OK I’ve been known to shoot a little street photography. It’s the dance of total strangers among the light and dark corners of our city streets. People selling things, buying things, drinking coffee and captured (even stolen) moments of intimacy in the right place at the right time. The trick is to be open to luck and to embrace it when the opportunity knocks.

More often than not I’ll be coming home with my hand on my forehead thinking about the missed shot. The one that got away.

Portrait is a little more scary. I really don’t do portrait that well and keep telling myself this is the year that I’ll start putting in 20,000 hours of hard graft and grind to master the craft of photographic portraiture. It’s difficult because you have to cross the human relationship barrier and actually get involved with human beings – moving from observation to description and hopefully onto a ‘response’, stealing Ricky Maynard’s line.

Having good gear, good technique, understanding light and the exposure triangle will only get you so far with portraiture; you have to mesh with other human beings. You have to be likeable and to like other human beings. There is a whole skill-set in portrait photography that comes well before you pick up a camera.

But I put that out there… I’d love to be better at portrait photography. I’d love to have the Diane Arbus way with people where they would feel comfortable inviting me into their homes and including me in their human experiences.

I also radically culled my social circle some years ago so good old friends with deep relationships over decades are pretty much right out of the picture. When I meet old friends we’re pretty much all on that wavelength – we were never good for each other. Times have changed. We’re older and wiser and too tired to look for trouble. But hey, those people would be absolutely fascinating to pursue for portraits. If only we were still friends, which we’re not.

What I do enjoy and often shoot are still life photographs of surprisingly mundane objects. A few bowls. A pot. The fascinating way light can be bounced and manipulated across various surfaces and textures within a simple composition. It’s more challenging than most people think… and even more fun if it happens to be a piece of original three dimensional artwork that I can attempt to extend.

Still life is about control. Still life is about construction of an image with the limitation being you have to breathe life into the lifeless. Almost the opposite of dealing with human beings.

I guess what I really wish is that I were better with other human beings. I only seem to take good portraits when I’m that third wheel photographer at somebody else’s event. Still observational. Only slightly connected. But I admire people with those human qualities. I really admire them.

That’s my five minutes of introspective reflection for the day on the subject of photography. One of the many ways I could improve.

My older sister scanned this negative using a simple piece of white paper and a lamp instead of a scanner so it’s not that high in quality. However, it’s a classic nortypig portrait taken by my paternal grandmother on (maybe) my 8th birthday… making it (probably) May 1972. Classic double six-guns. My grandmother was a direct descendant of the Watsons of Rockingham Castle, Northamptonshire. As reverends they were first settlers close to where I grew up.

My Norwegian grandfather was a photographer born in 1870 and he jumped ship in Australia at 19 years of age. He was a photojournalist and portrait photographer and my particular interest is in a set of 100 glass negatives and his wooden large format camera found by a local farmer in a King Island barn several decades ago. Knowing the gem he had in his possession, being an avid photographer, the farmer donated the items to the King Island Museum where several negatives and the camera are on permanent display. Several years later, they were exhibited for a fortnight at the Launceston Museum.

The glass negatives were taken on King Island from 1900 to 1910 and are significant because the island was only opened for farming in 1880 so Kittles’ captured many historic moments (including the first car on the island).

So this is how I see the project at this point. Imagine an ball of hemp twine unwound across space and time. My grandfather holds one end and I the other. My objective is to wind that ball back upon itself over and over in successive layers. Because it’s just too easy for me to look at Kittles’ photographs and imagine that I understand their context… the meaning of photographs changes as culture and society change around them. I need to understand what it meant for Kittles and why he did what he did.

The funding issue aside (and that I will need to visit King Island over the next few years several times) it seems like the place to start is right here with me. My life and context in 2012 is as relevant to the photographic journey as discovering Kittles’ context a century ago.

To that end I have slowly begun exploring several avenues. The first is self-portraiture and I will expand this year into general portraiture. The second, and I have to confess to being less than prolific, is the introduction of analogue film photography (or slow photography) with a Zenza Bronica ETRS medium format camera. I’m too poor for a Hasselblad but if anybody wants to donate one to a project feel free to contact me.

Even better would be a large format camera and dark room equipment. And funding.

I should also acknowledge that Brett Drinkwater at Tashosting provides web hosting services on the King Island Project website for free. The white-site design and building was done by me.

Upskilling from Digital into Film Photography

This is my first foray into shooting film photography and I’ve been trying to upskill myself during Linden’s month-long absence. She’s shot and processed her 35mm black and white photographs but I’m really a digital guy. In 2008 I stepped-up from borrowing her Canon point-and-shoot to a Nikon D90 with a 50mm prime lens (the zoom gets no use from me anymore). However, I’m finding that digital lacks some soul and in certain respects film can be a far superior and more satisfying medium. Don’t underestimate the power of a medium format camera… it’s got some serious kick butt punch for detail with a frame size of 42.5mm x 55.1mm.

So far I’ve spent time learning about my film camera and loaded my first medium format film (through the education of a YouTube video using the same camera). My next step is to learn how to process my film negatives at home so it all becomes a part of my new film photography process to shoot the film, process the negatives and scan them into the computer (retaining the original negatives in an archive sleeve). This process seems far more sane than shooting hundreds of images on a modern DSLR and then being locked into days of post-processing and wading through the archival nightmare of my personal computer. This process also introduces a time and money cost to each photograph as opposed to the ‘free imaging’ available with a fully featured DSLR. The simple truth is that nowdays almost anybody can make pretty pictures… and I’m looking to make something with a little more heart and intrinsic value.

Migrating to ‘Slow Photography’

Just like I’ve migrated from fast booze at the bottle shop over to slow booze that I ferment in my office… I’m migrating, at least some of my attention, away from fast photography toward what I’d like to call ‘slow photography’. The making of select images by hand as a time-honoured craft. The craft of my maternal grandfather, Kittles Johannes Tronerud. A big part of my acquisition of a medium format camera is the project relating to Kittle’s 1900-1910 glass negatives housed in the King Island Museum.

I want film photography to make me think and to push my boundaries. I want film photography to push my emotional buttons and connect me back into an earlier experience. I want it to enthuse me with the magic of cameras and subjects rather than the overawing powers of modern computer chips.

Processing B&W Film in a Developing Tank

Processing my first black and white film feels a little daunting. To that end I’ve been watching a series of Ted Forbes videos about processing film in a developing tank. This morning I purchased a second-hand Paterson Universal developing tank… it’s a round container with an adjustable spool to feed either a 35mm or a 120 roll film onto before it gets sealed light-and-air-tight when the lid goes on. The spool loading is achieved in the dark by feel (after I perform a few training runs in the light with a dud film) inside a 27″ x 30″ darkroom changing bag. The sealed developing tank can then be safely removed from the bag and the appropriate liquids can be poured in and then removed at appropriate times – the developer, the stop bath, the fixer and finally a few drops of wetting agent.

The chemicals I purchased include:

• Ilford Ilfotec LC29 developer – 500ml dilutes to 10 litres at $40
• Ilford Ilfostop stop bath – 500ml dilutes to 10 litres at $20
• Ilford Hypam fixer – 5 litres dilutes to 25 litres at $50
• Ilford Ilfotol wetting agent – 1 litre (lifetime supply) at $31

The next step will be to hang those 15 negatives on clips to dry and then slice them up in sets of four to be scanned and archived.

The Art of Photography Videos

The Ted Forbes ‘Art of Photography’ videos are a world of help and I think the one true contribution of the web to photography isn’t Flickr or social networking… I think it’s the ability for photographers to expand their craft through high quality video and tutorial content (but that’s just my opinion, I guess):

• Episode 20: Film Part 1 – Holga
• Episode 21: Film Part 2 – Darkroom chemicals
• Episode 22: Getting your film into the developing tank
• Episode 23: Developing film
• Episode 24: Scanning negatives

From Here on in it’s all an Adventure

So this leaves me still with a few things to pick up in the next week or two including a stop clock, three pyrex measuring jugs, a small eyewash pump and an oven thermometer. Unfortunately, with funds almost dried up for the month, I’ll have to put on hold that purchase of an Epson Perfection V330 Photo Scanner ($229). We’ll just have to see how the world slides… maybe somebody will employ me… maybe not. I sure need the money right now.

So there is my latest adventure… expanding my boundaries… pushing myself into new skills and taking a few risks. Hopefully shooting and developing my own medium format film will contribute in my evolution to becoming a better photographer. Tomorrow… well all that’s left for tomorrow is to take the Bronica out into the sunshine to shoot some frames. Awesome.

Black Dodge is just a really nice old car that’s parked every day outside the Tasmanian School of Art. An iconic piece of industrial design circa yesteryear, particularly the grill and front bumper bar. When cars were designed for style and made out of steel. I’ve got the Black Dodge on my own desktop right now.

L’Astrolabe Research is another industrial design photograph of the scientific research vessel named L’Astrolabe which travels between Hobart, Tasmania and the Antarctic. This shot is capturing the industrial nature of the machine as opposed to the romance of the sea. Man’s mechanistic beast for conquering the elements. Garish, yes. Unforgiving perhaps. But there is beauty in rough textures of the ocean battered research vessel.

I’ve also uploaded a 1024 x 768 version of each for those who don’t run higher resolutions. Black Dodge calendar at 1024 x 768 and Black Dodge no calendar at 1024 x 768. And L’Astrolabe Research calendar at 1024 x 768 and L’Astrolabe Research no calendar at 1024 x 768.

The wallpapers will be available here until the end of the month.

She’s been a prolific blogger on the local art scene since 2004 with her weblog Translucent. She is also a web standards web designer (who gets the big web standards picture) with Certificate 4 qualifications to back that skillset up in Web Design, as well as Multimedia. She is also one of the founding members of local NPO Hunter Island Press Inc where she has been the web mistress for the last three years and writes and manages a great deal of the content generation. She’s also one of the busiest people I’ve ever met in person with an interesting personal and family history (if you ask her). She found me under a cauliflower (OK that’s a fib) and we’ve been in a solid relationship for nearly 8 years.

This week Linden has been interviewed by Steve Gray over at Art Re-Source so you might learn a bit more about what she gets up to (especially when I’m out of the house).

And it’s my mother’s birthday today so I wish them both well. We won’t go into the banana story… suffice it to say the smacking of bottoms proliferated but I think I won through determined resistance.