January 2010

Wednesday 20th

This is the first entry of the new year, the new decade indeed. It feels that there is a lot to report since my last entry - though I'm sure that feeling will boil down to little when I get round to writing it all out.

I'm continuing to come to terms with the wide-angle lens - occasionally I find myself taking one of those really intuitive photographs - which don't depend on conscious composition in the viewfinder but seem to reveal themselves organically as one stands in front of the scene even before one has raised the camera to the eye.

I've been agonising over the fact that I spend so little time in the darkroom now. This is largely due to commitments and busy-ness during the day. I'm lucky to be an early riser by nature. Recently I've started going to the darkroom at 6.30 am and spending a couple of hours working there. My concentration takes a while to get going but once it does I find that I am working well. I'll try to keep up this discipline - the only downside is that it displaces the Latin study which I used to do during these hours.

I've started printing my 6x6 contact sheets with the negatives emulsion side up i.e. making them left-right reversed. The reason for this is that medium format cameras show the scene before them left-right reversed.

Now, the process of photographing seems to happen broadly in the following stages: you arrive in front of a scene that seems to offer a potential photograph; you move round the scene looking in the viewfinder and evaluating what you see; when you find an interesting point of view you stop and refine the composition in the viewfinder; then you carry on moving round and exploring the scene, seeing how it looks from different angles and distances.

Well, all the fine work and evaluation seems to happen in the viewfinder. What's more a photograph will often work much better either reversed or 'straight'.

All this has led me to the conclusion that the peak of inspiration happens whilst looking through the viewfinder - and that it is this moment, this view that is most likely to reflect that inspiration on the contact sheet.

Try viewing your 6x6 contact sheets in the mirror - or printing them both straight and inverted - I think you'll find that the inverted contact sheet will give you the best results.