Spring, Pain, and the Sublime

Life has been less than idyllic lately, well, moreso than usual at least. This world is not for utopias, at least not in this stage of cosmic history depending on who you ask or who you believe. But as a result, making photos has been on the back burner as I/we navigate some of the unpleasant difficulties of time and the inevitable ends that accompany earthly life. Death seems to always be a motivating factor in me picking up a camera, have you noticed that? It seems that in the midst of troubles the reminder to turn the eye to beauty is a useful salve. Is not beauty the signature of the sacred in the world, after all?

I recently picked up a 40mm prime lens for the Canon 6D because Jess tends to settle in to that focal length and it will probably be a more fun experience for her to shoot with compared to her usual choice of the 28-70 zoom lens. I think it will feel more at home to her, since she seems to love the simplicity of point and shoot cameras and a prime lens is one less thing to think about when making photos. But, I decided to throw it on the 6D for a walk around the neighborhood to try it out. I’ve gone back and forth about the 40mm focal length over the years but more often than not I find myself not liking it, and that didn’t change this time. I’ve really settled back in to shooting a 50, being able to carve out little scenes with its slightly focused FOV and all. But still, the 40mm pancake from Canon is a venerable little lens in the right hands.

I’m looking forward to spring settling in to the valley here, or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’m enjoying it since it’s fully here. There is such a singular beauty in the world coming back to life after the long deep slumber of winter. It’s hard not to be moved by it. I didn’t make many pictures on this short little walk with the family but it was still good to get out, look at things, appreciate the gift of the world and try to bring back some small pieces of it in images.

On Creative Incantations

A walk with a Soviet gem

Zorki 1 + Industar 22 | Kentmere 400

A long time ago I owned a Leica IIIa. It was my first foray in to rangefinders and my first Leica, and it’s always had a special place in my heart. I’ve also always attributed some kind of misplaced magical quality to it. As part of this tendency I decided to replace it after selling it with a minty clean Zorki 1. If you’re a regular reader you’ll have heard this message before.

So as part of the idealization of this camera I tend to ever-so-often have the urge to, you know, ritualistically reenact the supposed magic of shooting my Leica III through the Zorki. Of course I know rationally that there’s nothing special about the Zorki or the Leica, and that the transformative effect that the Leica had on me so many years ago isn't something I can really just reenact by shooting the same camera again. It’s not the camera.

I’m always reminded of this fact when I go out and shoot it and have a lukewarm experience. It becomes quickly obvious that I’ve romanticized the whole platform. The camera is clunky, the viewfinder is tiny. The results out of the Industar are generally super low contrast and need a lot of post-processing to get them to look nice. The form factor of the Zorki can be conducive to the kind of shooting experience that I found so impactful in the earliest days of shooting the Leica. And for me at one point in my life it clearly was effective in producing a kind of shooting experience that was conducive to shooting freely and in the flow of experience, etc.. But, again, it’s not just the tool that does that. It might be precipitated by a certain tool in a certain context but that doesn’t mean the causal relationship is primarily driven by the tool.

Regardless, walking around with the little Zorki is always fun even if it’s not magic and can’t magically transport me to this creative space that felt magical in some of the earliest days of my photographic journey. I think I’ve hit a point in my life where the tool I’m using doesn’t really matter. I tend to make the same kind of photos no matter what camera/lens combination is in my hands. And that in way is its own important realization, so maybe the ritualized procedure of shooting the Zorki is still good for something even if it’s not magical teleportation to a magical mode of creativity. For photo specs here: The photographs were all shot on Kentmere 400 developed in a 1:50 mix of Rodinal.

Wonder if they found it

Phoning it in for March

Hey look I got a post in for March

Canon 5D Mk1 + Canon 50/1.8

The last bundle of photographs I have in my “Finished” folder was from basically exactly one month ago. Needless to say March has not been all that productive. It’s not even that I’ve drifted away from making photographs I’ve just been sucked in to other avenues. I’ve been reading a lot, and have recently been digging in to a close reading of Plotinus’ Enneads as well as Proclus’ Elements of Theology. I’ve also been going through the process of working out how to build up the new Rivendell Appaloosa that I purchased, a dream bike of mine that I’ve wanted for years. So my interests have been drifting to and fro. But damn was it pretty out the last couple days.

Leica M262 + Leica 50/2.8

Also, it kind of feels that we’re definitively done with winter at this point. We had one good final snow a couple weeks ago and Jess and I got out to take advantage of one last ski. The last few days you can walk outside and things look green, and the light is warm, and something about that weird viriditas flowing through things apparently struck me as beautiful enough to want to grab a camera and make pictures.

I took a couple walks through the neighborhood, as one does. Once with the old Canon 5D and a second one a day or so later with the Leica. I still have a weird contentious relationship with the Leica, as I’ve talked about before. Like I’ve said, I’ve made more photos with a Leica rangefinder than any camera over the years of making pictures but lately it just feels a little loose compared to using an SLR where it feels like seeing the actual image that will go to the sensor/film means I’m able to be so much more deliberate about framing and composition. Anyways, you’ve heard all this before so I’ll stop rambling about it.

I shot the first of the ten rolls of C41 in the fridge the other day as well when we took a walk in the woods one morning to get some energy out of the pup (it didn’t work, he was still insane, send help). I’m still procrastinating on mixing up the chemicals and trying C41 development at home. I need to find a way to get the chemicals to 103 degrees without having to buy one of those sous vide things. I think I can just fill the sink with hot water and get the developer up to 103 and it should be good for the 3 or so minutes of development time you need for C41. The other steps are less temperature critical. I’ll practice with water and see how things go.

I’ve also been going through the laborious process of rescanning all of my film negatives and saving them on to a designated external hard drive. That’s a tedious job, but in the process I was scanning some old C41 film and came across a best practice for scanning color film with decent results. It’s nothing secret, I think it’s what most people do but I’ve never given it enough effort to figure it out until now. I make raw scans of the negative in Silverfast and then do the color inversion with Negative Lab Pro. I was getting frustrated to the point of just saying, “Fuck it” to even bothering with C41 but the raw scan + NLP process is really good. So at this point I’m just trying to shoot more of the C41 to try and force myself to have to develop it…

That’s all from me for now, so I’ll leave you with this handful of photographs and my meandering ramblings. As always, if you ended up here somehow and made it this far, thanks for looking