Tag: Black & White

Trees Ago

While I mostly shoot with a Fujifilm X-T4, I still have my X-T3 with a longish zoom (55 – 200mm, or about 85-300 full frame equivalent) usually mounted on it. When I’m traveling I can therefore carry both cameras go all the way from 16 wide to 200 tele without switching lenses. Now and then I take a few random shots with the long lens in between travels and even less often I remember to unload the chip to Capture One and see if there’s anything on it. Here’s one such from months ago, taken from my window on a frosty morning and converted to Fuji Acros.

Farnham, Surrey

Evidence of Friday?

Farnham, Surrey

Two more snow images, another lesson in exposure. These were converted to B&W using Fujifilm’s ACROS film curve in Capture One. You can see that they’re not as cool as the last image. They’re also a bit gray – brightening anymore was creating hot spots. The better solution would have been to set the correct exposure in the camera, not afterwards.

Farnham, Surrey

Bench

Farnham, UK

Also in Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, a look at the bench in photography, how it’s been used by different photographers and how their images can be seen to play off one another. Of course, the benches under discussion were occupied by people (like the ones below I took in the early 1970s). This bird bespattered bench was in an odd, out-of-the way spot where it’s hard to imagine anyone stopping.

Equivalents?

Farnham, UK

Almost 100 years ago, Alfred Stieglitz famously published a series of photographs called “Equivalents” of clouds. I never quite got them. Walker Evans said of them, “Oh my God. Clouds?” according to Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment. He describes them as not being meant to document the sky at the time Stieglitz photographed them but, rather, they were equivalents of Stieglitz’s interior state. Dyer contrasts this with Richard Misrach’s Non-Equivalents, which specifically do document the state of the sky. Many others have riffed on the Equivalents, including Vik Muniz. So, I’ve never quite gotten pictures of clouds. Then on a 5-mile walk, under a cloud-laden, leaden sky, I saw these skies like Bob Ross was showing you how to paint the sky with a big soft brush and I thought they were imminently photograph-able. You be the judge.

And… I’m back

Blog Note

So progress continues on the projects and I hope to have some work to show here soon. In the meantime, there’s no harm in continuing to document my peregrinations around Farnham and the occasional foray further afield. But I think we’ll start up with just 1 post a day, rather than the 3 I’ve been managing for the last 10 years or so…

Farnham, Surrey, UK

I was struck by the light shining through my recycling bin-liner.

Staircase

Centre for British Photography, London

Galleries and museums, because of their preference for white walls and a kind of deluxe starkness, often provide geometric black and white still life opportunities. I’ve often photographed corners, nooks, and chairs in such places.

Kitchen, Night

Farnham, UK

I was struck by the shadows and light on the cabinet doors of the kitchen, so I got the tripod and took a few shots at different distances. This one is a 26-second exposure so I’m guessing the motion blur is coming from the actual shutter press (no mirror flapping on my Fuji).

Al Zoe Leonard: Al río

The day after we went to Paris Photo we went to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and got tickets to the Zoe Leonard exhibit, Al río / To the River, recommended by classmates who had seen it the day before. It’s an immense show that goes on and on for rooms and rooms, vast expanses of white space, perhaps conveyed by the images above. We arrived late morning and were, initially, the only ones there, other than the guards. I was almost more impressed at the opportunity to wander through the vast, empty white space of the museum (reminiscent of my trips to NY’s Metropolitan as a kid, when it was often so empty you could go bowling without disturbing anyone) than I was by the photographs.

The images look at the US/Mexico border area, as loosely defined by the Rio Grande/Bravo. On each wall is a series of pictures, looking at a particular scene, over the course of time (seconds, or minutes, I would guess). Some of these are very affecting; cumulatively, they certainly are. But I was unable to guess at the reason for some of them. One entire room was dedicated to pictures of the swirling water taken, perhaps, over the side of a bridge. While they are far from identical, they are all the same. Another follows a man on horse from a distance, behind, as he travels a short way. The final room is a series of color pictures of a laptop showing security footage of people crossing a barbed-wire-surrounded bridge. No indication of whether this is a public website, or if she’d been granted access to a security control room. Beyond the brochure materials about the exhibit (shown at the link above) there are no placards, captions or other text to explain what you’re looking at or why – which is, in itself, a kind of statement, I suppose. I confess, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. Of course, the same might be said of my series of images of the exhibit.

As always, click any image to see them all full-size.