Edinburgh Street Photography Experiments – Part 1

I periodically blog about my experiments with street photography or what I’m now going to call ‘urban photography’ because I don’t really see seeing myself being a street photographer any more. I don’t think I’m sharp enough to make the kind of images I’d like to see.


These days I’m often nowhere near people in my daily journey at least not in the traditional ‘Street Photography’ sense of a large sprawling city full of people.



On the rare occasions I do find myself on the street its always the same places because it’s part of my route either to work or my daughter’s nursery. This is making for pretty repetitious images which I’m starting to hate making.


What I have been trying to do with the few trips I have made with my cameras is get comfortable with:
a) getting closer, and
b) composing on the fly.



I say that every time I post about my meger attempts at street photography because they are the two most difficult things for me to do. Point ‘b’ is the hardest by infinity because that requires an instant (or less) to make an interesting image. Point ‘a’ is also difficult, getting over the fear of detection by your temporary models and not liking it.



A week or so ago when most of the images here were made I had two incidents where people weren’t happy with me taking their photo. Both parties reacted very differently.



The first incident was with a young man about 19 or so who I thought could make a good portrait while waiting for a bus. I lifted my camera he turned and said “no I don’t like it”. I hadn’t actually taken the photo so I reassured him I didn’t take it and although he wasn’t happy he wasn’t angry and didn’t make a fuss and we both got on the same bus. No problem.


I can totally understand where he’s coming from, if I had taken the photo I’d happily delete the image if it was a digital camera but there was no way I’d remove my roll of film.

I’d simply make sure that negative was never printed or scanned for publication online or elsewhere (like it would).

More in Part 2 ….

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by sibokk on 1 May 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Digital Photography, Film Photography, street photography
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Posted by sibokk on 1 May 2012

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2 Cameras 1 Roll

20120428-182010.jpg

I decided to go through my backlog of 35mm p&s cameras and found a 38mm 2.8 Canon Sure Shot Otto Focus. Brendan, AKA Aware Of The Void, said positive things about though it ate batteries.

Sadly it wasn’t in a good way with a temperamental shutter which was just one symptom of its eventual death moments later.

Now the roll, or soul, lives on in my Olympus Trip 35.

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by sibokk on 28 April 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Day To Day

Posted by sibokk on 28 April 2012

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Art Attack!

On Friday 13th I spent the day doodling and getting paid to do it.

One of the teams in the department I work for at the University who focuses primarily on eLearning development asked me to join them at an eLearning conference to try and shake up what could be seen as a serious affair with weird drawings and a few photos.

I was given an iPad to doodle on though I’ve only ever played with one maybe once or twice prior to the day. I’m not yet sold on iPads/tablet devices so it was a challenge.

It took a wee while to get to grips with the basics of the three iPad drawing apps I had to play with but I primarily stuck with Paper and Brushes because SketchBook had too many buttons that I couldn’t be bothered getting to know and I didn’t have time to either.

Brushes records every stroke you make and thus enables you to export the construction of the sketch as a video:

I didn’t just use the iPad, I brought some ‘manual’ tools with me as well and made some like this:


I cheated with that last one because I think I drew that around a few years ago and simply found it in my sketch pad.

It was all in good fun and was taken as such which was great.

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The drawing style for the day was based on this drawing I made of Leo Sayer on Celebrity Big Brother a few years ago:

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For more of this sort of thing head over to my old Flickr account.

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by sibokk on 15 April 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by sibokk on 15 April 2012

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The Darkness Took Me … (again)


Part two of my home-made ‘darkroom’ (disaster).

It’s been a month since I made that mess and blogged about it. Two nights of mucking about that ended in ‘meh’. Though on the second night adjustments were made they were sadly cut short from a terrific headache and the said adjustments didn’t actually affect any change.


More bin liners were applied and adjusted, brown parcel tape is applied to the rear bicycle light to suppress as much rogue red light as possible. Yet the fog returns.

Below I experiment with contrast and exposure but since the paper is fogged, either by available light or aged paper, the blacks aren’t black and the whites would never be white.

I’ve tried to retain via scanning an accurate representation of how un-black the blacks are and how grey the whites are.


One thing I felt I had to do was keep the red light as far away from the images as possible but it didn’t help. I think the light leaks in the room were too extreme despite doing my best with the bin liners I had.


Stills in Edinburgh offer out darkroom space so I believe that’s my next step and I’ll keep the Durst Enlarger until we hopefully move into a larger house.


I’m not disheartened, quite the opposite so Stills it is.

3 Comments
by sibokk on 15 April 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by sibokk on 15 April 2012

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Casio-Yeah!

Inspired by using the R72 filter on my GF1 and reading some bits and bobs online about converting digital cameras to see in Infra-Red I went at the Casio Exilim hiding in a drawer.


This is probably the worst camera to do such a task with because every photo almost seems to come out differently.


Due to the nature of the cameras continuous exposure metering style every new photo appears to be drastically different from the last.


Hacking up the Casio was an oddly time consuming affair. There were so many bits of plastic to unscrew and peel off that I quickly lost count. I decided halfway through to forget about even trying to put this thing back together properly.


As I finally made it to the flux capacitor I discovered how small the sensors are on these kinds of cameras. Freakishly small!
I finally used black duct tape to tape up the exposed circuit boards and loose wires.

As I mentioned, the variation of colour and tone is very random. As you can see below the camera with flash can produce some odd results with skin tones and, well, pretty much everything else with a magenta almost purple haze.



Below, you can see the difference between the original and altered white balance:

I took this shot (below) through my cheap R72 filter. Maybe more of that to come(?).

What I find odd is that some shots just look normal-ish. Then you realise the colour of the clothes are all wrong.


I’ll leave this post with some final photos of my wee experiment




The Casio Exilim Flickr Set

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by sibokk on 4 April 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by sibokk on 4 April 2012

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Red SFX

At the end of March 2012 I got an R72 filter initially to use with a roll of Ilford SFX but I discovered it’s just as effective on a digital camera.


I didn’t meter with the roll of SFX but ‘cheated’ by using my GF1 as a tester for each shot. A bit of a cop out but at £7 or more per roll I wasn’t planing on ruining it, but I nearly did anyway.


I was concerned that I may have under exposed the roll and stupidly pushed the film. This meant that each frame was veering towards black on the negative but fortunately not too black as not to have anything of worth.

Some of the scans had a really uneven yellow cast that looked quite nasty so I grey scaled those guys but on others the faded yellow/green tint looked very nice.


It just means I’ll need to expose for longer when printing and I do plan to do more darkroom printing in the next few months but it just won’t be at home.

The SFX film is sensitive to red light up to 740nm so I opted for a maximum of 720nm, I think it worked out OK but I’m very interested to see what this filter does to other films.

Development at 200 speed using ID11 stock is 10 minutes and 14 minutes pushed to 400. I should have stuck with the former but I think they are still usable negatives.


I did enjoy playing about with the R72 filter with the GF1 as I could shoot in colour. I did do a little post processing in Aperture by setting the white balance balance against the lightest part of the image. This had quite an interesting effect.


I’m pretty certain I’ll be attempting this with B&W and colour films very soon. I have my Zorki 4K loaded with Konica R100 slide film and I’ll shoot a couple of frames with the R72 filter if the sun pops out again this week.





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3 Comments
by sibokk on 2 April 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by sibokk on 2 April 2012

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Streets of Aberdeen

For my week off at the end of March I popped up north to see family and, of course, shoot the place up.

With me I took a roll of Ilford SFX in the Mamiya C330, 4 sheets of Direct Positive paper with two other sheets of Fomapan 200 for the Crown Graphic and finally I had my GF1 digital camera.

I was planning on using the GF1 with the R72 filter to make test exposures so I didn’t ruin the roll of expensive SFX.

When I got to the city centre I used the GF1 like John Rambo as usual.

**WARNING!!!**LOADS OF PICTURES AHEAD!**


I couldn’t help myself …


In the city centre I somehow managed to struggle to find anything interesting enough too shoot with the Mamiya and the Crown Graphic.
I still don’t understand why. I ended up only taking 4 shots with the Crown and maybe 2 with the C330 …


… so I turned my sights to the streets on what turned out to be an amazing day of solid sunshine.




I’m still not sure why I do street photography as there are millions of people that do it better and are able to get really close, though I somehow managed to get quite close on that day.


Getting close has and always will be a problem for me but I reckon the GF1 made it easier that day.


I don’t think many people noticed me if at all which I found quite odd. I usually feel quite self conscious attempting any candid street work.


I think it also helped I was using the 14mm – 42mm lens at 14mm though I did occasionally switch it up by going to 42mm or dropping to the iPhone here and there. I only have 50mm lenses for my FED 3 and Zorki but I’d like a 28mm or 35mm some day.


In a perfect world where I’m stupid rich and didn’t need to worry about work and childcare I’d pop on a plane and attend one of Eric Kim’s ‘streetog’ workshops to get me comfortable shooting on the street. I love Eric’s work and especially Two Cute Dogs who appears to help out more and more these days.


But it would force me to face the fact that I still don’t know what it is I want to say or express about this kind of photography or in my other photos. I do ponder a lot and worry about our modernity in a 2001 kind of way but do we need to have a definitive direction or goal with what we do?

‘Yes’ is probably the correct answer, I just don’t know.


Anyway … I’m still not sure if I want to feel comfortable taking photos on the street. I think the reason I do take photos on the street is to make me as uncomfortable as possible, taking the proverbial bus trip out of Comfort City, and making me try to compose on the fly.


I’ve only been ‘trying out’ photography as a proper hobby since mid 2011 as before that and at art college in the 90′s I was mainly painting and drawing weirdo pictures and photography was just a distraction from it …

… so I’ve still to get my head around how to compose a decent photograph and get round to reading a few books on it. Anyway, I’ve rattled on a wee bit too long so I’ll finish off with a few other shots from that day.




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by sibokk on 1 April 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Digital Photography, Portraits, street photography

Posted by sibokk on 1 April 2012

http://streetlifeedinburgh.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/streets-of-aberdeen/

“The Darkness Took Me …”

While the cat’s away the mice will construct a temporary yet wholly inadequate darkroom to print some really foggy pictures.

It has actually been around 16 years since I’d last done any photographic printing using an enlarger and all that jazz.
How one forgets.

For the first run I chose the worst photo possible so I quickly gave that up and chose something slight better but still terrible (below).


I was fumbling about with some sliders on the side though I didn’t know what they did. I believe they are used to lower the projected contrast as they were making the prints really flat looking.

My safelight wasn’t very safe even though I never pointed it directly at or barely indirectly at anything outside of a fixer bath. One other thing that certainly didn’t help was the lack of sufficient light sealing in the bathroom.



I didn’t actually keep track of my timings but I will tonight for round 2.



More to come …

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6 Comments
by sibokk on 27 March 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Darkroom, Developer Developer Developer!, Film Photography
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Posted by sibokk on 27 March 2012

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Mamiya C330 Fomapan 400

Camera: Mamiya C330
Lens: Mamiya-Sekor, 1:2.8 80mm
Film: Fomapan 400

The other day there I polished off a roll of Fomapan 400 (to make way for a roll of Ilford SFX 200).

I still love this camera very much …

I also love this weird tree (below), I’ve been walking past it for a couple of years now.

More Portobello …


And one final portrait from up north.

I’m very happy with Fomapan 400 as 120 and I know fomafoto.com have got plenty in 35mm, 120 to 5×4 even up to 18×24 in some emulsions.

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by sibokk on 21 March 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Day To Day

Posted by sibokk on 21 March 2012

http://streetlifeedinburgh.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/mamiya-c330-fomapan-400/

Urban Positive Paper Retrospective

Camera: Graphlex Crown Graphic
Lens: Graphlex Optar 162mm
Film: Ilford Direct Positive Paper

This was my first successful Direct Positive paper shot with the Crown Graphic (until I find the other once I did and see how bad they are).

I gave myself a wee photo-walk on Friday 16th of March starting up by the Royal Infirmary and heading into town.

I caught this one (below) by the entrance to a road up to a recycling/tip.

I wrote a wee bit of blurb about the shot on the images Flickr page. Here’s a paraphrased highlight:

I really wanted to the grass to be the focus as soon as I looked through the ground glass and saw the grass looking 3D in that way a ground glass can make things look so I went with it. I’d decided against the trees as the focus of the image though it’s hard for them not to be.

I wish I had just a little more in the middle, but not much more, and I knew I would easily get those two forward trees OK. In the middle was a nice arrangement of twisted trunks and leaves and I think just a little hint of them would make it even more creepy.

To me, what I finally got looks like a staged scene with positioned lights though in reality I was lucky to have any light left. It was also raining a little and quite late in the day.

Some of the other shots on that wee walk are listed in my FED Extra post.

2 Comments
by sibokk on 19 March 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Day To Day

Posted by sibokk on 19 March 2012

http://streetlifeedinburgh.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/urban-positive-paper-retrospective/

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