Tag: film cameras

Isle of Dogs and Poor Doors – 2014

Isle of Dogs and Poor Doors: On Wednesday 3rd September 2014 the weather was fine with blue skies and clouds and I decided to spend the afternoon photographing in the Isle of Dogs before meeting with Class War for one of their ongoing series of protests against separate entrances for the wealthy and social housing residents of a tower block in Aldgate.

Isle of Dogs Panoramas – Island Gardens to South Quay

Isle of Dogs and Poor Doors - 2014

The main purpose of my visit to the Isle of Dogs was to make panoramas of scenes which I had photographed more conventionally over the years, including the black and white images that I included in my book ‘City to Blackwall‘ and more of them are now in my albums on Flickr.

Isle of Dogs and Poor Doors - 2014

I had gone back so make some panoramas in the area in the 1990s and early 2000s, using various panoramic film cameras, but the switch to digital had made creating panoramic images much simpler for me.

Isle of Dogs and Poor Doors - 2014

Perhaps the most important change was in accurate viewfinding – with my first panoramic film camera the most accurate way to see the extent of my pictures was by viewing along two arrows on the top of the body – much more reliable than its viewfinder. But of course digital also gave a wider range of shutter speeds and ISO.

Isle of Dogs and Poor Doors - 2014

And to do this, the camera needed to be firmly mounted on a tripod – and I carried a rather heavy Manfrotto around with me. This also enabled me – with the aid of a spirit level – to ensure that the camera was level. The Nikon I used for these panoramas had level indicators in the viewfinder and was easy to use handheld.

Isle of Dogs and Poor Doors - 2014

However to make these on digital I needed to use a fisheye lens – the 16mm Nikon fisheye. Not the kind that gives a circular image, but a full-frame fisheye where the image circle goes through the corners of the frame. This gives a 180 degree image across the frame diagonal, but rather less horizontally and vertical, with considerable curvature of straight lines.

Software – I then used PTGUi for these – than comes to the rescue, converting the spherical perspective into a cylindrical one which rendered verticals upright (there are several ways this can be done with slightly different results.) Later I moved to simpler software.

With the 36Mp Nikon D800E there were far more pixels than necessary even after this stretching and this was no longer a problem. I could work with single exposures rather than stitching together several images as I had done earlier with digital cameras.

Many more pictures at Isle of Dogs Panoramas.

Isle of Dogs – Wideangle Images

Although I had mainly gone to make panoramas I also took a Nikon D700 body and made pictures with a 16-35mm Nikon zoom. Not everything is best suited by the panoramic treatment.

Again there are many more pictures at Isle of Dogs.

Class War ‘Poor Doors’ picket Week 6 – Aldgate

A police officer watches as people walk down the alley leading to the ‘poor door’ of the luxury development

Class War and friends held their sixth weekly protest outside 1 Commercial St in Aldgate and it was a relatively uneventful one.

As the protesters arrived, two police officers came out from the building and talked with the protesters making clear that they expected the protesters not to block the doorway for people entering or leaving the building. More officers soon arrived to police the event.

There were a few heated arguments between protesters and police but nothing of any consequence. The protesters held their banner well in front of the door.

They talked and handed out leaflets to people leaving and entering the ‘rich door’ as well as to people walking past – and to at least one cyclist stopped at the traffic lights.

After keeping up the picket for an hour as intended, Class War packed up and left – until the next week.

More pictures – Class War ‘Poor Doors’ picket Week 6.

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Sitting on a goldmine?

Though film is now long dead for serious photography, the past few years have seen an upsurge in film sales, driven by young people who want to have fun taking pictures. And although I don’t see much point if any if you are going to have your films trade processed and then scanned, I can see how people can get a great deal of satisfaction about developing film and darkroom printing, which still has its particular magic that enthralled me around 50 years ago.

Like the youth of today, back in the 1980s and 90s, I became interested in archaic photographic processes, going heavily into what then became known as ‘alternative processes’. Partly my interest was in learning more about the historic processes used by some of the early photographers whose work I admired, but it was also in the aesthetic possibilites offered by cyanotype, kallitype, platinum and palladium, gum bichromate et al.

My interest was shared by a number of friends, one of whom became a well-known figure in the world of alternative photography, organising international conferences and making soemthing of a living running workshops and selling prints. But eventually I realised that my interests were more in the making of images to say something about the world and that the conventional processes, which were just beginning to embrace digital photography and printing. And I found that I could make prints which seemed to me just as expressive using an inkjet printer (and Piezography inks) as I had acheived with salt printing or platinum and with much more control.

When digital first began to dominate photography around ten years ago, film cameras were redundant and secondhand prices slumped. But apparently with a new young generation wanting to shoot film they are now in great demand. The video by NBC Left Field, ‘Why We Still Love Film: Analog Photography in the Digital Age‘ includes  some footage of a secondhand camera shop with cameras now being sold for silly prices. The man at K&M Camera in New York in the film says demand now exceeds supply and offers smiling customers cameras at prices that seem to have an extra zero on them. Those like me, who couldn’t bear to sell their old film cameras at knock down prices, may now find they are sitting on a goldmine.

Unfortunately for me, a quick check online of the UK secondhand camera market tells me that UK prices as yet don’t reflect those in New York, so we can either sit tight and hope they will catch up in time, or take a heavy suitcase full to the States. Though looking at those UK listings of cameras which all seem to be in at least ‘good’ if not ‘excellent++’ condition I do wonder how ‘knackered–‘ might affect the price.

It’s certainly a good thing that using film forces people to think about taking photographs rather than just keep pushing the button. Most of us who grew up on film probably still do that anyway with digital, though it has made some differences.

Long ago I remember looking at the contact sheets made by a Magnum photographer, working with 35mm film. Most of his sheets of 36 exposures only really contained perhaps two pictures, working around the subject until he was satisfied that he had probably done the best he could. Where possible (sometimes there is only a fleeting chance and it is gone) I work the same way with digital, but can now take more frames and take them in a considerably shorter time and have a higher chance of getting the scene exactly as I want it.

But it’s perhaps a good time to sort out all those old cameras and put them up for sale. And perhaps we shouldn’t leave it too long. As one of the photographers on the film in what was perhaps its most interesting contribution points out that the film renaissance is likely to be of relatively short duration because of its environmental impacts.