Street Shooting

A photo-shoot out in the street may never end (click on the title to go to a Google-page link on 'Street Photography'). The shoot might take a long time if, like me, you're doing a 'Homage' project, and the photographer (Lee Friedlander) has been shooting loads of series over the last six decades. Trees (mature Californian Oak) , blossoming Japanese Cherry trees, sticks, thousands of street signs, war monuments, 'The Noble Worker', his friends, his colleagues, different sets of nudes at different times, and on and on. Oh yes, he incorporates his own shadow wherever possible, zillions of reflections onto windows, off windows, through shop-front glass, etcetera . . .
I'm getting to grips with the initially off-putting 'overlay' techniques he uses to build up and make tangential the 'real' subject of his imagery. I am loving it. Of course, I musn't 'copy' his work, but t's OK to do 'in the style of'.

I've shot loads of medium-format (I couldn't afford a Hasselblad as he used, but I borrowed a Bronica SQ-B which acts the same). I have learned to love Black and White again, and I've now got to go on a crash-course on 'Gelatin'Silver' printing; that's what he used, and apparently he prints ALL his own images.





















I went to the British Library to look through a couple of his limited-edition portfolio 'books'. I was very impressed by the toning and very wide range of shades of grey, which are alarmingly good.
One of my images in this post was shot on a Sony-Ericsson 'phone, another on a Canon digital SLR, and the last is a film negative shot using a large-format 'portable' 5" x 4" camera.

Bronica Medium-Format film camera. . .

I'm doing something new - I'm writing this blog post entirely on the iPhone. . . This one's about the difference between a Bronica SQ-B medium-format film camera, and a Bronica Etrsi medium-format film camera.

Yes, I know, the Etrsi is a 6 x 4.5 cm. image, and the SQ-B is a 6 x 6 cm. image. BUT, although I knew that, I had no idea that THE LENSES were different, ie. NOT interchangeable between Bronica bodies. Thanks to my buddy and camera repair-person Panny at Camera City (+44 (0) 20 7813 2100) for solving the problem (my Etrsi lens wouldn't mount onto the SQ-B body) . . . the reason is that because the two cameras' image area and shape is different (one's narrower than the other), the lens must compensate for the different image capture shapes . . . Simple, when someone knows what they're talking about . . .
The Etrsi is 'automatic exposure' if you attach the optional 'prismatic view-finder'. However if this is left on 'auto' for long, the battery goes flat, and you're left with a single default shutter speed of only 1/ 500th of a second, not good on a rainy afternoon . . .

So I'm using the SQ-B lenses with the SQ-B body, when I do my 'in the style of Lee Friedlander' photo-shoot on the weekend. . . As usual, click on the post title to go straight to a Photo.net article all about the techy differences between Bronica models. . . I'll save the Etrsi for other non-square-image shoots . . . which is most of them, at the moment . . .

The one thing I could not do in this post on the iPhone was to re-size the image (I always make them 15 cm. wide, to fit the column width of blog-post text). I needed Photoshop, so I edited the image (using Levels and Curves, slightly tweaked for contrast) on the MacBook Pro . . . thats' it though, everything else was created on the iPhone tonight . . .