Jim Goldstein suggested that his readers create galleries of their 5-10 favorite images from the last year. Since I spent most of my shooting time in SE Asia, with brief forays to Iceland, Ouray, and the American SW, I concentrated my selection on that area.
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[...] Favorite Images from 2011 – James B Martin [...]
[...] Favorite Images from 2011 – James B Martin [...]
We approach this daetbe from a slightly different angle. Sisse and I were raised on shooting Kodachrome, not the more forgiving Tri-X or color negative films. Therefore we are very precise in our exposures, and bracket our shots to obtain the perfectly exposed digital negative. When you live and work in Paris, New York, or London, where there still exists top-notch labs, with the knowledge and expertise for processing film, it can still be attractive. However when you travel and go through security, we all know the involved risks and stress that exist.Four years ago, we were on assignment in Israel and decided to have the film processed locally. We found the ‘best’ lab in Jerusalem. In the beginning, the film looked okay, but when we came to Roll 70, most of the colors had all disappeared and there was only a muddy-magenta image left. We were experiencing a lab that no longer was prepared to handle E-6 processing. It was devastating. From that moment on we decided to embrace and perfect our knowledge about digital imaging. We love how it has freed us up so we can be more creative and experimental than ever before. Surely it has increased the work-load in the field, but we would much rather see our photos each night, instead of waiting for weeks to know if we have succeeded the way we intended. Throughout the day we do not look much at our LCD screens, only to quickly check exposures. We know all how unreliable they can be anyway.Do we romantically yearn to shoot film again? Perhaps, but only when using larger formats, when you really approach making photographs in an entirely different way.
At the end of March, I wrote in my blog a similar crencon I’ve had for some time now (see link). I’m self taught and from the beginning wanted to shoot medium format but couldn’t afford it. So, I taught myself to shoot 35mm as if it was medium or large format, slowly, deliberately, with awareness, rather than multi-frame motor drive, wham bam thank you ma’am.I put off going digital as long as possible and, initially, kept to my shooting regimen. It was easy to fall from grace and the quality of my work suffered. Getting caught up in the technology made me lose a but of myself in the images I made.It’s funny, Edward Weston back in the 1930s complained about photographers getting too wrapped up in gadgets and technology and that sentiment is as applicable today as it was then. Even more so, I think. Photography, with the associated technology, has become a series of button presses leading to a manufactured creation rather than a conscious mental and spiritual involvement by the photographer and hands-on production. The art is driven by the availability of technology and someone else to create the coding that allows us to manipulate and intangible, invisible set of binary codes eventually becoming a physical image (in print only) of something that may or may not be of our own imagination. Sure, we point, compose and expose, but the rest?When I find myself being sucked too deep into Photoshop, I grab my Polaroid SX-70 camera and some of the last remaining stock of instant film I have and go out to make real photographs.