_valerian

More “scans” from the weekend. Putting stuff here and then coming across it online between the time of posting and the next darkroom session helps with the decision of what to print since it gives me time to get used to the pictures in a round-a-bout sort of way. (how’s that for a single sentence.)
Working out in the streets in winter doesn’t make for very interesting images when how everyone is bundled up in jackets and masks.

I’m fairly certain that only the first of these will end up as a standard 11×14 print.

Caught up on some workprints last week. The dynamism around the crowded areas during New Years is incredible and hopefully some of that made the transition to the photographs. It’s easy to get up in faces when there is no more than a foot between you and everyone else. Plus everyone you see is in a good mood and half of those people have cameras around their necks anyway.

Over a year ago I bought a roll of near expired Kodak 3200 film from the bargain bin at Bic Camera in Kashiwa- and it spent the next several months on a shelf in my fridge. It was a concern that a 3200 style of grain wasn’t going to visually match the rest of my work when printed large that it got passed over but on a whim in October I ran it through a loaner M4 on a block of Omotesando.

Sample Image (Pic? Capture? Photo?)

This photo is a nearly textbook example of a boring and predictable Tokyo Street Photo. It has all the following hip and edgy elements:

1. Shot on Black and White Film.
2. Lot’s O’ Contrast (well, somewhat. The film was actually pretty grey for me)
3. Shot on a crosswalk (complete with a Left Shoulder and Back of Someone’s head in the right side of the frame)
4. Shot on a crosswalk within the Shibuya/Harajuku/Shinjuku/Ginza districts
5. Features a beautiful woman.
6. Features a LOL WTF TOKYO IS SOoooo RANDOM!!!!!1 element. (her tiara)
7. Features Large Billboard People* (albeit far in the background)
8. It most certainly LACKS a pretentious eye-rollingly embarrassing and corny title. Let’s try making up one though. How about: “And thus you saved me as the millions passed” or “As love flows in the stone city of broken dreams” or my favorite: “blah blah blah some stuff like Creed or Nickelback or a sophomore in a high school creative writing class would write blah blah.”
9. I am tired of taking these!

It’s far from being an interesting picture but it does have some grain which 3200 film is more than happy to provide. I scanned a small 5×7 print at 800dpi and the following is what a section of the photo printed on Ilford 5×7 postcard paper scanned at 800dpi on a cheap Canon flatbed scanner and “auto toned” in photoshop looks like on your monitor.

It’s hard to see in these samples, but the grain is certainly worth the price of admission if this is what you are after.

Sample Image 2

The same afternoon a few blocks over I wound up walking past the guy who should have won the 2009 One Wall grand prix, Koji Sato. (the lady who should have won was Yuki Watanabe.)

Saito leaving for a location shoot from his office in Shibuya and this was our second chance meeting in a month. The first was during the intermission of the One Wall grand prix knockdown artist talk evening in Ginza. Let me digress: Saito and I have a mutual friend from Senshu University back in 2001 or 2002 so actually we had met at least once before. If it weren’t for his incredible memory (or my height & facial structure since I am not a “looker”) I would have gone home from that evening talk event simply uneasy with a gnawing sense of discontent regarding the spectacle of publicly viewed juried photographic award distribution by Famous Tokyo Art Elites . But thanks to Saito I had both the aforementioned taste of disgust AND the wonder that comes with randomly catching up with an acquaintance after an 8 year absence.
So to meet up with him again a few weeks later was a second jolt of that wonder AND another chance to point my camera at a woman I had just barely met. Note to as of yet un-met ladies–> This is what happens when we will meet.

Personally, one roll of 3200 was enough but if it is easier (or cheaper) to get than Fuji Super Presto 1600, have a blast shooting in the near dark or at f22 at 1/500 on the street during the day. A few rolls and a Fuji Natura would be a great setup.

I’ve been mostly shooting with Fuji Presto (Neopan) for the past 8 years and despite a few flirtations with 1600 Super-Presto, it’s got the look I like and by now using manual cameras my eyes are adjusted to looking at the world through it. But if you want grain like any other film you can just over expose it. As is what (somewhat accidentally) happened here in Kamakura two weeks ago.

Details:

This brings me to another point–> The limitations of web presentation are such that it’s barely worth scanning prints to share via computer monitors. I understand that it is a necessary evil because it’s so damn useful but images online are mere suggestions as to what an actual photograph could look like. Seriously, no one listens to Bach in MIDI format but for some reason a Henri Cartier Bresson web gallery is presented as near enough to Real Pictures as anyone would need. And that’s the second point- the internet is freaking amazing in providing text based information (charts and graphs included) but when it comes to photography or video, it is simply and extremely Good Enough. But this is a post for another time.

* Big Billboard Face + Pedestrian Photographs!
This is a lazy sub-class of “street photography” which is the photographic equivalent of seeing two people at a table in a restaurant talking on mobile phones and saying to your friend “Gosh, I wonder if they’re talkin’ to each other? Har Har Har”
These pictures are some of the least challenging pictures possible- similar to Weathered Old Barn photos where the sense of Nostalgic Sentimentality is swapped with a ham-fisted combination of forced Irony and Realness since they feature unknown people and Oh My God the face on the billboard is big and the person walking past is smaller than that face! They are super easy to shoot because all you have to do is wait quietly across from a large picture of a face. China and Tokyo are the biggest offenders and Newsweek and Time feature no less than 8 of these photos from cities all over the world in each of their weekly issues.

I’m a hater!

But yes, you might as well get them out of your system (or, admittedly, keep taking them from time to time like me).
Via my undergrad graduation exhibit in 2002:

A few years back Fujifilm discontinued their dedicated postcard sized photo paper. For at least the past 2 years no one stepped in to fill this nearly insignificant void in a fairly insignificant* market and not being able to find the appropriate paper last year (and having run out of my remaining stock in December 2007) I didn’t send any Nengajyo this year. I figured that I’d just have to cut down some larger sheets of paper into 3″x5″ rectangles but the idea of precisely cutting paper under a dim safelight with a hobby knife wasn’t all that exciting.

On a quick stop to Yodobashi Camera on Sunday I headed up to the darkroom floor to see if maybe there might be some other brand of paper I could use- and imagine my surprise then to be told by the clerk that Ilford is manufacturing a new cut of paper for postcards. 100 sheets for 3000 yen is fine with me, and the 200 in the picture above will last for quite some time.

Now the hard part is deciding which picture to print. Next year is the year of the tiger but I haven’t been to the zoo in ages. I’ll figure something out…

*sadly, the more insignificant something is to the general public and it’s usual chain of supply and demand, the more precious that particular item (photo paper) is to those who depend on it to do whatever it is they think they need to do with it (make photo postcards). Canon might sell more photo printers in an hour in Tokyo than Ilford will boxes of this paper in a year around the world, but dammit, what you can get in the darkroom is going to be far more vibrant than any conglomeration of microscopic ink splotches on cheap card stock. It is an uncomfortable thing to be confronted with the possibility of the demise of something having to do with what it is one feels that they need in their lives. It must be so easy to simply go digital and just know that something better is just a product cycle away…