The Reciprocity Effect

FOR THE LOVE OF PAPER

Diana and I both love paper.

We love the feel and texture of many types of paper and I truly appreciate good paper when it comes to printing as well as for making books. It is with this in mind that I have been enthusiastic to try out Ilford’s Art 300 MG Fibre paper.

Today was my chance to finally do just that, and from what I can see, I like this paper.

It feels good in the hand, just the way a good rag paper should, but most importantly, it seems to be a “gutsy” paper, with deep rich blacks, good acutance, and soon enough I’ll know more about how well it tones.

It is a slower paper then I’m use to, but that has the advantage of slightly longer exposure times allowing for comfortable working conditions when refining the local tonalities with burning or dodging, and it is an indication of a paper with greater tonal range then many of today’s silver papers. I made three prints today, one of which is a challenging print, difficult to get the subtle tonal gradations I am looking for in this high key image, and on the Art 300 paper it felt easy, or at least much easier to achieve the look and feel I am after with this image, then on other MG papers.

Like a child waiting for Christmas morning, I’m excited to get into the studio early tomorrow to see how the prints have dried.

QG

LET IT SNOW

Or rain, or blow up a gail… it all makes for more interesting pictures.

Street photography is not just a fair weather sport.

Although it is extremely pleasant to walk around on warm sunny days, and generally speaking there a a lot more people out in the streets, it is also well worth venturing out when the weather cranks it up a notch or two.

People behave differently in bad weather. A city is transformed - especially if it is a city that is not all that accustomed to getting snow - and the world of photographic opportunities changes.

After a few hours on the street in below freezing weather I am always happy to find a warm cafe with homemade soup, good coffee, and friendly people.

QG

PLATINUM & PIXELS

Test Print: Hand-coated  Platinum / Palladium Print

Digitally enlarged negative from Leica M9 image file.

Yes it’s true,  I’m back working in the darkroom but that does not mean that my M9 is up for sale.

Far from it.

When I first bought my M9 in 2010, it did not take long for me to realize that a new world of opportunity had opened up. The option to make exceptionally good, digitally enlarged negatives for platinum printing, from the incredible image files produced by my Leica M9.

After making a few tests I was convinced and I started making plans for a new darkroom that very day.

It took a little while, but my new darkroom is ready and after almost nine years without a darkroom of my own, I am now able to bring together the best of the digital world, with the best of the analogue world, all in one very exciting workflow.

The M9 allows me to work in exactly the same way as I do with my film M6s and it captures exceptionally sharp, high resolution image files that I can then work on with a software combination of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Nik Silver Efex Pro, and Photoshop, to produce a high quality, precise, digitally enlarged negative, on my Epson printer.

This negative is then used to make hand-coated platinum / palladium prints.

Platinum prints are renowned for their luminous tonal range and unmatched archival permanence but it is a contact print process that requires the negative to be the same size as the desired print. For a Leica photographer this was always a bit of a challenge prior to making digital negatives. I did make some enlarged negatives using an analogue process in the late 90’s and into the early 2000’s,  but it was always a difficult and frequently unsatisfactory process, unless I was making the negative from the long discontinued Scala film by Agfa, which worked brilliantly. Digital negatives from the M9 have brought that brilliant world back and with it, my ultimate image making workflow.

With the darkroom only recently completed I am really just beginning to get comfortable with the entire process and am now focused on producing limited edition platinum prints from my Mile Zero: A Place Uncertain project.

Down the road I plan to offer personalized workshops and custom platinum printing but for now, stay tuned for updates as I pull these wonderful handmade prints from the dark.

QG

NEW DARKROOM ROCKS

First printing session in my new darkroom today!

This darkroom has been setup for printing both silver and platinum with a black light UV exposure box that will handle 16x20 inch paper, 4x5 enlarger, and archival print washers. It is very comfortable in there with a good layout for workflow and the vents keep things from getting too heady.

Nothing like putting on some good music and having 5 clear hours to work.

QG

PLAYING DRESS-UP

One of the themes I write about here is “knowing who you are”, by which I mean that deeper understanding of how to be true to ourselves rather then cloak ourselves in the facades of how others see us or would like to see us.

My daughter - who is almost 4 years old - loves, like most children to dress up in various costumes and outfits that she puts together. In her mind she can pretend to be a princess, a bee, a mother… anyone she wants, yet somehow she is always fully herself.

As adults we tend to dress ourselves, at least metaphorically, in “costumes” but we often fail to see them as such. We lose a sense of our true identity.

Perhaps it happens in the transition from Play to Work.

I’ve noticed that adults who play, possess greater levels of self-awareness and identity, so heres to more play in all of our lives.

QG

GET YOUR PARTY HAT ON

As I write, the New Year is making it’s way around the world.

We live in one of the last places on earth to greet the new year, but our party hats are ready and so are we. Ready to welcome another year of adventures, opportunities, and with luck, prosperity.

Every year comes with it’s hardships and it’s rewards and so we have set our sites on goals that will draw our friends and family together, and give us ways of sharing creativity, learning and insight.

To all, we wish you a very happy and healthy 2012.

QG

TRAVELLING LIGHT

When I first seriously picked up a camera thirty years ago, my dad’s old Konica SLR, it had just one prime lens, no light meter, no auto exposure, no auto focus… no options, except what I chose to photograph.

I learned photography with that camera.

I learned to judge exposure by trial and error, eventually learning to read the light with my eyes. To this day I’m still in the habit of calculating exposure in my head before checking it with my meter. Kodachrome was a good teacher. Unforgiving of error, it rewarded accuracy of exposure and of seeing richly.

For many years, photography was a simple transaction between myself, a very basic camera, and the subject. Then somewhere down the twisting road of professional photography, the transaction got more complicated. Suddenly I had cases full of cameras, lenses, lights, meters, and bits of grip equipment. There were other cases full of stands, softboxes, umbrellas and tripods… it took two people with strong backs just to carry all the stuff.

Did I make better pictures?

My clients certainly approved of the results and they seemed to like the show we made of setting everything up. It all looked very “professional”, or something to that effect.

But did I make better pictures?

Not really.

Don’t get me wrong. I am in no way knocking this way of making images. For many photographers these items are simply the valuable tools or their trade, part of their art, part of who they are as image makers. It’s just not for me.

For awhile now I have been on a journey back to that simple, eloquent transaction between myself, a camera, and the subject.

The big cases are up for sale, but nobody seems to want them.

Everything I work with now will fit easily into a very small shoulder bag that even my three and a half year old daughter can lift.

Do I make better pictures? I hope so.

Certainly I travel lighter these days, and I make pictures that make me much happier, and that definitely sounds better to me.

QG

PS - Yes I still have that old  Konica FP. It sits with pride on a shelf in my studio. The gear train seized years ago but the memories created with it live on.

THE MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE

Five time zones wide, Canada is a large country.

In a romantic way, I’m proud of this, personally energized by the possibility of adventure that this represents. In more practical terms, I see how size has produced a dysfunctional three-tired system of government, and how in so many ways it has disenfranchised many Canadians.

If you include the return trip I made as a small boy, playing in the back of my parent’s Land Rover, towing a Bowler trailer, forth and back across the country, then I’ve driven across Canada a total of nine (9) times. That’s eight times more then most Canadians and nine times more then many.

Why? Why have I driven across such a vast land so many times?

A few of my trips across have been primarily for the sake of seeking adventure. Several more have been cross-country pilgrimages in search of a place to call home. For one of the trips; one that was expressly for the purpose of adventure, I actually went first to Cape Spear, Newfoundland - which is as far east as you can go in Canada - before pointing my headlights west and setting off on a five month meandering journey.

One trip was made just as the country fell into the icy grip of winter, complete with blinding snowstorms, trecherous roads and the opportunity to watch a country prepare for Christmas.

These trips have given me the chance to camp in the mountains, or in the grasslands or in the back of my truck, with only granola and apple sauce to eat, tucked securely into a sleeping bag and be rocked - literally - to sleep by the pounding of wind and hail as I perched on the north shore of Lake Superior as a storm consumed the lake. Often I have ventured off of highway 1 - the Trans-Canada - in search of some idea about how Canadians live, the Canadians that are not found in one of our four larger cities, or even in the handful of smaller cities… I mean when was the last time you met someone from Holland, Canada?

So often we think about Canada in terms “East” and “West”, and occasionally, if the conversation turns to global warming and arctic sovereignty ”The North”.

We - Canadians I mean - tend to talk about Toronto like it is in the “East” - which it is not. At best it is just right of centre, perhaps politically as well as geographically; and we point to Vancouver as the best place in the country to live, which I would argue.

Mostly we forget about what lies in the middle, or in the “East” for that matter.

So for tonight I am reflecting on the country as a whole, and letting my mind wander its backroads.

Merry Christmas Canada.

QG

JUST FOR LAUGHS

Wearing a Cadet uniform at a Buskers Festival is a little like wearing a red flag into the bull ring. In about three seconds she is going to spot these two boys and have her way with them… all in good fun.

CITIZEN JOURNALISM

When I went to photography school in the mid 1980s, it was made quite clear to us - as aspiring photojournalists - that the future of photojournalism was dead.

Quite simply the still photographic image was losing the race for public media attention to a sexier, faster, wealthier medium… television.

Then along came digital photography. Suddenly the still image was back in the game. and after a few false starts, photojournalism regained speed, and sex appeal… perhaps not wealth, but two out of three wasn’t bad for a medium that was pronounced dead, or at least given very little time to live only a few years previous.

The first real - as in practical - digital SLR came upon the stage in the mid-90s. Kodak brought it to market and made bold claims about the future of photography. I recall a sales rep managing to keep a straight face as he handed one to me and announced that this was the future and at a price tag of just $43K.

It was crap. The image quality from that camera I mean, but economics drove technology forward and DSLRs evolved into workable and somewhat affordable pieces of equipment that rescued photojournalism from its dire fate.

Then along came the iPhone.

Packing a built-in camera that was already leagues better then the early DSLRs, the iPhone shoots stills or video and best of all it can upload immediately and directly to media websites. Spot news is now recorded and reported by the participants or the by stander. The distribution mechanism remains.

As we stare down the barrel of 2012, the media industry has witnessed and weathered nearly three years of deep financial cuts, losses, closures, layoffs and general dismay, with newspapers and photojournalists feeling the bite most severely. This week, as CNN lays off yet more people, I hear the rumblings once again… “photojournalism” is dying, dead, or at best gasping for breath.

Is that true? I don’t know. Maybe.

No question that the field is shifting dramatically, opportunities close, new ones open and the new vernacular is “Citizen Journalism”. 

News media for the people, by the people, or something like that.

When I enrolled in photography school I did so because I was set on becoming a photojournalist. I was crushed by the news that my chosen career was dead before I even got a real taste of it.

Some years down the line, after graduating, and after shedding the commercial skin that my jaded education had grown over my photographic heart, I sat in an editor’s office waiting as he reviewed a series of pictures. Photographs made on a remote, rugged and beautiful stretch of New Zealand coastline. Photographs that documented a group of Maori removing the jawbones from a stranded and dead sperm whale. Photographs that tapped into the heart of the matter, a story about cultural identity, personal revival, traditional practice, and cultural renaissance.

As he reviewed my images, I waited expectantly for his comments. I’m quite sure that I expected to hear praise. He looked up from the table of prints, levelled his gaze on me and said, “you’re an artist, not a journalist”.

I was deeply offended.

I saw myself as a journalist, a photojournalist; not an artist.

It took a few more years for me to know myself well enough to know that not only was he right, it was in fact a compliment. I am not a journalist. I have artist in my blood.

So let the iPhone packing citizens have their journalism and make it too.

It’s the art that I want.

The art of visual documentary storytelling.

The art of deeper exploration, richer contemplation, and personal discovery.

QG

PS - Yes, the magazine did publish my story, and they completely buggered up the layout; artistically speaking.