Yesterday I went to the opening of the 2011 East London Photomonth Photo-Open at Rich Mix on the Bethnal Green Rd. It was a fairly crowded event, with most of the 80 people who had submitted work there, along with their friends.
I looked hard for anyone with red shoes but in vain
Photomonth is a uniquely democratic photography festival, and for me that has always been a very good reason to support it, although I’ve never yet entered work for the Photo-Open, preferring to curate group shows including my own work as a part of the festival in which those taking part do so on the basis of a small body of work rather than a single image.
For me the projection of images – though I didn’t stand and watch it all through last night, thinking that I could drop in again while I was passing as the show continues until 26th November and the centre is open daily from 10am to midnight – was in most ways more interesting than the small sample on display as prints, with many of those taking part having several images in the projection – which showed all images submitted.
The prints were printed by theprintspace, who also made the prints for my ‘Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood‘ which closes tomorrow (5 Nov 2011) and the colour work was certainly excellent. I was not quite convinced that the (relatively few) black and white prints on show were quite at the same level, though they were certainly not bad prints. But black and white printing is still something of a dark art even though we have come out of the darkroom. I’m not convinced that C-types (which I think these were) can ever match the best inkjet prints; as I’ve commented before, “colour printing is a process while black and white is an art.”
Concentrating on choosing which image to vote for in the Photomonth Youth Award
Watching the projection of all the images
Watching the projection did also make me wonder about the selection process involved, and certainly my own choice of images would have differed fairly radically from those on the wall. Among them there were certainly some interesting pictures – my favourite taken in a meat van – but there were also those that I could see little reason for selecting.
I think there was probably a deliberate decision to select work that showed the widest possible range of approaches and subject matter, and perhaps also to show work by people who had not previously shown.
Watching the projection of all the submitted images
When I arrived home I started loading the files as usual into Lightroom – I’d been taking pictures both on the Fuji X100 – a great camera for unobtrusive photography in low light, as well as using a Nikon D700 with 16-35mm. The files for the Fuji loaded without problem until the very end when Lightroom reported a problem with its catalogue file. Some 14 hours later it is still chuntering away on the hard disk with “Catalog Repair in Progress” and I’ve decided to leave well alone until it either finishes or the computer crashes.
The Fuji focussed pretty well in the lowish light – I was working at ISO1600 with the lens wide open at f2 and some slowish shutter speeds – and I think I took some decent pictures, but there were situations where I needed a wider view than the 35mm equivalent. With the maximum aperture of the Nikon 16-35mm at f4 I needed to use ISO3200, but that isn’t a great issue with the D700. I processed the D700 images on my petite notebook, which doesn’t have enough memory or horsepower to run Lightroom, and has a screen that gives a very different result if I move my head around. On the notebook I have an old copy of ACDSee and its image editor FotoCanvas, which can do some basic corrections, but I’ve done very little on these, other than some slight changes to exposure, watermarking and resizing. The colour balance is exactly as Nikon decided it ought to be.
When that catalogue is repaired – or I give up on it and start a new one – I’ll post some more images from the evening, and perhaps correct and tidy up these.
