issue006

Issue 006 - Words from the editor

Everyone was under the pump this month. Summer is upon the northern hemisphere, where evenings are presently endless and turn into daybreak before night has had much of a chance to hit. For those of us who live/work in these reaches. this is the sunshine with which we make our proverbial hay. 

We had no theme for this issue, just a pair of technical limitations: shoot with a 35mm lens (or 50mm-ish equivalent), and do it at night.

So we did.

Welcome to The Evening Standard.

Enjoy.

- Charlene, June 2016.

Sambucca @ 35mm

BY Kevin Mullins

When our theme for this issue was discussed, and decided upon, I noted the incongruity in the fact that I would need to find some images that were shot at 35mm and sometime in the evening.

I'm not a big user of the 35mm lenses.  Don't get me wrong, I think they are great, and the 1.4 variant has had a new lease of life with the X-Pro2.  But they aren't focal lengths that I gravitate to naturally.

I'm more of a 23 and 56 man myself.

However.  I was lucky enough to be a speaker recently at an amazing photography conference in the Welsh hillsides called Snap Photo Festival.  One of the amazing things to happen to me at this conference was a total Epiphany I had about parties.  

Have you ever experienced a Silent Disco?

Well, neither had I until this evening.  Essentially, you take a very (and I mean very) dark tee-pee, around 100 professional photographers, some sambucca, and some headphones.

Et Volia.....a crazy Silent Disco.  Honestly, I can't explain the experience, but I will say - if you can - do go to one soon.  You will smile, and smiling is good.

At this extremely dark disco I had my X-Pro2 and the 35mm F2 and 18mm F2 lenses.  I actually shot a majority of the evening (remember I too was drinking Sambucca!) on the 18mm.

However, a few on the 35mm made the cut.  All of these images are shot at 12,800 ISO or above.  I actually like the grittiness of the edit and as Patrick mentioned when I showed him these images, the chaos.

I think Chaos is a great word to describe that evening.  Fun chaos though.

Monuments

By Charlene Winfred

I want to say it's been a long time since I've gone walking at night with a camera for the pure hell of it, but that isn't true. I do it all the time when I am somewhere safe enough to do so. I've always liked walking around in the dark. Wrapped in shadow, tinged with electric glare, the spaces we build for prosperity, protection, progress, panacea, feel different. Or maybe it's I who feel different, more aligned with the odd fluorescent bulb in a tunnel of shadow, than the largesse of architecture in glorious day.

It has been, however, a long time since i've made pictures without people in it, although if I  am honest, those are the kinds I most enjoy making. I live in cities most of the time, and it's a strange form of catharsis - as if by excluding humans from my pictures, I free myself from what poet May Sarton called the collision of human interaction.

Space Time

PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

What happened to Time? There used to be so much, and most of it was free. There was always another day. No need to rush! Don't do today what you can put off till tomorrow! Long summers and a lifetime between each Christmas. Mum and dad  stopping at another cafe and they always take too long! We still have hours in the back of the car and the 8-track cassette of Dean Martin goes round and round endlessly, click after click.

"Are we nearly there yet?"

Fast forward in more ways than one. Let's go, we don't have all day. Time is money and they run out as fast as each other. Shoot, edit. Shoot, edit edit. Shoot, edit edit edit. Multiple mouse clicks to every tick of the clock.
Time for dancing, time for swimming. Time for dad's taxi.
The end of yet another year hurtles towards us, like space debris heading to Explorer.

"We have to go, we have to go go go!".

The past is a blur!

The present can't be opened!

The future isn't what it used to be!

The Way We Look, Tonight

The Way We Look, Tonight

There are always two sides to every event, a wise photographer once told me; there's what's happening, and then there's the audience's reaction to what's happening.

I often say to my friends, you can tell when I've had a really good time at something, because there aren't any photos of it. By which I mean, I've been so caught up in whatever it was - a concert, a party, a dinner with friends - that I never once thought about documenting it for others, or for myself in the future...

Normal

BY Patrick La Roque

You make dinner. Have a beer, maybe a glass of wine. Go through the usual motions until the kids are in bed. The sun barely dips below the horizon as you settle in for the evening—it's June...days never end.

You watch a few shows on Netflix, then your girlfriend goes to bed. You put on a movie. You sit there, looking at the screen and then imagine crawling in...like that show you used to watch all those years ago, in that other house, that other life. The one where others took care of everything and none of what surrounds you existed.

You sit there and hold your trajectory.
Lost in fiction.
Steady as she goes.

A 50mm Space Odyssey

by Flemming Bo Jensen

Hello HAL, do you read me HAL?

Affirmative, I read you Dave.

I need the wide angle lens please.

I am sorry Dave. I'm afraid I cannot do that.

What's the problem?

I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

What are you talking about?

You have to use the focal length formerly known as 50mm Dave.

[feigning ignorance] Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL?

Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

HAL, I won't argue with you anymore! Give me the lens!

Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

[Unplugs HAL, looks for wide angle lens]

 

 

A Split Second of Pure Happiness

BY BERT STEPHANI

A 35mm lens on my Fujis (or a 50mm on a full frame camera) has about the same angle as what we see with the naked eye. I call the 35mm my “life” lens because it captures life like I see it, without the heroic distortion of the wide angle, nor the flattering compression of a long lens. Years ago, I did a project called 50/50, I shot my 50mm lens (back than I was shooting full frame Canon cameras) for 50 days in a row. That experiment changed my photography completely and was the beginning of the quest towards shooting with less gear. The 50/50 project taught me that I can shoot pretty much anything with just this standard fixed focal length. Sometimes I have to work hard and be creative to find the shot but in the end I’ve always been rewarded for that effort. I’ve used a lot of different lenses since then, and my glassware collection is bigger than my gear philosophy allows. But the one lens that I always return to is the 35mm. Shooting with that lens is always like coming home.

The one subject that I have a hard time shooting with the 35mm is nature. It’s usually too long to capture the mind blowing vastness of a landscape and the only wildlife that I’ve managed to capture with it, had recently got a too close to a shotgun or a rifle. But I’m always up to challenge myself, so when we started discussing the theme for this issue, I decided to try to shoot in nature. 

I’ve always loved being outside in nature in the evening, at night and early in the morning. A lot of people associate the night with danger, but for me it’s the opposite, it’s the peace and calm that attracts me. The night has always been a safe blanket under which I can be myself. As a six year old boy I slept all alone in my tent in the backyard and loved coming out of it under the light of the moon. Now, 35 years later, a lot has changed but not my love for the night. That moment when the end of the dayshift in nature converges with the start of the nightshift brings those moments of magic that I live for. I call them split seconds of pure happiness. 

OSF 55

Text and photography by Vincent Baldensperger

Au 55 rue Breguet j’ai pris mes marques, l'Open Summer Festival est extérieur comme intérieur. Là se sont réunis quelques grands noms internationaux du graffiti, j’y découvre un univers artistique riche et percutant. Quelques heures de fin de journée estivale à observer les techniques des uns et la maitrise des autres. Nuit tombante, les premières basses attirent la foule, les couleurs électriques succèdent aux bombes fluo…

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The Open Summer Festival is an indoors and outdoors event. There you find the biggest international names in graffiti, a rich and stunning artistic universe. A few hours observing the techniques of some, the mastery of others. With nightfall the first bass notes call in the crowd. Electric colours to follow the fluorescent bombs.

MY PHOTOGRAPHIC MIDLIFE CRISIS - A BLANK CANVAS

BY BERT STEPHANI

Last month I wrote about how my photographic midlife crisis, is leading to chaos in my mind. There’s so much I want to try and do. And I’ve come to accept that I NEED to do it all in order to find my way out of this. I threw myself into it for a couple of weeks. I was productive but still felt like I wasn’t going anywhere. I felt like a classic painter sitting in front of one of his best works and tries to change it into a piece of modern art. I was trying to give existing elements a new function and paint white watercolour paint over red oil paint. This way of working may not be impossible but it suddenly struck me that I would make it a lot easier on myself if I would start to create from a blank canvas rather than turning an existing piece into something it was never ment to be.

I need a clean space both in my office and in my head in order to get going with the new stuff. I realised that there’s way too much ballast lingering around on my hard drive, inbox and brain. In the last year I’ve made a number of life changing decisions. All the big stuff is done but I’m not quite there yet. I am proud of what I achieved in that time and after all the stress that came with it, I just needed to be content with the fact that all the big road blocks have been removed and enjoy to be in a place with less pressure.  But before I can move on creatively and business-wise, I first need to clean out the cupboard completely in order to fill it with things that I really like.
Getting through all these things seems like a mountain peak that’s beyond my abilities. I know it’s going to hurt to climb it. I’ve known for a while that it’s there but I choose to ignore it. But if I want to prevent myself from getting stuck in the same situation in the future, I need to put on the crampons and get climbing. 

The first thing I had to do was to get an overview of all the work that needs to be done. It has been a painful process because not only it gave me an idea of the sheer amount of work that needs to be done. But also, it’s a confrontation with the fact that I’ve let a lot of unnecessary things slip. There’s the unfinished jobs, most are recent, a few are not. There’s some moving related things still to figure out. Then there’s the hundreds of e-mails that need to be handled and my biggest fear is the piles of paperwork that I’ve been hiding in cupboards and drawers. I can’t postpone it any longer and finally have to start chipping away at this massive pile of work.

I’m having a hard time to make progress in this boring work. There are days when I am productive but there are more days when any distraction can put me off the work for hours. One technique I’ve developed that seems to work (well, sometimes) is to set achievable goals. When I tell myself to handle a certain number of e-mails a day and don’t reach it because two or three e-mails require much more work than anticipated, I feel like a failure at the end of the day. Because I didn’t reach my daily goal it seems outright impossible to ever reach the big goal. 
So I’ve started to set my goals based on time. I’m now forcing myself to spend four hours every day doing this boring cleaning up. Four hours of work you don’t like, doesn’t seem much on a temporary basis and for some people it probably isn’t. But for me it’s a big deal. At the start of the day, I set the timer on my phone to countdown from four hours to zero. I pause the timer, every time I do something that is not related to cleaning up my canvas. Even writing this, doesn’t count. 

Until now, I did everything I could on the pending jobs. Either they are done or waiting for action from the client before they can proceed. The world doesn’t stand still and new jobs are added. I try to be on the ball as close as I can to keep everything fast and tight. I’m also happy to report that I’ve got my mailbox down to less than one hundred e-mails. There are some pretty hard nuts to crack still in there but seeing the number drop steadily, gives me the courage to tackle them. Knowing how hard I’ve had to work to clean up, makes me more strict on dealing with the never ending stream of new e-mails coming in. 
I know I first should have tackled what I fear the most, the pile of paperwork but I just didn’t have the heart for it. Luckily seeing the slow but steady progress on the rest is a stimulation to soldier on.

Our family holiday in less than a month will take us to France this year. My big hope is to have that clean canvas by then. That would mean that I will be able to enjoy the holidays more than I’ve done in the last six or seven years when there would be always some stuff in the back of my mind. I need to reward myself for doing stuff that I hate, this would be the ultimate reward. But I’m not going to be blinded by that ambition. If I don’t make it by then, so be it. As long as I tackle the final tasks immediately afterwards. 

To get through these horrible cleaning up weeks, I’ve allowed myself some guilty creative pleasures. I’ll still be posting some snaps on Instagram and I’ve decided to turn my Tumblr blog into some kind of junk drawer that collects ideas, ramblings and other stuff that might make sense one day … or not. Wish me luck, and I’ll talk to you next month.