PAW = Pain in the Ass in the Winter

I think this whole Picture-A-Week (PAW) thing is paying off, mainly as an incentive to get off one's duff. Especially now that it is very cold out. Talking about cold, yesterday I made plans to head out early this morning. I was planning to walk along the beach, which should be quiet and deserted this time of year. The kids were coming along, and I had charged some NiMH AA batteries for the Olympus for them to use.

However, it would not be so. Early this morning, the furnace conked out. We huddled in the family room around the fireplace, and with a couple of space heaters blasting away. After the service guy fixed it, we were just too frozen to go anywhere.

Later today, I went around the outside of the house to open the faucets and drain the pipes. There's a stream running around our property, about a couple of hundred feet into the woods from our house. It was partly frozen, and the ice was reflecting the sunlight very nicely. I had been browsing through Paul Caponigro's Masterworks from Forty Years this weekend, and I have to say, your frame of mind does influence what your eye tends to see.

So, there I was in the woods, in my pajamas and a heavy coat, in 20F weather. If not for the extra oomph of incentive to shoot this week, I would have had my feet up beside a nice cozy fire, like a normal person on a cold Sunday morning.

Personally, I think Caponigro's best photographs of New England were the ones he took around his home in Redding, Connecticut. I wonder if he shot those in his PJ's?

Click HERE to see the photos

First R-D1 Photos

I am having a lot of fun with the R-D1. So far, I have only used the 35mm Summicron ASPH on it, as a normal lens.



It's lowlight performance has been excellent - rangefinder handholdability and ease of focusing plus good performance at high iso. This shot was taken at iso 800, f/2 and 1/30. I like the results. Film-like, for lack of a better word. It does not scream digital.


Plus I get to play around and get images that I never would have gotten with film (duh, since I shoot black and white film 99% of the time).

Epson R-D1 First Impressions

No, I just can't justify spending an obscene (to me) amount of money for Leica's new M8.

As luck would have it, I came upon a very lightly used Epson R-D1 from an RFF member who was "upgrading" to the M8. Even the R-D1 was much more than I wanted to spend back when it was introduced a couple of years ago. Well, not anymore. Yes, refurbs of the R-D1 go on sale from time to time online at the Epson store (and they sell like hotcakes). However, the R-D1 had a known QC problem, and I had always been wary that refurbs were the once defective units sent back to Epson for one reason or another. In Darwins view, not the fittest.

Well, anyway, thanks to the R-D1S and now, the M8, very good used samples of the older RD-1 can be had at moderate prices. And since these have been "tried and tested," this may be a way to obtain one with less risk of getting a lemon. And if you are lucky, you may just get one that is almost new. Plus some goodies like extra ($$$) batteries and memory cards. Of course, if you are not the type who has to have the latest toy on the block, then it is always nice to have someone else eat the initial depreciation. As Gene Wilburn so eloquently put it, ahh... "the joys of bottomfeeding."

The difference between the R-D1 and the newer R-D1S? Mainly an updated software... a free download from Epson UK (mine came with the updated v2 software). The older R-D1 also had the advantage of having the RF adjustment screws easily accessibly simply by removing the hotshoe. With the R-D1S, the top plate has to come off. A daunting affair.

Back on topic, my R-D1 came this week. Cosmetically, it looks brand new. Funtioning perfectly, with no misalignment of the finder. Initial tests showed a few dead pixels, but after running the dead pixel mapping function in the new software, these were history.

I have been very, very impressed so far. It feels well-built, with a substantial magnesium alloy body. The rubber surfaces grip well. The funky analog guages actually work very simply, and with one glance, you have all the important information (WB, Image Quality, exposure left on card, and battery charge) on hand. ISO is adjusted like film speed on the Bessa, by lifting an outer ring on the traditional shutter speed dial. The dial also incorporates exposure compensation settings for when you are shooting in AE mode.

Here are the things that make the R-D1 unique, and appealing to me:

1. You can go about shooting all day without ever having to go into a single menu.

2. The thing I hate most about using digital is the small viewfinders and godawful tunnel vision that plague DSLR's other than the fullframe Canons. With the Epson, it is no different than shooting with a Bessa R3a - a bright, lifesize 1:1 finder.

Only the area of the framelines have changed to accomodate the 1.5x crop. My 35mm Summicron is now an effective 50mm. My 50mm is a portrait lens. I don't use the 28mm focal length much aside from the excellent ones built into my Ricoh GR-1 (and GRD), but that would give, roughly, a 40mm.

This is what I miss most, since 35mm is my favorite focal length. To get it, I would need a 24 or 25mm lens, and an accessory viewfinder. I have not tried this combination yet.

3. The R-D1 feels and handles like a rangefinder film camera. That means I can reliably shoot it handheld at 1/15 sec, I can use my M- and LTM- lenses, I can carry it all day without being bulky, obtrusive, or intimidating. In short, I have the same pleasurable rangefinder experience, with the "advantages" of digital.

4. All would be for naought without the results. True, the R-D1 has only 6 megapixels (funny, most people thought that was enough last year), but the results are very nice. Black and white shots have a smooth range of tones. Not too contrasty or oversharpened. Not "plasticky" or unnatural. To my taste, it gives results similar to newer, less grainy film emulsions like TCN or Neopan.

These past few days, I have been using the R-D1 almost exclusively with the LCD flipped closed, and in a leather halfcase (in case I get the urge to chimp) borrowed from my Hexar RF. I can also do away with the case, and attach a Photoequip Unigrip with no need of modifications.

It was not long before I forgot that I was shooting with digital. Until I had to crank up the ISO from 200 to 1600 between shots. Nice.

Alchemy

A large part of the fun in photography actually comes after the shutter has been pressed. Well, for me at least. A lot of the "magic" happens in the dark - mixing different concoctions of chemicals, strict recipes for temperatures, volumes, agitation times, etc, all leading to the climax, the moment the image appears from seemingly nothing. Magic.

One thing great about using film is that there are so many possible combinations of film and developer, all with slightly different results. Add to that the variation in film exposure time, developer concentrations, as well as processing time. So much flexibility and control.

For the sake of uniformity, I have settled on a few combinations which have given me the particular look that I like:



I like to shoot wide open, or fairly close to it, especially with Leica lenses. This is their forte. For the past 2 years, I have been shooting mainly with Agfa APX 100 as my slow film. I like the results I get when developed with Rodinal. Really special. Unfortunately, both have been discontinued.











For medium speed, I have settled on the combination of Ilford HP5 and Kodak HC-110 developer. Another match made in heaven.














The few times I needed fast film, I had been satisfied with the results I got from Ilford Delta 3200. I have not used it enough to try processing it myself. Many people have also been happy with Neopan 1600. I guess I will try that next time I find the need.











I have not been doing much "pushing" of film. I have played around a bit with TriX at ISO 1600, and partial stand development in Rodinal. There have been some excellent results posted in RFF by guys who do this quite regularly, found in the darkroom section.

770: Deus Ex Machina

Vast collection of Ralph Gibson's work from 1960-1999, with over 800 richly reproduced photos in a heavy brick of a paperback.

Thought-provoking. It urges you to expand your horizons beyond the classic street photography cliche that every HC wanna-B seems to be striving for (worthily, mind you), and to think outside of the box.

The book is short in words, but here's a valuable quote:

One day Dorothea (Lange) looked at my photographs and told me, "Your problem is that you don't have a point of departure. If you are going down to the drugstore to buy toothpaste and have your camera with you, the chances of making an important photograph are greater than if you just stand on the street corner waiting for something to happen." I promptly returned to the street corner. It was only years later while working on The Somnambulist that I finally understood the wisdom of her admonition. Since then I have always worked with a point of departure. Every photograph is relevant to an idea that is being examined, a series, or a book. Within this matrix infinite possibilities remain but the chaos is diminished.



(Since this is the first Book post of 2007, let me repost this: 770? In case you haven't figured it out yet, that's the Dewey Decimal Classification number for Photography and Photographs. I figure that in the future, it would similarly help search for these blog entries.)

Remembering

Happy Birthday, Daddy

Facelift

The Chum Bucket gets a new look for the New Year. I gotta say, the new blogger interface is much more user-friendly. Some of the photo layout in the older posts got a little bit messy, but I can live with that.

I am keeping the old format of The Itinerant Photographer for now. I want to live with both for a little bit. I have also been migrating most of the photos to flickr, so the photoblog has become sort of redundant. I may end up just maintaining one (this) blog. We'll see.

Let me know how you like it.

Picture-A-Week: Why Bother?

What did you expect? It IS the New Year, and it is time for resolutions.

I have never tried to start a PAW (Picture-A-Week) project, but there really is something to be said for people who have the discipline and stamina to come up with a photo every week for 52 weeks. Inevitably, the idea came again this year, mainly spurred by a recent thread on RFF to start a PAW project.

Time to do some thinking.

Let's face it, when you are in a beautiful place, photographs come more easily. Especially if the place is new, or novel, to you. Good photos? I don't know, but proportionally, you're bound to get more of those as well.

"Photographers shoot too much film! If you go to the barnyard even a blind chicken can find grain." -- Andre Kertesz (excerpted from Deus Ex Machina, by Ralph Gibson).

But what about the ordinary? I think that's where a PAW may help. To see the extraordinary in things that you probably see everyday. Seeing. Photographically. That is a worthy goal.

"Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison d'etre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison d'etre, which lives on in itself." -- Andre Kertesz (again!).


At the very least, it should be fun.




RFF PAW Project links to participants, courtesy of gregg.

RFF PAW 2007 Flickr Pool.

New Directions

I tried my hand at making a video presentation today. The compression used by the YouTube server degrades the photo quality somewhat. I will need to look into that, as well as how to convert the Windows Movie Maker file to an ipod compatible format.





Addendum: Some more RFF members' video essays on YouTube.