In the 13 years I have shot weddings and indeed the 20 years I have studied photography I have never used the square ratio on my digital camera. I may, from time to time have cropped an image after the event but have never seen the world in a square at the time of shooting - aside of course from my old medium format cameras!
Guidance: Make it more sensual.
Assignment: Today you must shoot a single subject using multiple exposures (a series of 6), using a novelty or vintage lens (otherwise pick your fastest glass) and your favorite camera.
With my huge vintage lens collection, it wasn’t the choosing of the gear that proved tricky for this assignment. It wasn’t the fact that I should shoot a series of 6 images of the same subject matter. What proved to be the real challenge here was sticking to the guidance.
Sensual does not equal sexual. It does not have to be. I thought it had to be. But I chose not to.
I chose the senses.
But how do you go about that with only 5 of them around.
I will leave the 6th up for interpretation. I know what it is to me. Do you know what it is to you?
Shot on the Fujifilm X-Pro2 using a 1971 Minolta Rokkor 58mm f/1.2 and a 12mm extension tube.
As a reportage photographer rapidly developing stories, unpredictable action and consequently fast shutter speeds tend to be my primary domain. But within those .somethings of a second that I ultimately capture I always seek to find a truth - to reveal something, some essence, big or small of the subjects and scenes in front of me that I can give back to the viewer to help them understand not just what was happening but who the people in these photographs really are.
I’m a street photographer, and for me that equates to candid pictures without asking permission. But for this latest Kage assignment, I wanted to get out on the street and ask if I could take peoples portrait. I went out with a Hasselblad 500c/m with an 80/2.8 and an X-Pro2 with a 50/2. I wanted to capture the men of Glasgow with as much character on their faces as possible.
An old man near the train station was causing a bit of a commotion with a piece of religious artwork. Although he looked impoverished, he had actually commissioned an artist to create this painting and having just collected it (on his wheelchair), he wanted to show it off.
I was given a poem about a female athlete by the man with the silver hair and I was asked on several occasions if I was from the press. People are suspicious about cameras these days. It seams that if you shoot with anything other than a phone, you must be press or up to something dodgy, even with an old Hasselblad.
Around one in three said yes to having their portrait taken. In the end I only used two shots from the Hasselblad due to a problem with the lens. Medium format film or a 1.5 crop sensor, can you tell which two are from the Hasselblad without looking at the metadata?
A friend asked me to show him how to shoot simple, elegant portraits and so he set up a shoot for us with a lovely young German student. In a way this was pure comfort zone stuff for me but it made me become aware that I’m often overthinking portraiture. In the pursuit of killer-images my mind gets away from the person in front of my camera. For this series I kept it super simple: My X-Pro2, the 35mm 1.4 and the 56mm 1.2 and a big window.
My friend’s next question was: what if I don’t have a window? I usually don’t light with a huge soft light source because it just seems too easy. But why would that be a bad thing? I hadn’t used a softlighter-type modifier for ages because it’s impossible to control. But on the other hand, it just pumps out a bunch of pretty light which gave me and my subject room to move.
We then went outside in a non-descript residential area to see if we could find good light and interesting backgrounds there. I think we did.
In many ways this shoot was effortless and if the wheels in my head were spinning it was just because I was trying to explain how my intuition works to my friend. I was pleasantly surprised by how the images came out and how enjoyable the process was. I’ll keep it in mind not always to try so hard but just enjoy the shoot, the light, the company.
January is usually a quiet time of year, but 2019 is different. My calendar is filled with judging, writing and shooting assignments, including a few days in Toronto at the end of the month for a rather important gig. Combined to holidays that were little more than a seven-days-a-week-xmas-playlist blur, the sense of renewal and opportunity for reflection are missing this time around.
I’m meditating again (or trying to...the brain is one crazy nervous beast) and over the past weeks I’ve searched, actively, for images that would bring me peace. Therapy through photography. It’s much too easy to get caught up in busyness otherwise—as Kevin and Dominique both expressed very well in their last essays.
So here’s some stillness...an illusion, while we gather our thoughts.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the rising move towards instancy in everything we do. From Twitter to Netflix to reducing the thirst for knowledge to scanning the top line of a smartphone google search we live in a society where time and space is seldom afforded. We want instant access, instant gratification, instant response and decisions. But sometimes time is the essential ingredient in allowing us reflect on where we’ve been, what we’ve done and what was really important all along.
I’ve known these guys for a very long time now. I met all of them, except Kasper, back in 2002. The year I started medschool.
We had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into at the time. We thought this was just education. It turned out we were quite heavily underestimating the importance of what we had set out to do. We were on a path that would shape our future in a quite profound way.
Back then we cared less about the healthcare system setups, the union politics, the suicide rates, medical rarities and the Hippocratic oath. All we cared about was friendship…. and anatomy.
I flunked anatomy, big time.
I thought it would be like high school. I thought I could pass the tests by just acting interested and use my intelligence. But I found out the hard way, that being a medstudent required an insane amount of work and effort. Every day. Unfortunately the gang moved up a semester while I was stuck doing the anatomy thing all over again for another 6 months.
But luckily we kept hanging out despite.
Our bonds were strong.
Many things happen during the course of a 6 year stay in university. And after those 6 years, comes clinical internships. Then the clinical speciality education.
Spread across the country, we still managed to get ourselves (and our growing party of wives and children) together for special occasions. Not as often as before, but we believed in quality over quantity.
We now live within 45 min of each other (except for Tobias who moved out west and has to drive a little longer), and even to this day we still get together.
It’s our club of friendship.
I treasure it more than I could ever express.
Accompagné aujourd'hui encore du 80mm pour une petite excursion dans le jardin. Prémisses automnales, parfums de fin de saison, teintes délicieuses...
Images réalisées avec le boitier Fujifilm x-pro2 + Fujinon 80mm.
Post traitement Velvia.
My friend Steven needed to go to Glasgow today to film some B-roll for a project he's working on. So I tagged along and shot some street while he grabbed some footage. It wasn't intentional, but when I started to look at the photos in Lightroom tonight, There was more than a few people lost in their phones.
The world is a beautiful place!
Life is far too short!
These things are worse than the crack pipe!
