Shots off some recently developed rolls from the past couple months
Unfortunately I never seem to shoot the same film stock consistently with the same camera so I never end up developing everything on a regular basis- I’d like to start ensuring I have everything I shoot in a given month developed by the time that month ends but we’ll see how it goes
A few more images off the negatives I picked up late last year
This hotel is still standing today in Mackay, Queensland
I had been contacted by another collector who identified the woman in many of the photos (including the image above) as Mollie Thomas; this is further substantiated by the name Thomas written on the actual cardboard negative sleeves.
I’d like to take more time to do some research on locations and people but trying to stay social, check off all the miscellaneous life errands, and keep on top of work is leaving me little time to even do any shooting of my own- the egg tray of my refrigerator is over loaded with rolls of unshot Tri-X and Neopan.
My study is getting full of stacks of old glass negatives, boxes of color slides, and rolls of black and white film that all need to be trayed, scanned and edited up- I’m hoping to get a breather sometime around mid-Feb when I can section off a clean weekend to keep things rolling.
I haven’t had much time to do any homework into these shots- I tried to see if I could look up the Exchange Hotel from the first shot but the subsequent Google results were too much to sort.
For now, I’ll focus on getting some scanned and posted- research can wait till later.
Reference:
I found a second hand shop was having a 30-50% off sale last weekend so I swooped in to see if I could get a deal on any old negatives they had- I ended up with a sizable bag of what I would guess is going on a few hundred spread across multiple packets.
Since the quantity is so large I’ve decided to break it down into a few separate posts, I’ve dubbed it the ‘Crown Street Cache’ since the actual store I found them at was on Crown Street in Darlinghurst.
These seem to be the most promising find yet- with the sheer amount of shots taken, there should be plenty of clues as to decade and location, I’ll see what I can manage this week for research.
I realized I had been forgetting to scan a few different rolls I had developed since I got back from the states so here’s a quick mix of shots in rough chronological order
That’s it for now
I went out to Sculptures by the Sea at Bondi and brought along an old Rolleiflex TLR that I had picked up about 8 months ago off a Canadian camera collector- I ran a couple rolls of Velvia 50 medium format through it just to get a feel for the handling.
The focus is much slower, the camera bulkier, the view finder is backwards (i.e. left is right) and the metering not as exact- even the square framing is a change- not to mention the 80mm focal length which feels telescopic compared to my usual wide angle lens.
When I switched from digital to film, I found that it forced me to think and plan ahead more in getting ready for a shot since I could no longer rely on auto-focus or a rapid fire shutter release- I’m willing to bet if I spent more time with the Rolleiflex I would find a similar gain in that it brings a new mode of working.
Quick update with a few shots of my own from the past couple months:
I snapped this first shot of Katie only to realize there was a way more interesting dude behind her
99%’ers camping out in Martin Place
Man who had just proposed to his girlfriend in the middle of Occupy Sydney
Enmore was over ran with teenagers expressing their identity crisis
Newtown’s ‘Reclaim the Lanes’ festival
Glebe Markets
I tried taking the same style shot multiple times, pocketing the subject in the bottom left or right corner while trying to give it as much context as possible
I’ve been working on doing my own film development and I feel like its giving me better results than anything I had got back from a lab in the past year- I’ve coupled this with using a Phaidon discount I get to buy up some photography books.
While reading through Danny Lyon‘s Memories of Myself he transcribes Hugh Edwards telling him how the best photographs imply movement. It seems an obvious statement in hindsight but I had never been able to put my finger on what the ‘poetic quality’ was that made some images stand out while others look stale and I think its that exactly- when it feels like the image is just after something started but before its finished.
After the Newtown Festival a couple weeks ago I was on my to Doughboy for a pizza when I dropped into Gould’s to dig through the mountain of books. I found a copy of Nikos Economopoulos’ In the Balkans which was the first time I had seen any of his work or even heard of him- its was 30 bucks (comparatively high for Gould’s) so I left it. By the time this Friday rolled around I had been thinking about the images so much that I sat through a jammed up CBD for an hour and a half on the M30 after work to go back and see if it was still there.
I consider it now the best photography book I own- in my mind its up there with Koudelka. Since leafing through it and studying the images, I feel like I’m reevaluating every shot I’m about to take. I dont know if its the cuts and crops he’s making after the fact or if he is actually getting that in there to frame while shooting but I’m amazed at each stray arm, foot, branch, bottle or cigarette in his shots.
After much internal debate I finally decided to take a class on doing my own film development over the ACP- so far its been fairly good as I’ve developed a couple rolls of Tri-X and learned about the print process by creating my own contact sheet.
This first shot was with Xtol at 1:1 and yeilded a very fine grain but low contrast image
This second shot was with Rodinal at 1:50 which came out with a grainier and harder feel
I feel like the Xtol seems good for scans as I can always bump up the contrast in the image via Lightroom to whatever is needed- but I like the grain showing through on the Rodinal. I’ve read online that this is fairly common and there has been a lot of experimentation with adding a drop of Rodinal to your Xtol to get the best of both worlds.
While these were just off some test rolls I ran through on the walk to class, this Sunday was the first time I was really able to get back out and shoot straight street so I’m psyched to get those rolls dev’d and the photos up even though I havnt yet posted the slew I’ve scanned from my trip to the states a month ago on top of a mountain of interesting found or loaned slides to scan on the side- should have plenty to keep me busy in the coming weeks.
I headed out to the Hunter Valley for a conference at the end of June packing the OM2n with my cheap as 28mm 3.5
I spent the next roll taking shots of my room, a winery, the trip back to Sydney and some late night flash shots around Enmore after checking out Lucien Alperstien’s opening night
Then when I was able to continually forward the frames ad nauseum I realized the roll never caught on the winder- I had effectively been shooting nothing
But I took the M6 out to try my hand at shooting a mix of whatever film was left in my fridge at 400 or 800 ASA
Some dude’s bad ass Ute
Spent a little time trying out some Velvia 50 at the end- I had e-mailed Joel Meyerowitz about a year ago when I first was getting into street photography, I only half expected him to ever get back to me but he actually got responded within a day offering some practical and useful advice- namely, to try to rangefinder if I havnt yet and give Provia, Velvia and Astia a shot to find what works best
In hindsight, it seems like really obvious advice from him, but at the time I was roaming around with a 450D and a $100 nifty fifty having only flipped it into manual mode a month or two prior
I still dont feel like I can shoot color- I cant ‘see’ my shots in anything other than black and white, I have a bunch of 400 speed fuji superia I picked up cheap that I intend on using for practice when I have the time to really get into it
I flew off to the UK for business and managed to snag a couple days at the end for some shooting
Found some good signage whilst in London
Jumped in while he was posing for someone else- I was thinking of getting a few cards made up for moments like this so I can get some photos back to people who might be interested
I snapped this outside of Flat White in Soho– the only decent place I was able to get an actual flat white Aussie style
They have these bikes all over London- I think the way it works is if you have a UK credit card you dip it in the machine, grab the bike, and it charges you from then until you return it to another bike station around town
Framing up the shot
Not sure what was going on when I shot this one, but I liked it concept even if it failed in execution
These last two are probably my favorites out of the London shots- of the two day’s worth of free time, there was only an afternoon in which I wasnt too jet-lagged, hungover, busy saying hello to old friends or pre-occupied checking out the London Street Photography Festival to do some actual shooting
With its wide sidewalks and packed CBD I found it an entirely different shooting experience than Sydney
In some ways it left me feeling like Sydney was lacking in that the more people you have packed into a bigger space all going off in their own worlds the greater the likelihood for potential shots, but in other ways I felt like all the time I put in working for every shot I could work out of Sydney paid off- I think Sydney is a great place to learn street photography in that its extremely safe for a city of its size yet its still personal enough an environment that you have to be super sensitive to the feelings of your subjects in a way you could probably get away without in a London or NYC
I began reading Teju Cole‘s Open City on the flight over and just finished it off tonight, I found it as awesome as the reviews pumped it up to be and thought it worth mentioning since he dabbles in street photography himself- while the book has little to do with photography, if you are interested and looking for a hard copy in Oz you might have to wait until September before you can get it anywhere short of Amazon
Few shots from the Newtown Cemetery
I’ll be in London next week for work so I’m hoping to catch a little bit of the London Street Photography Festival and find some time to burn through a few rolls myself- should have something to show in a few weeks time
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