Panchromatica's blog/

Just settling in and looking around so far. Who knows - I might yet stay.

It's taken me a while, but I have finally manged to upload a member picture. I think there is a bug, in that if the picture isn't square, and one side is LESS than 50 pixels it won't upload.

Tony Blair hands over power today to Gordon Brown, so these videos from YouTube seem appropriate

Hurt (thanks Brendadada)

Endless Love

 

Having been here for a few days and tested out most of the functions, I  like what I see. At first the fact that it was so quiet compared to F***** was a bit disconcerting, but after a while that became a positive factor - none of the frenetic me me me posts you see in Flickr forums. I won't go Pro for a while however, partly because I am going to get my moneysworth out of Flickr, and partly because there are still some other options I want to try out. Ning.com for example still looks very good.

In the end though, it is the community that makes even a virtual place like a photosharing site and the community at Flickr was becoming increasingly irritating - and that was without the dreadful impact on management decisions of the Yahoo acquisition. It is a shame when the old neighbourhood goes downhill, but it happens and you if have the freedom to move it would be silly not to do so.

I’m Ian, 60, semi-retired from Gateshead now living in Wiltshire - former town planner, former community activist.

I still have my first real camera. This is a Zeiss Contina 35mm I acquired in 1966 when at university in Birmingham.

Zeiss Contina - my first prope…

One of the pictures from my first roll was on Flickr and is now here.

My first SLR was an ancient Miranda D (from the days when Miranda was a real camera not a brand name owned by Dixons). The lens had to be manually stopped down to take each picture. My success rate in doing that was probably only about 50%! This shot was taken using that camera and a cheapo telephoto lens from Dixons.

I then moved on to a Minolta SRT100. I eventually sold it to buy a Canon EOS 630, but have regretted that decision ever since. It was solid, ultra reliable and by the time I sold it I knew all its quirks and characteristics.

I moved into digital via a Minolta Dimage 2330. The image quality from this was pretty good, despite the relatively low pixel count. That recently gave up the ghost – one colour channel simply isn’t registering. I replaced it with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX10, which so far is brilliant and half the weight.

I still have the Canon EOS but to it I have added a Canon EOS20D. While I’m happy with both the Canons, they don’t somehow feel as satisfying to use as the Minolta SRT. I think this is more to do with ergonomics – the way the Canon feels in my hand more than anything else, but it equally possible that it is misplaced nostalgia.

Anyway, I now own:

• Canon EOS 630 film camera with 50mm standard lens
• Canon EOS 20D digital with kit 18-55mm zoom and Canon 80-200 zoom carried over from the 630
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX10 digital compact
• Zeiss Contina 35mm
• Motorola V3 Cameraphone
• Ancient Agfa box camera - the winding mechanism is broken but it produced some nice pics the last time I used it (which I realise as I write this was round about 1964!)
• Slightly less ancient Kodak Box Brownie 1 (originally my father-in-law's)
• I also have a couple of 35mm compacts around somewhere.

I take entirely digital images at the moment because of my interest in photomanipulation. I still have a hankering to try medium or large format film though. I borrowed a Seagull from a friend, but didn't really have the chance to use it properly. What I would really like to try is one of those great big things with rise and fall adjustments for the front and back - the sort that used to be used in architectural photography - but I don't think my back would stand up to lugging it around!

When I did take film it was almost entirely Kodacolour slide film, although I dabbled with Ektachrome too. When my daughter was born I moved to colour prints like most fond parents and never went back to slides. For B&W it was either FP4 or HP4 – which dates me I know.

I never got into processing my own film, but did some B&W printing when I was at University – probably 1973ish. This was on a home made enlarger someone gave me. It used two aluminium pudding basins for the bulb housing with a Heath Robinson arrangement beneath for the lens and condenser. I never got my own darkroom so the next printing I did was at the former Spectro Arts Workshop in Newcastle in the late 1970s. Some of the prints I did then are also on flickr and again these are likely to move over at some stage. I also did a bit of Cibachrome printing at that time, but not very successfully. This is a scan from a Cibachrome print,

Using digital of course I now don’t need a darkroom and in my case this was probably the biggest single driver for moving over. I don’t have the expense of processing and have more or less total control over what I produce.

I haven’t done with film entirely however. I still have about 10,000 negatives and slides accumulated over the past 40 years. The vast majority of these are still unscanned and in the case of the slides, they are deteriorating rapidly. I need to scan the slides in particular as quickly as possible to ensure their preservation. This image (still on Flickr) shows some of the problems.

Because of illness I haven’t taken much in the way of new images for a couple of years so I have been spent a fair time experimenting with digital manipulation. Unfortunately I can also see a time when I won't be able to get out to take new ones. If that happens, processing that ‘archive’ could also become my only involvement in photography.

EDIT: a few typos tidied up, photo of Zeiss Contina added [30th June 2007]

I have already sort of cut myself adrift from Flickr, at least in terms of new pictures. I like the way in which I can blog and post pictures, audio and video in one place here on ipernity, without the messiness of YouTube or Myspace. I don't want to give up on my main blog, though. So, for the moment, and assuming my Flickr acount eventually winds down - or out - I think the ipernity blog wil be restricted to things to do with photography and 'image making', while the main Panchromatica blog will continue to deal with community and politics and the environment. I don't suppose the split will ever be so simple as that but it gives me something to work on.

 

I suspect that in the art world - at least that part frequented by the likes of Brian Sewell - Photoshop is a term of abuse, but then I also suspect that in some of its more hidebound corners, photography is still viewed as an upstart medium. There is a tendency of course for people to abuse that with which they are not familiar. I imagine that when factory made paints first became available, those painters who ground their own pigments and mixed their own paint got quite sniffy about this dreadful new stuff. Similar comments were no doubt made about synthetic brushes and acrylic paint. In the early days of colour photography, many photographers rejected colour as a distraction from the core aesthetic of photography as an art.

The famous remark about photography, that 'from today, painting is dead' has of course proved untrue. Photography has established itself alongside painting and drawing as a valid form of artistic expression. As with painting however, the generic term embraces a huge range of styles and forms. Think of the imitations of old master painting by Reijlander, the soft focus portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron, the social realism of the FSA photographers or Weegee, the 'decisive moment' of Cartier-Bresson, the surrealism of Man Ray, Angus McBean or Diane Arbus. These are all photography, but with very different impacts.

Portrait photography apart, photography has conventionally however been supposed to record what is in front of the camera. The photographer's role was in selecting what to record, not in creating it. Cartier-Bresson famously refused to allow any cropping - what he saw in his viewfinder was what he printed. However, conventional darkroom chemistry is not a neutral process. Bill Brandt for instance when he returned to some of his work in later years produced images much darker than the original prints. Even photo journalism is not immune. Robert Capa's classic photograph of the dying soldier was widely suggested as being posed (although eventually proven to be genuine) while the photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, now rendered into a sculpture, is a restaging of an earlier event but with a larger flag. It is the second image however, that has gained iconic status.

Man Ray's 'photograms' are another obvious exception while Angus McBean continued the tradition of Reijlander, in assembling his images as a collage - a tradition now picked up by many 'Photoshoppers'. Photoshop is of course a specific package so I will use digital manipulation or DM from now on, as a generic term for the whole range of digital manipulation tools available.

I want to start however from a slightly different perspective, with Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp.

When Duchamp signs mass-produced objects . . . and sends them to art exhibits, he negates the category of individual production. The signature is inscribed on an arbitrarily chosen mass product because all claims to individual creativity are to be mocked. Duchamp's provocation not only unmasks the art market . . . it radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois society according to which the individual is considered the creator of the work of art. Duchamp's Ready-Mades are not works of art but manifestations.

I start here because a frequent complaint about DM work is that its output is not artistic because it is not the work of individual effort and has no ‘craft element’. I shall come back to that second point later. For now consider the question of individuality.

Typically photography is defined by its literalness. The photographic image is seen as a direct description of reality not a representation of it. In practice of course the photographer has selected from the world just as much as the painter. The image is defined as much by what is outside the frame as by what is included and is inevitably only an approximation of the real world it purports to capture. Although I took my first photograph some 40 years ago, it took me some time to recognise this. Accepting this separation however frees the photographer from the tyranny of literal representation. Since DM requires an original photographic image, there is already therefore a degree of selection from the world involved and that of itself is an artistic choice.

By representative I do not necessarily mean figurative. If the apparent parallels between the image as captured and the world in front of the lens had not distracted us, this would have been obvious anyway, as photographers explored the use of differential focus, distorted or out of focus images, solarisation and grain. Some, like Man Ray or Angus McBean, pushed the boundaries to the limits but all of these techniques met some hostility from ‘traditionalists’ before being absorbed and accepted as a part of the aesthetic of photography.

DM, obviously also involves image manipulation. This may be limited to the application of a single filter or tool. At this point some problems of terminology arise, because these filters are described so often in terms derived from painting – brushes, watercolour etc. Where packages like Corel Painter are used to originate a piece of work then this is probably useful since it allows the artist to work by analogy. At its best though, DM is not about mimicry but about creating something that cannot be created in any other way.

Statements like this - If you can score a copy of the 800-pound behemoth known as Adobe Photoshop, you can fake artistic ability with the best of them - don't help however, even when they obviously come from computer geeks rather than artists. As with any art form, there are good and bad examples - Sturgeon's Law applies here too. I suspect that the difficulties many have with it however is the ease with which images can be created which can give the appearance of having been created in ‘conventional’ media but in practice have never seen a brush. Take this image for example – derived from one of my own photographs – which has been processed in Paint Shop Pro using two ‘plug ins’.

Village stream and ford

My intervention was pretty much limited to selecting the strength of the parameters to be applied. (I cloned out some road signs before applying the filters) There are five parameters, each of which can be given a score of 0 to 100. In theory therefore there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations. In practice a variation of 1 or 2 is unlikely to be noticeable but there is still a huge range of choices that can be made. I’m making no claims for this as ‘high art’ – whatever that means – but I contend it still has value, even as a faux ink and wash drawing. A ‘craft skill’ is still present even in this relatively mundane image - a point made to me in an email about another image of mine – also on Flickr.

Jungle blooms

…I don’t think it matters even a little bit how long something took to create - some great ones come in the blink of an eye and others that one spends a long time on just never make it into the really good category - I think it depends more on whether or not you are connected to your "source" and it feels like "this is me in action"…

Digital technologies now offer more opportunities for new ways of seeing the world. To some it offers the opportunity to create new realities by creating realistic digital collages – not always for reputable purposes it must be said – while for others it offers the chance to further blur the boundaries between photography and other media. So far however there does not seem to be an agreed aesthetic response to the characteristic feel of the digital image or a digital equivalent to the painter’s brush stroke.

One of the debates raging within photo clubs across the world, as many cross over from film to digital camera usage, is what should be allowed in the post processing of digital images. One community is for minimal post processing. Another group would like to see only what could be done in a wet darkroom be allowed. And finally there is a third group that says anything goes.

As with the move from painting to photography, from monochrome to colour, so now the move from chemical to digital is generating a new debate on what is ‘acceptable’ – on what is ‘Art’.

While at its simplest level DM may involve only the application of a pre-written filter, it can be much more complex of course. Something that appears to be gaining in popularity is the ‘Orton’ effect. This involves layering of different treatments of an image to produce a very distinctive effect. The effect may well be possible in other media but its conception depended on the existence of digital manipulation. Its use provokes strong reactions as does another digital technique HDR.

It is unlikely that you will find work that pushes the boundaries in this way in many galleries. The art school/gallery network is still to wrapped up in the creation of value, to cope easily with the implications of unlimited  'originals' inherent in digital imaging.  Flickr, even with its present difficulties and its rather bizarre stance in the past on 'non-photographic' images, remains a good place to look however. With luck ipernity will develop its own pool of talent like these.

Check these out as a starter:

Michael Seidman
Ron Diorio
Lawrence Roberts
Rogerio Granato
Ian Summers

It is interesting that most of these artists are not young computer geeks, but people like me, not exactly in the first flush of youth, who come to digital imaging and manipulation nevertheless with no preconceptions and in the process probably push the boundaries more than someone who has grown up with this technology.

NOTE: This post has appared in various forms on my blog, on other sites and as personal statements for shows etc. Each time I bring it forward, it grows in length and new sections this get added. I expect I will come back to the theme in the future!