Page 4 :: ULTRAsomething

Posted by Egor

· October 1, 2022

The Folly Files III : Blurrography

What’s great about trilogies, is that you know precisely how many instalments you’ll need to endure… unless we’re talking about George Lucas, who has obviously deemed the dictionary to be a purveyor of fake news.

Still, just because there are three of something, it doesn’t mean you need to consume them all. Which — Lucas example extended — is exactly what happened with me and the Star Wars “trilogy.” I nodded off during the first film; never saw the second (or third, fourth, fifth, sixth, etc); and have been shunned by my technology coworkers for decades since. So I’d like to thank the small smattering of ULTRAsomething’s larger smattering of readers who’ve soldiered through to this, the final chapter in the Folly Trilogy — a trio of articles discussing “taking photos with cameras that are utterly inconsistent with modern visual tastes or with 21st century photo dissemination techniques.”

The first camera in this trilogy, the Kodak Stereo camera, qualifies as “folly” because its images, while likely to engage with an audience, are kept from doing so thanks to a 200 year dearth of suitable stereo viewing and distribution methodologies.

Unlike the Kodak Stereo camera, the second camera — the Pinsta — produces images that can be easily viewed and distributed through traditional means — but it succumbs to “folly” because I, the photographer, can’t be bothered to spend the inordinate amount of time and effort required to produce a single decent photograph — much less a collection.

The third and final camera in the Folly Trilogy — the Ford MVP — is easy to carry and enjoyable to shoot (unlike the Pinsta); while producing standard 35mm images (unlike either the Kodak or the Pinsta). Unfortunately, the Ford MVP is guilty of looking more like a camera than acting like one. So cheaply made, it makes the build quality of Lomography cameras look like Hasselblads. And its image quality? No reason to change the metaphor, because it also makes the output of a Lomography camera look like a Hasselblad. If you ever wanted to smear a lens with Vaseline to get a dreamy effect, but didn’t have any Vaseline handy, this is the camera to reach for.

Obviously, Ford Motor Company didn’t make this camera, but they did slap their logo on the box — once offering it as incentive for customers to pony up for a new pony car. It’s from the same dubious lineage as the more widely known Time Magazine and Sports Illustrated cameras, which also served to sweeten the perceived value of parting with one’s cash. Unlike those zine cams, which had faceplates imprinted with the words “Time” or “Sports Illustrated”, the Ford is emblazoned with the letters “MVP”. Why? I have no idea, but I’m using it as a motivational tool. Preferable, too, is Ford’s decision to give it a swanky “chrome” body, which definitely out-hips those boring black magazine variants.

I’m guessing the camera dates from around the mid-1980’s, which corresponds precisely with my time at Ford Motor Company — though my job developing Ford’s high-end, acoustically-tuned, premium/branded sound systems left me ignorant of the mechanizations of Ford’s marketing “brains.” This little bit of Egor trivia is precisely why my friend — one of the few people aware of my automotive past — leapt at the chance to connect the dots, and gifted me with a Ford MVP that she stumbled upon in a Portland camera shop.

Belying a body made from Fisher-Price grade plastic, and a rewind crank that falls apart if you turn the camera upside down, the MVP sports a 50mm lens with an actual glass element. It even provides a modicum of exposure control via its pictograph-based aperture dial — its odds of relevancy depending, obviously, on your choice of film speed. Rumour has it the camera’s one and only shutter speed is 1/100s — which I figure is probably correct within an order of magnitude or two.

The MVP is much heftier than I expected, which gives an impression of quality — though one that’s been debunked by various websites, which reveal the presence of a lead weight placed in the bottom of the camera to produce exactly this illusion. I was tempted to disassemble mine to confirm the weight’s actual chemical compound, but given the build quality of the rewind crank, I opted not to risk removing any screws from any plastic.

The bottom of the camera proudly states “Made in Taiwan,” though I have yet to uncover its actual manufacturer, or who was responsible for its development. Not that it really matters, since designing butt-simple film cameras isn’t rocket science; much less automotive engineering.

The better question is “who, in Ford’s marketing department, thought this would make a good promotional item?” Any glee a customer might have felt pulling this from their bag o’ new car swag, would surely dissipate once they drove that new Mustang to the Fotomat™ kiosk and picked up their prints.

One of the main reasons I shoot half frame cameras (besides the fact I’m ‘cheap’), is their murky fidelity — somewhere between a photograph and a charcoal drawing. It’s a look I love, and one vaguely similar to that from the MVP, in spite of the fact it’s not a half-frame camera. However — not content with just a little smudge — the MVP pushes the murk factor into overdrive. It’s as if you took a half frame image; loaded the film on the developing reel without bothering to use a dark bag; processed it in exhausted chemicals; framed it behind a frosted sheet of plastic; and coated the corners with Canola Oil.

I’ll admit, given the curious inclusion of a glass lens, I expected a modicum of fidelity. But once I extracted the first reel from the development tank, those expectations got slapped down by the big clammy hand of reality. The images this camera produces are an abomination — and this is exactly why I love it.

Unfortunately (from a remuneration standpoint) my tastes are “utterly inconsistent with modern visual tastes.” So any camera that delivers such taste (in spades, no less) falls squarely into the trilogy’s definition of folly. Characterful images are contrary to the inclinations of the literally-minded, sharpness-obsessed influencers of today. Most folks want their camera to define the subject, not interpret it. They want to see details, not suggestions. Perhaps, if this was the late 19th century and the dawn of pictorialism, it would be a camera of desire — much like the Kodak Stereo camera would have been a camera of desire in the mid-19th Century. But now? In a time where the vast majority of humans equate idealized, hyper-realism with great photography? The Ford MVP is going to offer the opposite.

Fortunately, folly will always find a home at ULTRAsomething — because every fool needs a paradise.

Final Ratings:

Personal Enjoyment Factor : 7. It would have been an “8,” but I dinged it a point for the mindful vigilance required to keep the camera upright, so the rewind crank remains intact. Viewing its photos is also quite enjoyable if, like me, your tastes reside on the outskirts of sanity. The MVP is like many of my favourite, no-budget, 1970’s drive-in movies — so bad it’s good.

Convenience : 8. Sure, it could be more convenient if, instead of manually setting the exposure via pictograph, the camera set it automatically. Then again, imprecise exposure is part and parcel of the camera’s gestalt, so any auto-exposure feature would need to include an element of randomness… which, come to think of it, would definitely be a camera I’d buy.

Long Term Potential : A safe and natural alternative to antipsychotic medications. As someone who has a tendency to occasionally step into a quagmire of banality and literalism and grow woefully depressed because of it, I need only point this camera at the most tiresome and vapid of subjects, look at the prints, and be instantly pulled from my moronic morass.

ABOUT THE ARTICLE : This is the final instalment in a trilogy of articles exploring cameras that are totally at odds with the expectations and demands of 21st Century life. The first was here, and the second was here. Many of you will be pleased to learn that, were it not for my heartless ability to exclude several worthy contenders (including the Insta360, a sample of which is seen to the right), this “trilogy” could easily have turned into an extended “series.” You’re welcome.

Regarding that Ford JBL Audio Systems tear sheet: Toward the end of my time at the company, there was actually a brief collision between my audio design duties and Ford’s marketing department. This glaringly patriarchal ad, which I assure you I had no hand in creating, ran in all the major stereo and hifi magazines that year. Alas, though my hand wasn’t in the ad, the same can’t be said for my face, which is on the far left, looking so very… um… I’m lost for an adjective here. I was paid $1 for the shoot, which marked both the beginning and the end of my professional modelling career.

REMINDER: If you’ve managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from the plethora of material contained on this site, please consider making a DONATION to its continuing evolution. As you’ve likely realized, ULTRAsomething is not an aggregator site. Serious time and effort go into developing the original content contained within these virtual walls — even the silly stuff.

Categories : Photo Gear

Posted by Egor

· September 1, 2022

The Folly Files II: Toilography

If patience is a virtue, then Satan’s in the kitchen, whipping up canapés for my impending “Welcome to Hell” party.

Every couple of days, I venture out — camera in hand — for a quick 8 km walk. On an average day, I’ll push about a dozen frames through a camera — rarely bothering to pause for the 1/60th of a second it takes for the shutter to complete its journey across the film plane. Occasionally, with reservation, I might slow down slightly when I snap a photo. But a full stop? Who has the patience for that? Blurry schmurry. I’ve got things to do.

Related to my impatience — and the reason why Satan’s also enlisted a crack team of demon sous chefs to prepare some delightful amuse-bouche offerings — is my pathological need to be unencumbered. I don’t want useless crap weighing me down or impeding my freedom of motion. No backpacks; no bulging pockets; no bulk; no weight. One look at the preponderance of compact cameras in my cabinet will confirm this. The heaviest, most ponderous cameras I own are probably the Leica rangefinders.

So with this is mind, what’s the silliest camera I could possible buy? A large format camera, you say?

Surely, you don’t think I’m that foolish!

OK. I’ll admit — overcome by a completely unrealistic notion that I would somehow magically become someone I’m not — I did purchase a large format camera earlier this year. But in my defense, it’s “only” a 4×5 (not an 8×10); has a pinhole (rather than a bulky lens); and is made entirely of plastic — placing its weight squarely in line with other cameras in the cabinet. But if you think these caveats somehow exclude me from the rank of “imbecile” on the Levine and Marks 1928 IQ Classification Scale, we need to dive a little deeper.

The camera in question is a “Pinsta” — a modern 4×5 pinhole kickstarter camera, designed to capture images on direct positive paper, rather than on a negative. What distinguishes it from other direct-positive pinhole cameras is the way it doubles as a portable darkroom — enabling you to develop the print right inside the camera. I suppose this is what puts the “insta” in “Pinsta” — at least if you’re the sort who measures time in “eons.” The manufacturer also advertises it as a camera “that fits in your pocket.” Seeing as it makes a twin-lens Rollieflex look svelte, I’m assuming the Pinsta folks must also be in the couture business, and that their new PinstaPocket™ baggy burlap ready-to-wear SackPants™ collection has yet to hit the Paris runways.

So — bearing in mind my Hell-bound tendency toward impatience, and my accompanying pathological insistence on unimpeded mobility — let’s explore, point-by-point, the various conflicts betwixt myself and this camera.

To begin, it’s a large format camera — designed to take exactly one shot before you need to reload it. And loading a large format camera isn’t as simple as popping in a new 35mm cassette, or unspooling a fresh roll of 120 film. Instead, it requires putting both the camera and direct positive paper into a changing bag; zipping it up; opening the camera; unboxing the paper; removing a sheet from the inner light-blocking plastic bag; fumbling around to feel which side is the emulsion side; inserting it in the camera; putting the paper back in the bag/box; reassembling the camera; unzipping the bag and extracting the camera.

After that, the camera needs to be mounted on a tripod, positioned and levelled — a further interminably exasperating act, which is exacerbated by the fact that the Pinsta is not a view camera. In fact, there is no viewfinder at all — no ground glass focussing screen; nothing. In order to know what is and is not in the frame, I need to crouch, squat, and contort my body to look through the camera’s little sight line aids — one pair for each of the four corners of the image.

And if this wasn’t slow enough, consider that the images are not being exposed on film, but on paper — paper that has an ISO of 3. Yes, THREE. Which is pretty drastic, considering I think ISO 100 film is borderline “too slow.” So recording onto a medium that’s 5 stops slower means standing around 32 times longer waiting for it to expose. For those of you thinking, “chill out, dude — 1/2 second isn’t that much longer than 1/60th of a second,” let me remind you that this is a pinhole camera. Which means I’m not shooting at f/8, I’m shooting at f/zillion (give or take — I haven’t bothered to do the math).

The simple “Sunny 16 rule” isn’t quite as simple when you’re dealing with these sorts of film speeds and aperture openings. So I need to spend a bit of time staring at the scene — peering into the shadows; gazing at the sky; and assessing the overall dynamic range — all in an effort to make a total wild-ass guess as to how long the exposure should be. Usually, on a typical overcast Vancouver day, it’ll take several minutes for enough light particles to march single file through the tiny opening to expose the paper.

Once I make my wild-ass guess, I enter it into my iPhone’s timer app, open the Pinsta’s shutter, and stand around for the next several minutes — waiting for the paper to record an image, and wondering why I don’t just take a shot with that very same iPhone, and move along.

Also, as someone who likes to practice the fine art of invisibility whilst taking photos, I can assure you this is not an invisible act — the changing bag on the ground; the tripod’s footprint; all that crouching and squatting and scrutinizing of some big goofy black box — people will notice you. They mill about, looking quizzically at the process, yet they remain oblivious to the fact that an actual photo is being taken — passing in front of the “lens”, or even parking themselves there in an effort to work out what I’m doing and why I’m now just standing around doing nothing but looking bored.

When the alarm goes off and I close the shutter, a full fifteen minutes will have passed between the time I decided to take a photo and actually took it. Alas, the process doesn’t end there. After all, I can’t take another photo until I’ve developed and removed the film I just shot.

This is where things get particularly interesting, since I’m now required to extract three large syringes from a giant backpack — one filled with developer; one filled with fixer; and the third filled with water for washing — and inject them, one-after-the-other into the body of the camera.

Needless to say — in the middle of an urban location with an epidemic of open drug use — anyone juggling syringes full of brown liquid does not exactly garner positive attention. At this stage, I know I need to move quickly before the cops arrive — but it’s hard to be quick when you’re developing a print.

The contents of the first syringe get injected into the camera and the whole box gets swirled around for a minute or two, making sure fresh developer constantly flows over the print. The syringe protrudes from the camera the whole time — waiting for me to suck the liquid back out of the box and horrify anyone still in the vicinity.

Next I inject the fixer, which requires about 5 minutes of swirling and swishing before it too gets sucked back into the syringe, followed by another syringe, which injects water, which washes the print for another minute or so.

At this point, I crack open the camera, whip out a knife (exhibiting yet more anti-social behaviour) and use it to pry the saturated, shiny, dripping wet print from the camera back. I shake off the excess fluid, sandwich the print in a drying frame, seal it in a ziplock bag, and slide the whole thing into one of the backpack’s outer pockets.

The camera gear gets dried off; the syringes get put away; the tripod gets folded up; the changing bag gets rolled up, and the entire shebang gets stuffed back into my multitude of bags and packs, ready for the next spot.

And speaking of spots, I can really only photograph a maximum of three locations before the chemicals are exhausted — and, truth be told, that third development is rather woeful. So, unless I plan to haul all this around for the purpose of taking only two photos, I need to also carry an additional jug full of pre-mixed developer; another full of pre-mixed fixer; and a third filled with water. I also need to carry an even larger, empty jug for disposing of the exhausted chemicals.

So basically, it takes me 30 minutes to take the same photo I could have taken in 1/60th of a second with any other camera.

Shooting with the Pinsta is not just a ridiculous drain on the amount of time I have left on earth — it’s an equally ridiculous burden on my need for unencumbered mobility. On a normal photo excursion, I carry — in one hand — a single camera with only the lens that adorns it. A tiny, empty bag is slung over my shoulder — just in case Vancouver does its thing and begins to drop rain from the sky. But a Pinsta-based photo excursion means packing a full size backpack, a large shoulder bag, and a tripod — basically the same amount of gear the average college graduate uses to travel the world in their “gap” year.

Fortunately, I can endure anything — even an assault on both my patience and mobility — should the results prove worth it. Alas, one look at the smattering of photos contained within this article indicates they are not. There are far easier ways to take grungy photos — one of which will be featured in Part Three of this trilogy.

I have no doubt this would be a dream camera for someone who isn’t me, or isn’t anything like me. A hermit monk perhaps; or maybe someone who breeds pack mules; or, at the very least, someone whose personality aligns, rather than clashes with their romanticism. There are definitely people for whom the Pinsta will unlock their creativity, rather suppress it; who will bond with the workflow, rather than rebel; and who will use it to create works of art that trample everything I’ve done in my 30+ years of hit and run photography. But in my hands it is, without peer, an object of sheer folly. In the words of Dirty Harry, “a man’s got to know his limitations.”

Final Ratings:

Personal Enjoyment Factor : On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being most enjoyable), it rates a negative 3 – ’nuff said.

Convenience : On a scale of 1 to 10, (10 being most convenient), it rates a negative 8 – also ’nuff said.

Long Term Potential : Craigslist

ABOUT THE ARTICLE : This is Part 2 of a three part series exploring the use of cameras totally at odds with the expectations and demands of 21st Century life. Part 1 is here and Part 3 is here.

ABOUT THE PHOTOS : As with all cameras, the image is inverted on the film — but because I’m shooting to direct positive paper, the usual film-to-paper image reversal does not occur. Sure, since I’m simply photographing the 4×5 prints for publication, I could just flip the images in Photoshop — but that seems contrary to the spirit of this camera, so all images remain reversed — exactly as they appear on the physical prints.

Also, I should note that the introductory photo — which shows some of the gear required for a basic Pinsta excursion — is missing a few items, such as the aforementioned knife, plus some towels for drying the camera between shots, and a few large ziplock bags for protecting the wet prints — increasing the bulk and the burden beyond what you see here, and what was able to fit on my table. And yes, “The Making of Skeletal” was, indeed, shot with the iPhone while I was standing around, waiting for the Pinsta exposure to finish.

Categories : Photo Gear

Posted by Egor

· August 1, 2022

The Folly Files I: Stereography

Cheesy British horror anthologies occupy a soft spot in my heart — along with cheesy Italian horror anthologies; cheesy Japanese horror anthologies; cheesy Korean horror anthologies; and… oh, who am I kidding? My heart is big enough and soft enough to accommodate the entire spectrum of 20th century genre cinema.

The point, however, is that sometimes an assemblage of short schlocky silliness is just what the doctor ordered — were I lucky enough to have such a doctor. And if this is true for genre cinema, perhaps it’s true for genre blogs — which I guess is what ULTRAsomething is… though I’ve never really been able to classify its precise genre.

So with this in mind, I decided to craft ULTRAsomething’s next three articles as if they were vignettes in an overarching theme — a theme that, when all three entries were combined, would be about the length of a typical article.

Well, that didn’t happen. This — the first so-called “vignette” — was supposed to clock in at about one-third the length of a typical essay. Instead, it wound up being twice the length. Fortunately, I’m nothing if not adaptable, so instead of calling this next series of three articles an “anthology,” I’m calling it a “trilogy.” Problem solved.

Semantics aside, the thematic structure of the trilogy remains the same as the anthology. Each of the next three articles, whatever their length, will revolve around a different camera — and when I say “different,” I mean “utterly inconsistent with modern visual tastes or with 21st century photo dissemination techniques.” Each camera is a folly unto itself, and each will make you (and me) question whether I harbour some hidden desire to burn my web stats to the ground.

On with the show!

Our first folly is the Kodak Stereo camera from the mid-1950’s.

It’s a rather unorthodox looking box of brown bakelite — the sort of thing that invites unsolicited commentary from total strangers. For this reason, toting the camera on a photo walk requires allocating extra time for the inevitable conversations it provokes. I discovered this on my very first outing, when I ducked into the local grocery, and quickly found myself engaged in the following conversation:

Clerk: “Is that a real camera?”

Me: “Yes.”

Clerk: “Does it work?”

Me: “Yes.”

Clerk: “It looks so weird.”

Me: “It’s a stereo camera. That’s why there are two lenses.”

Clerk: “Oh, so it’s a radio.”

Me: “No, it’s a camera. By stereo I mean it takes 3D photos.”

Clerk: “Like in a circle?”

Me: “No. It takes images that look 3-dimensional, as if they had depth.”

Clerk: “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

Me (in my mind): ‘Of course you haven’t. It predates social media.’

Curiously, she was only the first of three that week, who asked if it was a “real camera.” I’ll admit, I’m as confused about why someone would ask this, as they are about why I’d sling such a thing over my shoulder.

Had I more time (or had they enough interest), I could have explained that the camera’s two lenses are separated by a distance equivalent to that which separates our eyes. One press of the shutter captures two simultaneous images on film — distinguished only by the parallax shift inherent with such separation. When these images are combined in some special way, or viewed side-by-side with (or without) the aid of a stereoscope to merge them, the two images form a phantom centre image, which has a pronounced 3D effect.

Using some surprisingly sharp lenses, the 35mm Kodak shoots 20 pairs of stereo images on a strip of 36 exposure film. Each image is 23 x 24mm in size, and the way each stereo pair is entwined with other stereo pairs on the film makes scanning a bit tedious, but the results (I believe) are worth it.

I’m sure, to anyone who’s only ever taken a photo with a telephone, 1950-something sounds like an eternity ago. They might even believe this camera dates from the dawn of 3D photography, but they’d be wrong. The fact is, stereo photography is almost as old as photography itself.

Niépce took his first photo in 1826 — a mere six years before Charles Wheatstone realized you could take two side-by-side photos and gain access to that precious third dimension. But the whole concept really took off in the 1840s, when optical physicist David Brewster slapped a couple of refracting lenses onto a stereographic viewing device, and caught the attention of Queen Victoria. Thanks to the royal thumbs-up, stereographs lit a fire beneath the rapidly evolving caldron of photographic techniques, and within months the London Stereoscopic Company had manufactured hundreds of thousands of stereoscopes plus a million stereographic prints — employing teams of photographers to travel the world to take 3D images.

Unfortunately, Brewster’s stereograph was not very forgiving of those with either non-aristocratic incomes or less-than-perfect vision, and many people — Oliver Wendell Holmes included — would get headaches from using them. This prompted Holmes to partner with Joesph Bates, and invent an extremely simple, lightweight, handheld device with an adjustable lens-to-photo distance that allowed people with crappy vision and a beer budget to also enjoy 3D photos.

Stereography remained popular for a couple of decades, until it became a victim of its own success — attracting photographers with both dubious imaging skills and a penchant for rephotographing other photographer’s stereo cards. With declining image quality came declining interest. An economic downturn further dampened the appeal of the stereograph, as did the inevitable backlash that occurs when one generation yields to the next. In this case, it was a hip, new breed of young photographers — engaged in the hip, new school of “pictorialism” — who universally proclaimed stereography “a gimmick,” and declared photography’s true purpose was to give an artist’s impression of a scene, and not a clinical rendering.

3D fell from favour in the art world, but found new life in the educational market, where ‘clinical renderings’ were considered a good thing. Over time, as movies and television introduced their own third dimension (time) to the photographic image, the educational market began to erode, and stereographic interest shifted to motion pictures, which adopted another ancient viewing method: the “anaglyphic magic lantern.” Unlike the stereo cards favoured since the Victorian era, this technique did not project two separate side-by-side images, but instead coloured one red and the other cyan, and superimposed them into a single frame. In order to see the 3D effect, viewers used special glasses with one red lens and one cyan lens, thus ensuring each eye would see only the correctly coloured image. As ubiquitous in the mid-20th century as stereoscopes were in the mid-19th, I suspect anyone who’s old enough to remember the panic surrounding Y2K is likely to have at least one pair of cardboard red/cyan 3D glasses in the bottom of a forgotten drawer or box.

As the years progressed, 3D continued to go in and out of fashion — and with each resurgence came and went other viewing methodologies. The simple red/cyan anaglyph glasses yielded to more advanced polarized glasses, which yielded to the active shutter glasses that fuelled the failed 3D TV market in the early part of the 21st century. Lenticular prints and their online equivalent, the “wigglegram”, represent two more attempts to create widespread acceptance of simple 3D photographic stills — each but a blip in the trash heap of trends.

It’s clear that the one unifying factor in stereography’s 200 year struggle to succeed has been (and continues to be) the absence of a suitable viewing mechanism — something I find rather strange. After all, most of us have two eyes with variable focus capability; and there are two images in front of us — so why do we need a mechanical viewing aid at all? Why not just refocus our eyes to form a phantom stereo image between the two projected halves? We can all position ourselves between a pair of stereo speakers, and without donning some sort of elaborate, rickety contraption, we can hear the instruments spread across a phantom sound stage. Our eyes’ ability to localize objects is no different than our ears’.

I’ve had a fascination for stereo photography since, as I child, I first peered through a beige Model G View-Master at a handful of God-awful tourism reels. But it was enough to hook me, and I have subsequently engaged with far more (and far more obscure) types of stereo images than I discuss in this cursory introduction. In the 30 years since I decided to take the leap from photography connoisseur to actual photographer, I’ve wanted to get involved with stereography — but the distribution problem has always stopped me.

Now, however, in my new guise as a photographer who doesn’t give a crap about his legacy, I’ve decided to finally take the plunge.

In general, I’ve settled on three techniques for displaying stereographic images:

Method one (and my favourite, by far) is the classic Victorian approach of stereo cards and an Oliver Wendell Holmes style viewer. Alas, not only is it the most internet-hostile of the techniques, it’s even gallery-hostile — since only one person at a time can engage with a stereograph. This approach guarantees I’m the only one who will see the photos in their greatest glory — hence the need to be comfortable with obscurity.

Method two is the humble red/cyan anaglyph, which can be vaguely satisfying when viewing images online — provided one is willing to rummage around a few drawers and boxes to find that old pair of cardboard glasses. Without such glasses, however, the photos are pure gobbledygook.

Method three, which I find to be the most satisfying for online viewing, is the crossed-view presentation technique. This method requires absolutely no goofy viewing devices and uses nothing more than our own eyes — just like people listen to stereo with nothing more than their own ears. However, many people do need to practice a bit in order to see the phantom image. And sadly, if I’ve learned anything from my time on earth, it’s that most people would rather buy their way to an instant solution than practice their way to a free and better one.

I have posted both crossed-vision and anaglyph images with this article. Those of you without benefit of a ratty old pair of glasses, but who still want to see some stereographs, will need to apply the crossed-view technique. For the unfamiliar, it works like this:

Size your browser such that it’s wider than 1200 pixels.
Click one of the cross-view photos to open it full size (1200 pixels wide).
Position your eyes a little bit more than arm’s length from your computer, and focus on the screen.
Slowly begin crossing your eyes until the two images form a centre, phantom image. It works best if you concentrate on aligning only one single element in the frame (preferably in the foreground). Once aligned, the stereo image should seem to almost snap into place and your eyes will lock focus — allowing you to peruse the image in full 3D glory, and without any viewing aid. If you feel your eyes crossing uncomfortably, you’re trying too hard. In general, your eyes only cross about as much as if you were trying to read a book pressed close to your face.

And if, after practicing, you’re still unable to form the phantom image, don’t sweat it — I’ve got an entirely different folly camera with which to horrify you in the next installment…

Final Ratings:

Personal Enjoyment Factor : 8 – this thing is a blast to shoot. Its only downside is it’s rather addictive and causes me to constantly prowl for scenes that would ‘look good in 3D’ even when I’m carrying a regular camera.

Convenience : 2 – The little aperture slide on top of the camera is a bit fiddly to set, and its through-the-viewfinder bubble level — while both handy and important — triggers 20 bouts of photographic OCD per roll. Scanning is a pain, since pairs are interleaved on the negative, requiring a lot of shuffling back and forth, with every left frame needing its scan exposure documented, so as to set a matching exposure for the right frame. Post processing is also a bit tedious (particularly since I employ three entirely different display techniques), but I’ve mostly automated that now. In general, when you consider the entire process from shooting-to-displaying, this is probably the fussiest camera I’ve used… but it pales compared to next month’s camera…

Long Term Potential : To taunt me from the camera shelf until I finally take that series of impressionist 3D photos I’m planning — photos that will ultimately become my greatest achievement. But with no ability to display them to a mass audience, I will eventually succumb to a devastating psychological breakdown, and a lifelong dependence on anti-depressants.

ABOUT THE PHOTOS: Yes, these images are rather pedantic — so much so that I haven’t even bothered to publish them in a proper ULTRAsomething display format. That’s because, first and foremost, I needed to get comfortable with how the Kodak Stereo camera ‘draws’ a scene in 3D, and I had to devise a scanning and display methodology, as well. At this point, I’m now comfortable with the process, so my next goal (as mentioned in the article) is to start using stereography to create impressionist images — ’cause it’s about time someone thumbed their nose at all the pictorialists who ruined 3D photography in the late 19th century.

Categories : Photo Gear

Posted by Egor

· July 1, 2022

Legacy

Some people live for the here and now; and some live for the future. I’ve historically been one of those future dwellers — always planning; always sacrificing today for the promise of a better tomorrow. Funny thing though: the older you get, the less of a future you have. It’s one of those immutable laws of physics that eventually forces many a “futurist” to become a “here and nower.”

To date, I’ve failed to budge one iota from a tendency to plan several decades in advance — decades that, thanks to those immutable laws, now stretch into the afterlife, and the somewhat nebulous notion of “legacy.”

As legacies go, mine is a bit ramshackle. There were a couple of synth pop albums in the early 1990’s — neither earned me a dime, though friends did report hearing the music while on-hold for Microsoft Tech Support. So I’m pretty sure I don’t want that as my legacy. Additionally, I’ve had a significant hand in numerous music technology innovations — particularly early in my career. These, however, were all conceived and designed while employed by some company or another, and are thus unrecognizable as a personal legacy. Also, there’s that BC License Plate, which is sort of the photography analog to the Microsoft hold music. Which, pathetically, just leaves this website…

Legacy-wise, it seems I have less to mark my time on earth than the guy who knocks up his girlfriend at the high school dance.

But recently — and surprisingly — that iota of mine seems to have shifted ever so slightly, and I’m beginning to think living for the future isn’t really the sophisticated endeavour it’s cracked up to be. Society tends to put us planners on a pedestal, as if careful consideration of one’s future actions is more noble than succumbing to the lure of current delights. But is it? As a lifelong model of such virtue, I’m questioning whether all this planning isn’t just an elaborate ruse — concocted by my subconscious as a way to pretend I’m doing something useful with my life when, in fact, I’m not doing a damn thing. When you live for today, you can assess your situation, and adjust accordingly to maximize each moment. When you live 20 years in the future, there’s no accountability — so you get to be a little lackadaisical on the fine details.

Besides, when did anyone who’s planning 20 years into the future ever achieve a single one of their objectives? What good is living for a future that never comes? When I was 10 and planning for 30, my world was consumed with designing fashionable jetpacks and garages with retractable roofs to facilitate my hovercraft. As I aged, my planning became more practical, and as little as a decade ago, my scenario for this year involved being retired from my day job, working on ULTRAsomething full time, and making annual pilgrimages to Japan. Unfortunately, these plans seemed to collide with someone else’s plans for a worldwide pandemic, savings-eradicating inflation, and a generational disinterest in both the written word and in any sort of metaphoric and/or ‘social landscape’ photography.

If I can’t make feasible plans for life in the future, how am I supposed to make them for death? Why worry about legacy when I don’t even have a currency?

Putting aside my suspicion that legacy planning is merely a mollification of a life lived for naught, there’s another sticky issue: 100 years from now, will there be any humans left to care? That was the timeline for human extinction, suggested by Stephen Hawking at the end of his life — and I’m starting to think he was an optimist. So it’s pretty silly to invest all this time and energy into building a legacy, when there’s only going to be another generation or two. Tops.

So all these plans I’m making for my work to outlive me? They’re as absurd as designing a house with a hovercraft garage. Wouldn’t the more sensible plan be to simply try to take a photo that pleases me when I look at it? Or write a piece of music that I want to listen to? Or pen an essay I actually want to re-read?

Besides, no one really gets to choose their own legacy. Show me the reanimated corpse of most anyone famous, and I’ll show you one ticked-off zombie — annoyed to discover all the inaccurate quotes, actions and beliefs that society has wrongfully attributed to them. My intentions in life are misunderstood enough — I can only imagine how they would be interpreted in death.

What is legacy really? And why do we all want one? At its most basic, it’s really just a desire to be remembered… or at least to have had one’s existence acknowledged. I’ve always balked at the idea that children are a legacy, even though it’s the most surefire way of being mentioned for another generation or two. Some people are so desperate to be remembered, they don’t even care what it is they’re remembered for — just some post-mortem acknowledgement that they once roamed the planet. But what’s the point? I certainly don’t know anything about the people who don’t yet exist, so why care if they know anything about me?

So I’m making a conscious effort to step away from the “legacy planning” thing. And while there’s still a little of it left, I’ll be diving head first into the “here and now.” Obviously though, before doing anything too rash, I’ll need to consider how future generations might perceive this decision of mine… I wouldn’t want to do anything to tarnish my legacy.

ABOUT THE PHOTOS: “Optimism Rally” was photographed with a Leica M10 Monochrom, fronted with a 21mm f/3.4 Super-Elmar-M. “Shoddy Matinée” was shot on Fomapan 100, inside a Nikon 28Ti, and developed in HC-110 (H). “Condo Living” was photographed through a 35mm f/3.5 Elmar LTM lens and Leica IIIc, onto Tri-X at ISO 400, and developed in HC-110 (E). “Placeholder” was shot on FP4+ at ISO 125 and developed in HC-110 (H). The camera was the cheapest bit of utter crap I could possibly find. It shall remain ‘nameless,’ since it’s a gift I’ve yet to present to a photographer friend. Hmm… maybe this is indicative of why I have so few friends.

Categories : Musings

Posted by Egor

· June 1, 2022

Origin Story

Before cinema’s fall from relevancy, most movies were stand-alone, self-contained creations — not episodic instalments in a franchised, multi-segmented marketing blitz. Often, within today’s modern movie franchises, it’s the origin stories that are among the most-loved and lucrative entries — indicative of an audience’s hunger to discover the source of some serialized character’s eccentricities.

Though eccentric itself, I’m not sure if ULTRAsomething counts as a franchise, nor if its readers are as famished for details as the average Batman fan. But another month is upon us and I have to write about something, so now seems as good a time as any to crank out this site’s origin story.

ULTRAsomething first appeared in early 2001 as my online music, photography, sound- and product-design portfolio. Seven years later, it was repurposed into the photo-centric, essay-based format you see before you. But these simple facts are not its origin story. For that, we need to travel all the way back to the days of rabbit ear antennas, dial phones, and typewriters.

Through a series of fortuitous events, as described in Jim’s Victory, a prepubescent, protoplasmic blob now known as Egor, began to compose its own music. As I grew, so too did my thirst for musical knowledge. I became increasingly obsessed with the idea of making ‘weird’ music; got exposed to the avant-garde through some records in my local library; and launched into a lifelong journey of sonic exploration. Music became my primary, all-encompassing love. Unfortunately, my high school guidance counsellor was adamant in her belief that “avant-garde composer” was not a viable career choice, so I decided my only other childhood interest, architecture, would become my vocation.

By the age of 17, my architecture plans were crumbling. The career counselling books all suggested that a “successful architect” would become a wiring or ductwork specialist at a large architectural firm. I wanted to design transformative spaces for human interaction — not be some cog in a machine. So if a five-year architecture program wouldn’t pave the road to becoming the next Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, why was I trading in my dream to become the next Pierre Schaeffer or Karlheinz Stockhausen? Fearful of “succeeding” my way into a tediously uncreative corporate career, I made the last-minute decision to study electrical engineering, hoping I might graduate into a job designing synthesizers.

Instead, I graduated into a job testing high voltage power supplies for the U.S. defence industry — a fate infinitely more soul-crushing than that big-firm architecture gig that had so frightened me. Suffocating beneath the workplace misery, I sought solace in my continued passion for electronic music, and I rekindled my interest in architecture — thinking, perhaps, that it wasn’t too late to switch careers.

Throughout my 20’s, my architectural interests widened more than deepened, and grew to include furniture and industrial design. I began to hang out in architectural bookstores, where trips down other aisles led me to an interest in graphic design, which led me to discover a small sub-section of photography books contained within. Until then, I hadn’t the slightest interest in photography — but through those books, I began to regard photography as a viable and compelling art form. In an act I’m sure delighted the proprietors, I stopped frequenting architectural bookstores, and transferred my browsing habit to art bookstores, which featured more expansive and diverse photography sections.

I devoured the contents of every photography book I saw — whether in stores or libraries. No subject was beyond my scrutiny; no genre unworthy of exploration. I began going to galleries, subscribed to numerous photography-centric fine arts magazines, joined the now-defunct Friends of Photography, and bought membership in the newly opened Ansel Adams gallery in San Francisco. I absorbed every book within that gallery’s store, and would attend each and every exhibition numerous times to scrutinize the prints.

During these years, I learned a lot about photography as a visual medium — about what I liked, what I didn’t like, and why. I learned what made an image work, and I learned the “language” of photography. I even learned about the photographers who made the images, and would study the economic and cultural conditions under which they created them.

And all the while, not once did I ever think about becoming a photographer myself. I saw photography as an art form, which meant it was created by artists — which I most definitely was not. Besides, by this point, I’d abandoned the corporate life and was now a struggling sound designer, composer, music technology writer, and computer music design consultant. The last thing I needed was another thing to struggle with.

It seems absolutely ludicrous from today’s perspective — but after several years spent vacuuming up every photo I could find, I was running out of new photos to look at. Tim Berners-Lee had just invented the World Wide Web, but it would still be several years before anyone realized its potential, and even more before the bandwidth would support photographic images. Fresh into my 30’s, and faced with a dwindling photo supply chain, I decided that if I wanted to see more photographs, perhaps I needed to start taking them.

There was no “Big Bang” — no singular moment that triggered my switch from photography connoisseur to actual photographer. It was simply the logical evolution. And while there were many factors that led me to purchase a brand new Canon EOS 100 (Elan) from Adolf Gasser’s in the fall of 1991, three stand out as significant:

First, was the influence of Bill Brandt’s “London, 1952″ — not because it was a nude (there were hundreds of fine art photographers working in that genre), but because it was the “anti nude” — a tightly-cropped, softly-focussed, high-contrast image that seemed more closely related to architecture and design than to portraiture. It was one of the most beautiful photographs I’d ever seen, yet it broke every rule of classical photography. Aside from this, and some earlier inspirational examples from surrealist’s like Man Ray or the Czech avant-garde, such concepts seemed underrepresented in the photography canon. “Breaking the rules” seemed like an avenue ripe for further exploration. So what if I gave it a try?

Second, in my ever-widening search for new photos, I’d begun to frequent Kinokuniya Books in San Francisco’s “Japantown” neighbourhood. Never mind that I couldn’t read a word of Japanese — I couldn’t read any of my French or German-language magazines either. I was there for the pictures. Most of Kinokuniya’s photo books were chock-full of the most banal landscape, cherry blossom, and cloud formation snapshots imaginable. But entwined amongst them was a smattering of photos that proved positively confounding in their seemingly total disregard for form, function or fidelity. Black and white; out of focus; poorly exposed, gritty yet murky — I couldn’t tell if they were the result of a printing press gone horribly wrong, or were actually intended to look that way. Though I now obviously know this was classic Japanese Provoke-school photography, I hadn’t a clue back then. All I knew is that I found the photos mesmerizing, and they seemed every bit as radical as the noise, drone, atonal, and avant-garde music I enjoyed. Without adequate access to more Japanese photography, owning my own camera seemed the most viable path to further exploration.

Third, was a realization that I could combine two hobbies into one. With only two-and-a-half channels accessible on the TV in my downtown San Francisco apartment, and with cable priced well beyond my budget, my viewing habits skewed toward the ancient art of “people watching.” I could (and would) spend hours camped in front of cafes — watching the passing parade, and delighting in the eccentricities, subtleties, personalities and conventions of human beings. Elliot Erwitt seemed to see exactly the same sort of things I saw, only he actually bothered to photograph them. At the time, I’m not sure I even considered people like Erwitt, Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand to be ‘real’ photographers, since I was still responding to photos by what they looked like, rather than what they said. But none the less, it seemed like having a camera with me could, at the very least, allow me to share those fleeting moments of serendipity with others.

My first forays into photography were a complete disaster. The visual gap between all those classic images and my one-hour photo lab colour prints — it was beyond cavernous. The photos I loved did not look anything like the photos I took.

I had a lot to learn about how a camera “saw” the world, and just as much about how to print. I invested in some stainless tanks, stocked my fridge with Tri-X, bought an enlarger and some B&W print chemistry, blacked out my bathroom, and started on the journey toward figuring out just how all those fabulous photographers conjured up compelling images from such a utilitarian little box. I’m still learning.

As photographer origin stories go, I suspect mine is somewhat backward. I didn’t grow up taking photos. Nor did I become a photographer in the ‘typical’ way — in which one starts photographing friends or vacations, and “catches the bug.” And I most certainly didn’t get interested through a love of gear; to be “cool”; to get access to events; or any other such nonsense. I became a photographer because I fell in love with photographs. And it was because of this love, and the large photographic vocabulary I had already amassed, that I ultimately chose to become a photographer myself. I honestly think, had I done it any other way, there would never have been an ULTRAsomething. Which, as far as I know, is pretty much the de facto requirement for any good origin story.

ABOUT THIS ARTICLE:

I’m well aware this is one of the most boring posts in ULTRAsomething’s near 14 years. But some day, when I’m dead and legendary, some poor copy writer is going to appreciate its existence when tasked with writing my obituary.

“Added Pressure” was shot on Tri-X, inside a Contax G1, fronted with a Zeiss 28mm f/2.8 Biogon, and developed in HC-110 (Dilution B).

“Ingels, et al.” was shot on Tri-X, inside a Leitz Minolta CL, fronted with a Minolta 28mm f/2.8 Rocker, and developed in a 1:50 solution of Rodinal (Blazinal).

“Post-It®” was shot on Delta 3200, exposed at ISO 1600 inside a Contax G1, fronted with a Zeiss 45mm f/2 Planar, and developed in a 1:25 solution of Rodinal (Blazinal).

“30 Years’ Fruition” was shot on Rollei Superpan, inside a Widelux F7, and developed in a 1:50 solution of Rodinal (Blazinal).

“Cart Before the Horse” was shot on Fomapan 100, inside a Nikon 28Ti, and developed in HC-110 (Dilution H).

“Technically Compliant” was shot with a Ricoh GRIII digital camera.

Categories : Musings

Posted by Egor

· May 1, 2022

The Shortest Path

The shortest path between two points is a straight line. Rarely is it the most interesting. And in the physical world, rarely is it as straight as you think — linearity being as much about perception as certitude.

For example, if I’m in the middle of the Bonneville Salt Flats, and I wish to walk the shortest possible path to a point only 5km away, I’m going to need a shovel. How else am I going to dig a trench — 2 meters deep at the midpoint — to counteract the curvature of the earth? No shovel, no straight line.

Our world is awash in trajectories we perceive as linear, but really aren’t. Time dilation anyone? It might take a rocket scientist to build a device for travelling to another solar system and back; but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that a quick, 2-year roundtrip voyage from the astronaut’s perspective could result in the passing of, say, 60 years here on earth.

Fortunately, I’m not here to bore you with the impractical. Instead, I’m here to bore you with something else entirely: our bodies. The very surface upon which we visualize our surroundings — the retina — is spherical, and the images projected upon it are curved. Our brain intuits the true nature of the objects, and auto-flattens any bowed projections accordingly. It’s the same sort of optical post-processing we perform when our brain is fed an upside-down and reversed retinal projection, and flips it around to match the orientation of our own bodies.

In other words, what we think we see isn’t necessarily what we really see. Which, as a photographer, gives me carte blanche to do anything I want — including ditching the idea that a photograph needs to have straight lines just because our brains are fooling us into believing they should be.

The whole idea of curvature is what occasionally pulls me into the realm of fisheye lenses, and what keeps me constantly in the realm of the Widelux camera. Both will bow lines we believe to be linear.

In the case of a fisheye lens, a spherical object is used to project an image onto a flat surface, resulting in a curvilinear perspective in which both horizontal and vertical lines are rendered as curves.

In the case of the Widelux, a rectilinear lens rotates in a horizontal arc across the scene, and the image is projected onto a curved surface of equal radius. This gives a particularly unique look, in which vertical lines remain straight while horizontal lines become bowed.

Both techniques delight me to no end, because both mess with our brain’s construct of what an object is supposed to look like. In the common vernacular, we call these “distortions,” but I believe this is a term born of bias. In reality, any projection of a 3-dimensional space onto a 2-dimensional surface results in “distortion.” The question is which elements are being distorted, not whether any distortion occurs.

Most lenses are of rectilinear design, meaning they’re engineered to keep lines as straight as possible — a feat they achieve at the expense of dimensional integrity. Anyone who’s ever shot a wide angle lens has surely seen the grotesque way in which objects near the borders are stretched wildly out of shape in order to preserve linearity. To me, this is no less a form of “distortion” than the fisheye, which keeps relative dimensions intact at the expense of linearity.

In fact, I’d even suggest that our brains can more easily acclimate to curvilinear photographs than rectilinear ones — at least at wide angles. That’s because we’re already accustom to interpreting curved retinal projections as straight lines. In contrast, we’re not accustom to interpreting stretched objects, so we’ll never really succeed in ignoring those wide-angle rectilinear distentions.

It’s a belief backed up by my own experience: The more time I spend looking at photos from a Widelux or fisheye, the less I notice the curvature — my brain easily intuits which lines should be straight, and it soon begins to simply interpret them as such. Since we’re all born with the straightening algorithm installed in our occipital lobes, all we need to do is access it. In contrast, since our brains don’t have any real-time de-stretching code installed, we can’t un-see the elongated objects at the edge of a standard wide angle photo.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which method — curvilinear or rectilinear — is closer to ‘reality,’ since ‘reality’ has little to do with what I’m trying to accomplish with photography. The simple fact I have no interest in colour should tell you that.

So for me, the party starts once I become aware of all the abstract possibilities of a curvilinear perspective — how I can alter spacial relationships by shifting an object’s location in the frame; how I can place arched surfaces contrary to the direction of the camera’s curvature to actually straighten them; and how I can tilt the lens to enhance or minimize the effects of the curvature — emphasizing and deemphasizing sections of the frame accordingly.

The notion that lines should be straight is just another arbitrary photography construct — no different than a belief that a good photo is sharp; has level horizons; adheres to the rule-of-thirds; or any of that other hooey. Whether you’ve got a blank frame of film or some empty space on your memory card, the only reality is that you’re free to record anything you want onto it. With that in mind, is the shortest path really the one you want to take?

ABOUT THE PHOTOS: Equivalence, Deco, Paganism, Dominance and Enveloped were all shot with my new (to me) Olympus M. Zuiko ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye Pro lens on an OM Systems OM-1 camera (yes, I’ve doubled down on Micro Four Thirds). Waves and Divergent were shot with a Widelux F7 on Acros II at ISO 100, and developed in Rodinal (Blazinal) 1:50. Spring and Exit were also shot on a Widelux F7 — this time on Fomapan 100, and stand developed for one hour in a mixture of HC-110 and Rodinal.

Categories : Musings, Photo Techniques

Posted by Egor

· April 1, 2022

Walking Man

This site has waxed poetic over half-frame film cameras for the better part of decade. My review of the Olympus Pen F surely qualified as an epic poem; while the Pen EE-2 was a work of ekphrastic poetry. The Ricoh Auto-Half veered into sonnet territory; while the Agat 18K could only be classified as an elegy — as much my own as the Agat’s.

I love the simplicity of these cameras. I love the way the photos they take are more a suggestion of a subject than a detailed rendering, and how that changes my vision accordingly. And I love their frugality — because not only can I fit over 70 shots on a single roll of 35mm film, but the cameras themselves are quite inexpensive.

Unfortunately, 60 year-old inexpensive cameras designed for budget-conscious consumers don’t last forever, and I must sadly report that my two most-beloved half-frame cameras — the Ricoh Auto-Half and the Olympus Pen EE-2 — have now shuffled off their immortal coils. Quite literally in the case of the Ricoh Auto-Half, as its coiled transport spring has now sprung.

Both cameras served me well, with the little EE-2 once acting as my ‘walk around’ camera on a trip to Iceland — a destination normally associated with seekers of the ultimate in digital image quality. In fact, it was the EE-2 that delivered my favourite photo from there — a shot I’d never think to take had I been lugging a “real” camera. But it’s the Ricoh Auto-Half to which I’d developed the strongest connection. Immediately after it failed, I had the irrational urge to get it repaired — a choice that would no doubt grossly eclipse the smattering of yen I spent to liberate it from an underground Shinjuku camera shop. Eventually, I realized the more rational option was to frame its loss as a golden excuse to buy an entirely different half-frame camera… and I knew just which one.

On the final day of my last Tokyo trip — a month before “Coronavirus” first became a household word — I’d traveled on a westbound train to some quiet little neighbourhood outside the megapolis. There, as happens in many Japanese neighborhoods, I stumbled upon the tiniest of camera shops. Inside was a half-frame Konica Recorder, which I made the mistake of handling for a bit too long. I wanted it. I hemmed a little, and hawed a lot. But with my return luggage already bulging with vintage cameras, I feared another purchase might incite Canadian customs to unilaterally declare me a “camera import business,” and slap me with a fine for operating without a license. Besides, I didn’t have enough time to run a roll of test film through it, get it developed, and return the camera should there be any problems. So I passed. But the desire to own a Konica Recorder remained, and the demise of the two half-frame cameras provided the impetus I needed to return to Tokyo (albeit only via eBay) and purchase one. Five days later, it was in my hands.

Unlike my Auto-Half and EE-2, which were both products of the 1960’s, the Konica Recorder is positively modern — arriving from the year 1985. You can tell because the thing has a sort of checkerboard ‘new wave’ case design, and bears an uncanny resemblance to an old Sony Walkman — a comparison that seemingly extends even to Konica’s decision to call it a “Recorder.” Hopefully such modernity will help it remain functional for the next several years. After all — though gloriously inexpensive — it did cost twice as much as the pair of half-frame cameras it replaced.

Adding to the comparative cost difference, is the Konica’s additional ongoing operating expense: two AA batteries! These are required to power its exposure meter (a task handled by unpowered selenium cells in the older cameras); its auto-wind (handled via a thumbwheel or spring in the EE-2 and Auto-Half, respectively); and its auto-focus (a feature missing from both the earlier cameras, which are fixed-focus designs). They also power the camera’s built-in flash — another feature missing from the Konica’s predecessors.

Speaking of autofocus, it seems to operate in “seat-of-the-pants” mode. There’s no actual focus area displayed in the viewfinder. So you’re left to guess what, exactly, the camera is focussing on. Common sense dictates that it’s the middle of the viewfinder — but how big is that area? Considering the camera sports a 24mm f/4 Hexanon lens, it barely matters — most everything is going to be in focus anyway; particularly since its minimum focus distance is still a meter away. To test this, I popped off a couple shots of rather large nearby subjects, centering them in the frame. Keeping in mind that focus is a fuzzy term when it comes to half-frame cameras, I scrutinized the shots and concluded that maybe, possibly, there might just be a tiny bit of bokeh in the background. So I’m lead to believe the autofocus does, indeed, do a little something.

The lens is surprisingly capable — quite helpful when you’re building photos with only half the number of grains. Exposures were certainly well-placed within the latitude afforded by black & white negative film. Overall, the images were more sharply rendered, and generally better exposed than those from any of my older point-and-shoot half-frame cameras.

Happily, this camera is free of all that DX-coding nonsense, so you can set your film speed to whatever you want. Unhappily, if you want your film speed to be anything other than ISO 100, 200 or 400, you’re out of luck. No shooting ADOX CMS 20 at box speed. No pushing Tri-X to 800 or 1600. Even at ISO 400, you might want to keep an eye on the sky — the shutter speed tops out at 1/250th of a second.

Film is transported vertically through the camera, so holding it horizontally results in landscape-oriented shots, like a full-frame camera. I actually prefer the portrait-orientation of the older half-frames, but it’s not a deal killer. As I mentioned earlier, the Konica auto-advances the film after each shot, and to my delight (and just like the Auto-Half), it transports the film only after you lift your finger off the shutter button. So you can take a shot in near silence, then walk away before releasing the shutter button — ensuring the zhzhzhzhtt of the auto-wind is safely out of anyone’s earshot.

In spite of being a bit larger than either the EE-2 or Auto-Half, it still slides effortless into the slimmest of pockets — aided significantly by the fact there are no extending bits or bobs to snag on your jeans on the way in or out. Instead, the camera’s working elements are all hidden behind a sliding shell that keeps the camera’s closed surface perfectly smooth, while protecting the lens, focus sensors, exposure window, ISO settings, and rewind switch safely from damage or accidental activation.

And about that rewind switch: when you reach the end of the roll, the film doesn’t automatically rewind. Instead, you need to flip the rewind switch, and those two little AA batteries start pumping out the juice needed to wind your film back into the cartridge. The problem is that there’s no indication of when the camera has completed this task. Instead, the rewind motor will happily spin that spool for as long as the rewind switch is ‘on.’ This makes it a bit difficult to judge when the film has been totally rewound. I thought I’d be able to tell by sound, but I was wrong. On the second test roll, after about 20 seconds, I thought it sounded like the film was back in the cartridge, but nope… it wasn’t. That little discovery cost me a few exposures when I opened the back. So for the third roll, I simply let the thing rewind for about 45 seconds before daring to open the camera. It probably means I’ll be replacing those AA batteries a couple rolls sooner than expected, but this shouldn’t add more than a few dollars to the lifelong operating cost of the camera.

Besides, any extra battery expense is sure to be offset by the amazing number of shots the Konica Recorder crams onto a single roll of film. I ran three different types of film through this camera — one corresponding to each of its possible ISO settings. I got 80 shots on a roll of Tri-X; 82 on a roll of Fomopan 100; and 78 on a roll of Rollei Superpan 200. Which makes this (AA battery costs included) THE most frugal film camera I’ve ever owned.

Much like the Walkman that seemingly inspired its form, this is a camera that begs to be carried around. So for two straight weeks, I did exactly that. And much like the concept that inspired its name, I used it to record just about anything I happened upon. 52 of these ‘recordings’ comprise the accompanying vBook. I could write about what I thought of the images this camera takes, or you can watch and decide for yourself.

As much as I like this camera, sentiment continues to nudge me toward repairing the Auto-Half. Whether I’d find a camera technician willing to bother? Doubtful. But until I do, the Konica Recorder — fashion victim that it is — has proven to be an able and technically superior substitute. Objectively, it produces the finest photos of any point-and-shoot half-frame I’ve used. Subjectively, it’s still too early to know whether I’ll develop the same sort of emotional attachment I formed with its two predecessors — but I have no doubt I’ll enjoy the opportunity to find out, as it will surely accompany me on many more walks in the coming years.

ABOUT THE vBOOK: A Portent Dawn, Redundancy and Fortuitous — as displayed in this article — are just 3 of the 52 shots included in the vBook. Since it’s an article about the Konica Recorder half-frame 35mm camera, you would be correct in assuming these, and all the photos in the vBook, are from that camera — shot over a two week period, and on the three films stocks mentioned in the text. The soundtrack is basically just a one-take improvisation performed on a Buchla Easel Command, with a tiny bit of additional accompaniment haphazardly improvised in a similar one-take-and-done fashion. The photos were then sequenced against the music in Final Cut Pro X.

Categories : Photo Gear, vBook

Posted by Egor

· March 1, 2022

Pipe Dream

In February 2013, on one of my then-frequent trips to Portland Oregon, I made one of my then-frequent visits to Pro Photo Supply to feed my then-frequent habit of shopping for interesting old lenses. There, sitting amongst a collection of gleaming chrome products in the impeccably tidy glass Leica display case, sat some sort of gnarly, heavily used, blackened brass pipe fitting. I naturally concluded that it had been left behind by a tradesman, tasked with repairing and replacing a section of the store’s antiquated plumbing.

I caught the attention of my buddy behind the counter, nodded my head in the general direction of the anomaly, and asked “why is there an old chunk of pipe in the Leica case?”

Without even glancing toward it, he knew exactly what I was talking about. “That’s an old, screw-mount Leitz 90 Elmar,” he replied.

“Is it any good?” I inquired.

“Probably not,” replied my buddy.

He opened the cabinet, extracted the alleged lens, and handed it to me. I nearly dropped it through the glass Canon display case over which I stood. My brain had severely underestimated just how heavy an ugly little tube of solid brass and glass could be. I held it up to the light and witnessed its densely oxidized brass and black patina seemingly absorb all the ambient light in its vicinity. I rotated the focus ring, and to my surprise, the lens elements moved in and out. I spun the aperture ring, and the internal blades dutifully opened and closed.

Both repulsed and mesmerized, I screwed it to an LTM-to-M adapter I had in my bag, then mounted the combo on my Leica M9. Visually, it was the unholiest of unions — a device certainly capable of photographing Satan himself. No lens/body marriage ever looked so homely, ill conceived, or just plain wrong. But like the plot of a bad romantic comedy, repulsion turned to love. And like the plot of a bad porno, love came cheap. $65.

I’ll admit, the images it foisted upon the M9 sensor looked every bit as ill conceived and homely as the lens itself. They were soft, blooming, heavily vignetted, and weirdly colour-shifted. Plus, the lens seemed incapable of rendering more than 3 stops of dynamic range — no matter how contrasty the actual scene. Calling it a “character” lens would merely trivialize its many aberrations.

Several times, over the next year, I’d mount it to the M9 and snap off a couple of shots — wondering what subjects, if any, could possibly benefit from being photographed with a 1938 90mm f4 Elmar? Particularly when there’s a perfectly capable 1996 90mm f/2.8 Elmarit-M sitting beside it on the shelf? Obviously, unlike the Elmarit-M, I could mount the pipe on an old Leica III — but I possessed neither a 90mm viewfinder nor the will to bother. So the ugly little pipe fitting eventually got ostracized from the “good gear” cabinet, and into a box with some of Satan’s other photographic castoffs.

And there it sat… month after month… year after year… until a few weeks ago, when it finally realized its purpose: to protect me from myself.

Prior to my dual cataract surgeries, I was fearful that my photography style might change once I gained the benefit of sight. For the last several years, trees had no branches; architecture had no ornamentation; humans had no faces. Post-surgery, I can now see that trees do have branches; architecture does have ornamentation; and humans have taken to wearing face masks.

Sure enough, with my daily environment now awash in a rich display of detail, I felt compelled to photograph it — and the high-res, high-fidelity Leica M10 Monochrom seemed just the tool to use. It took but a single afternoon of snapping the most banal images imaginable for me to learn my pre-surgery fears were coming true. Gone were the metaphors — replaced by hackneyed shots of snowcapped mountains, and boats floating on a gently rippling sea.

What I needed was a way to save me from myself. And it dawned on me that salvation might just lie in that old 90mm Elmar, sitting in the bottom of Satan’s drawer. Mounted to that same M10 Monochrom and tasked with photographing the vapidness to which I was currently drawn, it worked a treat. While it didn’t stop me from pointing my camera at scenes awash in splendid detail, it did stop my camera from recording all that surfeit precision — the type guaranteed to lead me insidiously down a path to some untoward belief that the “best” photo is the one which most sharply renders an aphid on the stem of some superfluous plant halfway across the frame from the actual subject.

No matter what I point this lens at, it produces images as soft as a roll of premium toilet paper; with resolution that would strain to chart above 2 lines/mm on an MTF chart; and with the dynamic range of grey cement under a heavily overcast sky.

Though such characteristics may sound detrimental — and the out-of-camera images do look grotesquely horrendous — there are actually a couple of benefits. First, the inherent lack of resolution eliminates any point to pixel-peeping, and instead lets me concentrate on the more interesting aspects of a photo’s shape and form, and not its details. And second, the paucity of dynamic range makes the files highly malleable. Once I started shoving pixels around in Photoshop, I discovered I quite liked how this old lens saw the world. The very act of setting an image’s black-point and white-point spreads the limited collection of captured mid-greys widely apart — granulating any gradations to produce a rather organic grittiness. This results in an ‘old fashioned’ quality that’s entirely contrary to the technical accuracy favoured by today’s lenses. So while my photo subjects remained every bit as banal as the ones I shot that first afternoon, the actual photos became suggestions of banality, rather than full-on clinical examples.

Naturally, once I saw how successfully the pipe fitting mucked with the Monochrom’s fidelity, I wanted even less fidelity. And so it soon found its way onto the front of my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mk3 — courtesy of not one but two lens mount adapters. There, the images took on even more grit.

I’m not sure how much longer I’ll remain enchanted by the fact that skies have birds, boats have names, and signs have words… but at least I know the patented lo-fi look of my photographs doesn’t need to suffer too much (even if the subject matter does). Maybe it’s finally time I got around to mounting this sucker on an old Leica III, where it truly belongs…

ABOUT THE PHOTOS:

Astute readers will notice that I’ve applied the apocryphal formula of “One dozen mediocre photos = one good photo” for visually populating this article. I’m pretty rusty on the whole notion of taking photos of things I can actually see, so there might be a lag until I regain enough skill to take some good photos, and thus reduce the quantity I need to publish.

As suggested by the article, everything was shot with either the Leica 10 Monochrom or the Olympus OMD E-M1 MK3. For those that actually care, “Fulcrum”, “Stratum”, “Farrago” and “Electroswoosh” are the Olympus shots. Everything else is the Monochrom… well, except the product shot, obviously.

Categories : Photo Gear

Posted by Egor

· February 1, 2022

Remix

I consider myself to be a tolerant person. As long as someone’s willful actions don’t impinge upon the ability of others to enjoy their own willful actions, then have a good time! It’s this definition of “tolerance” that justifies my intolerance for recording artists who remix their music — whether it’s to match their current musical tastes, or to align with the “sound” of the day. A willfully remixed recording — particularly when it replaces all traces of the first recording — impinges on my ability to enjoy the music as it originally existed.

Take Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” — a true masterpiece. Or at least it was in 1985, when I first bought it and played it endlessly for the next several years. Every nuance of that album was absorbed and coded into my DNA. Like dozens of other recordings I adore, I could replay its entirety in my mind, without ever putting it on the stereo. It became a part of me.

But Kate has tweaked it on several occasions, with only the remastered 2018 version appearing on today’s streaming services. Every time I hear this release, I’m dispirited by the subtle alterations in its overall sonic signature; unsettled by its re-balanced instrumentation; and, in the case of “The Big Sky”, dismayed by an entirely different version than what appeared on the original album.

The thing is, as a musician myself, I get it. When you record a song, you’re aware of the myriad little things you wish were different — more midrange clarity; a tighter bass performance; a cleaner solo; a different drum balance. Any artist worth his or her ears is plagued by the differences between what they intended and what resulted. But here’s the thing: no one else is aware of this. Once you release a recording into the world, it becomes the world’s — it’s no longer yours. A song you wrote about loss may become the listener’s anthem for hope — it’s out of your hands. What’s published is past, so invent the future! If an artist is worried about their legacy, I believe it’s better to put one’s efforts into creating new work, and not into altering the old.

That’s why, 22 years ago — when I packed up all my belongings and immigrated to Canada — I actually discarded all the reel-to-reel multitrack recordings I’d ever made. The songs were mixed, mastered, and released… and I knew even then that I’d never go back and remix them. Destroying the multitrack masters simply guaranteed it. Besides, I had nowhere to store them, and no longer owned the multitrack reel-to-reel machine required to play them.

Given my objection to the revisionist tinkering of recording artists, one might logically conclude I’d feel the same about photographers and their prints.

Nope.

I have no issue whatsoever with a photographer reworking their previously published photos. While on the surface this might appear paradoxical, the very fact both opinions exist simultaneously means it’s not really a paradox. Rather, it suggests a flaw in the logic used to deem it ‘paradoxical.’ In this case, I suspect the flaw is to believe two entirely different artistic mediums have the same effect on the human psyche. In my case, they most assuredly do not.

Although I love both music and photography, I absorb them quite differently. Music is more like meditation — it leads me through a complex web of neurocognitive reactions that have a profound effect on my emotional state. Even something as seemingly insignificant as a change in the relative volume between two instruments, results in a slightly modified harmonic series that can alter the synaptic connections formed by a particular recording.

Photography, however, is more Pavlovian. Its impact on my emotions is more immediate and less immersive. My connection with photography is a cause/effect relationship — I see a photo and it triggers a response. Even when I’ve viewed a photo long enough and often enough to be cognizant of every grain (or pixel), my experience is rarely altered when a photographer modifies the print.

Music guides me through an emotional experience, and I follow. Photography points me toward an emotional experience, which I then navigate on my own.

It’s why I can look at two editions of a Daido Moriyama book — each containing significantly different renderings of the same photographs — yet have an identical emotional response to both. In spite of being fully aware of how vastly different one version is from another, it doesn’t affect how I engage with the photos, or their effect on me.

Bill Brandt was another photographer who frequently reworked his prints. Though unlike Moriyama (who seemingly embraces serendipitous abstraction through duplication and publication constraints), Brandt’s reworkings were more consciously aesthetic. Basically, the older he got, the more contrast he wanted in his prints. You can pretty much date every Bill Brandt print by simply looking at how much (if any) grey it contains. Several of his prints had a major impact on me in my early photography days. Years later, when I was able to see alternate prints of these same photos, I felt no less connected to them, in spite of their radically different look. Sure, I might prefer one print to another, but my emotional response to the photo does not change.

So, once again, ULTRAsomething has devolved into another introspective boondoggle — and like most introspective boondoggles, this one began with a very simple question: “What would I do if I suffered a retinal detachment that permanently affected my ability to take photographs?” My knee-jerk reply to this hypothetical question was, “I’ll just go back and re-edit the hundreds of old photos I’ve already published — photos that I now wish I’d processed differently.” Obviously, like many knee-jerk replies, this one was highly illogical. If I can’t see well enough to take photographs, I certainly won’t be able to see well enough to edit them.

But my hypothetical answer, senseless as it was, caused me to explore why I had no qualms about “remixing” old photos, when I’m all qualms-a-go-go about remixing old music. And having done the mental dirty work, I now know — should I secure a lucrative book deal or a major gallery show — that I’ll happily reprocess any of my old images to better fit the display medium. Sure, believing such a thing is possible is every bit as illogical as thinking blindness would the the ideal condition under which to edit photographs. Which is why, while I wait for that call from Steidl or the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, I’ll continue to look toward the future — snapping new photos and adding to my photographic legacy — whatever the world eventually deems that to be.

ABOUT THE PHOTOS: In spite of what the article might imply, all the included photos are fresh new dreck, and not reprocessed versions of previously published dreck.

“A Dramatic Conclusion to a Harrowing Tale” was shot on Fomapan 100, using a Japanese market Leitz Minolta CL with a 40mm f/2 Rokkor lens.

If one mistakes this article’s subject to be “wonderful albums by female artists in the 1980’s,” then “One for Jane Siberry” would be the lead photo. For me, it invokes a similar mood as her song “Hockey,” from 1989’s ‘Bound by the Beauty.’ It was shot on Tri-X using a Contax G1 and a Zeiss 45mm f/2 Planar lens.

“Abundantly Camouflaged” was shot on HP5+, using a Minolta TC-1, while “Impertinence” employed the previously seen Leitz Minolta CL — but this time filled with Tri-X and fronted with a 28mm f/2.8 Rokkor lens. “Day and Night” was also shot on Tri-X, this time inside a dubiously focussed Contax G1, now fronted with a Zeiss 28mm f/2.8 Biogon. It is, in essence, a self contained re-mix. But then, isn’t every positive struck from a negative a ‘remix’ of sorts?

All films stocks were shot at box speed and, as is nearly always the case, developed in a 1:50 solution of Blazinal.

Categories : Musings

Posted by Egor

· January 1, 2022

I Eye Eye

Last spring, after scoring my first hit of Moderna’s COVID vaccine (and the ubiquitous 48 hours of soreness, aches, and malaise that follows), I was right as rain… until four days later, when a blast of chest pain jarred me bolt upright in the middle of the night. Although the pain and accompanying jolts remained my ever-present companion for the next week, I wasn’t overly concerned. I’d experienced this with previous illnesses, and chalked it up to my highly inflammatory immune response doing what it sometimes does. As expected, the inflammation subsided, and the pains ended a week after they began.

Not long after, reports emerged that a small percentage of mRNA recipients experienced bouts of myocarditis approximately a week after getting vaccinated — the vast majority of whom were men in their late teens and early twenties. Naturally, I took this as a sign that I had the heart of a 20 year-old, and immediately signed up for a TikTok account, hung a Billie Eilish poster on my bedroom wall, and took to openly mocking boomers.

With that newly minted modicum of antibodies, I booked an appointment with my optometrist — hoping to get some badly needed new contact lenses. I settled into the chair, ready for the doctor’s usual “which is better, A or B” routine, when he abruptly stopped the examination, pushed his swivel chair back toward the desk, turned on the lights, and informed me that my vision issues weren’t because of my prescription, but because of cataracts. Not only that, but they weren’t the usual Stage 3 type that plague a third of the people a half-decade older than me. Nope, mine were Stage 4 — the type more associated with someone who’s 90.

To prove his point, he continued with the exam, dialled in the best possible correction, then asked me to look at the chart on the wall. “What wall?” I asked. “Exactly,” replied the doctor.

I was thoroughly confused. Within one month’s time, I learned I had the heart of a 20 year-old and the eyes of a 90 year-old. Is there nothing about me that’s my actual age?

I’m sure this news comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who’s viewed my photography all these years — after all, I haven’t exactly been a proponent of photographic fidelity. None the less, I was surprised.

Because a perpetual tide of COVID waves has decimated the scheduling of “elective” surgeries, I’ve now been stumbling around for 8 months since the diagnosis, waiting for my new plastic eyes. During this time, I’ve stopped driving; avoided going outside at dark, dusk or even on overcast days; and ceased watching anything with subtitles — that’s right, no Nordic Noirs for me. I’ve become a master of the Macintosh’s accessibility settings, and can often be seen wearing two or even three pairs of glasses simultaneously — some upside down — in order to function.

Surprisingly, this hasn’t had as demonstrable an effect on my photography as one might think. Sure, it affects when I can photograph (mid-day only) and where (I avoid crowded city sidewalks, since I can’t tell people from lamp posts, nor cars from the streets they drive on). But my photos have always had a rather lo-fi aesthetic — even when I could see.

Then again, maybe the photos have always had a lo-fi aesthetic because I’ve never really been able to see? You don’t just get Stage 4 cataracts without going through the previous three stages — which would obviously have been affecting my vision for many years.

So I’m actually a bit worried — not that the surgeries won’t work (though complications concern me), but that they will work so well I’ll see just how bad my own photography is. Then what will I do? I’ve grown so accustom to taking and editing photographs without actually being able to see them, that any continuing visual degradation would probably just add to the arc of my photographic oeuvre. But should the surgery succeed, and I suddenly realize that trees have leaves; people have faces; and placards placed on the sidewalk in front of restaurants are for informational purposes, and not for me to trip over — well, that could likely result in a seismic shift in my photography. Do I have enough self-discipline to not become a ‘pixel peeper’ should I gain the ability to actually SEE a pixel?

I was originally scheduled to have surgery on both eyes in January, but it appears COVID’s latest surge may postpone the joy for at least another few weeks. Once it finally occurs, I’ll still require a couple months of healing before I can be fit for new glasses. So I’m guessing it’ll be spring before I’m all fixed up and functioning like a properly sighted human.

Fortunately, I can type by touch, and my photography has always been more about intuiting a situation than seeing it. So I expect I’ll continue to post unabated during these next few months of compromised vision — just as I’ve done for the past few. And what happens come spring — once it’s finally over and my vision has stabilized? Who can say? Maybe I’ll buy a 100 megapixel medium format digital camera, and become a colour landscape photographer. Or maybe I’ll be so disheartened by the photos I’ve been publishing that I’ll return to writing music full time (at least until the inevitable battle with deafness pushes me back into photography).

But first, I need to come to grips with the whole idea of someone slicing up my eyeballs. As a devotee of 70’s and 80’s Italian genre cinema, I’ve seen at least 50 highly stylized close-up depictions of every type of eye trauma imaginable — and not once did the recipient seem even remotely OK with it. I don’t know if it’s some kind of cosmic retribution for my viewing habits, but if it is, I really wish I hadn’t found rom-coms so repugnant. Enduring the karmic punishment of my own personal “meet cute” sounds infinitely more appealing than a knife to the eye.

ABOUT THE PHOTOS: This month’s photo selections are representative of those only a blind man could love. Although “Cataract” could pass for a photo of an actual cataract surgery, it might just be a snapshot of my washing machine’s spin cycle, or maybe it’s a spinning tire. Whatever it is, it’s an apt metaphor for the article, which was shot with an Olympus OM-D E-M1 MKIII and an M-Zuiko 12mm f/2 lens.“Mixed Metaphors” and “November” were both shot at ISO 400 on HP5+ with a Leitz Minolta CL, fronted with a Minolta 40mm f/2 Rokkor lens, and developed in Blazinal 1:50. “COVID-22” infected a Konica C35, which was stuffed with Tri-X, exposed at ISO 400, and developed in Blazinal 1:50. And while “The Window of Abundant Obstructions” sounds like the title of a giallo I inexplicably haven’t seen, it’s really just the title of another photo of metaphorically fuzzy purpose. It comes courtesy of a Contax G1, fronted with a Zeiss Biogon 28mm f/2.8 lens, through which it rendered a latent image on Tri-X at ISO 400, which I then developed in Blazinal 1:50.

Categories : Musings, ULTRA news

Posted by Egor

· December 1, 2021

13

The joyful exuberance of ULTRAsomething’s childlike naïveté is over. Rebellion rages within — exacerbated by mood swings, sassiness, and a vexatious surliness. They grow up so fast, these cherubic little websites. As the calendar flips to Sagittarius, ULTRAsomething clocks another birthday — its thirteenth. A teenager!

While turning 13 is statistically quite common for humans, it’s a rather rare event for blogs… or whatever it is this website actually is.

In fact, many of the classic teen characteristics — such as recalcitrant independence, social awkwardness, and runaway identity crises — have been part-and-parcel of the ULTRAexperience since it was just an infant.

Which suggests, perhaps, that I’m wrong to frame this site’s 13th birthday in human terms. Maybe websites age more like dogs? In which case I’m happy to report that ULTRAsomething has just turned 91! It would certainly explain why I’m feeling far more introspective on this particular occasion than would be possible for any 13 year-old.

Then again, 91 implies the website’s demise is close at hand. If that’s the case, shouldn’t ULTRAsomething have more to show for a cradle-to-grave existence than a slovenly 234 articles, 1,500 published photographs, and roughly half-a-million words? That’s an output more worthy of a sloth than a dog.

Which, now that I think about it, is perhaps a more apt yardstick. In sloth years, ULTRAsomething has just turned 39. That’s an appropriate age equivalency for a site still developing new directional ideas, and that still believes it can one day succeed in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

So perhaps I’ll celebrate this, ULTRAsomething’s 39th birthday, in the most sloth-like manner possible — sloughing off all those extra words I was planning to write, and taking a nice leisurely nap.

ABOUT THE PHOTOS: “Felicitous” and “Sun Spot” were both photographed with a Ricoh GRIII — the proper one with the 28mm lens, and not that newfangled 40mm job. Speaking of 40mm lenses, “Introvert” was shot with a 40mm f/2 Rokkor lens, mounted to a Japanese market Leitz Minolta CL stuffed with HP5+, shot at ISO 400, and developed in Rodinal 1:50. “Apropos of Most Everything” was snapped with a Konica C35 at ISO 100 on Acros-100II and developed in Rodinal 1:50. “Vancouver 12, Egor 1” was shot with an iPhone 12 Pro… yes, you read that right. And no, it’s still not a suitable substitute for a ‘real’ camera, but it is better than a Leica at checking email on the go.

Categories : Musings, ULTRA news

Posted by Egor

· November 1, 2021

Proclivities

Back when I was young and dumb(er), I would read interviews in which photographers, like Elliot Erwitt or Lee Friedlander, would mention perusing old contact sheets and “discovering” some heretofore unknown tendency toward a particular subject.

I always thought this was strange. How can a photographer not know where their proclivities lie? It made no sense to me.

Last May, while gathering photos for the IPL article, I realized several of the final candidates featured dogs as the primary subject. Deeming this “a tad excessive,” I whittled the selection down to a single pooch, and didn’t give it another thought until June — when multiple dog photos once again found their way into the finalist pool. Again I whittled it down to one, and again I didn’t give it another thought until July — when my final candidates folder contained five new dog photos. However, unlike the previous months, I couldn’t find many suitable alternatives — even that month’s rejects were dog shots! So I was forced to publish two dog photos, rather than one. When it came time to post August’s article, 100% of my preliminary candidates featured a dog somewhere in the frame. I struggled and juggled — failing, once again, to bring the doggie count below two.

It was only then that it finally hit me — I take a lot of dog photos! In retrospect, it’s obvious. But, like Erwitt or Friedlander, I wasn’t aware just how strong the propensity.

This got me wondering: Are there any other subjects that attract my camera without piquing my awareness? I glanced over my last several posts, and there it was: the port-a-potty.

Without even realizing I’d done so, I had published three portable toilet photos within a six month period. Granted, that’s not a lot in the general scheme of subjects — but it’s probably three more portable toilet photos than the average guy publishes in a six month period. Randomly opening a few old blog posts uncovered evidence that this is not a new fixation — I’ve got portable toilet shots going back a decade. Nor is it a fixation likely to end soon, as witnessed by the additional port-a-potty shots I’ve included with this article.

What other proclivities might be hiding in plain site?

I turned to my Lightroom catalog, and took a gander at the keyword list I’d so carefully crafted over the years. One keyword, in particular, had an anomalously high count: stairs. I clicked the link and was greeted by the site of a thousand photos in which stairs were a primary element. What’s particularly curious is how few of these I’ve actually published. Stairs, it seems, are one of my most photographed subjects — yet I rarely deem any of them worthy of publication. So why have I taken so many? And why do I continue to do so — particularly when I so obviously suck at it?

Despite taking all these stair photos, I can recall only one instance when I was consciously aware of doing so — and that’s when I suffered from a debilitatingly pathological obsession with a crumbling and decrepit staircase that descended from Vancouver’s seawall down to the shore. I couldn’t walk past it without a Pavlovian urge to fire off a few shots. I photographed those stairs from every conceivable angle, using every camera and every lens I owned. Hi-fi digital shots; lo-fi grainy film shots; sharply rendered; soft focus; black & white; colour; from a distance; up close — you name it, I shot it. I was tormented by the need to take a compelling photo of those stairs, while never figuring out what was actually so compelling about them. This went on for several years, until the city cordoned off that very segment of the seawall — stairs included — tore it all out, and replaced it with a characterless and visually bland alternative. It was the happiest day of my life. To this date, I’ve only ever published one photo of those stairs, when I used it to make a cheesy, Photoshop composite to illustrate my Alternative History of the Film Camera article.

Looking back, I’m not sure that particular descent into mania was even related to my generic stair fixation — more likely, it was just a mental defect. This theory is backed up by a totally new, but eerily similar obsession — one that began a few months ago, when I snapped a shot of a dilapidated pedestrian bridge that crosses an even more dilapidated railroad. Viewing the photo at home, I realized it completely failed to encapsulate what I felt when I saw the bridge. So the next time I crossed, I took a few photos… and the next… and the next… and, well, now I find myself looking for excuses to walk across that bridge. This is exactly how the whole seawall steps thing started. I should probably nip the problem in the bud, and make a series of anonymous calls to city hall — demanding they send a crew to dismantle and replace that bridge with something far more characterless and visually bland.

So I’ve proven, once again, just how clueless that young Egor guy really was. In the end, it took me a scant 30 seconds of research to disprove my old theory that a decent photographer couldn’t possibly be unaware of his proclivities (assuming I qualify as a ‘decent’ photographer). I’ve also discovered that my own particular proclivities don’t necessarily translate into better photos… just more photos. If I can just finagle a way to live to 160, I might finally be able to figure out this whole photography thing.

ABOUT THE PHOTOS: “Kibble-of-the-month.com” [Leica M10 Monochrom | Leica 21mm f/3.4 Super-Elmar-M] is yet another new dog photo, proving the proclivity has not yet subsided. “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Hole” [Konica C35 | Across 100II | Rodinal] and “Special Delivery” [M10 Monochrom | Voigtlander 75mm f/2.5 Color Heliar] are indicative of my ongoing infatuation with public toilets. “Daunting” and “Scene Awaiting a Crime” [both Leica M10 Monochrom | Minolta 28mm f/2 Rokkor] represent two new additions to my Lightroom collection of photos keyworded with ‘stairs.’ “Straight In” [Leica M10 Monochrom | Leica 21mm f/3.4 Super-Elmar-M], “Straight Through” [Leica M10 Monochrom | Leica 35mm f/2 Summicron v4] and “Straight Up” [Widelux F7 | Across 100II | Rodinal] are just three of an embarrassingly excessive collection of ‘pedestrian bridge’ photos taken in the past few months.

Categories : Musings

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