There is little I can say about the immense body of creative work Elliott Erwitt left behind and the profound influence he had on the world of photography that hasn’t been said. His greatness simply goes beyond words for me at this time of his passing. He was without equal and will be missed.
https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/remembering-elliott-erwitt-1928-2023/
The recent resurgence of film photography has fascinated me to the point that now, years after it began, I finally decided to go back to my film/darkroom days where my interest in photography is rooted and shoot my first roll of film for the first time since the mid 1990s.
As one who was schooled and worked many days and hours on end in darkrooms over several years, I thought getting back into film after 20+ years of digital photography shouldn’t be difficult at all. That said much has changed with the new incarnation of film. For one, Kodachrome is no longer available for color film photography, my absolute favorite for capturing the best 35mm images back in the day. Most of what I did in school/work during my early days of photography was of a commercial nature, so technically perfect and high-quality realistic sharp images were what was in high demand. There was nothing like processing an 8 x 10 color transparency in the darkroom and taking a look at it after it dried, and it was almost looking like the real subject, not a positive image since the resolution was so high and grain almost invisible! Creative photography was not something I was involved with professionally but was my favorite genre on a purely artistic level. Black and white gilm photography was paramount for me in the creative realm then and still is today in the digital world.
This all brings me to today, and my planned venture into black and white photography after decades away. As mentioned, much has changed since then, so to venture forth, I wanted to begin with a familiar “constant” from my past. With that said, I decided to go with the first two basics, a camera and film. I chose my Nikon Photomatic FTN 35mm camera I’ve owned since 1974 for my camera and Kodak Tri-X 400 for my film. While Kodachrome was my favorite color film, but it is long gone. Kodak Tri-X 400 was my favorite black and white and needless to say. I was elated when I found it is available today!
I am looking forward to this endeavor and still looking at film processing and print options. To get the most out Kodak Tri-X 400 film, they closely work together, almost one and the same. I was never able to get all the creative and extraordinary images out of Kodak Tri-X 400 back in the day that others did, so now is my chance to make happen, what didn’t back then.
https://theslantedlens.com/2022/how-i-shoot-tri-x-black-and-white-film/
This short video has some great still photographs and good tips for shooting in black & white with some apply to color as well.
Personally, I struggle with number two at times, using an EVS setting to expose by eye instead of meter. If I am moving around, the type of photography I am shooting varies wildly, the light and shadows are ever changing, I play it safe by shooting RAW, meter, bracket to get good HDR, use spot metering for precise focusing, and S priority to ensure no motion blur. That is just me and overkill sometimes.
I especially like number five, being in the right place at the right time as a function of your state of mind as much as anything else. I know for Street Photography, the first part is essential, the state of mind gets you there. I am not a Street Photographer and am acutely aware that I have yet to muster up the proper state of mind to be a good one. Until then, I will happily appreciate the images created by those who have mastered it!
I studied photography in school during the film/darkroom days, well before the age of digital photography. We would process all our own film/prints in darkrooms. This included color, which was difficult in comparison to black and white, due to the chemical process involved. After school, I worked in a custom color and black and white photo lab where we processed film and made prints and transparencies for customers of all types, from fine art to commercial. This education and experience gave me an appreciation for the fundamentals and roots of early photography and the pioneers who brought it all into the digital age.
In the end, it is about the visual image, and when I look at the first photograph made, and the images after that, I also think about what it took to get those images before my eyes. It is beyond amazing to me how that change with how visual images could be made in the early 19th century created an impact on the history of the world since that is truly unfathomable to fully comprehend.
All the images above were taken the day after Dallas received a historical level of rainfall the day before. The rain amount was from 10″ to 15″ in 24 hours depending on where it fell. This record of rain fell days after a heat wave record of 67 consecutive days without rain and heat above 100 degrees ended. This deluge caused the Trinity River bed to go from cracked parched earth to flood stage above 30 feet in less than 24 hours. With that rain, the dry cracked earth caused by the drought and heat was under water.
The picture below was taken a few days before the rain.
Photo walks for me sometimes involve a minor level of urban exploration of manmade structures, both abandoned and active, that have a story, detailed components, and unique interesting designs in a manmade environment.
Often, my favorite time for these explorations is a Saturday afternoon when the natural light of the day is brightest, into the twilight hours, when there is a mix of artificial lights mixed with the changing natural light. It is also a time of recreation from family play in the daytime, to a more adult dinner and nightlife time.
Early Sunday mornings are another time I enjoy urban exploring but for entirely different reasons. It is a time when the urban landscape is relatively empty and quiet. I have gone before sunrise, to catch the changing morning light illuminating all the manmade structures and as people begin to emerge into the scene.
Unlike street photography, my images at these times focus only on the inanimate manmade objects I see of interest and not the human element active among them. I leave that part of it to others.
It is often said that one does not need to travel far to get good photos, there are many a few feet from your door if you just look for them. Sometimes, they can be a few feet inside your door. Then black and white/grayscsle image of the lamp, window blind slats, and black background screen on a stand is a few feet from my bed. It has been there a while, but I didn’t “see” it there and visualize it as in this picture until I woke up the other morning and there it was! One thing I enjoy about photography is how it encourages he to look deeper into object around me and grab a nice image from the mundane.
Four years ago, while on a walk around the lake with my camera one afternoon, I began to hear the sound of seagulls making a tremendous racket and then saw quite a number of them in the sky, darting around in all directions above the shore. They were very active and making quite a squall. As I got closer, I noticed a young couple feeding them near the shoreline. I saw this as an opportunity to get some Seagull in action shots so moved closer. It was absolute pandemonium at this point and almost impossible to plan a shot. The couple had left some bread on the shore and I began trying to toss some of it up in the air to draw the Seagulls closer with bread in one hand while holding my camera with the other, then quickly juggling it all to try “grab” a shot. This whole planned process was not working so I just set my camera to a shutter speed that would freeze the fastest movement and action, while not opening the aperture so much that I would lose my depth of field. Fortunately, it was a bright sunny day so the ISO stayed low and I basically joined the mayhem and shot at will. When I downloaded the pictures that day, what I saw was pretty sad, and felt like a total loss. I didn’t go back to look at them, until recently. The attached picture looked hopeless from an exposure standpoint and the image of the seagull was small and in the corner of the frame. Fortunately, I was shooting with a full-frame Nikon D750 DSLR so there was a lot of room to crop and still hold the image together. In the end, I pulled the JPG image of the one attaches scene, and made adjustments to it only in Lightroom. To get this image at 1/4000 of a second (didn’t realize I set it that high) and f10 with an ISO of 100 pleased me! Of course, this has compelled me to go back and look at the rest of the Seagull shots from that day to see what else I might find to work with!
