Minolta XD5 + Minolta 28/2.8 + Kentmere 100 @ 400

The autumn forest, pushing Kentmere 100, and shooting some more 28

November 17, 2024

I haven’t posted in a little bit (relatively speaking I guess) so I figured I’d put up a round of photos from a roll that I shot on the afternoon of November 13th. I lent out my TTArtisan 28mm that I would usually shoot on the Leicas to a friend of mine so I hadn’t been shooting much 28, sticking to the Zeiss 50 or the Voigtlander 40mm on the Leicas. I’d been nostalgic about the 28 so I decided to grab my grandpa’s old Minolta XD5 so I could shoot the Minolta 28/2.8. I grabbed another roll of Kentmere 100. I’ve only got one more roll of it before I’ll have shot through it all.

Ruckus | Minolta XD5 + Minolta 28/2.8 + Kentmere 100 @ 400

It’s fall, and the forest is much more open but even shooting midday (albeit a cloudier midday) there wasn't quite enough light to get away with a 100 speed film so I had to shoot the Kentmere at 400. I’ve found that Kentmere 100 does push surprisingly well, which I wouldn’t usually expect from a slower film. I typically develop it in Rodinal or Ilfotec-HC. If I’m shooting in very contrasty light I will tend to stand develop in Rodinal because of the way the stand development can tame contrast. In less contrasty light the Ilfotec-HC does a good job of rendering a natural looking contrast without losing too much shadow detail. This roll was developed in Ilfotec-HC 1+31.

Leica M4-2 + Voigtlander 40/2.8 + Kentmere 100 @ 400

Solace in the sanity of things

November 07, 2024

I took a walk on the morning of November 6th. After sitting with the heaviness of recent developments in American politics I decided that I needed to get out of the house, put some distance between myself and the insanity of men and find solace in the sanity of things. I grabbed the Leica with the 40 and a roll of Kentmere 100 and headed to a nearby park.

It was a cold morning, frost still glittered where the morning sun had not yet melted it. Where the sun shone on the melted frost it was as though everything was adorned in innumerable jewels. The light played beautifully through the autumn forest, and I was once again reminded of that certain magic and salvific power that we can find in these places. These places, these experiences are a kind of philosophico-spiritual gateway out of the hollowed, narcissistic and quasi solipsistic worldview that characterizes our modern attitude, what Micrea Eliade has called the desacralized cosmos.

An old friend of mine used to say that the only salvation for humanity was the fact that nothing it could do is eternal. Those words have always stuck with me. They speak, in so few words, to the place of humanity in the grand tapestry of the cosmos, to the deep beauty of creation that outshines our worst failures. For all the horrors we have and will continue to bring upon the planet there is this quiet, ineradicable sublimity pervading things.

Many have written about this experience, obviously. For example, the beautiful piece by the poet Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things. Personally, the writer who comes to mind most frequently for me is the American poet Robinson Jeffers, the poet laureate of the wild god of the world. Below is Jeffers’ poem Return, in which Jeffers urges our return to the earthly sphere beyond the cloudy and ethereal realm of abstract ideation. A return to the sanity of things and a turn from the insanity of the abstract machinations of the human mind.

“A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.
Things are the hawk's food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.”
— Robinson Jeffers | Return

I have always found in Jeffers, and in the experiences that flow from his words, a kind of transcendent experience and a coinciding peace. In the unhinging of our perspectives from the narrow humanism of the enlightenment and the turning outward of ourselves we are opened up to the vast inhuman beauty of creation, of which we are still intimately a part. It is a reminder of that perspective which Thoreau alludes to in the closing paragraphs of Walden when he reminds us that the world is wider than our views of it.

The election has marked yet another development in the manifold crises that seem to be part and parcel of the slow unraveling of the world in which we find ourselves. The weariness and tedium of the election cycle had ended in one large step further in to fascist disintegration, with few if any silver linings. Let me be clear, I have no hope in salvation at the hands of political elites, puppets dutifully playing the roles of the right and left wing of capital in the service of a system which is, by all observations, a race to the bottom for humanity and the rest of the planet. A telos in which everything beautiful is to be sacrificed for the insane desires of a handful of unimaginably powerful individuals. The rot is systemic, fascism is capitalism in decay, goes the saying often misattributed to Lenin.

It is hard to find beauty in it, I admit. But it is there, quietly shining if we are strong enough to look, to paraphrase Plotinus. This experience, thematized, expressed and photographed in different ways over the years, has long been my muse in my photographic output. It was the experience which moved me deeply in long walks in the forest in dark times in my life, and became that which I desired to express and share in my work.

I have always hoped that if my work can bring anything to the world, it is that it might function as a glimmer in the dark, a reminder of that deeper beauty of creation in the midst of disintegration.

Experiments in Color

November 02, 2024

On Monochrome

For the nearly ten years that I’ve been shooting I’ve shot 99.9% black and white images. Photography, for me, has been monochromatic. My introduction to photography was through landscape figures like Ansel Adams and John Sexton. When it came to making my own work the language of photography that I’d been to some degree indoctrinated in to was black and white. And beyond this pedagogic influence of “the masters” there was some kind of connection to black and white imagery that I did not experience in color work.

I’ve spoken about it here and there in different interviews but the gist of black and white for me is that it provides a certain degree of distance from our everyday experience of the world. In that gap between the familiar and the unfamiliar there is this space for uncanniness and for our reencountering of the world around us. Somewhere I’ve said that a color images calls to be viewed, while a black and white image calls to be contemplated.

Good Color Work and Episodic Experimentation

And yet, despite my deep roots in monochrome imagery there is some kind of allure to color images. I don’t find myself moved by a lot of color work but when it is done well it can be incredibly moving, even sparking the same kind of uncanny encounter that I describe black and white work doing so well, which is all the more amazing when we think that good color work manages to strike us in the medium of our everyday experience. On this note, I think this is why it’s hard to do well. Sure, we can make pretty photographs in color, ones that dazzle but which contain little beyond visual titillation.

One photographer who comes to mind here (in terms of creating moving color work that manages to be more than mere aesthetic masturbation) is Eliot Porter. Porter’s work is some of the few color photobooks I own. Between his unabashed compositions of the chaos and complexity of nature and his beautiful use of color, Porter’s imagery evokes a kind of mystical presencing of his subject matter, even in his work that is not strictly “nature” photography. For me personally Porter’s work and the capacity to express that kind of encounter with the subject in the medium of color is kind of the benchmark. That said, I’m also very much a complete pleb when it comes to color work so my familiarity with the realm of color photography is pretty dismal. I could very much use having my mind blown by other color photographers.

And so every couple of years, driven presumably by this unconscious draw, I get a wild hair to start shooting color images. Usually this infatuation lasts about one or two outings where I go out, make some color photos, come home and decide that they’re trash and just go back to my comfort zone and shoot black and white, resigning myself to the idea that color just isn’t for me before repeating the process again in another couples years. Some might call this insanity.

For some reason this time I felt more motivated to just keep shooting color, maybe as part of the broader urge to push my work in different directions, maybe out of an enjoyment of change and the challenge of trying to make interesting and compelling imagery in a different medium. Whatever the reason(s) I’ve been sticking to it and the process has been interesting.

The Language of Color

To maybe state the obvious, one of the things that I’ve realized is the trickiest part of making color work is developing a language of color, for lack of a better term. Color palette, tonalities, relationships of color in an image, etc etc. Not only during the act of shooting and seeing in terms of color imagery but during post-processing, when editing RAW files, there is a whole new layer of decision making and artistry involved.

To some degree black and white imagery is inherently less complex. At risk of being too simplistic, in monochrome one deals primarily with tones of gray and subjects. When I walk with a camera and I’m making images in black and white I’m looking at light, I’m looking at subjects, and for instances of the two coming together in ways that stop me and move me to make a picture.

When shooting with color imagery in mind I am still looking for light and subjects and the relationships created between the two but I’m also considering colors in the frame, the relationships between those colors, color contrasts, the temperature of the color, and, as said above, how I’m going to interpret that data captured by the camera during the processing phase to render what I initially saw in the final image.

This “language of color” is my biggest stumbling block, or maybe it’s better to say that it is what I’m currently working the most on figuring out. How I want to use color to express the things I wish to express in imagery. But, I am enjoying the process and seeing where it takes me. I have flashes of the kinds of imagery I’m looking to make in my mind, something that is able to blend some of the qualities of my black and white work with color. And I’ll continue to struggle my way to realizing those images. I’ll post another little gallery of some of the color work that I’ve made recently that I’ve liked or that I’ve felt is moving in the right direction. I don’t know if this is useful or helpful to anyone but my own desire to talk my way through this but nevertheless, I hope you’ve enjoyed it!