a parliament of owls

so i actually should be finishing my phd proposal. but posting some more of my px100 experiments seems like a much more satisfactory way to spend a cold melbourne night while half watching the the carlton/melbourne afl game.

the top two are from my first pack. the bottom two from my second. i was going to detail where the wheel was set, blah blah, but really, due to the dodgy shutter, exposure times varied. so really all these px100 shots are in the hands of the gods! but i really don’t mind that. it’s really why i love polaroid photography. the mystery, the random results, the excitement of seeing what turns (or doesn’t) turn out. & with these new impossible films the frisson of the polaroid magic is even more exciting. so all of you out there who haven’t tried it or haven’t had the greatest success, go for it! there’s magic even in the shots that are less than perfect. looking forward to showing you more of my experiments …

ps thanks to the lovely amanda  for tweet support encouraging my procrastination tonight.

night owl

i declared my sx70 broken a while ago. but thankfully it’s not. it’s just being curmudgeonly and the shutter is staying open for several seconds when i press the button. it’s not the same amount of seconds though. no. sometimes it’s one or two or three or sometimes (but not very often) it acts completely normally.

frank, the awesome impossible project camera doctor, has been trying to help me fix it via email from across the world but i still need to fiddle a bit more. i recently hurt my shoulder so fiddling with a polaroid or even taking photos difficult.

but there is a plus side to all this.

• the long exposure time means i’ve been playing with interior night shots.
• and these have to obviously be held very still so i’m doing some still life stuff.
• and i’m experimenting with my packs of px100 that have been sitting there for months.

this little fella was my test subject for getting the light right. it’s a bit hard due to the unpredictability of the shutter speed but i’m liking this version best out of the five shots of him. it was actually the first shot and i would prefer a little more contrast in the white so i kept experimenting. but i wasn’t not able to get it any more contrasty than this.

when it’s easier for me to type & control photoshop (ie with two hands) i’ll post the various images of my little owl that i did while practising.

i really really really like it. i will definitely be buying more. very soon in fact as i’ve used two of three packs already!

oh in case you are wondering, my owl is my pen/brush/scalpel holder in my studio.

he’s from have you met miss jones. i want one of everything!

mindfulness in photography

Mindfulness is the practice whereby a person is intentionally aware of his or her thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmentally. Mindfulness is applied to both bodily actions and the mind’s own thoughts and feelings. In Buddhism, the second kind of mindfulness is considered a prerequisite for developing insight and wisdom. Right Mindfulness is the seventh path from the Noble Eightfold Path, which is in its turn the fourth of the Four Noble Truths.

websters online dictionary

today amanda wrote an awesome post at mockingbird about the benefits of film cameras in honing your photographic skills. i so enjoyed this post as it spoke to me & eloquently expressed a lot of my feelings about the benefits that shooting film has brought for me. the post was followed by some thoughtful comments and dialogue by various people that greatly added to the discussion. but it was also attracting a bit of negativity from a commenter. now kudos to amanda for publishing & responding thoughtfully to it. it was a not very informed comment by someone who doesn’t seem to have really read the post or looked at the rest of amanda’s blog to establish context. i think now that it may be a troll but at the time it prompted me to write a long comment on the page & in the end maybe it provided a good discussion point. i wanted to reproduce my response here as i think it has helped crystalise my philosophy in photography – mindfulness! don’t forget to read amanda’s posts too and the comments to receive the full picture! to quote myself:

Hey Amanda

Thanks for this great article. It captures exactly how I feel about what film has taught me about photography as opposed to my DSLR. While I shot fully manual on my DSLR from early on, moving to film afterwards fully honed those skills of judging the light in a setting and being able to correctly expose for it. This was particularly true as i first moved to an old camera that i thought had no light meter so i has to use my knowledge of how to expose correctly for the light (the fact it did have a light meter is another story!). My first shots on that were of snow … eeep! Some looked great others didn’t. But it taught me a hell of a lot.

I think those who say that you can teach yourself all this on a DSLR are partially correct. But they miss the importance of the blind that comes from not being able to see your images & the effect of having to slow down. Sure, on a DSLR you can turn off your monitor but even doing this I’ve always given into the temptation of looking at the shot before I declare myself happy. With film you just have to get it right and the only way to do that is to ponder and really think about your shots and exposure. Plus there definitely is that thought that ‘hey this is costing me more money, i should get it as right as i can’.

I too am not anti DSLR. I recently used a Canon 5D Mkii for a wedding and have to say I’m in love. But I do use my DSLR almost like a film camera now. I don’t waste shots, I pause and think, I often ignore the light meter, I try not to check the photos too much.

I would never have achieved this mindfulness in photography without having gone back to film.

Keep up the awesome posts!

soon after on twitter amanda said how disheartened she was about the negative and sometimes nasty comments she received about it on both the blog post and twitter. it sucks how something that could provide fruitful positive discussion is turned into a negative.

sure you can disagree with a point of view but do it in a thoughtful way that shows you’ve analysed & contextualised the person’s thoughts.

mindfulness seems a good path to follow when commenting also!

would love to hear everyones’s thoughts – on mindfulness, photography, film, digital, commenting etc

ps the photo above is the camera of which i spoke above, it’s a 1965 zeiss ikon & i’ve posted a number of images taken with it in paris. the image was shot on my 1970s sx70 polaroid with new px100 silver shade film by the impossible project. my first shot … i love it!