Project work has sort of taken a sideline to essay work recently, but with my essay now handed in I can spend the next (and final) week on my film project.  I was supposed to be out taking photos today, but thus far the skies have been really boring and I’m down to my last roll of film.  I’m waiting another hour or two and if the skies don’t clear up then I’m just going to have to do with overcastness and hope that the rest of my film arrives in the post tomorrow.

I’m still taking photos of residential towers, but I’ve found that using large format is prohibitively time consuming, not to mention slow, and time consuming.  And expensive.  I’ve found that it’s actually really nice to work with if you have plenty of time on your hands, so I’m going to try and persuade uni to let me take out an MPP over summer – you know, for if a situation arises in which I have loads of money and time.

Because of having to spend an awful lot of time on essays and stuff recently, I’ve been shooting a lot of medium format instead of large.  But I’m now out of medium format film, and I’ve been shooting a lot of stuff like this, which isn’t really relevant to my project:

…amongst other things, such as photos of Kat’s friend Kim eating, and Kat herself being very ill, neither of whom would appreciate having the photos stuck online.

…or maybe I will include it, I don’t know.  At least when I print it myself in the darkroom it won’t have those damn marks all over the sky.  Uni really should clean their scanners more often.

I discovered this video regarding the laws surrounding photography in public places by Reason.tv via PetaPixel.  If anyone reading this has a serious interest in photography and isn’t already following PetaPixel, I highly recommend it.  They’re a very active blog, and their posts are universally pretty interesting.

The video is completely US-centric, but it’s still an interesting video to watch, exploring the realities of the laws in America regarding photography in public places, and how myths arise that are taken as law but aren’t actually grounded in anything.  Well worth eight and a half minutes of your time if you’re into this sort of thing.

I’m in the process of writing my final second year essay – a 3000 word affair based on the content of lectures, seminars and workshops over the course of the term.  I’ve decided to write my essay on the role of photography as a truthful medium when regarding images of war, the intolerable, and the barbaric.

Two of the images I’ve decided to use regard a photograph of a 15 year old Haitian who was shot dead by police for the looting of two plastic chairs and three framed pictures.  The photograph, by Paul Hansen, won a Swedish award for best international news image.  Aside from the obvious controversy surrounding a photograph of a dead teenager winning an award, the image has recently received additional criticism in light of the existence of a photograph by another photographer named Nathan Weber, who photographed the girl from the opposite side, showing a group of photographers crowded round her.

The award has been put into question – why should Hansen’s photograph have received an award when, clearly, numerous other photographers may have captured almost identical images?  It turns out that photographs taken by other photographers at the time have also won awards from separate bodies.

I have included the photographs below for your considerations:

You can read further information on this topic over at PetaPixel, from which the two photographs above are taken.

Just made an interesting discovery in a blog post expanding on a post on The Online Photographer: apparently, according to an engineer from SanDisk, at any one time around 30% of SanDisk cards ‘in the wild’ are counterfeit.

That’s an incredible number!  The articles suggest that many of these counterfeit cards originate from eBay.

I personally use SanDisk Extreme IIIs as my card of choice – I have a couple of 4GB ones that I use in rotation for my 5DMkII.  They’re all a couple of years old now… they’re back from my 40D days, when 4GB was a decent size for 10MP RAW files.  But they’re all still in perfect working order after having a lot of use made out of them, and I don’t have any real need to upgrade.

The cards I use are currently about £30 on Amazon, but occasionally they go on sale for about £18.  I use them because they’re fast enough to keep up with the 5DMkII for video and are generally considered a fairly reliable card.

I decided this term to do all my project work on film.  It’s the last term where project marks don’t actually count towards my final degree grade, so I decided to try the remaining techniques that I want to try ahead of my final year: film, colour printing, and large format.

Large format is slow and expensive, so for reconnaissance I decided to use my Bronica SQ-A, which is medium rather than large format.  I discovered that printing colour contact sheets is a huge pain compared to printing black and white, so I decided to scan the negs in for a sort of digital contact print.

A nice feature of medium format is that the the negs are so big that you can just crop photos out of the contact prints to get an idea of detail.  The photo below is simply a crop of the image above, which was only scanned at 300 DPI…

Although these are only really test images, I will probably end up printing them at some point.  I’ve been printing on 10×8″ and 16×12″ Fuji lustre paper.  The photos are shot on Fuji Pro 400H, which has similar colour and contrast properties to the Fuji Pro 160S 5×4″ large format film I’m using, and gives beautifully subtle, understated prints.

When they’re cropped to these ratios, the images look like this:

As you can see, scanned on perhaps the world’s dirtiest scanner at uni.  I think I prefer the ‘instagram‘ type crops above, with the film information printed on the side, but you can’t scan these with the film inserts in the scanners at uni.

Some large format scans will follow.