{"id":1446,"date":"2011-11-10T15:57:16","date_gmt":"2011-11-10T15:57:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1446"},"modified":"2011-11-10T16:03:07","modified_gmt":"2011-11-10T16:03:07","slug":"salgado-talks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1446","title":{"rendered":"Salgado Talks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sebasti\u00e3o Salgado<\/a> now works using a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III and you can read a fairly long interview with him on the Canon Professional site<\/a>. Although I admire much of his work, somehow he isn’t a photographer whose pictures I would go out of my way to see, though I can’t quite justify why not. Perhaps he makes things a bit too neat and pretty for me, things that I feel should be messier and somehow have more life. But it’s hard not to admire the man and his work, including the “epic Genesis project<\/a>” that this interview is about, though perhaps the description of the work as ‘epic’ is part of what worries me.<\/p>\n

In some ways what I found most interesting about the piece was the technical stuff at the end, where we find that he has a specially modified camera to give him the 645 frame format ratio. He also says “I don\u0092t look at the back of the camera after I take a picture. I only look [at the end of a day\u0092s shoot] very quickly to see if there is a problem.” I have to admit that I don’t often look at the camera back, though I like to do so occasionally, not to see if I have got the picture I want, but more to see if I have got a picture at all. I find it only too easy to forget some vital setting which means I get the exposure totally wrong, perhaps forgetting that I had dialled in a couple of stops exposure compensation earlier. It does all appear in the viewfinder display, but I find I don’t usually notice that when I’m really engaged with the subject.<\/p>\n

But Salgado really does take things a stage further,\u00a0 pretending he is still using film and having contact prints made for him of the 10,000 images from each trip to work from and make his “edits with a loop.” The sentence that had me fooled for a moment until I realised that it meant a ‘loupe’.<\/p>\n

He says he doesn’t shoot more on digital than he did on film, and on a 645 film camera, those 10,000 images would have ended up well over 600 contact prints. Perhaps he really did shoot that many films, but it seems rather a lot.<\/p>\n

He then has his Paris lab make “a physical negative” from the digital file, and his prints are made from this. The article doesn’t make clear whether he – or his printer – works on the digital file to carry out any necessary ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’ or other corrections, or whether this are left to the final darkroom stage.<\/p>\n

I also learn that he has 8 lenses and a 1.4x tele-extender, but perhaps surprisingly nothing wider than 24mm, which I would find rather limiting.\u00a0 But I certainly applaud his advice to young documentary photographers that they need to have a good understanding “of history, of geopolitics, of sociology and anthropology” rather than technical knowledge being of paramount importance, though I see I have changed his word ‘knowledge’ into ‘understanding.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sebasti\u00e3o Salgado now works using a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III and you can read a fairly long interview with him on the Canon Professional site. Although I admire much of his work, somehow he isn’t a photographer whose pictures I would go out of my way to see, though I can’t quite justify why not. … Continue reading Salgado Talks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-issues","category-photographers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}