Cloudy, with a chance of Orwo NP7

Back in January, I ordered up a mess of Compania Imago film. I was especially excited by their recycled wood and plastic film canisters and the (exceedingly remote) possibility of reusing them to roll some whatever whenever. I’ve shot through most all of that film now, and just have one roll of ancient Ansco left in the fridge. I’m saving that one because it’s so old; I was saving this one because I had such trouble with it the first time (largely due to my own errors, but still: once bitten and all). This time, I was sure to get my settings all set, and I think I got it right, or right enough.

The negatives are ludicrously dense, probably fogged by age and poor storage or something. God knows. But at EI 200, everything came out fine, though I did have to ‘scan’ them with a ridiculously long exposure. B/W negatives usually get something like f/8 and 1/60th; Color usually goes more like f/5.6 and 1/30th. I scanned the Orwo NP7 at f/5.6 and 1/8th: thank God for sturdy tripods. Continue reading “Cloudy, with a chance of Orwo NP7”

Unboxing Wafaa Bilal’s ‘168:01’

In 2003, looters burned the library at the College of Arts at the University of Baghdad. 70,000 texts were lost. Wafaa Bilal put together ‘168hrs. 01sec’ to memorialize the cultural and historical losses in Iraq, symbolized by the installation of a library of blank, white books at the Art Gallery of Windsor, ON earlier this year. I contributed some money via Kickstarter, and during/after the exhibition, brother Wafaa replaced one of the white books with an text that was later sent to the College of Fine Arts to help rebuild their library. I’m honored to help my brothers and sisters in Iraq in this limited and symbolic way.

https://youtu.be/t-haaH4CstM

Wafaa Bilal is a performance and installation artist, and Associate Arts Professor at the Tisch School. His Canto III was in the 2015 Armory Show and the Venice Biennale, and his works can be found in museums around the world.

Carrie Mae Weems-‘Kitchen Table Series’

I don’t know where they got my email address—probably some mailing list-type service—but Light Work sent me an email with an advertisement for their 2017 Book Collectors Offer: a signed copy of Carrie Mae Weems’ new book of her 1990 Kitchen Table Series and a 2017 subscription to Contact Sheet for a fairly reasonable price. I hemmed and hawed about it for a couple of days, and then pounced. I’m thoroughly enjoying the subscription to Aperture I received as a gift earlier in the year, and I reasoned that 1) another regular photography publication will be welcome, and 2) a signed copy of a photobook I didn’t know anything about would at least add something to the bookshelf.

Little did I know the importance of the Kitchen Table Series. It’s a look into a life we all share, and simultaneously a life we, or I, for one, really know nothing about and to which we have little access. My mom would recognize something different from it; my wife something different still; none of us would get all the way to what some of my coworkers might understand. Yet it’s a universal, and important tale. If you can get your hands on a copy, do it.

Continue reading “Carrie Mae Weems-‘Kitchen Table Series’”

Returning Home

After three and a half days with Mom, I drove back home on November 21. I started to take the direct route out of Arkansas, but then decided to detour some, and ended up taking the same route through the wilds of Eastern Oklahoma. Continue reading “Returning Home”

Arkansas 5: food and film

I picked up a copy of Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces some weeks ago, and so I shot some Shore-inspired plates of food from time to time during the trip. Most often, I just had one camera with me, but a couple of times, I had the presence of mind to get shoot both cameras and see how the films handled.

First up: Kodak UltraMAX 400 (L) and Fuji Superia X-TRA 400 (R).

Mom’s tile is green, sortof an evergreen color. The Kodak got it close, but only with great torturing of the RGB levels. It also didn’t handle the mixed lighting too well (early morning sun from the left, and “daylight balanced” cfl above).

The Fuji Superia handled the mixed lighting admirably, but missed the floor, and with very little levels fun.

I started running low on film by the second day, and so picked up some Fuji 200, so next up, Fuji Superia 200 (L) and Fuji Superia X-TRA 400 (R).

Even thought it’s frame 0, without the mixed lighting, both did fine, no color balance issues at all. The 200 was a bit closer straight out of the scanner (with an curves inversion and white balance set to the base in Capture One Pro 9). The 400 took a bit more work.

In these limited circumstances, it looks like the Fuji stocks win, but, really, all of the consumer films are fine right now. Sure, I love Kodak Pro Image 100, but the current Gold 200 and UltraMAX 400 stocks are marvels of modern chemistry, and while we’re not living in a golden age of choice, at least we can walk into any drug or general merchandise store and pick up some good film that’ll do just fine in a variety of situations. The consumer stocks may be a bit more saturated and contrasty than the pro films, but they don’t curl like the pro films and they’re much cheaper and more readily available.

Shots on Kodak stock took a bit more work than ones on Fuji, and were generally oversaturated for my taste, but both were easy to process in Capture One Pro. I developed all the rolls in a day and a half, and processed most of the 9 rolls in only 3 evenings. That’s fast! It’s often one or two evenings for one roll.

Let’s try to be thankful for what we have. Let’s try to support local film sellers as often as we can, especially the small shops, but even the big retailers, and let’s get out and shoot!

Arkansas 4: Bookstores!

I love a good used book store. It probably goes back to my childhood: Mom and I clocked a few hundred hours in The Book Swap (across from Richland Plaza shopping center, but now long gone, so long gone in fact that the place where it used to be just looks like a vacant lot) when I was young, and we’ve continued regular visits to bookstores ever since, pretty much every time we get together.

About six months after she moved up to Arkansas, she started talking up the Dickson Street Bookshop. I’d been hoping to go, but this was the first chance we had to visit. And not only Dickson Street, but we also popped into the Friends of the Fayetteville Public Library’s bookstore and Once Upon a Time‘s physical store… apparently, it used to be inside their warehouse, but they recently moved to a standalone building down the road: I’m sorry I missed that! Anyway, on to the pictures… Continue reading “Arkansas 4: Bookstores!”