Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

The lumiere project has been a collection of soundless minutes for two years now with Brittany and I collecting videos. The project is still going strong in no small part due to continued participation and support from talented people like Michael and Sam. The first four videos are still online showing rusty tools and cars moving slowly (1, 2, 3, 4).

In the department on non-moving, non-digital images factory takeover has turned one year old. It is full of images from the household's old cameras and it is a very fun thing to produce. The latest addition is a Lubitel 166 and I'm enjoying the medium format film.

This year's the new project is the new Hoist that I mentioned in my previous post. We have taken all the things we learned from making collaboration software for two years and applied it to the new product and the result is software that works like you (rather than software that dictates how you should work). It's a new paradigm for collaboration where the individual is empowered in a way you don't usually see. I'm very excited about showing off the result of 5 months development off next week when we start holding workshops.

Umberto Eco talks about open texts, those that have many blank spots where reader interpretation can thrive. In the age of DSLRs and the photographic norms from Flickr where aestetics have become an unnatural obsession with 'sharpness' the technicalities of recording an image leaves little room for an open text (there are of course other way to make a photograph open). It is only when the equipment performs below par that we get an excercise in reader interpretation. Take for example the above photo that I got back from the photo lab yesterday. Somehow my shutter had become sticky after the first two exposures and now I'm left with 34 very open texts to interpret.

I'll readily admit that I have a camera disease. The newest and exciting member of the family is a Konica Auto S2. I bought it from a very nice young man on Craigslist for $20. The Konica Auto S2 is a rangefinder camera from the mid 1960s. It has a 45mm/f1.8 lens. As you may have guessed the "Auto" in the name refers to the built-in lightmeter that allows for shutter priority photography. Unfortunately the lightmeter in mine is broken and I have to guess at what the correct exposure would be before each shot. I've been through one roll of film with the camera and it's shown to not be much of a problem. The 1-hour photo place can compensate for most errors in the development process.

Shooting with a rangefinder is a different experience than I'm used to. First of all the camera itself is much lighter than the very heavy Topcon Unirex SLR that I've been hauling around lately. As a result it's easier to keep steady.

Focusing a rangefinder involves matching two superimposed images in the viewfinder. This operation takes a bit of practice, but is neither easier or harder than focusing an SLR. It can however be hard to see what's going on in very bright light. In those cases the SLR is faster to handle. In low light the rangefinder wins by a large margin. Indoors it can be hard to see what's going on as the SLR's viewfinder becomes very dark very quickly because of all the light lost in the mirrors. The rangefinder doesn't have a mirror box and the viewfinder is much much brighter and the two superimposed images are pretty easy to match up in low light.

Finally, the Topcon Unirex is very loud as the mirror slaps up and while that's fun to listen to it can be very disruptive in certain situations. On the other hand I can use the Konica to take pictures during presentations without annoying the other participants. There is no mirror that needs to move up, only a quiet leaf shutter to open and close.

This doesn't mean I'm jumping on the rangefinder bandwagon entirely. The unirex has a better design on the shutter speed and aperture rings making it better to handle and it can focus significantly closer to the lens (especially with an inexpensive diopter filter). Also, using a polarizer filter with a rangefinder is next to impossible so when I'm in that mood I'll grab the SLR.

If you stumble over a $20 rangefinder camera I highly recommend going for it. At the very least it's a fun experiment to try a different camera design than the ever-present SLR, and who knows maybe it's what you never knew you always needed.

I'm taking photos on film again and it's a lot of fun, if a bit expensive. It began in February with an cheap fisheye camera and by now our collection is up to half a dozen cameras. My current favourite is a Beseler Topcon Unirex that I acquired used for a reasonable $70. It is a consumer SLR from the early 70s (production was stopped in 1973) and despite its age it is in a very good condition.

My father can confirm that I have been talking about SLRs for a long time, but there have been no way I could justify the cost of buying a digital SLR. A used film SLR is another matter and since the Topcon uses an extinct lens mount I will not be tempted to buy additional lenses. I am very pleased with the 50mm f/2 on this camera.

Learning how to use a mostly manual camera is an enjoyable experience. The underexposed and out-of-focus pictures has a certain charm to them and film grain looks good unlike the decidedly un-good look of digital film noise. B and I have setup a photoblog—quaint, I know—where we collect mostly photos shot on film and items from B's vast collection of old family photos.

My first camera was (of course) a film camera. I was 13 and I got it as a present from friends of the family. Fixed-focus, fixed focal length, fixed everything. I still have it is a closet somewhere. There are actually a couple of scans in an old blog entry from that camera. I never used it much because developing film is very expensive for the Danish teenager. Now that I am slightly more affluent (no doubt thanks to the dollar tanking) this is not a great concern. It also helps that the film cameras are either fun (fisheye) or more sophisticated (SLR) than my first.

Someone who is not me invested in a polaroid camera despite the recent news that the polaroid company will cease to produce film (of course this also meant that the camera was extremely cheap). The process and the results are very exciting. The above video shows you the 4 minute development process in just under one minute. There's no audio.

I'm still trying to figure out how to get good use of my 16mb memory card (here and here). My goal was to keep taking pictures until the memory card was full, but with only 8 frames to go some guy with a bluetooth headset needed to move his car and I had to move. We are left with 228 photos at half a second exposure. Next time I must try to do this in the daylight (19 secs; 11mb)

We went to shoot the Pike tonight. This video was assembled from 103 photographs (8 secs; 5 mb).

I spent the holidays in Florida. Many unexpected things played out, one result being a photo album of lawn ornaments in an RV park.

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope you're enjoying it.

Tomorrow it will be 6 months since Richard clarified his view on photography and video. To mark the occasion I will post a quote by Roland Barthes from Rhetoric of the Image and pretend I have another 6 months to write a proper reply. Perhaps it's a red herring, a stalling technique. Hopefully it's food for thought.

[…] The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjuction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence (claims as to the magical character of the photographic image must be deflated); its reality that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is always the stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered. […]

Yes, I had to look up stupefying. Next week: Why French authors prefer semi-colon over period and avoid commas altogether.