sitting idle on the shelf since December.

    These cameras, plus the unearthed Diana, all contained exposures taken by my past self — who my present self has always considered to be a superior photographer. I could barely conceive of the photographic heights I must have achieved within these four rolls of half-exposed film. I could wait no longer. Over the next four days, I took each camera for a walk and exposed its remaining frames, then got on with the task of developing this year’s Oscar Barnack Award winners.

    Upon opening both the Diana and the Yashica Mat, I was somewhat surprised to see that each contained Kodak Portra 400NC color film. One thing my present self knows about my past self is that he has practically no interest in color photography. So I’m not completely sure why these cameras both contained color film, nor why I still have several rolls nestled up next to the beer in the bottom of my refrigerator. I suspect my past self got a good deal on some expired stock, and took advantage of it.

    When one struggles to make a living with photography, one becomes inherently cheap. So, Pulitzer or no Pulitzer, there was no way I would pay some lab to perform the C41 color processing on this film. Besides, in the past year, all the photo labs had abandoned downtown Vancouver for cheaper rents in the boondocks. I could see no reason to jump in the car, drive out of town, hand over cash money and drive back the next day just to get some color negatives to scan.

    So, convinced that my past self had no intention to make any use of the color information contained within this film, I simply stand-developed both rolls of 120 film in Rodinal. During the 60 minutes that the film sat undisturbed within the elixir, I thought about the riches these frames would bring, and of the future assignments that would surely result. After a glorious hour of daydreaming, I gave the film a water stop bath, a swish in the fixer, unspooled the rolls and excitedly held them up to the light. Not a single frame contained the slightest hint of mastery. Each shot was, in fact, as dull and worthless as the bulk of my daily photographic output.

    Undaunted, I got on with developing the two 35mm rolls — one from the Widelux and one from the Rollei 35T. In spite of the heightened expectations brought about by my unyielding admiration of my past self, neither strip contained anything of value. So banal were all these shots that, although I’ve sprinkled them throughout this article, I suspect you didn’t even notice them. Masterpieces? Hardly. Noteworthy? Nope. Interesting? Not even. It turns out that, even though my expectations grow exponentially with the amount of time since an image was shot, the shots themselves are no better now now than they were on the day I took them. Delusion is a cruel mistress. She is not the sole province of the digital shooter. She does not distinguish photographers by their chosen imaging surface, lens, camera type or brand. She is merely there, hovering over us — sadistically motivating us to try and live up to our own self-aggrandizing misconceptions.

    Which reminds me — I just realized I have a half-exposed roll of film in my Vermeer 6×6 pinhole camera, and I’m rather certain I haven’t shot with it since last autumn. A Post-It™ Note attached to the camera’s top tells me there’s Plus-X film inside but, alas, that note doesn’t tell me what’s on any of the exposed frames. No problem, ’cause I’ll bet you dollars to donuts there’s a Pulitzer Prize sitting on one of those frames…

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: “Morning, Yaletown” and “Holeyscape” were shot with a Widelux F7 on Tri-X at ISO 400 and developed in Ilfotec DD-X. The first “Rain” and “Shine” set was shot with a Diana toy camera on Portra 400NC at ISO 400 and stand-developed for 1 hour in Rodinal 1:100. The double exposure evident in the sky of the first “Rain” photo is compliments of the Diana’s dicey film transport mechanism. The second “Rain” and “Shine” set was shot with an old Yashica Mat on Portra 400NC at ISO 400 and stand-developed for 1 hour in Rodinal 1:100. “Obfuscated View, English Bay” and “Obfuscated Temptress, Vancouver Sidewalk” were shot with a Rollei 35T on Tri-X at ISO 400 and developed in Rodinal 1:35.

    This article (along with many of its associated comments) first appeared on May 3, 2012 in my f/Egor column for the Leica Camera Blog.

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • Rodinal Jones

    Rodinal Jones

    There’s a new monkey in my house and he’s riding my back. Rodinal’s his name and film developing’s his game.

    My reference to Rodinol as “new” is slightly inaccurate since it’s been a darkroom standard since the 19th century. It was one of the first products sold by AGFA, and it remained in AGFA’s catalog until a few years ago, when various corporate acquisitions, mergers and spin-offs spun Rodinal right into oblivion. Fortunately, AGFA’s 1891 patent has long expired, and a handful of other manufacturers are now bottling the stuff under all manner of alternative names.

    So my new monkey isn’t really new — he’s just new to me. And his name isn’t really Rodinal, it’s “Blazinal.” But it’s all just semantics because, new or old, Rodinal or Blazinal, I’ve got a serious jones for the stuff.

    Rodinal, for the edification of those who think “megapixels” when they think “cameras,” is a high-acutance film developer. Basically, this means it produces sharp negatives with pronounced micro-contrast, but at the expense of a very prominent and conspicuous grain. If that sounds like gibberish to those of you accustom to a CMOS-to-SD workflow, please partake in the following paragraph:

    Film is coated with silver halide crystals, which are highly sensitive to light. Once the film is shot, any exposed crystals will turn black when dunked into a developer. Following development, the film is immersed in a fixer, which washes away all the unexposed silver halide leaving only the exposed, black crystals behind (thus creating a negative image). These crystals are what’s known as “grain.” Of course, nothing’s new under the sun so, like today’s photographers who obsess over minimizing digital sensor noise, film photographers were forever trying to reduce the visibility of those crystalline grains. That’s why, over the course of the 20th century, solvent-based developers (like Kodak D-76) supplanted the popularity of high-acutance developers (like Rodinal). Solvent developers contain agents that actually dissolve some of the blackened silver crystals, softening the “edge” effect of the little granular clumps and thus minimizing their appearance. These so-called “fine grain” developers produce a smoother image, but at the expense of sharpness and micro-contrast.

    Flash forward to 2012. Thanks to an ill-advised experiment in false economy, I now find myself with numerous rolls of color medium format film — all frugally purchased long-ago from expired stock. But since my home is equipped only for black & white developing, I would actually need to send these negatives to a lab that had medium format C-41 processing capabilities — thus completely negating my rationale for pinching pennies on expired film. Since color rarely plays an important role in my photography, I decided to save some cash and develop those color negatives in black & white chemistry. I knew, if I dropped that color film into a 1:100 solution of Rodinal for 60 minutes, then I’d have a perfectly scannable B&W negative. So I picked up a bottle of Blazinal from my local camera shop, rolled up my sleeves and commandeered the kitchen sink in a bloodless coup.

    Via a glitch in the internet’s time/space continuum, those early Rodinal experiments will appear in an article titled “A Derelict Memory Lane,” which was written prior to this article, but which will appear later in time.

    Suffice to say that the experiment was a success. And, as a bonus, I now had a nice big jug of Rodinal to play around with. Truth be told, I was never all that happy with my current developer, Ilfotec DD-X. While it does seem well-suited to tabular grain films, like Ilford’s own Delta series, I usually prefer the traditional, organically-grained films like Tri-X. Back in my early (pre-digital) days, I often developed Tri-X with D-76, which I still prefer but which never achieved quite the look I wanted. Here, in the 21st century, I no longer shoot enough film to counteract the short shelf-life of an opened jug of D-76. So, with DD-X readily available and sporting respectable longevity, it became my developer by default. But what I wanted was grain. Yes, grain. If I want my photos to be polite, I’ll shoot digital. When I want peppery bits of impudence, I’ll opt for Tri-X. But, try as I might, I never could get a well-defined grain structure from either DD-X or D-76.

    So, after finishing a recent roll of Tri-X, I dropped it in a 1:35 solution of that newly purchased Rodinal clone and followed the recipe outlined in The Massive Dev Chart’s iPhone app. The result? Exactly the type of negatives I’d been longing for: sharp and with a full (yet scannable) tonal range; high micro-contrast; and crunchy, beautiful grain. In short, Rodinal gives me exactly that ineffable tonality and graininess that I want from film.

    This past weekend, high on Rodinal, I took three cameras to Vancouver’s 420 pot protest to photograph others who shared my euphoric mood (albeit courtesy of a different chemical substance). Two of the cameras contained 35mm Tri-X, which I developed in a 1:35 solution. The third camera contained Fuji 160c color film, which I stand-developed at 1:100. While the photos might be somewhat lacking in compelling content, I have nothing but admiration for the Rodinal. In spite of some extremely contrasty lighting conditions — sometimes shooting directly into the sun — plus some schizophrenic exposure choices on my part, every single negative is scannable, printable and full of the tonal characteristics I desire.

    I can hardly wait to blow through the bricks of Tri-X currently in my fridge. There are so many things to try: push-processing night shots; different dilutions; and, once the Tri-X runs out, alternate film stocks. While my dissatisfaction with the tonality and dynamic range of digital motivated my return to film a couple years ago, my film use remained “casual” at best. Now, my “discovery” of Rodinal (albeit 120 years late) has kindled that re-engagement with a vengeance. I suspect it’ll be some time before the kitchen sink returns to its usual food-preparation responsibilities.

    My name is Egor. And I have a Rodinal jones.

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: “Imbibing Fee” and “Ladies Imbibe” were shot with a Leica M2 and a v4 35mm Summicron lens on Tri-X at ISO 400, developed 1:35 in Blazinal. “Imiber’s Incline” was shot with a Fuji GA645 on 160C color film, which was stand-developed 1:100 in Blazinal. “Darth Imbibes” and “The Dude Imbibes” were shot with a Leica M6TTL and a 28mm Summicron lens on Tri-X at ISO 400, developed 1:35 in Blazinal. “Lovers Imbibe” was shot with a Leica M2 and a Voigtländer 15mm f/4.5 Super Wide Heliar lens on Tri-X at ISO 400, developed 1:35 in Blazinal.

    Additional photos from the 420 protest, all developed in Rodinal, can be found on ULTRAsomething’s “Bonus Content” page for 2012.

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • Resurrection: AE-1

    Resurrection: AE-1

    The year was 1977 and I, supreme ruler of the ULTRAsomething empire, was just one of several thousand bell-bottomed, platform-shoed, polyester-bedecked high school doofuses with a ridiculous haircut and a father who had recently joined the voluminous ranks of proud new Canon AE-1 owners.

    At the time, I paid very little attention to his new camera. Saying “cheese” while staring into its front lens element was, for me, absolutely no different than performing the same ritual for his old Yashica SLR. Besides, I wasn’t even remotely into cameras then. I had far more pressing interests: like writing 20+ minute prog rock songs in 13/4 time, and learning how to quote various Rachmaninoff musical phrases using only wild, squelching feedback.

    Truth is, I barely remember the AE-1. I mostly recall my Dad complaining that it was too large, heavy and awkward to bother carrying. A perusal of old family slides reveals a marked decrease in the number of photos taken during the AE-1 years. If my memory is correct, a single roll of film once contained photos from two years’ worth of Christmases — not exactly what anyone would consider a prodigious output.

    Although I recall my Dad being quite proud of the camera, I suspect he never really bonded with it. He took scores of great family photos with his older Yashica, but the quality level seemed to diminish precipitously with the arrival of the AE-1. Guided by my own modern photographic obsessions, 20/20 hindsight and father/son DNA similarities, I have a theory for why that was: automation made him sloppy.

    It’s the same point I raise again and again in this blog: The more decisions you let the camera make, the less interesting your photos become. Beginning in the mid-1960’s, a smattering of esoteric cameras started to feature semi-automatic exposure capabilities, but Canon’s AE-1 was the first to deliver it to the masses. One had simply to set the lens’ aperture ring to “A” (for automatic), point the camera, and the built-in meter would send exposure data to the internal processor, which would then set the aperture for you. That’s right, the AE-1 was the first mainstream camera to feature Shutter Priority mode. Canon marketed this camera aggressively to amateur photographers, touting its ease of use and ability to create perfect exposures. But the problem then (as it is now) was that many photographers relied too heavily on this snazzy new feature — instantly forgetting everything they once knew about exposure — and chose to simply “let the camera decide what to do.” Consider, for example, the following two late-1970’s AE-1 photographs that my Dad took of yours truly:

    In the first photo, it’s obvious that Dad let the camera’s built-in meter determine the exposure — failing to compensate for the backlighting of the scene, and thus underexposing my drummer, Ralph, along with the majority of his 10 zillion piece drum kit. In the next (flash) photo, we see that the camera’s center-weighted meter did what center-weighted meters do — expose for the middle of the frame. The camera paid little attention to the foreground object (me) since I resided at the edge of the frame, and thus failed to compensate for the flash overexposure on my face. Curiously, Dad seemed to pay as little attention to me as the camera (unless it was truly his intention to document my understated bedroom wallpaper for insurance reasons). I suspect that the half-way-toward-point-and-shoot simplicity of the AE-1 sometimes made him forget focussing was still a necessity — a problem Canon “rectified” with the advent of their auto-focus EOS series, a few years later.

    Soon after the AE-1’s arrival, I left for college and spent four years trying to learn enough electrical engineering to become a music synthesizer designer. Somewhere in that span, Dad switched to an auto-focus point-and-shoot camera, and I never saw the AE-1 again…

    … until two months ago when, on my visit to his Arizona home, he pulled it from a box and said, “is this worth anything?”

    “On the open market? Not much.” I replied. “But to me? You bet! I’ll shoot anything I can load film into!”

    And so began the resurrection of my Dad’s old Canon AE-1.

    The camera probably hadn’t been out of its box in 30 years. Fortunately, Dad removed the battery before storing the camera, so there was absolutely no corrosion. Additionally, the Arizona climate helped prevent the growth of any mildew or fungus. Aside from the film door’s foam light seal, which had turned to goo, the camera looked exactly the same as it did in the late 1970’s. I rummaged through the box and dug out the three lenses he owned. One, a zoom of some sort, had a broken aperture blade, so it went back into the box. That left two primes: a Canon 50mm f/1.4 and a Promaster 28mm f/2.8. I popped the 50 on the camera, the 28 in my pocket, and hit the local drugstore to search for a battery and some Tri-X. Batteries they had. Tri-X, they never heard of. These were the Arizona suburbs, after all. So I made do with a 3-pack of Kodak BW400CL, which I’d been wanting to try anyway.

    Numerous personal impediments have prevented me from shooting much these past couple of months, but I did manage to push two of the three rolls of Kodak BW400CL through the camera. And, while none of these photos have any aesthetic value other than to “test” the AE-1’s operation, taking them has allowed me to form several impressions:

    1: It’s now been 18 years since I bought my first digital camera and I still prefer the look of film for any photo that doesn’t require massive resolving power in order to succeed as an image. I think I can safely say that the ubiquitous, modern, bayer-pattern digital sensor is just not the “be all, end all” solution for me.

    2: There’s just something soul-satisfying about thumbing a camera’s film advance lever — each flick is like putting an exclamation point on the 1000-word photo you just took.

    3: The AE-1 is almost exactly the same size as my Leica M bodies. Compared to the big, bulbous, behemoth SLRs of today, the AE-1 is quite petit. Frankly, if they still made SLRs like this, I’d be inclined to shoot with them a lot more frequently. And, honestly, I’ll probably take more “keepers” with this 35 year-old film SLR than I will with my digital K-5.

    4: That 50mm FD lens rocks! Stopped down a few notches, it shames any of the EOS-era lenses I once owned.

    5: Wide open, that 50mm FD lens is softer than overcooked spaghetti — but in a surprisingly pleasant way. So pleasant, in fact, that I sometimes find myself looking for subjects that will benefit from the dreaminess inherent in the f/1.4 aperture.

    6: The ProMaster 28mm lens was a disappointment. I still don’t know who, exactly, made this lens. Some sites suggest Tamron and others opine Cosina. Either way, I found its corner quality far too lacking for me to bother using it again. I don’t think the lens is actually damaged — rather, it appears to have always been this way, and you can plainly see the edge defocussing even in this old 1980 photograph of my college apartment.

    7: Much to my surprise, I ended up liking the BW400CL film! Who knew? I thought it would annoy me that, since it’s a C41 film, I couldn’t develop it myself. But I must admit: dropping it off at a drugstore and picking it up the next day felt joyfully, lazily decadent. And the results are superb. It won’t be replacing my refrigerator full of Tri-X any time soon, but the film had scads of dynamic range, and a very minimal amount of grain when I exposed it properly.

    8: Speaking of exposure, the AE-1’s internal meter was deadly accurate. Normally, I expose either by eye or by handheld meter. But when I do rely on in-camera metering, I much prefer the type of old-school center-weighted metering that the AE-1 offers. In my mind, modern matrix/scene type meters give too much exposure control to the camera and not enough to the photographer.

    9: In its day, Canon marketed the AE-1 as the “amateur” alternative to its professional F-1 35mm SLR, and readily admitted to the “cheapening” of some components. But from my perspective some 35 years later, there is nothing cheap about this camera’s build quality. While I’d probably be reluctant to take it to a war zone and pump dozens of rolls of film a day through it, I’ve seen many modern “pro” cameras with build qualities nowhere near as good as the AE-1’s.

    Ultimately, I find the combination of the Canon AE-1 and its 50mm f/1.4 FD lens to be a truly satisfying marriage. A quick search of the internet indicates there are hundreds of copies of this camera/lens combination available for about $150. I’m sure there are thousands more in people’s garages and basements, just waiting to be rescued and resurrected for even less money. Even at E-bay prices, I would consider the AE-1 to be an absolute steal for anyone interested in engaging (or re-engaging) with film.

    So Dad, if you’re reading this (and I know you are), thanks for using this camera so sparingly and for storing it so carefully for the past thirty years. It’s found a permanent home amongst my camera collection and, should you be wondering, the answer is “no, you can’t have it back now.”

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: All the black & white photos were shot by me, using the Canon AE-1 with a Canon FD 50mm f/1.4 lens and Kodak BW400CL film, which was developed at the local drugstore and scanned using my Plustek 7600i scanner and Silverfast Ai software. The color photos were shot by my Dad over 30 years ago using this same camera.

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • Gear Guano Canal

    Gear Guano Canal

    This article’s original working title was “Digital SLRs Make You Stupid.” But after typing only a paragraph or two, I realized dSLRs might well make me stupid, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they make you stupid.

    Now don’t get too comfortable wallowing about in smugness — I’m not letting you off the hook that easily. In reality, we (as a collective of photographers) are all a smidgeon muttonheaded, but we each possess our own personal and individual stupidity catalyst. Mine might well be dSLRs. Yours might be mirrorless cameras, lenses, flash units, noise specs, software, video codecs or even fashion.

    Generally speaking, it’s photographic gear that dims our wits. Every month, photo equipment suppliers dump fresh buckets full of gear guano into photographer filled trenches. So thick and heavy is this guano, that it impedes our ability to move forward — blinding us to anything not presently deposited upon us. We can’t see the future. We can’t see the past. We can only see the gleam of the new and the shiny. All our favorite websites are flooded with the latest product puffery. All our photo friends are salivating profusely. Everyone’s in a rush to sell their “useless” old camera gear and tender their little plastic cards for a chance to sip from this month’s Holy Grail. The only way for a photographer to avoid the guano is to treat it like the monster under the bed: close your eyes and it simply disappears.

    For some time now, I’ve been rather proficient at keeping my eyes shut and the covers over my head. Of course, being predominantly configured from human DNA, I’m not completely immune to new contraptions. But for the last several years, I’ve managed to successfully ignore every manufacturer’s gear guano deluge. Sure, I bought a few cameras — but these were mostly old and inexpensive film cameras from a previous era. With the blankets pulled tightly over my head and my flashlight shining upon books by Koudelka, Frank, Friedlander, Davidson, Moriyama and a thousand others, I was comfortably impervious to the marketers and their ceaseless paraphernalia droppings.

    My favorite camera of all time is my 1958 Leica M2. It has no spot metering. Nor does it have center-weighted, matrix or scene metering — in fact it has no exposure metering at all. It has no scene modes, no style modes and no Av, Tv or P modes. It has no autofocus, no focus tracking, and no ability to even select a focus point other than “smack in the middle.” You can’t use it with long lenses. You can’t use it for sports. You can’t use it for macros or tilt/shift photographic effects. It has no depth-of-field preview, no exposure bracketing, no art filters, no image stabilization, no live view, no gyroscopic levelling, no GPS, no wireless tethering, no USB connector, no user-customizable buttons, no histogram, no HDMI output, no clock, no self-timer, no high-speed frame rate, no electronic communication with its lenses, no power button, no white balance setting, no built-in flash, no focus assist light, no face, blink or smile detection, no weather sealing and, most egregiously, no video! In fact, the Leica M2 body gives me access to only one parameter: shutter speed. ISO? That comes from the film. Aperture and focus? That’s for the lens to control. Everything else? That’s up to me and my creativity.

    Even my digital purchases have been measured and thoughtful. My shooting style frequently makes use of wide-angle lenses, so my upgrade from a cropped-sensor M8 to a full-frame M9 was a no-brainer — it had a direct impact on my ability to better-practice my craft. And my decision to jettison Micro Four Thirds in favor of the Ricoh GXR could hardly be the result of marketing hysteria. After all, the GXR was already a two-year-old camera when I decided to buy one, and Ricoh doesn’t even bother to sell them in Canada.

    Over time, I’ve developed my own photographic vision(s), and I insist that my photo equipment conform to that vision. I do not wish to make my vision conform to the photographic equipment. I’m pig-headed that way — or at least I was until the Pentax K5 digital SLR landed on my camera shelf. I bought it primarily for one purpose: to take photos in the rain. And, if I had treated the K5 like every other camera I own, I would be perfectly happy letting it sit on the shelf, waiting for the next rainy day to fulfill its purpose. But I just couldn’t leave well enough alone. I started digging through the owner’s manual, reading about its multitude of special features — all of which promised to magically transform me into a “better” photographer. Naturally, I started to learn how to use each and every one of these features, even though I had no actual need for the majority of them. “You never know,” I thought, “I might need this feature one day.”

    These are the words uttered by every shutterbug who steps onto the slippery slope — the one misstep that snatches the well-meaning photographer from his blanketed, marketing-proof cocoon, and sends him sliding into the gear guano canal with all his other pea-brained photo brethren.

    For the last decade, SLRs have been conceived and marketed as “all things to all people.” Because no single do-everything camera can possibly perform every one of its functions better than the competitor’s do-everything camera, people are forever and for always dissatisfied with their current selection, and thus envious of any new product — each of which is sure to have at least one or two features that surpass the capabilities of their gear. The more functions a camera gains, the more room there is to contrast, compare and pit one camera against another. Marketing heaven.

    And this is precisely why my purchase of something so ordinary as a year-old, garden variety SLR landed me in the gear guano canal. I don’t recall ever taking a “test shot” with any of my Leicas, yet in the last two months, I’ve taken thousands of inane trial exposures with the K5. I’ve spent countless hours painstakingly configuring its myriad custom settings, while continuously fine-tuning its micro-focussing accuracy to correctly confirm focus with the paleolithic-era K-mount manual lenses that I prefer.

    Every time I encountered a feature I didn’t find particularly worthy, I’d get mildly annoyed. For example, the K5’s video capabilities pale in comparison to both my old Panasonic DMC-GH2 and my even older Canon 5DmkII. Never mind that I rarely shoot video, or that neither camera’s superior video functions prevented me from selling them. Suddenly and inexplicably, I decided the K5’s video capabilities weren’t “good enough” for me, and I would likely need a replacement camera. I leapt to this ridiculous conclusion solely because of my awareness that other dSLRs have much better video functionality. Of course, any K5 replacement would still need weather sealing — I wasn’t going to give that up just to get better video quality. So I quickly found myself reading everything I could about the new Canon 1Dx and the Nikon D4 — two weatherproof cameras with much better video capabilities than the K5, and with a pair of sphincter-altering $6000+ price tags hanging off them.

    Putting video out of my mind for a little while, I continued to take more “test” photos with the K5. And the more I took, the more that camera’s anti-aliasing filter began to bother me. Neither my M-Mount Ricoh GXR module nor my Leica M9 have an anti-aliasing filter. This means their images have the potential to be much sharper than anything I could ever take with my K5. Forget the fact that I rarely use any camera under such ideal conditions that I’m able to obtain optimal focus — The fact that the K5 would never produce as much resolution as my other cameras led me to conclude that I simply couldn’t live with that quality-squelching anti-aliasing filter.

    So it was back to the internet in search of a solution, and because I didn’t want to give up weather-sealing, I soon found myself studying up on the $10,000 Pentax 645D medium format camera. But wisdom prevailed, and I reckoned that, in my heart, I’d never be happy with the 645D knowing that the $23,000 Leica S2 would more sufficiently satisfy my “needs” — a pointless admission since the odds I’ll ever afford either are greater than the odds I’ll be struck by lighting while sitting indoors on a sunny day. Besides, while I’m certain that either camera would give me the sharpness, dynamic range and resolution I need to make very large prints, neither camera shoots video — so I’d be crazy to give up the K5. In spite of the fact I had decided its video wasn’t “good enough,” it’s still better than having a modern SLR with no video at all. Isn’t it?

    In the middle of this mania, Nikon announced the new D800e and I thought, “At last! A perfect solution! It’s got great video specs, an option to purchase it without an anti-aliasing filter, and enough pixels to make big prints — and it’s ‘only’ $3000! What all can I sell?” But then I started worrying about clients. Nikon’s going to market this camera to the masses, meaning they’ll sell hundreds of thousands of them. Is any well-healed client going to hire me if they see me shooting with the same camera they use? Perception is reality, after all. Further complicating this mental exercise was my realization that the D800’s weather-sealing is somewhat lacking when compared to my K5. “Maybe,” I thought, “I could do without weather sealing…”

    It’s at this point that I became cognizant of being way over my head in gear guano. I bought a K5 for essentially one reason: inclement weather shooting. And now, because it has a million other bells, whistles and buzzers on board, I start comparing its bells to Canon’s; its whistles to Nikon’s; and its buzzers to medium format — effectively rationalizing away the one real reason that I own the camera: weather sealing! Why am I worried what my clients will think if I use a particular camera on an ad shoot? Who cares? Last I checked, I don’t have a single advertising gig on my calendar, nor do I plan to look for one. Will my fine art prints fail to sell because my existing cameras only have enough resolution for a 13″ x 19″ A3+ print? In truth, it’s far more likely they’ll fail to sell because I’ve never actually bothered to delve into the world of fine art photography. Besides, I’m a photographer who primarily documents humanity — who’s going to pay money to hang those shots on the wall? No one. No matter how big I make the prints.

    I’m one of the lucky ones — it only took me a couple of months to recognize my descent into the guano, so I still had enough strength of will to extricate myself. I’m now back to using my K5 properly — in the rain and, on occasion, as a nice way to shoot wonderful (and wonderfully inexpensive) Pentax lenses from days gone by. But I’ve re-learned my lesson, and any way you slice it, the fact remains: SLRs make me stupid. In this, I know I’m not unique. But as I mentioned earlier, SLRs aren’t the only gizmos that consume a photographer’s brain matter faster than a bong-toking zombie — any unreasonable gear obsession will do it. And it’s not an obsession that’s unique to cameras, or even to the digital age. Plenty of photographers once whiled away weeks, months and even years in the darkroom, taking “test shots” and experimenting with different films, developers and papers — all in search of the illusive quality of “technical perfection.” But there is no such thing as technical perfection. There is no perfect camera. There is no perfect lens, flash, film or Photoshop plugin. There is only the perfect image — and people have been taking them for well over a hundred years with some amazingly imperfect gear.

    Which reminds me: There’s a world full of subjects out there, and I’ve been neglecting my lovely little Leica M2 for far too long now…

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: Only one of these photos was shot with my K5 digital SLR. Can you guess which one? In all the others, the camera occupied its rightful place as the medium, not the message — as it should be. “Cup Holder, Vancouver Style” was shot with a Leica M9 and a pre-production 21mm Super-Elmar-M f/3.4 ASPH lens. “Little Ray o’ Sunshine” was shot with a Ricoh GXR using its A12 28mm f/2.5 lens module, which I “guess focussed” using Ricoh’s ‘snap focus’ feature. I was immediately drawn to the little girl’s expression, and included it here since it so accurately mirrored mine as I wrote this post. “Urban Gypsy, Good Fortune” was shot with a Leica M9 and a 28mm f/2 Summicron lens.

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • Shooting Through the Wormhole

    Shooting Through the Wormhole

    We live in an era where sharpness, literalness and hyperrealism dominate the modern photographic terrain. In spite of this, my own photography is actually informed by the golden age photojournalists of the 1930s and 1940s, post-war photo essays from the 1950s, and John Szarkowski’s New Documentarian leanings of the 1960s. I wasn’t always this anachronistic. Rather, I used to be even more so.

    My earliest photographic tendencies skewed dramatically toward pictorialism, early surrealism and the Czech avant-garde. Although these weren’t exactly harmonious movements a century ago, my late 20th century perspective allowed me to pick and choose elements from each without buying into an entire philosophy. I became a “pictsurrealist.” In the fanciful world of my youthful daydreams, I would be the new Frantisek Drtikol. In the fanciful world of my recent dreams, I would be the new Garry Winogrand. But in the real world, I’m simply Egor — a perennial photographic outsider.

    Perhaps the greatest thing about being unpopular is that you don’t have to worry about alienating your fan base — you have none. So, for this reason, I’ve always recklessly infused my mid 20th century documentary stylings with a sprinkling of my early 20th century surrealist tendencies, while accepting a fair amount of pictorialist qualities in photos where sharpness would otherwise be the norm.

    The contradictions of my own photographic disposition are a perfect reflection of photography’s own 180-year struggle to define itself. Is a photograph’s primary purpose to produce a visual record of times, places, people and events? Or do photographs exist primarily as objects of stand-alone beauty? Should a photo tickle the intellect or the eye?

    Each generation of photographers does little to settle the debate, as each tends to pick a side and adhere to it at all cost. Last year, in an article entitled More Poe than Van Gogh, I proposed an alternative view that generated substantial internet discussion, but ultimately did nothing to resolve the argument. And, truth be told, I chose my side several years ago — deciding that my strongest inclinations were toward documentary photography and that I would use the camera to illustrate those little slices of life that people might otherwise miss. There would be no more room for postcards in my portfolio. But this mortal coil is not a linear path, and I’ve recently begun to experience a shift back toward my own “pictsurreal” proclivities.

    Because I am now so publicly identified with the documentarian side of the great photography debate, my backslide into pictsurrealism has caused me a fair amount of self-induced embarrassment. But why should it? Why must one’s photography fall under a single mandate? Maybe my duelling penchants aren’t actually at odds with one another — maybe they’re simply two sides of my own personal photographic coin? If you were to flip a coin every day for the rest of your life, would you expect it to always come up heads? Of course not. So, day in and day out, when I point my camera and flip that photographic coin, why would I expect it to always come up documentarian? Some days, the coin is going to say “pictsurrealist.” And so, rather than fighting against the coin toss, I decided to just go with it.

    Fortunately, for the sake of both bank account and sanity, my photographic tools are the same regardless of the outcome — it’s only my eye and my technique that change with each flip of the coin. There is, however, one tool that I tend to employ much more in my pictsurrealist work than in my documentary work: the pinhole lens. Actually, “pinhole lens” is a misnomer since pinholes are completely lensless. They are, in fact, air. A teensy tiny bit of air, but air nonetheless.

    Shooting through a pinhole is like shooting through a wormhole. It’s a shortcut through time. Pinholes create a timeless look, which is a quality I desire no matter which side of the coin I’m shooting. If I take a visually appealing photograph today, I’d like its appeal to be one that would resonate with viewers 100 years in the past, as well as 100 years in the future. Similarly, if I document some interesting aspect of human nature, I want that photo to be relevant across generations.

    Pinholes and rangefinders are an ideal match. I’ve written many past articles about the rangefinder advantages for documentarians, but I could make an equally strong case for the pictsurrealist. Traditional SLRs and modern mirrorless cameras both provide through-the-lens subject monitoring, but rangefinders use a viewfinder that’s separate from the lens. This means rangefinders, unlike these other cameras, actually let you see what you’ll be photographing with that pinhole. For me, this is a huge benefit. It means that each time I make a pinhole, I can take a few shots, learn its field of view, and then use it exactly like I would a real lens.

    And, yes, I said “make” a pinhole. Of course, you can purchase pinholes for the Leica (and, for convenience sake, I frequently use one made by Leica Goodies), but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or even an optical physicist) to design a pinhole lens. A strip of gaffer’s tape and a sharp object are all you need. Granted, my homemade pinholes aren’t exactly objects of beauty, but they work … and every pinhole I make is different. For example, the one shown in the following photograph (and fondly dubbed, the “Psychopathilux”) is actually a piece of tape that I stabbed multiple times with an X-acto knife, then stuck to the front of the M9.

    And here are a pair of photos from this particular version:

    As with everything in photography, love and life, the pinhole is not perfect. Those who are attracted to the idea of a “lens” with nearly infinite depth of field should know this does not mean everything from 1 cm to infinity is impeccably sharp — rather, it means everything is equally unsharp. Also, I would suggest that anyone who suffers from obsessive-compulsive sensor cleaning disorder forgo digital pinhole photography. If you ever freaked out over how dirty your sensor looked at f/22, just imagine what it’s like at f/140. You don’t just see every molecule of dust on your sensor — you see its atomic structure. Pinhole photography demands intimate familiarity with Photoshop’s assortment of heeling brushes and, perhaps, a prozac prescription.

    But if you own a rangefinder and aren’t averse to bucking the sharpness, literalness and hyperreality trend, there’s little else to prevent you from experimenting with a pinhole. And, given the current scarcity of Leica lenses, the pinhole might just be the only new “lens” your Leica will see for quite some time. So take a look through the wormhole — and see what’s looking back.

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: All photos accompanying this article were taken with a pinhole rather than an actual lens — some pinholes were store bought, and some were homemade.

    This article (along with many of its associated comments) first appeared on January 18, 2012 in my f/Egor column for the Leica Camera Blog.

    If you find these photos enjoyable or the articles beneficial, please consider making a DONATION to this site’s continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site — serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls.

  • The January Effect

    The January Effect

    I always found the idea of making New Year’s resolutions somewhat curious. Why must one wait until January before resolving to rectify all the mistakes of a squandered and miserable existence? If you have an epiphany on June 29th, what good does it do to wait six months to act upon it? Wouldn’t right this moment be more appropriate?

    Normally, I wouldn’t be too concerned with the New Year’s resolutions of others, except they always seem to affect me in some way. Take, for example, the ever-popular diet resolution. For eleven-and-a-half months each year, I can belly right up to my grocer’s salad bar, build a big beautiful salad, and be eating it within minutes. But in January, the crowd around the salad bar makes Christmas shopping at the mall look like a hike in the wilderness. If people would simply begin to eat properly the moment they acknowledge their cookie and peppermint white chocolate mocha lunch habit might be a problem, then I wouldn’t be forced to forgo salad for the first two weeks of every year.

    Although the collateral damage from other people’s resolutions is mostly disadvantageous, there is actually one New Year’s resolution that always delighted and amused me. I dubbed it, “The January Effect.”

    Each January (usually around the 3rd or 4th of the month, after the population had sobered up), I would begin to garner quite a bit of attention from the fairer sex. Nothing extreme — just the little smiles, looks, touches, hair flips and mild flirtations women use to signal interest. Mind you, I’m not (nor was I) what the average female would consider to be a platinum catch. In my heyday, I would have generously applied a grade of “B-” to my physical desirability. I was not so desirable that I could attract a woman’s attention from across a crowded room, but was desirable enough to hold the attention of the women I met. For 11 months each year, these were the rules of attraction with which I complied — but each January, my mojo would seemingly and suddenly shift into overdrive.

    It actually took me a couple of years to realize I hadn’t suddenly and miraculously become handsome over the holidays. In fact, my new found desirability had nothing whatsoever to do with me. Instead, it had everything to do with the women themselves. I came to realize that I was their New Year’s resolution. I had become the personification of the salad bar. Each January, weary from the previous eleven months spent pursuing the unattainably handsome, dangerously seductive or tantalizingly rich, women would resolve to lower their standards. This, they decided, would be the year they would “smarten up,” drop into a lower league, and thus land a more respectable guy. Apparently, I fit that mold.

    I won’t lie. I loved the January Effect and began to anxiously await its arrival each and every year. Even though I eventually married a woman so far out of my league that I needed a telescope just to see her, I (and my ego) still enjoyed my annual illusion of desirability. It felt good to be the desire-ee rather than the desire-er.

    Sadly, about a half dozen years ago, the January Effect began to diminish precipitously. My daily reception of carnivorous glances became weekly glances. The next year, I received a grand total of one. The year after that, none. Thanks to a combination of age and gravity, I had dropped below the female threshold of “good enough,” and entered the realm of “not if you were the last man on earth.” I am now enveloped in my fifth January without personally experiencing the January Effect.

    With the demise of the January Effect came the end of “good things” happening as a result of others’ resolutions. So, in that vein, I’d like to take this opportunity to suggest a few resolutions that others might make that would benefit me.

    For example, I would like The Vancouver Canucks hockey team to resolve to win this years’ Stanley Cup. I really don’t want to see the opposing team hoist the cup and flaunt it on Vancouver ice again. However, should the Canucks fail to win the cup this year, I would alternately like to request that inebriated, under-aged men from the suburbs resolve not to try and burn down my city.

    But I realize I can’t control other people’s resolutions. So to counter any potentially negative effects resulting from the resolutions of others, I should probably just consider making my own. But what to resolve? I searched high and low for the answer, and gave it some serious thought.

    Eventually I decided to seek a resolution from within my own photography. Are there things I’m doing wrong? Buds to nip? Bad habits to break? I dug into last year’s Lightroom library to see what I could learn. One of my first discoveries was the sheer preponderance of pigeon photos I had taken. What was that all about? What was the point? Maybe I should resolve to stop, but why? If I happen to see a particularly photogenic pigeon, what good would come from a resolution to not take its photo?

    I mean, if I really feel the urge to stop photographing some segment of our flighted friends, maybe I should resolve to cut down on photos of crows feeding on the carcasses of drowned rats.

    Digging deeper, I noticed that I took precious few photos of people who stared directly into the camera. I don’t know whether the dearth of direct portraits was a stylistic choice, or simply one born of fear. But it did start me flirting with the idea of going all Diane Arbus. The idea of actually getting to know people before I take their photo has a certain appeal, but I think such a drastic change in both my personality and style is a bit too much heavy lifting for a little ‘throw away’ New Year’s resolution.

    On the opposite end of the quantity scale, I noticed that I photograph a lot of kids. Yet, even though they’re great subjects, I frequently choose not to publish them. Maybe it’s because I fear the wrath of angry parents? If so, then perhaps I should resolve to stop. But frankly, every kid I photograph is ridiculously cute. So maybe I’m actually doing something good — providing ample evidence that not every person who photographs a child is a pedophile. So, no — I’m not going to stop photographing kids just yet.

    Then there’s my never-ending obsession with taking softly focused photographs of people whose body language intrigues me. Because I’m more interested in the shapes of the bodies than the details upon them, I will often shoot these out-of-focus. These are some of the most divisive photos in my portfolio — some folks love them, some hate them. Some might view this schism as a negative thing, and resolve to reduce (or even eliminate) these photos from their repertoire. But I’m thinking the opposite: In any art form, controversy is good. So I’m standing behind the “focus, schmocus” quote I first published in my Bartlett’s Rejects article.

    Other observations flitted by. I saw my Lightroom library contained a lot of shots from a lot of odd and old cameras. I certainly see no reason to give that up for a New Year’s resolution. If anything, I’d like to do more of it, but cost factors prevent this from becoming a bona fide resolution.

    Further perusal of my photo library reveals a rather unnatural attraction to signage — whether for reasons of whimsy or incongruity. Sure these signage shots are cheap and easy, but my pavlovian instinct to keep shooting them is not a monkey I’m ready to exorcise. Besides, I’m hoping they’ll have some kind of historical significance long after I’m gone. I’d like to think they’ll make my offspring rich, but I don’t have kids. So maybe they’ll help British Columbia pay its bills in the late 21st century.

    Darkness continues to fascinate me. As I discussed in The Geometry of Night, I really consider the night to be one of the few untapped, unappreciated avenues open to photographers. Unfortunately, that article had the fewest readers of any article I ever wrote for Leica. My own warped logic tells me this implies that I’m actually on to something good! So I’m sticking with it. But I don’t think it really counts as a New Year’s resolution when you say, “I resolve to keep doing exactly what I have been doing.”

    As a self-proclaimed documentary photographer, I suppose I should resolve to make more of an effort to figure out what the heck it is I’m actually documenting. But really, scenes like the following are just so much more interesting when one hasn’t a clue.

    I finally concluded that any resolution I make must be simple in concept and focused in intent. For example, I enjoy dabbling now and then with lens flare, so maybe I should resolve to do it more? But the problem with this approach is that lens flare either works for a subject or it doesn’t — to overindulge thoughtlessly would be a reckless resolution.

    Eventually, on about my fourth pass through last year’s Lightroom library, I found my New Year’s resolution: take more photos with a 50mm lens! To my surprise, I shot less with a 50mm than with any other focal length. For something that’s supposedly a “standard” lens, I was surprised to learn that I used it so little. I was even more surprised to find that, in spite of its limited use, so many 50mm images managed to find their way into my narrowed collection of “good” shots. So why didn’t I use it more? I don’t rightly know. But I resolve to find out. So this year, I’m declaring in full view of the world that I resolve to take more photos with a 50mm lens. It’s a pure, simple and doable resolution. And, best of all, it’ll distract me from the emptiness of another year passed without benefit of the January Effect.

    ©2012 grEGORy simpson

    ABOUT THESE PHOTOS: Astute readers will recognize the deft and surreptitious way in which this article satisfies one of my ongoing resolutions — to occasionally purge my library of unpublished photos through an otherwise pointless article. Here, then, are the gory technical details surrounding these photos: “Another Guy Gets the Look” was shot with a Leica M6 TTL and a Voigltander 50mm f/1.1 Nokton lens using Delta 3200 exposed at ISO 1600 and developed in Ilfotec DD-X. “Blowing the Final Frame” and “Problem Solved” were shot with a Rollei 35T using Tri-X at ISO 400 and developed in Ilfotec DD-X. “Thomas Hoists the Cup” and “Riot, Dusk”  were both shot with a Leica M9 and a Voigtlander 75mm f/2.5 Color-Heliar lens. “Looker,” “Thinkers,” “Bent Pigeon” and “Granville Room” were all shot with a Leica M9 and a 35mm f/2 (v4) Summilux lens. “Dining on Drowned Rat” was shot with a Pentax K-5 and a Pentax-M 120mm f2.8 SMC lens. “Pillars,” “Donair” and “Regal” were shot with a Leica M9 and a 28mm f/2 Summicron lens. “Cooler Now Than I Will Ever Be” and “Flare Flair” were shot with a Ricoh GXR using a Ricoh 28mm f/2.5 A12 lens/sensor module. “Cellular” was shot with a Leica M9 and a Voigtlander 50mm f/1.1 Nokton lens. “Marine Building Lobby, Vancouver” was shot with a Widelux F7 using Delta 400 film exposed at ISO 400 and developed in Ilfotec DD-X. “Duck!” was shot with a Leica M2 and a Voigtlander 50mm f/1.1 Nokton lens using Tri-X exposed at ISO 400 and developed in Ilfotec DD-X.

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