Week of 10 28 2013: Urban Idyll

Exciting News!!

It’s official! An image from the project has made its way into the national and international print world!

The photo is in the November issue of The Sun Magazine, p.8.  It looks like it hasn't hit the newsstands quite yet. 

Location: Lookout above Waterworks, Fairmount Park

Image size: 11.5 x 17.3 approx

Camera: Superheadz Blue Ribbon

Lens: Super Fat 22mm

Film: Kodak Gold 400

Develop: PhotoLounge, 19th and Chestnut, Phila. 

Scan: Epson V500

Print: Epson Artisan 1430/ Cone Color Inks/ Moab Lasal

A super-wide angle lens creates a world all its own; or, one could say, one that simply does not look like the one we perceive due to the optics of the human eye.  I carry a $20 plastic appurtenance along with my regular camera and I’m starting to get a feel for how it renders the physical world. I went back to the location where this was shot and was surprised to see how shallow the space actually is.

I can very easily see why people become toy camera junkies but I’m in no hurry to invest in more gear or give up my more complex, slower cameras. I still love the discipline of a very a carefully composed and technically executed shot, and the results when it flies. I’m suspecting too that working with different camera methodologies on a regular basis causes each to play off and strengthen each other.  

Right: Photo that will be appearing in Nov.'s 
The Sun Magazine. Taken at 22nd and South (L2 Restaurant). Camera was a 1936 Welta Weltur. 

Week of 10 21 13

Location: 11th near Race
Camera: Panasonic Lumix G2
Lens: 14-42 ED
Print Size: 11.5 x 15" approx @240 dpi
Output: Epson Artisan 1430/ Cone Color Inks/ Moab Lasal

Week of 10/14/2013: The One Year Mark!

Location: Broad and Noble Streets

Image Size: 29” x 29” @240 dpi

Printed: 11.5” x 11.5”

Camera: Rolleiflex K4

Lens: Schneider Xenar

Exposure: f19.5 @ 1/10   (Guessed, no light meter.)

Film: Kodak Portra 400 (120 roll film)

Develop: PhotoLounge

Scan: Epson V500

Print: Epson Artisan 1430/ Cone Color Inks/ Moab Lasal

First things first-- with this week’s edition, The Concrete Muse is one year old!  The support and encouragement the project has received has been primary to its success. My thanks go out to you all, especially those who email me back with perceptions and ideas.

  

The plan is to continue into year two and to improve and refine both the vision and the technical along with project expansion: photographing further afield from Center City, finding new sources of funding, mounting new and innovative exhibitions.

Now back to the image…

Noble Street is almost not a street at all. It’s a pass through between Broad and Thirteenth, right next to the Inquirer plant, a shortcut that also leads to where the Reading Viaduct comes down to street level. With the planned development of this area into a park, I can surmise, almost with certainty, it will not continue to look this way. I had previously taken a shot at this locale on 35mm, but it seemed to be calling out for an image that would encompass the feel of things in depth and detail.

The 60 year-old Rollei, though very intelligently designed and a pleasure to use is much slower than a 35mm slr; it doesn't have a zoom lens, a viewfinder that is a mirror image so when you move left the image moves right, and the format is a perfect square. Strangely, I've had the camera for years, but I still feel like it is going to be many more rolls of film before it will feel like a natural extension of my vision. As you can see by the two shots, it causes a definite change in the way things are seen and captured.

The day I shot this (last Tuesday) I used a light tripod on the street, something I had never done before.  It was great to be able to shoot at super-small apertures, slow shutter speeds and get amazing depth of focus, but I could see what a nightmare this could be trying to get the camera on and off the tripod and getting things adjusted if this were the dead of winter. Working this way, it would not be much of all that big a jump to going to a view camera where you are carefully looking at every corner of the composition rather than working more from the hip, but it’s probably not advisable to bury oneself under a dark cloth in this kind of environment.  I was surprised at how much car and even pedestrian traffic there was.  

Right: The original 35mm shot, Nikon FM2n on super-cheap Kodak Gold film. Jpeg straight from the processor's preview CD.

10 07 13: Shores of the Schuylkill

Place: Schuylkill Banks, across from The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Image Size: 11.5 x 17 @300 dpi (full frame)

Camera: Nikon FM2n

Lens: 28-105 Nikkor Zoom

Film: Kodak Portra 400, 35mm

Develop: Photo Lounge

Scan: Epson V500

Proof: Epson Artisan 1430/Cone Color Inks/ Moab Lasal

I’m forever hungering for more texture and detail in my prints, although I am finding lately that smoothing an area and making less of a focus may be necessary to the overall structure of an image. I’d much rather do that in the printmaking than have regrets that I didn’t capture enough on the light-sensitive stock.

In keeping with my desire to get as much from the negative as possible, I made the print and then re-made it. I could have rested satisfied with the first version, but my curiosity got the better of me. On the second go-round, instead of a single scan, I did two: one for the foreground and one for the background, which I then masked and combined in Photoshop.  I was rewarded by a much livelier rendition in the second attempt, especially in the foreground flowers. I went to nineteen iterations, playing with balancing the sky off against the foreground. I wanted the dark clouds to move forward and have some variation in tone and not be a dead “curtain” but not so strong that they became the primary focus.

Week of 09/30/2013

Place: Ridge and Buttonwood Sts.

File Size: 12.5 x 18.5” @300 dpi

Camera: Nikon FM2n

Lens: 28-105 AF Nikkor (used manually)

Film: Kodak Portra 400

Develop and proof scan: PhotoLounge

Scan: Epson V500

Conversion to black and white in Photoshop

Full size print: Epson Artison 1430/ Cone Color Inks/ Moab Lasal

I try to be democratic with my lens, but something about this woebegone vacant lot near Tenth and Spring Garden and its immediate environs seem to get under my skin—in a good way. Maybe because it is one of the few places in Philly where one gets such an open view of early Twentieth century industrial buildings.  I ended up trekking down there twice this weekend to re-photograph it in the ultra-clear afternoon light Philadelphia has been experiencing these last few days.  

09/23/2013: More Mannequins!

Location: 17^th and Chestnut

File size: 11” x 14” @ 240 dpi (slight crop)

Camera: Fujica Gs645

Film: Tri-X 120 rated at ISO 200

Develop: HC 110, 1:49, minus 1 stop

Scan: Epson V500

Proof: Epson 1430 Artisan/ Cone Color Inks/ Moab Lasal

Photography is largely about romancing the fleeting moment.  Each photograph is an intersection of multiple factors, an unrepeatable performance that never plays out quite the same again. The ongoing process is a hard teacher too. As the old saw about experience goes: It gives the test first, then the lesson. Certain images make me wish I’d spent more time the subject, or had been able to muck around in the confluence of light, form, space and atmosphere a bit longer; they worm their way into memory for future reference. They are like nameless lovers who vanish into the night.

Not Exactly a Kodak Moment

Image Size: 13 x 17 @240 dpi

Locations: Woodland 

Cemetery/ Rittenhouse Square/Studio

Camera: Panasonic Lumix G2

Lens: 14-42 ED

ISO: 200

Proof: Epson 1430/ Cone Color Inks/ Epson Lustre

This last week I've just wanted to break routine, so I thought I’d risk unleashing some of the other work I’m doing. This is from a series entitled: “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Maybe it has to do with taking my first vacation in ten years, an all-too-brief but fantastic jaunt to Seattle.  There is also a kind of psychological shifting of gears that always happens for me as summer gives way to fall.

Without this becoming a statement of purpose, let me say that I often encounter interesting spaces that look like they should be stages for some kind of drama. It must be my theatre background (I did my undergraduate in set design). It’s also an idea that goes back to work I did in drawing and painting in graduate school.  So, I sometimes experiment with these vacant spaces and move figures from photo to photo to create compositions that exist solely in my mind's eye.

It surprises me that the artistic validity of creating a synthetic photographic moment is still an object of bitter dispute. Is not any methodology that gets one to the desired ends fair game?  In this case, it is the ability of Photoshop (and constant practice!) to meld separate realities together. The figures were captured in Rittenhouse Park, the landscape is a cemetery in West Philadelphia, and the odd figure with the mask is an abundantly talented artist and model named Holiday Noel, photographed in my studio.  All were shot with no specific end in mind.