War Pigs (One Picture Is Worth A Thousand Megabytes)

Morning Shipmates - this week has flown by and I was only aware of its passing by the movements of Mog's shadow as he snoozed on the deck, like a big fluffy cat-shaped sundial.

He's fair knackered and glad to be back in that happy ship's cat land where every scrap is a feast and every ship's mouse is now a friend.

Mr.Sheephouse vanished for a large portion of the week, only to appear again on Wednesday speedily propelling his rowboat in our direction like there was no tomorrow.

He climbed aboard in a fluster of cape and swearing, wig threatening to take off, muttering something about deadlines and committment and has posted the below for your delectation.

Personally I think he couldn't be arsed and is making up excuses . . .
But such is the life of a gentleman photographer.
Anyway, enough o' this bilge, the tide's on the turn, so hoist the main sail . . off we go

***

You know, having just watched the closing ceremony of the Olympics, I was taken by how many athletes were filming the whole thing, and I found myself questioning the relevance of photographs.

Is there any point in a single image when everything is captured for digital replay 24/7?

Is it possible to sum up such a momentous occasion with maybe one or two simple photographs?

There were virtually no cameras - it was all either the ubiquitous communication soap bar (iPhone) or a video camera. It's funny, the more I think about it, camera manufacturers seem to be painting themselves into narrower and narrower corners. What's the point in a compact camera these days?

Anyway, as we sat there enjoying the moment with a few glasses of wine, an image popped into my head and lodged there. 

It is a quiet image, but somehow it sums up another similarly momentous occasion, namely the Second World War.

It was made by one of my favourite photographers - Mr.W.Eugene Smith.

Calling For Help - Okinawa 1945

Eugene's images of the closing days of World War II in the Pacific are stunning in their power and relative calm. There are many I could have chosen, but this is the one that popped into my head and inspired this FB, so it is the one I shall use.

To my mind, it seemed to encompass everything one could be feeling being stuck in a crater under heavy fire.

It is known that Eugene did 'set up' photographs and that is quite possibly the case with this, but that doesn't lessen the power. Look at the camera angle. He is above them slightly. He would be more exposed to the incoming fire, but then he could well have been. 

The more I read about Mr.Smith the more I realise that he cared little for his own safety. 

It could well be a snatched shot from a small disctance with a mild telephoto, or a wide angle close-up with him propped against the side of the crater. However he did it, it works.

Would these fleeting looks even have been acknowledged if they had been filmed?

No.

He has used his eye and his skill to single out one small slice of time and render it to permanence.

Genius.

***

When I started thinking about wartime photography, a number of other images also came into my head - each succinct and to a point. Moments in time that could have been nearly meaningless if they had been film footage, but which have stood the test of time in their power.

You see, that is the difference between a photographer and a film maker.

The photographer uses his talents to highlight those moments in life which pass all too fleetingly, and hammer them home (if he or she is good enough) into iconic images.

Hopefully they are of a quality that the more you look and think about them, the more they sum up things in ways that the daily parade of sorrow that passes over our TV screens never could.

***

The next photograph is by Larry Burrows who lost his life in the Vietnam War.

An English photographer, his influence is actually far greater than many people realise.

He is best known for his colour images of the conflict, which often resemble those enormous set-piece battle paintings found in many museums and art galleries, it is well worth searching out his images - they are bloody and sorrowful and epic and strangely compelling.

My chosen image comes from his essay for LIFE magazine:

'One Ride With Yankee Papa 13' 

It manages to say in a few pages what a team of film crews never could with thousands of feet of film or thousands of Terabytes of storage.

It tells the story of  Lance Cpl. James C. Farley and a mission into enemy territory. 

It starts out with a briefing, continues with Farley having happy times on some downtime a couple of days before and then proceeds rapidly into the thick and bloody hopelessness of battle.

It ends with the picture of Farley below.

You simply could never film it.

In a supply shack, hands covering his face, an exhausted, worn James Farley gives way to grief.

You can see the complete sequence here:

http://life.time.com/history/vietnam-war-one-ride-with-yankee-papa-13/#1

Again another extraordinary LIFE photo essay.

***

Another incredible photographer who can say more with one image than you could in a lifetime is Don McCullin, a man blessed with the luck of nine cats. Really. Saved from shrapnel by his Nikon (honest) he has endured probably more conflicts than any other war photographer and still remains alive.
These days his beautifully powerful and quiet landscapes are a complete anathema to the images he is best known for.
The photograph below just says it all.
All the grief and pain.
All the sorrow.
It won him many accolades and ensured he was shipped all over the world to cover conflict.
I personally find the woman's expression just wrenching.

Grieving woman with young boy, Cyprus

It was made during the Cypriot war of 1964.

These days it is hard to imagine now how such a beautiful country, where people go for peace and quiet and relaxation, could have been such a place of pain and death.

It is an awe-inspiring photograph for its sheer humanity in the face of inhumanity.

Just look at that boy and the old lady on the left and especially the woman with child behind.

This is the true story of war.

There is an excellent article on Mr.McCullin here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/aug/06/photography.art

***

My final image this week was made by the incredible photographer Lee Miller, who worked (amongst other things in a life of great photography) in that almost unknown field of women war photographers.
Of all the images here, it is the most serene and surreal and yet also I feel the saddest.
It was made at the liberation of Dachau.
Yes, the man was an SS guard at Dachau.
We have no idea whether he was kind or cruel.
He was someone's son though.
Maybe someone's lover.
Someone's Father.
Just following orders?
Or too terrified of the consequences of disobeying?

Dead SS Guard in Canal, Dachau, Germany

The sadness of wasted lives and the futility of war literally seeps out of this photograph.

It seems to matter not whether he was a vehement follower, or a hapless soul caught up in something beyond himself.

He is a dead human being. 

But the brutality of his death, and indeed the horror found at the liberation of Dachau seem to have been transformed by the water. 

All there is, is the world. 

Our shadow plays, though shocking and bloody, terrifying and inhumane are just scree on the glacier of time.

To my mind, this photograph shows that man can transcend war and man can be transformed if he were of a mind to be.

But man never will.

It has taken a woman's touch to show us this in a photograph.

Lee Miller was a remarkable photographer. 

You can find many of her wartime images at her archive:

http://www.leemiller.co.uk/virtualExhbNew.aspx?virtexhb=1

***

And th-th-th-that's all folks.

I hope is hasn't brought your weekend down too much.

Making statements like this is a dying art. 

You'll soon be connected to your news feed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no moments free to sit and quietly contemplate a single moment of time, singled out, treated with respect and placed in front of you so that you can reflect and think.

After the (trying and dull [I'm sure they were]) word-fest-FBs of recent weeks, I am going to leave this one here.
It is relatively word-free and hopefully the power of these images that need no description will wend their awful way into your consciousness.
Don't you think it is sad to think that there are men and women and children; troops and civilians; refugees, innocents and the bloody-handed, undergoing these same feelings of grief and terror and pain and sorrow as I write this.
Stay dry mateys.
If you indeed are lucky enough, thank God you live in a country where the play of the greed of mankind has hopefully burnt itself out.
As usual, God bless and thanks for reading.

Flying In A Blue Dream

Greetings Shipmates.

Well that was a peculiar two weeks.

Me old Mog was soundly beaten in the 100 metre Kattomeat dash by a professional cat.

I thought Olympic sports were set up purely to demonstrate the beauty of amateurism? Certainly these days it seems far far away from the mores of olive eating, hair plaiting, naked men in the baking heat of the Med. For a cat of Mog's years, the competition was just too great and in the end he had no fun and came back to the ship with droopy whiskers and a sodden tail. Meanwhile the sleek, aerodynamic, lycra-clad cats took the prizes.
Mog feels scruffy and old and unloved, but as I said to him, there's no shame in it. If he hadn't held the torch for the Kattomeat dash for all these years, it would have slipped into the mire of bizarre and forgotten cat sports of yore. He felt consoled for a bit.

Then the sun shone and then it didn't and then it did, and we sat and chatted and he felt better.
He was particularly heartened by the massed chanting of:
"Mog-o! Mog-o! Mog-o! Mog-o!"

The Goode Shippe FB is now fully laden with new stores and to be honest yer Cap'n wants to be out and about, plying the seas of ether, discovering new lands for you to enjoy.

You need a break sometimes if only to consol a sad cat.

***

Sometimes things just happen.

I think they happen for a reason, and they can be strangely interlinked.

There I was at work a couple of weeks back handling some re-reissues of classic albums, when what jumps out at me but a photograph. Not just any photograph either. A wonderful, dreamy, gorgeous slice of colour and beauty. It was the cover of Flow Motion by Can and was made by their (now dead) guitarist Michael Karoli. 

Here it is and if this doesn't make yer jaw drop I don't know what will.

Mr. Karoli was not a professional photographer. He was an avid photography buff and above all, a highly influential and passionate musician from arguably one of the most important post-1960's German bands.

I dare you to try and research his photographs though - it is an impossible task.

So how has he got it so right?

I don't know, all I do know is that I would count myself proud to have produced such a work.

Remove the lettering and you have something that would (and should) grace any modern gallery in the world.

This shows an immense ability and an eye for a startling composition don't you think? It is so dreamy, and the use of colour is immensly calming and satisfying. 

It is a precursor of Lomography by some twenty years. I think it is fairly obviously either a double or treble exposure or a composite print as there appear to be three elements: the woman with her hand on her hip and the tree; the silhouette to the right; the overlay of flowing water.
However he made it, it is a masterful photograph and I just think it is incredible.

Isn't life wonderful when you have a serendipitous meeting . . .

***

Anyway, after mentally filing the above as a possible side excursion for a future FB, fast forward a couple of weeks. 

There I was minding my own business browsing the books in Waterstones on a very wet Monday when I encountered Ernst Haas. Not personally you understand as he too has been dead for a number of years. No it was a Thames & Hudson Photofile book.

I was aware of Haas's monochrome work, but not really his colour.

The cover of the book looked intriguing, so for want of something better to look at, I opened it and was punched straight in the face by one of the best colour photographs I had ever seen.

Western Skies Motel, Colorado 1978 - this may not look ideal on your monitor, but believe me, it is beautiful.

I don't know about you, but I am getting strangeness, intrigue and downright beauty off of it.
I am not a colour photographer. At all. It is just something I have never done, and yet now I find myself wanting to scratch that itch.

I've always had a sneaky admiration for some of the groundbreaking colour photographers like (the these days totally ignored) Eliot Porter and the highly regarded Stephen Shore. So why isn't Ernst Haas better known?
Although Kodachrome (slide film) had been around since 1935 and had been widely taken up by the photographer at large, it was difficult to reproduce, and was also virtually always reliant upon being returned to the manufacturer for processing.
The earliest possibilities of colour were pointed out in 1938 in a book called The Leica Book In Colour in which 72 photographs were reproduced, but it wasn't until the introduction in 1942 of Kodacolor (a chromogenic film - basically a mixture of silver halide and dye layers . . . colour negative film as we still know it) that things really started cooking. However, you have to remember that in 1942 the majority of the world was a theatre of War, and what with the privations afterwards, colour film and processing were costly. (Agfa had actually introduced the world's first chromogenic film in 1939, but there was a little matter of it being manufactured in a country trying to achieve world domination!)

Anyway, if you look at the situation thus (and interject the worst human conflict mankind has every known) it is easy to understand the delay in its uptake and what a huge impact affordable colour film and its processing and printing would have had back in the 1950's and 60's.
It wasn't just huge, it was genre changing.
(Just as an aside, even in the 1970's I remember large parts of London where there was nothing but craters surrounded by fencing. I would say it took roughly 30 years for a full state of recovery to occur in the metropolis).
When Mr.Haas started to make his mark, back in the 1950's, monochrome was pretty much the be-all and end-all. It was easy to reproduce and everyone did it, but a huge tidal shift occured (no doubt helped in part by Mr.Haas and other brave photographers [I'm thinking of the wonderous National Geographic guys]). The tidal shift was such that these days colour is the norm and monochrome photography is the unusual thing.
I mean, who takes pictures in black and white? It is as archaic as that black and white TV set your Gran dispensed with in the 1980's, and yet it is as vital and passionate art form as you could ever wish to encounter **. 

It was a natural shift though - it stands to reason - the world is a colourful place. Why not record it so?
For myself, the problem I find is that pretty much every image I view is colour. It is everything and everywhere. It is all-conquering and commonplace. And it can be (dare I say) a tad boring.
Now to me there is something wrong with that.
Certainly there are any number of colour practitioners out there who would no doubt beg to differ, but I think the problem is that colour has become so incredibly easy, and with that easiness has come familiarity, and we all know what the old saw says that breeds . . . .
Taking your film to be processed at the chemists or your local camera shop, or sending it away and waiting with anticipation for that stiff envelope to return, sort of broke down the mystique of colour, and in recent times, digital has taken away from that even further. You snap, you view on the tiny LCD or on a computer monitor, you delete, you save. Even the difficulty of making a colour print has vanished into the haze of pointless human activity - you can print your holiday snaps whilst yer Ma gets the shopping at Tescos for chrissakes!
Colour printing was difficult. Not only that, but go beyond what used to be 'amateur' additive printing into the heady world of dye transfer prints (which were the pinnacle of colour reproduction and were exhorbitantly prohibitive at the time and have virtually vanished now as Kodak [the only supplier of materials] ceased production of said materials back in the mid-90's) and you were looking at something that cost, not just in man hours but also a big hole in your wallet. With the advent of digital, most (if not all) workers in this time consuming and expensive process moved over to digital *** and the ubiquitous, bloody ink jet print. This being said the quality of colour IJ printing can be wonderful, and even advanced printers who used to practice the dark art of dye transfer now find themselves stating that their IJ prints are almost indistinguishable from the real thing - but they won't have the archival life, nor do they really have that rich other-worldly beauty that set a dye-transfer apart. I also think that the effort involved in DT printing must have embued itself into the final product somehow . . .
And it is now all gone; you just set your profile, load up your printer and click print.
There's as much craft skill as a chimp with a banana.
Everyone does it.
Simple.
And familiar.

***

But all this is rather moving away from my original theme, namely a young Austrian man called Ernst Haas and his powerful vision.

Ernst's big break came when a photo-essay he made on a Rolleiflex was published in the magazine of the occupation forces, called Heute, in August of 1949.
It was entitled  Und Die Frauen Warten . . . (The Women Are Waiting) and was an incredibly moving essay on the repatriation of Austrian troops from the Russian front.
A large spread of 15 photographs over 8 pages culminated in the second photograph below.

It was obvious to all, there was only one way to go for someone with that sort of ability and it was up.

He was accepted that year by Magnum, the famous photographic agency, and moved to New York in 1951, quietly establishing himself as one of the world's foremost photographers. 

His work was widely published in LIFE, Vogue, Look, Esquire, Paris Match, Queen and Stern. 

LIFE printed their first ever colour spread (and a major Haas sequence) in Images Of A Magic City in 1953 - and one cannot underestimate the influence this would have had on the public at large.
Certainly colour had been used for covers and adverts and single images, but a spread like this was new.
Click this link:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=F0gEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

The magic of Google books will take you to Part One. Page 108!
And the following edition too which continues it and also features a photo essay by my hero W.Eugene Smith:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XUIEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=true

Mr.Haas' work continues on Page 118, Eugene's on Page 165.
Now obviously the scans aren't great, but you'll get the idea.
As a small aside, Ernst pretty much only ever used Kodachrome for his colour work, and it shows - the colours the early versions of Kodachrome showed are to me the epitomy of good colour.

His book The Creation which was based upon his work with the director John Huston and the film The Bible, went on to sell 350 000 copies, which is an extraordinary number of books.

LIFE again, in 1958, devoted no less than 36 pages to a sequence of his work called Magic Color In Motion. (Notice too the use again of the word magic. It kind of shows how new and exciting colour was.)

Mr.Haas was the first person to exhibit colour photographs at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York in 1962 - a feat that would not be repeated until the William Egglestone exhibition some 14 years later.

Popular Photography Magazine listed him, in 1958, as one of the world's ten best photographers.

This isn't small potatoes, this is big stuff. 

Popular and populist, lauded by his peers, and yet now largely unknown (when I say that I mean just not spoken about in the same awed tones of the likes of the over-rated Egglestone). 

So how did this happen?

According to Lenscutlure.com Haas was sidelined by Szarkowski, Steichen's successor as curator at MoMA.

"Though introducing Haas’ work to a large audience and a major milestone in the history of the medium it would not come to have the same effect on the development of the artist’s career. On the contrary: Haas' exhibition though planned by Edward Steichen (renowned photographer and curator of MoMA at the time) was in the end realised by his successor John Szarkowski. With this shift in curatorship, Szarkowski would enforce a different taste. Having the duty to complete Steichen’s idea, but keen to champion his own and dissimilar ideas, Szarkowski’s enthusiasm regarding the artist and the exhibition Ernst Haas - Color Photography was meek, the praise in his accompanying texts all but faint.

Steichen, once in favor of pictorialism, thus a subjective photography, valued Haas’ profound use of the camera, while Szarkowski on the other hand chose to favor a less embellished sentiment; a more hard edge modernist inspired American approach. It was this disregard and clashing of personal agendas that would ultimately and erroneously see Haas excluded from the canon of color photography; his indisputable talent became the victim of the cyclical debate of what art photography should be."

So there you go. An incredible photographer with a gifted vision, sidelined by art-speak and politics. Oh how the world never changes!
Repeatedly down-graded by the photo-cognoscenti, Mr.Haas became almost an after-thought in photographic history.

And yet the power moves on.
Steidl's book Ernst Haas - Color Correction and numerous bods like me on the net, are slowly trying to help his memory gain the reputation it deserves.
He should be uttered in the same breath as Adams and Weston, Steichen and Strand.
His almost surrealistic images and incredible sense of the use of simplicity and complexity in the same image, and above all his sense of colour, are profound.
I don't think I can look at colour photographs in the same light again without holding them up against this un-lauded Master.

Below are some images he made in New York, on Kodachrome, in the 1950's. 

The third of them takes me back to the start of this rather lengthy FB.

One can never know for sure, but if I were to bet on it, I would say that Mr.Karoli was incredibly influenced by Mr.Haas, and quite possibly by photograph number 3.
But who can say. All I know is that this all reads rather like Shooting the Past **** , and that it has been a pleasure to head off across country like this without anything being planned.

Colour photography can be rich and powerful, sensual and overwhelming, true and false. It can (if used carefully) be an enriching tool for the concerned photographer. You just have to be careful how you use it.
One day soon I will scratch that itch and load some colour film and see what happens, but all the time I will keep at the back of my mind Mr.Ernst Haas as the pinnacle of what you can do with it.

Don't you think he truly deserves to be more highly regarded?
Hope so.

Anyway, as usual, take care and stay dry.
Thanks for reading and as my friend Canadian Bob (who coincidentally grew up in 1950's New York) always says: Watch Out For The Signs.

** You have only to do a bit of a trawl on the 'net to discover that monochrome photography is not only alive and kicking, but is generally regarded as being the only serious form of photography

*** http://www.charlescramer.com/dyetransfer.html Hard. Damn hard!

**** About a photographic archive and starring Timothy Spall, it is one of the best dramas ever made by the BBC http://hmv.com/hmvweb/simpleMultiSearch.do?searchUID=&pGroupID=0&adultFlag=false&simpleSearchString=shooting+the+past&primaryID=0

Granny Takes A Trip

Greetings me old soaks.

There's a slow moving shower with your name on it and it is heading your way. At least that's what it seems like.

This week your Cap'n is in reflective mood. Were times better in days of yore? Is the advancement of society better or worse now? Are we heading to the edge, or will we keep on sailing to some nice sunset?

I don't know. All I do know is me bones are weary and the Goode Shippe FB needs work done, so we're going to lash up in port, get the jobs done, and then put up our umbrellas and go and sit on the Poop Deck, talking Poop and drinking same and getting same.
Also, me old Mog is in the final twelve cats for the 100 metre Kattomeat Dash, so good luck to him.
We also have to recharge our supplies.
Oh and our erstwhile gentleman passenger, Mr.Sheephouse, needs to make some photographs, so we need to accomodate his needs too.

Stay dry Poopsters.

***

Back in my old Virgin Records days, my manager had a nickname for me: "Granny".
In a weird happenstance I can now apply that nickname to a new acquisition and allude to an altogether more innocent time when you could name boutiques after strange things and get away with it . . . hence the title of today's FB.
My best friend Steve, mistakenly told me a while ago that he had picked up an old Olympus Trip 35 at a car boot sale for a couple of quid. Nothing remarkable in that you might think. But little did he know how I was going to badger him to death about whether he wanted it nearly every week for years! He has been digital for a very long time, so I didn't think he'd be using it, save as a weapon to cudgle me with.
It was an exciting prospect.

He eventually caved in and is still there, at home, curled foetal style in the corner, clutching his head and muttering "lens cap" . . . whilst the Trip is in my pocket.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Olympus Trip 35 (to give it its proper nom de plume) I ask you to cast your mind back to the late 1970's/early 1980's and a TV advert with the tag line 'Who do you think you are? David Bailey?'

The ad showed Bailey upstaging a 'professional' at a wedding, using nothing more than the lowly Trip. I say lowly, but actually the RRP for these small mechanical marvels in 1980 was £55.95, though they commonly sold for £49.99 which, as they say, was not an insignificant amount of money at the time.
In inflation terms, now that is about £225.

 The extremely handsome Mr.David  Bailey in action.
He looks like he should be in a foreign film as an investigative journalist.

To get some idea of relative costs, my first 35mm SLR bought in 1980 was an Olympus OM10 for which I paid the grand sum of £115 from Comet, and that included a flash unit and an ever ready case. So, whilst just half the price of the OM, the Trip was still a decent amount of money.
The Olympus Optical Company must have had an enormous faith and profit margin in the Trip. 10,000,000 were sold over its 17 year lifetime from its introduction in 1967, which in itself is a pretty remarkable thing.

My apologies to 'All Rights Reserved' on Flickr. Yes I have used your scan and yes I have tidied it up - sorry.
This is a Trip ad circa 1980.

With this little round-up, I am not going to go into all the usual doo-dads everyone does when writing about Trips, I will however try and give you an honest and slightly weird new users impression.
First off, it is small, but chunky. It has the heft of an object filled with bits of metal (which it is). It is a wonder of ingenuity, in that it is utterly simple.
You have a dial for setting apertures when using flash, and on the same dial a nice red A. This signifies Automatic mode and is its usual mode of employment.
In front of this is your four stage focus dial, and in front of that an ASA dial for setting your film speed.
The Trip uses Zone Focusing, a concept which meant that even if you were an idiot (unless you were a total one) setting the little focus ring to either One Head, Two Heads, Three People or A Mountain, meant that you could produce an acceptable photograph. Basically it extends the lens for close focus and moves it back towards the body for infinity. The zones encompass bands of distance and if set properly, everything within those bands should be sharp. The bands are narrower the closer the focus. The automatic nature of the aperture takes care of depth of field, but this can vary quite wildly, so my tip later on about using faster film is all the more appropriate.
Operation is easy, set the zone of focus and click. You will obtain an acceptable result. When I say acceptable, they're actually more than that - they are rather super actually.

The simplicity belies the truth - the 40mm Zuiko lens (a Tessar design) is really good, and whilst it won't produce results that are the same as an SLR lens, I would say it comes as close as a gnat's whisker.

Millions and millions of 'snaps' must have been taken with this little marvel, and yet, despite their current cult status, they are overlooked and old fashioned.

Why use something where the shutter is virtually instantaneous when you can use a more modern camera with that oh so prevalent shutter lag?

Why use something where you have to use a little of that addled lump of offal and electricity between your ears when a device can do it all for you and take away the worry of not getting it right?

Why rely on a beautifully simple fixed lens and your ability to move around and interact with the action, when you can get a modern compact with a reasonably noisy zoom and stand well back.

I can add a lot more things (on film cameras) like noisy motors instead of a simple thumb-wheel, and a crank for rewinding; then there's the dreaded digital pregnant pause where your memory is being stuffed with the image, and all that buffering is going on, shunting and puffing . . .
But I think what I am trying to ask, is who in the world of camera manufacturers decided that us happy snappers wanted a battery eating device which did absolutely everything for us?

To illustrate this go and fetch your compact camera.

I assume it will be a digital one . . if it isn't, well done, take your seat on the other side of the lifeboat and we can compare notes later on.

Now, switch your camera on and listen. There's the whirr as the lens extends.

Point your camera at anything and press the shutter release.

This is where FB gets a tad weird because:

I a . . m . . . .g . . .o . . . i. . . . n . . . . .g . . . . .t . . . . .o . . . . . s . . . . .l . . . . . o . . . . .w . . . . . y . . . . . o . . . . . . u . . . . . . r . . . . . .e . . . . . a . . . . . r . . . . . s . . . . . .d . . . . . . o . . .  . . . . w. . . . . . . n . . . . . .

Your finger has depressed the shutter release button and the gnome crushed by the electrical contact inside has sent a nano-llama cantering off into the depths of the camera. The nano-llama has a bit of paper pinned to it with a message on it. Inside your modern compact camera there's a tiny shrew's brain squashed and laid out on a tiny chip which makes all the decisions. The llama canters up, the shrew gets the message that the shutter has been released and sends more nano-llamas out to the nether regions of the camera with a series of questionaires. These have little check boxes which cover the permutations of light and distance and so on. The nano-gnomes manning the observation stations quickly check the boxes and send the nano-llamas back on their way. They arrive with a thunder of skidding hooves back at the shrew's nest where the shrew reads the boxes and makes a decision and sends more nano-llamas out with the appropriate instructions. The nano-gnomes crank the various cranks and a picture is taken.

Now why shrews you ask?

Well for a start their brains are tiny. Secondly, they might not be totally dim but they are a bit, however their brains are incredibly quick operating and they can pull together a lot of stimuli sharpish .  . you know . .

Earthworm or Beetle?

Snake or Hawk?

Kill or Run?

You might also be asking why llamas?

Well they are sure-footed on unsteady ground and entirely trustworthy.

Why Gnomes?

Well Gnomes are intelligent and cunning, but generally do as they are told.

N . . . o . . . w . . . w . . e . . . a . . . r . . . e . . . c . . .o. . . m . . .i . .n . . g. . b . .a . .c . .k .u . p . t . o . f .u .l l speed.

Listening carefully, what you heard was the sound of your autofocus hunting around a bit for something to focus on - generally the areas in the centre of the picture or even a face with that modern miracle, facial recognition * and then the sound of the shutter working.

You now know how this part of your camera works.

It is fortunate for your sanity that I haven't gone on about the engravers, and the good loaves of bread delivered by the battery bread van.

The Trip is different to your modern camera: a simple light gathering cell around the lens gathers light, generates an electrical current and operates a simple meter. A needle in the meter moves, and as you press the shutter button a series of cams move up on two pivoted arms to clamp the needle, and, depending on how far the needle has deflected, decide how much light is coming in by mechanical means. The shutter and aperture then react accordingly.
If there isn't enough light, or you have left the lens cap on then the shutter locks and red flag appears in the viewfinder telling you that you cannot take a picture.

If you think about it, it is an ingenious straight line road, whereas a 'modern' camera is actually a circuitous route.

The Trip is also fixable by unskilled hands (namely mine) whereas cameras relying on battery power are a lot harder to sort out.

It is also one of the few cameras that would be capapable of taking post-EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) photographs, in that there is nothing silicone-based to get fried.

But this is moving away (as usual) from the main meat and potatoes.

These days in Britain, using a camera in a crowd is often fraught with difficulty.
To any Police Officer or bystander you are a criminal scoping the place, or someone wishing to harm children, or a terrorist.
It's utterly ridiculous if you think about it, but entirely indicative of the suspicious and unwelcoming society we have become . .
I blame Cracker and Prime Suspect and all these TV criminal shows where your neighbour could be about to come around your house in the dead of night and remove your giblets through your nose whilst singing a Spice Girls song . .

And that's me getting away from the point again.

Please take the following with a pinch of salt - If you were interested in any of those dubious activities I would say that the Trip is almost the perfect camera for it, because it is small and light, and so totally simple. Granted you would have to get the film developed and you might be shopped by Boots or Jessops, but on the whole if you want a covert camera and can develop your own film, this is the camera for you.
The camera's beauty relies on a thing which is often ignored in film terms - that is the film's latitude, which in layman's terms is its forgiveness. Any negative film be it colour or black and white has a certain amount of error compensation built into it - this is so that it can deal with varying light conditions. It also meant that when colour film started to be used more commonly, that picture you took of your Gran waving a rubber chicken in the air whilst she was backlit by the setting sun, wouldn't look like Leatherface, silhouetted and coming at you with a chainsaw. The films latitude was able to deal (in part) with such wildly varying light conditions. Obviously it wasn't the panacea, but it helped and with an Olympus Trip 35, if there really isn't enough  light for the film to deal with, the camera will actually stop you wasting a frame. That is not always what you want, but seeing as the Trip only has 2 shutter speeds, it was a nifty bit of design to avoid disappointment.


Phew - this black with grey print is a bit relentless isn't it . . so here's some Daisies to break up your reading and give you a breather and let your eyes have a rest.

Feeling better?
Right, on with the march!

There are two ways around this though. The first is deceptively simple. Load fast film. Up to 400 ASA is fine on the Trip - it is calibrated to deal with that.

I tested mine with Rollei RPX 100 but it would have been better with something like Ilford Delta 400 or Kodak Tri-X. Basically anything of greater speed with a wide latitude to it. If you do decide on those two, then set the metering part of the camera to ASA 320. This way you will have enough balls in your shadow areas and if you use a compensating developer you won't over-do your highlights - pretty simple really.

The second is a cunning trick as deceptive as it is simple. If your Trip's shutter won't release and you get the red flag because it thinks there isn't enough light, point the camera at a brighter light source, depress the shutter halfway, keep holding it down and now get back to your dimly lit subject and make the photograph. Granted it might well be underexposed, but if you are using something like Dilution G HC110, the developer will ensure that whatever might be in the shadow detail is rendered. yes you'll have a thin negative but at least you will have one.

The above is a full-frame photograph made with Trip on the hoof whilst in St Andrews on a dreich and overcast day. The film was Rollei RPX 100 so not the world's fastest, however, as such it shows the extraordinary capability of the Trips simple design. There is shadow detail, there is a broad range of greys, there are good highlights. Pretty much everything I wanted to be in focus is, AND, I was able to take the picture sereptitiously - I doubt anyone was any the wiser for me taking this snap. You can actually see me to the right of the frame reflected in the window. There is an extraordinary amount of detail when you consider it was probably shot at about 1/40th of a second and probably around f5.6 and was shot quickly, so I wasn't being careful.

I was standing around minding my own business when a swarm of Italian youth exchange students came and stood in front of me. I thought Sod It and took a picture on the hoof again. Yes, there's camera shake and the composition is nil, however I was literally about 3 feet from the cool guy with the glasses, so that shows you how unobtrusive the Trip can be, although to be fair he spotted me!
It was a revelation to use it this way. Life-changing? No, but nearly, as, in the Trip, I have found something which leaves me totally free to break my normal photographic bounds and jump into the midst of the action without being obtrusive.
Of course Leica users have known this for years, but personally I have found it to be a revelation.

The Trip is SO simple that I defy anyone not to have fun with it.

If you are an SLR user then you are going to find the instantaneous quiet snick of the shutter a surprise.

If you are a confirmed digital camera user and have never used as simple a camera as this then you are going to be astonished at the feeling of being free from menus and lag and unnecessary fluff.

Forget buying yourself a nice suit and a set of cuban heels in Granny Takes A Trip. There's no need - this is naked photography at its most basic.
Everyone should try it - it is a very surprising and enjoyable experience.

Dear Steve - thanks mate for the wonderful gift.
And for the rest of you, stay warm, stay dry, God bless and thanks for reading.

* Fortunately Peter Gabriel back in 1970's Genesis days was never photographed with facial recognition software, because he would have confused it . . Face? Flower? Flower? Face?

P67 - The (Model) Number Of The Beast . . . (Unless You Count C330F Too)

Morning m'Dearios. 

This week your Cap'n has been reading about the terrible tale of the Somerset Nog. A horse (half Suffolk Punch/half Dachshund . . well, it gets very foggy on the moors) so long and overburdened that it snaps in two and founders along with its cargo of day-trippers in Ganderpoke Bog. They do say though, that if 'ee passes Ganderpoke Bog at midnight, you's can still hear the two ghostly halves of the Nog singing a lament.
It fairly wrings your withers to read about it. 

So let that be a lesson to you all:

Don't overburden your Nog.

***

My apologies to you all in advance, but this weeks FB is pure photography all the way, so hold onto your hats, tighten your belt and make sure you've got a pair of flat shoes on . . .

It will bore you to hell unless you like talking about cameras. Normal, less techie, service will be resumed next week.

When I started taking photographs seriously again, after a hiatus of about 15 years, I resumed using what I thought would give me the best quality (as our American friends would call it) bang for buck. 

I eschewed restarting with 35mm because I had used it fairly extensively at college and wasn't really wanting to go along that path again. 

At college, I had actually had the most photographic enjoyment at the time using The Beast - a Mamiya C330F. This is a camera so heavy it requires a team of sherpas to move it about. I think back in the '80's a large number of them were seen in use by the members of the Russian weight lifting squad at the 1988 Seoul Olympics . . . .

Sherpa Ten-dzen transports a Mamiya C330F to secret Russian training camp circa 1987

Honest, it feels like it weighs about 20 gravities, but it produces very nice quality photographs, and is actually about the cheapest way you can get into interchangeable lens medium format photography without selling your kidneys.

Having fond but painful memories of the Mamiya though made me search in another direction, namely Germany and the Rolleiflex. They were light and beautiful and the camera of choice for lots of well-known photographers. I couldn't afford a 3.5 or 2.8 F model with their exceptional Planar and Xenotar lenses, so I opted instead for a Rolleiflex T.

It wasn't cheap, but neither was it a fortune. What it was however was a stunning piece of 1960's engineering with a range of accessories that worked and fitted beautifully. In other words it was the bees knees.

I have spent many long hours wandering near and far with my Rollei and despite a few teething problems to start (film transport going funny) it has served me well (and still does actually). They are a very adaptable camera - portraits, landscape, pretty much anything you can think of a use for a camera for, and with a bit of free thinking, you can get there. 

However, as time went on I started looking seriously at the likes of Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams and wondered whether upgrading to a larger format would make some of their vision rub off on me (it didn't by the way). So after much thought, I decided I was very hungry and needed a bigger doughnut.

Enter The Beast # 2. 

I saved up all my pocket money (and Christmas money too) and bought a trip into larger format heaven - a Pentax 6x7.

This camera looks and handles like the fat boy brother of the largest 35mm camera ever made (a Nikon F2s?).

Smuggled prototype photograph from Pentax HQ, showing proposed sizing of the original Pentax 6x7 (with new Mk II lens range) in proportion to average human being size. You can clearly see a plan for world domination here.

The Pentax is solid and heavy, has the loudest mirror slap you have ever heard and the shutter flings itself across with such violence it will actually torque the camera even though it is secured to a tripod. In your hands it can kick like a .22 air pistol. 

It was widely used by fashion photographers (Mario Testino and Bruce Weber are two who come to mind) namely and for that if you are using fast film, or flash, but definitely in the higher range of shutter speeds, I can see it working, but for quieter landscapes it is quite a proposition. The incredible thing is though, that for many it is the landscape camera of choice . . or was, in those heady days of using film. 

Personally, I found it difficult and I had to adopt a totally mad method of taking photographs with it.

Apologies if you love and use your P67, the following might tickle your funny bone . . . 

Note: if you are using the Pentax for anything other than hand-holding it at about 1/125th with the lens stopped down a couple of stops, then try this method of using it on a tripod . . it works. 

So here we go - Rogers' Pentax 6x7 Tips.

Rogers' Pentax 6x7 Tip Part 1: Firstly you fix it to your tripod like you are expecting rough weather and phone 999 (or 911).

Rogers' Pentax 6x7 Tip Part 2: Compose your photograph - I recommend the waist level finder actually, because you do not get the full frame when you look through the prism finder. Make sure all emergency services have arrived and are ready and on standby.

Rogers' Pentax 6x7 Tip Part 3: When you are happy, zip up your flash suit, make sure you are in eyeball contact with emergency coordinators and then LOCK THE MIRROR UP AND SET THE SHUTTER TO B. If you do not do this then you will not get a sharp photograph.

Rogers' Pentax 6x7 Tip Part 4: Use your lens cap the way they used to be used - in other words keep it in front of the lens. You can actually use your hand too.

Rogers' Pentax 6x7 Tip Part 5: Hang on to something immovable and release the shutter. This is difficult to do - I found a bicycle chain around my ankle and then secured around a bollard or tree quite good. A cable release is essential, however I have used a pencil. Ear defenders are recommended. The shutter noise will scare birds and small children so sand-bagging the camera can work too. Don't worry though - the emergency crews should be in place to deal with any mishaps.

Rogers' Pentax 6x7 Tip Part 6: Remove your lens cap, but still keep it tightly in place until you are sure there is no movement or vibration from the camera. Very gently move the cap out of the way for your timed exposure. Count off your exposure. Place lens cap back in front of lens tightly and quickly. Release cable release to close shutter and unlock mirror.

Denouement: There you have made a nice photograph with the Pentax.

Kindly ask emergency teams to stand down, but remain in field radio contact with them as you have another 9 frames to use up.

I simply had to adopt this method because it was easier than that well known P67 tip of forcing all your weight down on top of the camera whilst it is tripoded to stop the torque ruining the photographs. I had had to do this a number of times until I came up with the method above believe it or not. It didn't half get some funny looks!

Unfortunately for me, because of my financially necessary photographic bottom feeding, the Pentax I had bought had probably been done to death by its previous owner(s).

It's reliance on batteries was also a pain and proved to be part of its downfall in my eyes. At about -4C, and a number of miles away from anywhere, it just refused to work. I was livid. It is no joke removing a small battery with freezing fingers and shoving it into your pants and clasping it tight in the crease where lower groin meets leg to get a little life back into it. This does work very well by the way, but I wouldn't recommend it if you are photographing in a city . . .

After that trip into the depths of a Scottish late Winter/early Spring I had a wonderful time with a few films being exposed correctly with a perfect frame count all the way through (10 frames on 120 film) and then it started misbehaving again: missing frames and locking completely, resulting in a blue darkroom fog of unloading the partially wound film, respooling it and starting again (!)

Enough was enough and I returned it to the vendor for a refund - they were good enough to do so after my 6 months of using it. I often wonder what happened to it. Knowing the secondhand market, it is probably still around with the problems of the transport still unresolved. 

Old and knackered cameras rarely die, they just keep getting shipped around the country.

For all that I seem to be criticizing the Pentax, I actually think that the problems of the early 6x7's were partially resolved in the later rebuilds - namely the Pentax 67 (see what they did there) and the Pentax 67II.

The superb photographer Steve Mulligan regularly uses a brace of P67II's for aerial photography and I simply don't see how they could have sold so many if they were rubbish.

There is a small whining voice inside me that says, I would love to own one again, simply for their sheer heft and the quality of the lenses. This being said, the lens I had (and could afford) was an early 75mm f4.5 Super-Multicoated-Takumar, and I thought it was a tad soft (there seems to be a concensus of opinion that it is one of the sharpest in the range, so maybe I had a not so good example). 

If I were to go for one again, it would be as late a model as possible with either the 90mm or 105mm lens and the 55mm wide angle. But then again, I would still face the same problem of not being able to see 100% of what I am photographing - a point which annoys the hell out of me.

My notes from when I returned the Pentax read as follows:

Basically no matter how good looking and likeable the Pentax 67 system is (and it is) - never get another one!!

The flaw of the system is the shutter (which is ridiculously loud and heavy in action *

If you want a 6x7 go for a RB67 or Fuji or something but not Pentax.

* The camera will torque no matter how much effort you put into restraining it. Only the lens cap/mirror up method works, but then we were let down by the lens.

The madness of bigger doughnuts did sort of resolve itself from this. The money I got back from the Pentax and lens and all the doo-dads I'd bought for it - strap, UV filter, waist-level finder, plus a trade-in of a nice little Petri rangefinder, enabled me to take a giant step forward.

I got the Supersized lunchtime special doughnut; a camera so large and bulky and yet so wonderful that I still own it. A Sinar F.

It is so much a character of his own, that he will have his own dedicated FB sometime soon.

But back to the Pentax, why does that niggling voice keep going? 

Why would I want to get another one when the original proved to be so unreliable and challenging to use? 

I think it could well be, that I like the idea (but maybe not the practicality) of having one again. Yes it was difficult to use. Yes it wasn't a ready companion miles away from anywhere, and yet, it was a character all of its own. A camera that you had to deal with on its own terms and not your own. A struggle to use, and yet a pleasure too. I hope he is still around out there, giving some bargain hunter pleasure and not pain!

The photograph below was made with the Pentax, at a place called Mossburn Ford in the Scottish Borders. The path Alec Turnips and myself were on passed through someone's garden, before meandering away and up a hillside. In the garden were some overgrown sheds with this incredible collection.

The photograph was made on Ilford FP4 at EI 64. I metered it with my Gossen Lunasix S meter (a totally wonderful light meter) placing the top left corner on Zone V. Exposure was 2 seconds at f16.

It was developed as per Barry Thornton's instructions - basically Ilford Perceptol at 1:3 and 20C, for 14 and a half minutes.

The scan does very little justice to the print, which somehow manages to 'breath' in the greys with a luminosity that is always very difficult to get a hold on.

I call it 'Grandfather's Chair', because of that old candlewick bedspread draped over the chair. 

It looks to me like a figure is sitting there - possibly the ghost of someone's Grandfather, still clinging to the unloved remnant of his favourite chair. 

Allied with the movement from the weeping Willow, and I think an air of strangeness has been imparted to it.

Of all the photographs I have made, it is the only one I have framed and on the wall in my study.

(Ab)normal service will be resumed next week.

God bless and thanks for reading.

Stay Gonk

Mornin' Varmints. 

Today yer good Cap'n be land-based for the weekend, holed up in port with nothing to do but twiddle me thumbs and whistle a happy tune. 

Can you feel it friends? 

The world is poised. 

Something huge is in the air and I can't put my finger on it. 

It is worrying. Like a hurricane coming in and not a breath in the sails. 

I don't like it at all. 

Even my stump has stopped itching . . . 

***

In much the same way that my generation seems to have destroyed the creative heart of a generation of human beings in letting them think that silicone-based gaming is a great way to spend days and weeks, so we have also created, photographically, a very dangerous precedent in the way that the camera phone has now become the primary way of making images.
Remember this is image capture, it is definitely not photography, and whilst profits might well be great for the lumbering technological behemoths, for the name of photography, things couldn't really be much worse.

As I have mentioned before, mankind is essentially (these days) lazy. The point-it-at-the-subject-and-press-a-button generation haven't the slightest clue about what they have just done:

"Ha ha ha ha, that's funny" 

as one youth said to another as a smart phone was passed around, smudging the screen with his greasy fingers..

It is a slice of time, but it definitely is not a photograph and has nothing to do with photography.
Even compared with digital camera capture it isn't a photograph.
A camera (yeah even a digital one, hardened FB readers take note) is a specific device. It used to be (when people weren't mad) designed for making something of permanence whether you realised it or not.

There was a massive difference between a Kodak Instamatic and a Leica, but they both did the same thing.

Both could be crass.

Both could be beautiful.

But both told the truth, for despite the possibility that someone somewhere might have done some very creative darkroom work, at the end of the day in that cylindrical, light-tight cassette, there was an end product that couldn't really lie: the negative.

I think the root of my problem with all digital capture is that I don't trust 01010101000010101 (Binary Storage) and yet here I am out-putting my heart to the world in the self-same manner.

Am I a hypocrite?

Well it certainly looks that way.

But the thing with the humble negative, is that you can hold it; you can store it in nice little archival sleeves; you can shove it in a plastic bag along with your holiday photos; you can scratch it; drop tea on it; sneeze on it; fingerprint it. In fact you can make a total mess of it, and, short of setting fire to it, something will still be there.

My friend spends a great deal of his time making images of truly ancient artefacts in appropriate settings. They really work, because somehow, and I don't know how he does it, he manages to coax the dormant soul from these objects, however, he finds himself often in the multiple back-up position because they are all digital images.

It is like in the Young Ones when Neil started talking about emptying his pencil case in an exam hall:

"I sat in the big hall and put my packet of Polos on the desk. And my spare pencil and my support Gonk. And my chewing gum and my extra pen. And my extra Polos and my lucky Gonk. And my pencil sharpener shaped like a cream cracker. And three more Gonks with a packet of Polos each. And lead for my retractable pencil. And my retractable pencil. And spare lead for my retractable pencil. And chewing gum and pencils and pens and more Gonks, and then the guy said “Stop writing, please.”"

So my friend has hard-drive backup, a lucky backup hard-drive and writes to discs too, as well as storing on memory cards.

It is overkill, and I call that a bit of a nightmare, but it makes him feel secure so that is what counts.

Actually before we move on, I must have a little aside into the world of Gonks!

There is strangely precious little material about these wonderful creatures out there.

The designs I remember my sister having back in the 60's are nowehere to be seen.

'Proper' 1960's Beat Gonks seem to have been lumped in with 1970's and 1980's fairground prizes, which were not Gonks!

I will be categorical on this. 1960's Gonks were hip and often round, had hands, wore smart 'clothing' and often had mop-top haircuts. In a word they were so Sixities, that they couldn't have existed at any other time.

1970's and 80's fairground prizes were often just fluffy objects with rattly eyes or beaks or both. They tended also to be furry, which no 1960's Gonk would be seen dead as.

I remember one in particular that I won at a fair in the early 70's that actually seemed to be made of cat fur. Whatever it was it certainly wasn't synthetic.

(Quite posh Gonks [Gonkus groovitimus]  and a description of what it is to be 'Gonk')

They were really quite the thing at one point. There were a couple of albums and also a film.
I think they were originally designed as a fun accessory for Swinging London and ended up going nationwide.
The film 'Gonks Go Beat' was a reworking of Romeo and Juliet and featured The Graham Bond Organization, The Nashville Teens, Lulu and the Luvvers, and The Trolls (?). It is noteworthy for the fact that it features Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce (later of Cream) and features two things that I find amusing - firstly a statement addressed to Jack Bruce after a groovy piece of playing:

"Next time I want to hear those big, big sounds that bring the coconuts down "

and Kenneth Connor standing next to sign that says:

BEATLAND - IF YOU'RE WITH IT, YOU'RE IN. 

Here's the not so groovy cover to the dvd release:

(The above is not the original design but a noughties cut-up. 1960's design wouldn't have been half so messy)

(That's more like it! Why would anyone feel the need to mess about with this?)

We're nearly coming to a point though folks, so bear with me, as, at this point in this painful interlude I have to say that 1960's Gonks need to be distinguished from a separate species, the Scottish Gonk (Gonkus hootisii) which started appearing roughly around 1970. These were definitely Scots, and never seemed to make the journey across the Border. Certainly for me they were a thing of remark during our holidays. 

They were basically tubes with arms and were often 'weaponised'. 

Mine had a spear, some had clubs. 

All had furry heads and tartan bonnets. There were millions of them every place we visited . . and now all I can find in a world-wide pantheon of information are just two pictures, of which I shall use just one . . .

(Gonkus hootisii [disarmed])

The above is a posh one and should be distinguished from the more common or garden variety which did not have legs. Actually, I would say this is a picture of a Proto-hootisii . It must be a very early one as the latter ones became cheapened, dispensed with legs altogether and just had the tube body all the way down. Please note, he is also missing his spear!

Alas the genus mutated beyond recognition and this is what the later species looked like.

(These are obviously convict Gonks. Banished to Australia they were later rescued and photographed in their sorry state. Apparently they date from the late 1970's and are of the sub-species Gonkus fairgroundicus.)

In researching all this though, worldwide there is precious little information on them. I checked for the latest version of the Gonkipedia but it didn't exist. 

They seem to have been one of those moments in time that has passed into legend . . . 

An Atlantis of the 20th Century? 

A Beat Sasquatch? 

The Big Grey Gonk of Ben Macdhui? 

Who knows . . . anyway  . . .

***

Phew.

There I feel better for that. 

But what has this to do with photography? 

Well, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

To coin a rather well known song:

They paved paradise 

And put up a parking lot 

With a pink hotel, a boutique 

And a swinging hot spot 

Don't it always seem to go 

That you don't know what you've got 

Till it's gone 

They paved paradise 

And put up a parking lot

They took all the trees 

Put 'em in a tree museum  

And they charged the people 

A dollar and a half just to see 'em 

Don't it always seem to go 

That you don't know what you've got 

Till it's gone 

They paved paradise 

And put up a parking lot

Hey farmer farmer 

Put away that DDT now 

Give me spots on my apples 

But leave me the birds and the bees 

Please! 

Don't it always seem to go 

That you don't know what you've got 

Till it's gone 

They paved paradise 

And put up a parking lot

Late last night

I heard the screen door slam

And a big yellow taxi

Took away my old man

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got

Till it's gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

© Siquomb Publishing Company 

I had no intention originally of including the whole song, but felt the words were entirely appropriate. Joni's concerns are nearly 50 years old, but their truth rings down the years.

And ever onward we go!

Why on earth would anyone earth want to make an image with one of these:

When they could use one of these instead:

Excuse me for shoving a Leica M3 in there, but it is such a beautiful thing to look at and by all accounts a beautiful thing to use too, though I have never held one. (I also rather like the IIIf which is more 1950's looking but still beautiful nontheless.)

My point is, that much like Gonks, cameras too have become homogenised. They have been turned from lovely square but round-edged Spangles, into the half sucked and spat out 'things' that used to mysteriously appear on pavements when I was young. 

We are in danger of lumbering ourselves with something which in design terms is non-specific, 'user friendly' (though that is a matter of much discourse) and in a word characterless.

I just hate how the world seems to do that. 

Beat Gonks become generic 70's furry animals. 

Genius pieces of mechanical and optical design become a tiny lens in a piece of metal and polycarbonate with 0's and 1's removing all the passion. 

Artisan bread becomes Warburtons and Kingsmill. 

A lovingly crafted pint of Yorkshire Bitter becomes a bottle of Bud. 

Pizza, the poor man's food made with flour and yeast and simple ingredients, becomes a cheese crust, multi-layered monstrosity baked on an Industrial scale. 

I could go on, but I won't. 

All I can say is that we, as photographers, are in serious danger of becoming last centuries thang. Professional cameras shoot in HD video. So do phones and the boundaries are becoming so blurred that what was a camera, is now a video camera and will probably soon be a phone too! And before you know it, it will be its own capture and processing lab, hard-wired to your eye and central nervous system, automatically snatching images of anything and fixing any mistakes to some pre-set criteria of preferences, so that the world looks perfect. 

Gone is any creative involvement other than just pressing that button or blinking that eye.

A one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth of a second slice of time, chosen and fixed with permanence within a piece of emulsion is fast becoming something so hopelessly antiquated that it will, before we know it, be cast upon history's scrapheap of useless and arcane knowledge.

Mark my words friends. 

It is coming.

AND FAST.

Pick your bogles while you can they don't stay fresh for long.

The above is as imperfect a photograph as you could ever wish to take. It is definitely not homogenised. It is a real piece of film that has been totally abused. I love it.

It was made on C41-process Colour film, which I developed in Black and White specific chemicals, namely HC 110, Dilution G, for 18 minutes at 21C. Apparently you're not supposed to do that. The film's nominal EI was 200, and I rated it at EI 100 simply for the fact of its age. It was Agfa Vista Colour 200, which expired in June 2005. The photograph was made last month, namely May 2012. The colour cast was very great when I removed the film from the fixer so I agitated it for about 15 minutes in a very weak solution of Potassium Ferricyanide bleach which sort of worked, I then re-fixed it. This explains why the grain structure is so soft.

It was made on a £5 charity shop special - a Nikon AF600 point and shoot. I used the Agfa film because it was there and I wanted to test whether the camera was functioning properly. It is.

Stay Gonk my friends (preferably Beat).