Frog Umbrella by Chris Marquardt

It's not the camera, it's the photographer. We all know that. Do we live it? Not always. Which is why I did a deliberate "lesser photographer" thing.

Where I would usually have the iPhone in my pocket as an emergency or backup camera, this time I made a deliberate decision to go out and shoot with nothing but the iPhone. No big medium format camera. No DSLR. Just the iPhone 4s.

Our creativity strives under constraints. Some of the greatest photography has been made with cameras that some of today's photographers wouldn't even touch with a ten-foot-pole. So I went an extra step and instead of using the iPhone's built-in camera app, I used one that most people would call crippled. Its name is NoFinder and it is pretty much what the title of the app says: a camera without a viewfinder.

Now adding that kind of a restriction might initially sound silly, but it has turned out to be surprisingly good for the creative side of things. Not being able to look through a viewfinder helped me concentrate on the actual scene a lot more than if I had looked through a viewfinder. Pointing the camera without a display also left a certain margin of error, but in the end for many shots that lead to interesting and unusual framing choices that I wouldn't have made with a viewfinder.

Most of those accidental choices of frame weren't that exciting, but then there were a few that I found really interesting. And again: I wouldn't have arrived at them any other way.

The last two constraints that I placed myself under turned out to be pretty much the most beneficial ones: my decision to set the app to only take square pictures and to work in black-and-white only.

The lack of a viewfinder initially made it harder for me to judge the angle of view, but after a few shots it became pretty clear how much would be in the picture. As an added benefit I now have a pretty good idea of the field of view that I can get from the iPhone. I didn't really have that angle visualized before.

And in the end that's how Frog Umbrella came into existence. Being able to see the entire scene with my two eyes, I could watch the umbrella kid walking away from the building and while it was doing so, I fired three shots while trying to anticipate the framing.

And the third shot was the charm. That's my kind of picture - everything fits nicely, the frog's eyes are doubled in the building, every element in the photo feels like it belongs exactly where I put it. I'll be happy when I bring home one single picture like this every time I go out shooting. I'm still working on that.

» Frog Umbrella on Flickr (leave a comment)

I recently posted a bunch of pictures that I took back in the United States in August.

Here are their stories.

Clicking on pictures opens them in a new window.

Let me start with the one picture that is my favorite of the whole bunch. It's Liliana, the daughter of my friend, photographer and parfumeur Douglas Hopkins and I made several pictures while we spent some time during my stay in Washington D.C.

I try my best to treat children with the same respect and at same eye level as I treat anyone else, and I try to carry that into my photography whenever possible. Lili sat on a structure in front of the Washington Air and Space museum, and when I noticed what the sun and the wind were doing with her hair, I took a few shots. What came out was one of those in-between pictures, where the posing stops and the real emotion happens.

Lili again, at the museum's gift shop, trying on props. This time I deliberately didn't shoot her at eye level, so I could emphasize the huge gap between the little girl and the pilot's gear, making for quite some contrast and fun. The goofy look on her face helped a lot to make this a humorous picture.

This is one of those street shots where I'm really happy that everything has it's place. The guy in the foreground sits very comfortably in the corner, facing outward, which gives him a bit of a lost feeling, and the fact that he's sitting on the curb holding his face, helps a lot in conveying that feeling. I shot several frames while different people walked past, the guy in the background also touching his face was the final winner.

Meet Peter, his friends and his dog. This one I'm very proud of. At first I walked past them, and the stream of thoughts in my mind went a bit like this: "Awesome, three guys in wheelchairs, with a tiny dog, I totally should take a picture of them. But how would you feel sitting in a wheel chair and some stranger asking to take your picture? But it's such a great scene! But I really don't want to hurt anyone's feelings…" and so on. At that point I had long walked past them, but then luckily the urge to get that picture won, I turned around, approached them, asked if they'd mind me taking a picture of them and they said "Oh sure, absolutely!" and I took about 10 shots of them from various angles.

I tried from their eye level, which I felt was the appropriate thing to do, but the busy background (it was at a street festival) didn't work, so I had to revert back to a standing perspective. A bit of tilt on the lens helped guide the attention to the three - and to the dog, wearing an SF Giants jersey.

I come to the United States every year to hold photo workshops. One of them was the Fire & Night workshop in San Francisco. I always wanted to include night photography in the workshops, and adding fire to the mix turned this into a really exciting one! There were a lot of pictures with lots of detail in the flames and great color contrasts between warm and cold, but in the end this is one of my favorites, even though the flame itself is blown out. I love how it shows the raw power of the flame, its strength to light the entire scene, its heat, and the motion of the fire breather juxtaposed with the other guy waiting.

Last but not least, the Fire & Night workshop also took us out to Treasure Island to take pictures of the San Francisco skyline at night - or rather at the blue hour. That term is misleading though, as it actually describes a window of maybe 10 to 15 minutes. It's the time shortly after sunset, where the sky turns a deep blue. We were really lucky to get the fog behind San Francisco lit by the city lights and glow in a bright orange. The color contrast with the sky turned out very dramatic. Initially I was unhappy about the clouds in the sky, but they turned out to add some great drama to the pictures.

Christoph Marquardt

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Car Train (click to view and comment on flickr)

Man muss analoge Bilder auf die Schatten belichten, die Lichter finden sich dann schon von alleine. Solches hört man immer wieder, und es ist schon ein Stück weit berechtig, speziell wenn man sich im Bereich der "guten" und "normalen" Belichtung befindet.

Die wirklich spannenden Bilder finden sich allerdings oft in den Extremen.

Was, wenn man sich an die Enden heran pirscht, an die Bereiche ganz im dunkeln oder im hellen? Bereiche, die sich an anderen Stellen auch gerne mal "Zone 2" oder "Zone 9" schimpfen. Bereiche, die man als guter Fotograf gefälligst mit einem Reflektor oder einem Blitz aufzuhellen hat?

Dort begibt sich so mancher Fotograf dann in derart unbekanntere Gefilde, dass er sich nicht mehr so ganz auf die Dinge verlassen mag, die er viele Jahre lang gelernt und praktiziert hat.

Ist Schattenzeichnung wirklich so wichtig? Darf man nicht doch diese Ungewissheit ins Bild legen, die dem Betrachter Spielraum zur Erforschung gibt?

Von 15.-17. Juli 2011 halten wir in Braunschweig einen Doppelworkshop gemeinsam mit Spürsinn zu den Themen Fotografie am Ende des Lichts und Entwicklung am Ende des Lichts, in dem wir uns ganz analog und mit viel Spielfreude in die Extreme begeben.

Die dunkle Ecke im Keller, in der sich die Monster verstecken, mag beängstigen...

...spannend ist sie allemal.

As my analog journey continues, I get deeper into trying different film combinations and different developments with different cameras - I'm in fact almost turning into a camera and film collector, even though I am making a point to actually use the cameras and not just put them on display to let them collect dust.

Last weekend while on a large format workshop (I'll talk about this another time) I took pictures using my 35mm Minolta X700 with a 35/1.8 lens on it and a roll of Efke 100 film, which I later pushed to ISO 400 in Rodinal R09 one shot developer. I used this 1+50 recipe for development.
(click for bigger size and comments)


Then today I got the package with a Zeiss Ikon Ikonta B (this is what it looks like, here's a review) that I got from eBay. It's a 6x6 medium format camera with a folding front, has a 75mm lens and takes 120 roll film. It also has an uncoupled rangefinder built in, which means you'll focus with the range finder, then take that result and dial it in on the lens. A two step process for focussing with a nice built-in error margin. And it doesn't come with a light meter, so you're down to external metering. All this slows down the process quite a bit, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a different way of working.



To me there is quite a different feeling between the results that come out of those two cameras. The 35mm pictures from last weekend give me an upbeat feeling. Even though they are on the darkish side, they feel very open and inviting to me.

In contrast the pictures I took today almost freak me out. In a good way. Almost a depressive vibe, which is what I was going for when I took them. That and a bit of luck, as it was the first time I used this camera and the first time I developed this specific film in this specific way.

The pictures from both these sessions touch me in different ways, and evoking emotion is one of my main reasons for doing photography. For me a good picture is the one that touches me.

So what makes those two photo sessions have such different results?

Let me try to analyze:

Weather
The weather was almost the same, both times the sky was overcast, but the 35mm pics were all either taken at night, or indoors, so there was definitely a different quality of light by default. Hard to compare from that perspective.

Film
The 35mm pictures were shot on Efke 100 film at ISO 400, then pushed during development. The Ikonta pictures were shot using Rollei Tonal 100 (an orthopanchromatic film) which is also an ISO 100 film, also pushed to 400 during development. Both films are different animals, and I intentionally did not scan both of them to grayscale, but left the color information intact. You can see the Tonal 100 having a slightly warmish tone which I think helps the vintage nature of the camera I used.

Both films also get a bit more grainy due to the push development, but it doesn't show as much in the medium format film due to its much bigger size compared to the 35mm negative.

Format & Lens
6x6 medium format, that's 60x60mm. Compare that to the 24x36mm that a 35mm camera does. 3600 vs. 864 square millimeters.

Let's try to compare: the 35mm camera's normal focal length would be 43mm, the diagonal of the film. The 35mm lens is therefore slightly wide angle. The normal focal length for a 6x6 camera is about 85mm, so the 75mm are also slightly wide, so in that respect they sort of compare.

There is one big difference though: The size of the film has a big influence on depth of field. At the same aperture and distance and comparable focal length, the medium format camera will give you less depth of field, which you can see in the pictures. In order to get the same shallow depth of field with the 35mm camera, you will either have to get closer to the subject, or you have to use a wider open aperture.

Crop
The 35mm format has an aspect ratio of 3:2, the medium format of the Ikonta B is 1:1 - square. The pictures I tend to get out of a square format are often much more closed and less dynamic compared to the more open 3:2 crop. In one of the 35mm images I even used an almost 3:1 ratio.

Composition
The two series are fundamentally different in composition. With the 35mm I used much more close-up action, and the compositions are overall more dynamic. The faucet is dynamic in it's assymetrical nature, the rainy window balances out the light sources, one behind a rainy window and many other blurry ones in the far distance. And the Canadian flag is a very dynamic experiment where I moved the camera while exposing for a second. There is also not much that connects the pictures. (Maybe water could be the connecting element, but then you'd have to soak the Canadian flag, and I like Canada way too much to do that)

In contrast the 6x6 pictures from today are all very static. They all share strong verticals and those verticals are dead center. This is something the 6x6 format makes me do. I can't help it. I didn't notice until I returned home and scanned the pictures. Looking at each individually, I think those three pictures are okay. I believe putting them together in a triptych creates something bigger than the sum of the individual pictures.

Vignetting
All vignetting that you see is a product of the lenses used. The 35mm lens has some vignetting when shot wide open - and all the shots you see are shot wide open. The Ikonta also does vignetting, even stopped down one or two f-stops. In fact, while the 35mm pictures were shot at f1.8, the Ikonta pictures were all shot at f5.6 - that's a difference of over three stops. And the vignette the Ikonta's lens produces at this aperture is just very silky and smooth and vintage feeling.

Conclusion
I'm not sure what to draw from this comparison, but I will take a few personal observations away from it:

• The 35mm format tends to produce more dynamic results, the 6x6 Ikonta ends up with more static pictures
• The vignette produced by the Ikonta looks great. Must. Use. Ikonta. For. Portrait. Session.
• Due to its warm tone, the Tonal 100 film is a good choice for vintage type results. Its orthochromatic nature helps this feeling too
• Both the Efke 100 and the Tonal 100 can easily handle push development to ISO 400. The Efke 100 reacts with a bigger contrast boost than the Tonal 100, which is more soft in that respect
• Working with the 6x6 is much slower (no built-in light meter, two step focusing), and as a result I tend to end up being a bit less experimental than I am with the 35mm
• This is also helped by the fact that a roll of 120 film on a 6x6 camera yields only 12 pictures, the 35mm film allows for 3 times the exposures
• Grey November weather is great for shooting with the Ikonta, it allows me to be lazy with the light metering, because nothing changes much. The 35mm with its built-in meter is more agile in quickly changing conditions
• The depth of field on the 6x6 is much more shallow than on the 35mm, which will help isolate subjects even if they are not very close
• The Zeiss Ikon Ikonta B is a vintage camera with bellows, which makes it much more interesting for passers-by than the much more modern and regular looking Minolta. This can be a great conversation starter, but it can be in your way if you want to inconspicuously take pictures. Street photography with the Ikonta? Probably not.

Do you have any specific camera/film combinations that help you take pictures of certain moods and with certain characteristics?

Every now and then I run into a song that I *have* to listen to over and over again without getting sick of it. Strasbourg / St. Denis is one of those. My music taste could probably be described as eclectic, and this kind of jazz definitely has a place in my heart, and I'd love to play the bass on this song with a good band one day.

So without further ado here is Roy Hargrove (this is only an audio track, but YouTube was the only place I could find it in an embeddable form)

By the way, I bought the entire album without listening to any of the other tracks, just based on this one song.

Picture: typographica.org

Do photography and typograhy have more in common than the "ography"?

I remember back in high school I used to doodle my own fonts on checkered paper instead of paying attention to the math lessons. And not just individual letters, I drew entire alphabets. Numbers and special characters and all. Many of them were quite similar, rather geometric, and I distinctively remember trying to make them look well balanced and getting the distance between the individual letters right.

This all came back when I ran across an article on typographica.org titled Making Geometric Type Work.

I knew almost nothing about typography back in high school, and it was years later that I started to read up on the subject. However, what I did know was what I liked. And I tried to figure out why I liked things.

Typography is everywhere. Look around you, the world would be quite a different place if you removed all the written words from it.

Typography is about design as much as it is about helping to convey messages. If you talk to type designers, you'll hear them use words like balance, width, joins, alignment, spacing - the exact same terms that we photographers use in the context of image composition.

And yes, it isn't that much of a difference - actually learning about typography and other visual media will inevitably influence the way you compose your pictures. Mind you, not always in a conscious way. I often catch myself almost accidentally having applied some of these principles when I revisit my images later.

Having made these principles conscious while learning about typography has helped slip them into my subconscious without me even knowing it.

And when I notice the results, it makes me smile.

Do you have anything visual that influences your photography? Let me know in the comments.

We're going back to the Himalayas next spring. To be precise, we are going to see Kathmandu, Lhasa, the north side Everest Base Camp, and the east side of Mt. Everest.

We are not doing this alone, we will take a group of 15 photographers. The last trek has been an unforgettable adventure for me. This was my first time in Asia and I have returned with an enormous amount of new impressions and pictures. And I can't wait for the next trek to start!

I also wish I had taken the picture in this post. Well, I haven't, she has. You can't have everything, can you?

Let's analyze it.

For me this is a great example of a glimpse into the every-day life of a different culture. My eyes first get drawn in to the brighter areas of the picture, and to the places where contrasts are. I then start to explore and take in the scene and the meaning of what I'm seeing. A woman bending down, apparently busy washing something. Took me a few seconds to realize that she's actually washing a carpet. With a bowl of water. On the ground.

And all of a sudden there is this colorful story that starts to emerge in my mind. Why is she washing a carpet? Doesn't she have a vacuum cleaner? Most likely not. Vacuum cleaners are expensive where she lives. Electricity is either sparse or at least not reliable at all. Can't she put the carpet into her washing machine? Oh wait, same issues.

At the same time these thoughts are going through my mind, I keep exploring the image, I notice the beautiful reflections in the foreground, I realize that the ground behind the carpet is dry, so it wasn't rain that got the ground wet, it all comes from the carpet cleaning. Does she do that every week? Every month? Is the carpet something of value for them and is that why she carefully cleans it? Or was it just necessary because it had become too dirty?

And then there are the very formal image criteria. Subject? Check. (The woman). Placement? Off center. Leaves space for the great reflections. And gives the lines in the pavement the function to lead your eyes back up to the subject. Foreground/background separation? Works nicely.

Have you ever washed a carpet? How do you go about analyzing images? Do you spend time to think about them? Let us know in the comments!