alight

last friday was a wonderful sunny day, as opposed to the recent spell of bad weather we're having, and I decided that it should not be wasted. constantina had asked me for a portrait session a while back, so we arranged a little trip to the seaside. the winter seaside is always a nice place if you want big open spaces, while at the same time you can get full advantage of the setting sun. my speed graphic was stranded on the sidelines, resting on a service table somewhere in the netherlands (the repair went fine and the camera is now on its way back to athens), so Ι fell back to 135 and 120 film. the minolta xd-7 was already loaded with some polypan f 50, and I hadn't aired the bronica sq-a for a really long time, so I took it along.

we arrived at the seaside early, but the sunlight was too harsh and I really get baked in direct sunlight (my body has a blown fuse when it comes to high temperatures), so we relaxed in the shadow until the sun was two hours away from setting, and the light had become more mellow - the golden hour.

I am quite wide-angle and static when doing large format portraits, but the 35mm format allows for fast pace and extreme close-ups - I tend to default to tight portraiture in such occasions, getting the most out of the 50mm/f1.4 lens...

...of course I still have the wide-angle bug in me, and wide-angle lenses really like big open spaces...

...and back to cream-cheese-the-hell-out-of-the-background territory...

a couple of dogs were around, they weren't exactly friendly...

...the sun was getting lower by the minute...

...and when I finished the half-full roll in the minolta, I took out the bronica, loaded it up with a roll of ilford fp4+, fitted the zenzanon 150mm/f3.5 on it and I was back to square portraits after months of working with non-square formats...

I need to get these negatives to the darkroom - they will print nicely, and also contact sheets would be nice. 20-something images in the 35mm roll and 12 images in the medium format roll, almost all of them based on different aspects of the same face, they will make up good contact sheets.

the last good day of the year

actually, these photos were taken on the last day of 2011 and the first day of 2012, since I couldn't finish the 35mm roll on new year's eve. this post should have a different title - it should be called something like "the last/first weekend of 2011/2012", or maybe "one weekend, two years", or "next time the weather's rainy, remember to load your camera with colour film instead of black & white" but the song by cousteau kept spinning in my head and I went for it. so there I was, new year's eve, just another saturday for some people (just me, I guess), clouds, rain, cold - a perfect day to visit the seaside. I loaded the minolta with some really old kodak panatomic-x film, decided to also take out the kiev 88 with the flektogon 50mm/f4 (I don't get a lot of time with wide-angle lenses), threw some medium format films in the bag and jumped in the car.

rafina is a nice place for winter seaside walks, the clouds were lining the sky and the colours were perfect for photographs... at that point, I realized that I hadn't brought any colour films with me apart from a slide film meant to be used with tungsten lighting... I wasted a minute in cursing and pitying myself and then decided to try my best... in the end you could say that my best wasn't good enough - lesson to self: buy a big stash of kodak portra and always carry some of them. you just can't beat colour film for anything remotely resembling a landscape.

anyway, photos. an attempt on a simple I-can-focus-really-close view of the beach...

...then this crazy guy came crashing through the sand...

...it's always nice to find interesting bits and pieces that people throw away, although it'd be nicer if you never found any kind of litter on a beach (and that proves that I can be politically correct if I want to)...

...then a typical I-have-shot-this-too-but-it-looks-better-in-colour frame taken during my superhuman attempt to finish the roll, which didn't happen anyway, since I was still in the middle of it...

...and this is the only shot from the kiev 88 roll that has some interest, although most of its interest lies in imagining how different it would be if it was a colour shot...

...that was the end of new year's eve photo walk, a searing, majestic session of uninspired photos that had the bad luck of being a black & white peg in a colour hole. thirty frames were shot on new year's eve, most of them died because of lack of any kind of photographic interest.

but you always have to try some things twice, so on new year's day I returned to the same beach to finish the 35mm roll. this time it was a little better, and I tried to get some movement in my frames...

...and you gotta love people walking their dogs on the beach - when combined with a super-slow 25 ASA film, you get the chance to imitate michael ackerman, or that other what's-his-name-guy who first shot a moving dog...

so that's it, a weekend of enjoyable walking by the sea and not so enjoyable photographs. hell, at least I cay say that 2011 left, 2012 came and I was still trying to finish one roll of film - one more story to tell my children (or somebody else's children, anyway). I have to point out that I learn from my mistakes, though - my next trips to the seaside were shot exclusively in colour.

a field portraiture day

...backtrack to the end of july. the 2010/11 season is ending and I daresay it has been very good for me - "good" as in "busy" and "doing new stuff", what with teaching and exhibitions and more commissioned analog-only assignments. however, my personal photography pursuits are suffering, ideas being born and then dying fast due to absence of time, a whole project being postponed for at least one year and, of course, less and less personal portraiture sessions. the latter is quite unsettling since I am addicted to portraits and I need a steady flow of them to keep my spirits up. moreover, I am painfully trying to master large format portraiture, which is a quite different beast than medium format, a lot less flexible, totally tripod-bound and requiring extreme patience and composure from the model and the photographer alike.

so, it's summertime, the concerts are over, I have extra free time and a need to get my speed graphic out on the field for a proper, calm and composed portraiture session.

enter miss eliza. she's a dream, a muse, a girl who understands my driving need and can keep still when I ask her to, while she's a most enjoyable personality when not posing. it's a hot sunday evening and we go up to a favourite location of mine: hotel xenia on top of parnitha. it's an old building that started as a sanatorium 90 years ago, became a hotel in the mid-60s and now lies abandoned and defaced.

I had four cameras with me - the speed graphic fitted with the hektor 150mm/f2.5 for large format, the medium format bronica sq-a fitted with the zenzanon 80mm/f2.8, the polaroid land camera 250 and a 35mm minolta xd-7 that I intended to use as a lightmeter.

before setting up the tripod for the speed graphic, I took a couple of frames with the polaroid - the positives are  good but they cannot be compared with the negatives, which acquire a lot of random "textures" during the bleaching process.

...then I put the speed graphic on the tripod and spent 5 minutes trying to arrange the framing. tripod photography is even more time-consuming if you have to frame and focus through an upside-down ground glass image. took two identical frames (better safe than sorry) and then decided to take out the bronica.

...on medium format everything is so much easier, framing, changing the angle of view, moving closer or further, catching momentary expressions or even the wind. and the ilford fp4+ does a very good job against the light, keeping a lot of detail in the shadows.

...with the 12-frame roll finished, it's time to go back to the speed graphic... and the first picture is an example of how you can lose your framing if you spend a long enough time on correctly focusing the razor thin depth of field of a f2.5 lens on large format.

...while the second picture really shows you the 3D effect of this particular lens/format combination. on both the images the fomapan 100 film holds up very well against the sun. very good large format film, especially considering its low price.

....and that's it. all in all we shot 22 frames in two hours: a medium format film, 8 large format sheets and 2 polaroid peel-apart frames. the only post-processing that was applied to the above images was burning/dodging and of course manual scratch and dust removal - I've yet to find a scanner that cleans itself as well as the negatives before scanning.

35mm film swap

...one more film swap, this time on 35mm film.mr. Akis shot a roll of Ilford FP4 on November 2009 and sent it over to me. took me almost two years to re-shoot the film, but I finally did it.

...of course 35mm film is more difficult to align than medium format film.