- Recent Photo Uploads -

Please take a look at the latest photo I just uploaded, “Wesly Ngetich, 2007.”

I looked at it once when I proofed it, determined the flare and blur was too much, and put it aside.

That was seven months ago. So why is this image posted now if I didn’t like it?

Well. Today I received a news alert to this article.

“While with his tribe Monday, Ngetich became involved in the political violence that has swept through Kenya since the disputed re-election of President Mwai Kibaki on Dec. 27.”

“According to information provided by his manager, Hussein Makke of West Chester, Pa., Ngetich was killed by a shot through the chest with an arrow in his hometown region of Trans Mara, Kenya. Ngetich, married with three children ages 8, 6 and 1, was 34.”

That was enough for me to pull out the contact sheets from that day and look at it again. With new eyes, and a somber mood given the unfortunate circumstances of the subject, the photo now open up, and present to me its true story.

Seven months ago, I was caught up in the technical failures of it, but now I see past that haze, and can pick out subtle details that I hadn’t noticed. I had never seen before that he wasn’t running, but instead gliding as both of his feet are off the ground as the pounding sun pushes him along. Do I need worry that I didn’t throw enough flash out there to illuminate his face? Not as all. We see a runner, in perfect runners form. All the ID we need is the number on the bib.

Am I just over reacting and artificially trumping up a blurred photo in my own head? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll let you make your own decision if its good or not. But, I guess for me, that this is just a cold, hard lesson on how context can trump technique. It is just sad that such a tragedy had to happen for me to realize what I had captured.

Last night I was out at Sir Benedict’s Tavern having some drinks, and there was live music being played on their stage. One of the performers in the group just happened to be using a double bass. While watching him play, I thought about what would happen if I went up to him, in the middle of his performance and said “You know that they make electric version of those now that are much smaller, and sound pretty much the same. Plus they have these things called ‘frets’ on them, so you don’t even need to know what a C# sounds like to play it. It is a much better system that you should switch to.”

I’m pretty sure that we can all agree that I’d have looked like a complete jerkface if I’d have actually gone up and said that to him.

I also think that I’d be drawing a very close parallel to every digital shooter who approaches myself, & other photographers around the globe who haven’t switched to digital and drops comments like “Where do you stick the memory card in?” or “Does that have a shutter, or do you just use a hat?” in a tone that sounds like they think we are somehow dumb for not advancing into the modern age of photography. Or that we have somehow managed to remain oblivious that such wonderful new gadgets exist, and need to be enlightened.

Guess what? We don’t. If you happen to be one of the people who have made such comments, and happen to be reading this, pretend we are the guy playing the double bass, and things should be clearer.

For the record, I do give elbow jabs back to my digital shooting friends with comments like “Batteries? Your camera needs those things to function? Weird?”, and actually do have special situations where I’m going to start bringing a hat to function as a shutter. 98.341% of the time it is all in good fun both ways. The norm that I’ve experienced is that people who make the small comments are often just breaking the ice, and and are actually interested in the equipment I’m using. This post is mostly directed at the more rare instances of actual attempts of belittlement that happens by some pompous shooters. (Mostly on Internet forums) I just want to try to put it into perspective on how silly they come of sounding to all of us on the traditional side of the fence.

Before you get all huffy, let me just make the disclaimer that this is not a digital bashing post. A more suitable title would have been “How combining film with digital without knowing the limits of the traditional media while simultaneously not realizing the the latitude of digital media ruined the party.”, but that would be pathetically long, and its kind of fun to make someone think I’m going to harass digital, and then not do it. This is just a real life account of how mixing media blindly can ruin things down the road, based on my own experiences.

I had only switched to 4×5 for about four months before I lost the darkroom access I had at the time. To fill the void of being darkroom less, I purchased an Epson Perfection 2450 scanner that can handle the 4×5 negatives I was shooting so I could at least still proof and upload the photographs that I was creating. This method went on from summer 03, to summer 06 and I never had a problem with it, until the end of the summer in 2006.

At that point I had a darkroom set up and got back to making wet prints. However, I wish I had realized previously what I realized when I started wet printing again. That being that just about anything except a grossly underexposed negative can be put into a film scanner, and have all the information read. Thus, learning to identify things like massive over development never happened. If everything was visual on the negative, the scanner would read it just fine, and I was happy enough. However, photo paper isn’t that forgiving, and now I’m finding that a lot of what I shot over the past three years was really hard to print traditionally, and dammit! I didn’t like it. Doing a contortionist’s act of dodging & burning just to get all the print’s tones onto the paper before even considering using the same methods for making artistic modifications, was just not fun.

So I decided to take action. I drudged up a copy of Ansel Adam’s ‘The Negative‘, and Fred Picker’s ‘Zone IV Workshop‘ and read them both. Then I took my Calument shutter tester and charted out all the speeds on all of my shutters. Invested in a Pentax Digital Spotmeter (at a considerable less price then the list price in the provided link) and went to town calibrating my equipment based on the Picker book, and articles at the archived Barry Thornton site.

Before I had ran the calibration gauntlet, I was starting to get real upset with my shooting. I’d go out and shoot for several hours, and be rewarded with about a 10% hit rate on properly exposed & developed negatives. Having this happen several outings in a row was quite demoralizing and costly. Since I’ve calibrated my equipment, this percentage seems to have gone up considerably. However, since I’m still a few weeks away from having a working darkroom set up again, I can’t be 100% sure of my results yet. But I do say, the negatives tend to look way better already. The shadows all have detail, and the highlights don’t look bulletproof. I’m eager to see just how much easier it will be to get a solid base print to work with soon. Getting these consistent, usable results has greatly improved the enjoyment of the time time I am spending actually out making negatives, and has put a spark back into me to go out and make more negatives.

That is pretty much the end of my story until I can wet print again to really see if my efforts have payed off. So I guess the moral of the story is Know your equipment. Leave nothing to chance. And don’t let digital be a crutch if you are mixing media.