Photos by Phoenix

Tripods are for wusses

My mate Tim has bought a camera. And he’s started asking my advice about photography stuff. The fact that the b*stard’s bought a better camera than mine hasn’t put me off trying to help out, but each time I consider a question, I start coming back to basic skills that I feel every photographer should learn, and these are far from techie or sexy or cutting edge. They usually involve less buttons and lights than anyone with a new all-singing all-dancing digital camera will want to be excited about. But some things don’t really change, you know what I mean?

I’ll give you an example: Learn how to hold your camera steady.

No, really. I mean it! Look – you think you’re holding it steady now, but if there’s a little gust of wind from the right – there look, you’re all over the place. And what if the light drops? What’s the lowest shutter speed you feel comfortable hand holding? Yes, I know it depends on the lens, but let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s a 35mm. 1/50 second? 1/30? (sucks teeth in…) 1/8^th?

Yes, yes, I hear you saying (or perhaps it’s just the tinnitus – a combination of 30 years drumming and wyrd practices affect me in diverse and wondrous ways), but that nice glossy camera magazine said that if the shutter speed dropped below the same number as the focal length of the lens then you should reach for your tripod.

Stuff and nonsense, I say. I said – oh, you can’t hear me; you’ve gone off to get your tripod, and don’t suffer from tinnitus. But… oops…  you’ve missed the shot. That gorgeous light’s changed and moved on.  And anyway, you could be forgiven for not always having your camera about your person, but who the hell carries around a tripod all the time ‘just in case’?

(Don’t bother replying if you do. You’re strange, and I’m not interested in the attachment to your anorak that enables you to do this. You probably carry condoms on you at all times in a secret pocket and have never needed those either)

 

Let me give you an example. You’re walking on the beach with your lady love, or in my case returning late from the supermarket with a mate, and you see this:

 

What’s the first thing that goes through your head? All right, the second, after “wow, look at that!”  if it’s “bollocks; I wish I’d got my tripod here”, then shame on you. Personally, I was running across the sand thinking various things all at once: how many seconds/minutes have I got before I lose another f-stop of light? Should I sacrifice the wide angle composition for a portion of it on a much faster standard lens? And if so, can I change it quickly without getting sand on anything? If I fall while I’m running how can I pitch and roll so I keep the camera clear of the sand and salt water?

I decided  the composition was key, so I opted to go for wide, giving me an open aperture of f4. Not ideal. And the maximum ISO of the camera I had in my hand at the time was 1600. Hmm. Again, could be better. With my mind switched to its own Auto mode, I found my thumb had flicked the lens to manual focus. Well, here goes.

 

½ a second. Ok; do-able. I squat, trying to keep my clothes relatively dry, but leaning my elbow on my knee, holding the camera body against my eye firmly and hunching I start the long outward breath and press the button. A couple of shots to make sure I get one completely shake free. Image Stabilisation? Not on this lens, baby. So it’s really down to steady hands.

Now, what if I want to shoot the sea itself – only reflected light from an already dark sky. Ah. Yes. Now we’re down to a couple of seconds. Well, let’s shoot it. I’ve hand held longer.

 

The light’s dropping by the second now. Just squeeze another couple off. I really want to get a sense of the patterns and movement of the water that I can more sense than see. I can feel it, and breathe it, but can I capture it? I know these last two shots must be running into a curious phenomenon that harks back to the age of film: reciprocity failure. 

The brave souls amongst you who have switched their cameras to manual will have realised that calculating exposure is actually quite easy once you’ve got a starting point: it’s a linear relationship between aperture, shutter speed and film sensitivity. That is, until it gets dark.  That’s when you discover there’s a point below which the film just stops being able to see properly. That cosy little linear relationship stops working. You find yourself giving it double, quadruple, ten times what it ought to need, and it gives back a different quality of reproduction, dreamy and slightly indistinct.

 Digital ought to be different, but –digital noise apart – I find some similarity. The sensor’s ability to see at all seems to drop off, but it starts picking up on other kinds of stuff not so obvious to the optical observer. Thrilling stuff.

 

And the good thing is that you can chimp the rear screen to see if the exposure’s usable, even if you can’t see the real character of what you’ve captured. Low light: I love it.

But back in’t days o’ film there were no such luxury. It were all guesswork an’ spell casting. It was Samhain (Hallowe’en to you), and I’d been out striding among the burial chambers on the island I’d been living on. Got back, couldn’t sleep, looked out the window and saw this:

First light on Celtic New Year. Damn! Had I got any film left? (If you’re genuinely wondering, I have to point out that the photo above is rather a strong clue to the answer…) I pulled the place apart and found the last one: 100 ASA Jessops cheapest slide film. I put it in my Olympus compact camera anyway, and stumbled back out. I was glad I did.

 

I braced the little camera on walls; I lay on my stomach and found rocks to lean it on; I knelt and braced; I lay on my back, bracing elbows on my chest. Anything I could think of to get the shots. And yes, the exposures were of the order of 4 seconds to about 12 or 14.

Months later when I got back to the mainland, I put all the films in, by which time this one was mixed in amongst the others. I couldn’t remember what I’d done with each, and my local Snappy Snaps could only process C41 in those days, so I took the brave decision to cross process the lot and just see what came out.

 

The results speak for themselves. Remember, these are shot on film, straight out of the camera, no photoshop. In fact, I think these are messily scanned in from 6x4 prints! I didn’t know anyone else who was doing landscapes on slide cross processed as neg, (and still don’t) but was so blown away by the exaggeration of the cloud subtleties and bonkers saturation, contrast and natural vignetting that I made  it a study and trademark of my work back then.

None of which would have happened if I’d given up for lack of a tripod. Or, in fact, just gone back to bed, as I almost did, just through sheer exhaustion.

 

 

So how low can  you go? Well I ran out of light on a shoot with the beautiful and talented Katie Buckhaven, most probably because she can talk for England. Yes, I know, this is me saying that, conjuring images of pots and kettles, but that’s what I mean. The pair of us were way too busy yakking, and not busy enough shooting. The setting wasn’t quite what I’d wanted it to look like anyway, and here we were in the pitch black, but I thought “well, she’s got the frock on now; let’s give it a go while we’re here”.  So I braced myself against the wall and pressed the button.

 

The shortest of the shots was around 6 seconds. The longest? Something over 20. (Ask Katie - she was holding her breath the whole time. And she'll confirm it was a whole lot darker than this looks!) Yes, of course there's a dreamy and indistinct quality to it. But then what do you expect shooting in a haunted coastal castle at night? Personally I thought it made a nice contrast to some of the daytime shots we got. And yes, a tripod might have helped me keep the camera steady, but it wouldn’t have helped me focus in the dark with a completely manual lens on wide aperture. And it wouldn’t have stopped the wind blowing Katie’s hair. Nor her limbs and jaw shivering.

Nah, cameras are heavy enough. Frocks are bulky. Last thing I want to be carting around on the off chance is another heavy bulky piece of metal. You know, it’s been so long, I’m not even sure where my tripod is…

 

 

 

 

Did I mention recently that I love film...?

Plan B

There’s a moment when it’s best to call it for what it is, and switch to Plan B.

We’d been up and down Highgate Hill more times than we’d relished just finding the cemetery. But now having found it, we had to admit that the shot was nowhere to be found. Paul had seen a great location on a documentary about the cemetery, but hadn’t had a chance to scout it for real, and now we were finding all kinds of fascinating places that weren’t it. He suspected his undoing lay in the hands of creative documentary editing.

It’s a huge graveyard. Not quite the necropolis that Kafka resides in, but expansive nonetheless. And hilly. And after finding ourselves back at the entrance once again, without having found anything close enough for the shot Paul wanted we stumbled instead upon that moment of group awkwardness that invites the question: shall we call it a day?

Paul called it. The shot wasn’t here. Let’s go back to the studio and do something else. The moment was underscored by the attendant wandering over at this juncture and ejecting all of us because she spotted the two tripods Jo was carrying, and suspected us of wanting to take pictures. Never mind three complete digital, one 35mm and one square format camera systems, Highgate clearly object to tripods. Nor did it seem to matter that we’d each forked out £3 each to go in. I’ve never paid to go to a cemetery before. Karl Marx’ grave maybe? Seems ironic, really: “Workers of the world, Unite around the monument to my life, body and ideas, all of which are so dead that the last communal organisation in town is triple charging residents, interns and visitors just to witness and preserve it all. Long live the ‘free’ market. Thank you and goodnight.”

Once back at the Waterloo studio we tried a few other shot ideas we’d had in mind, and everything fell into place. It’s only a small space, so there was a lot of getting in each other’s light, but we had fun. In fact just getting back was fun in itself...

I wanted to try the natural light thing with a black and white film shot of Sophie, but by the time we got to it I realised I’d missed the light I wanted. I opened the blinds just to check and saw the most amazing sunset over London. Great! Switch to plan C! we scrambled over the couch to get to the balcony and I grabbed the shots in under 3 minutes.

Paul got his ‘levitation’ shots on the go (more on those when they’ve emerged from the Adobean vaults) and we had a fair old crack at the Charlie’s Dark Angels thing. Finally his rabbit costume came out and the girls knew it was time to pull the eject handles. We weren’t the only ones with a backup plan….

It was a good fun shoot, and we had the time to get a real variety of images that we might well not have got if we’d persisted in trying to find a compromise shot at the cemetery. Good call.

Noise

Hokay, just a quick thought in the midst of looking back over the year.

My last shoot last year was From The Jam playing live to a packed out Forum in London. Very cool, and great to find myself among several hundred moshers about my age who hadn't seen The Jam play in twenty years and were clearly going berserk with the experience! A great feeling, but a little hard to hold a telephoto steady in amongst it all...

The thought is this: What's so bad about noise?

It happened in HiFi, then in music, then in photography: a desire for 'cleaner' sound or images that somehow turns into an obsession that precludes any thought of the nature of the particular subject matter being represented in each case. CD, ProTools and Logic, and Digital photography, with its obsession with megapixels. (Not forgetting Tuna - 'No bones!')

But what if you're shooting an electrifying gig by a late 70s New Wave band?

Shooting live music for one of the music papers back then (remember Sounds, NME and Melody Maker?) meant pushing Tri-X at least 2 stops to 1600 and maybe processing it in Rodinal if you could a) find some in time and b) actually wanted tighter grain. Gritty, grainy, contrasty images. But it really worked! It suited the subject matter. Immediacy, working with what you've got and banging it out - that was the whole ethos, and it's what made it exciting.

Where's it gone? Are we so scared of 'imperfection' these days? Does it somehow open us to unwelcome professional judgements?

Well, now's a great time to consider it. The advent of the Nikon D3, with huge dynamic range and a feasible working ISO rating of 25600 (!!!) and the workability of HDR techniques even for everyday amateur photographers mean that we can now shoot and represent stuff WAY beyond what the human eye can see. It's astonishing. I'll show you some later - I'm hoping to shoot Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant at the Hilton here in Prague Old Town this week, and for sure I'll take a tripod and get busy with some HDR. Because that's what will make it look best.

And, of course, some of those techniques can be applied to most things, even live music. The question is do we want to? Here's a conventional image (RAW, 1600, telephoto at f4, pretty much the limits of the gear I had on the night) - how much more do we want to see, and what will it tell us?

We have a choice, now, surely? We can make truly subjective judgements on the quality of resolution and feel we want given the subject. We did it with portraiture - the advent of sharp lenses in the mid 20th Century made us realise that we don't want to see everything in microscopic detail! Hence soft focus, and the now bewildering array of expensive special effects to make you look like you were shot with a cheap 1930s lens. (And let's not get into vinyl noise samples in the background of CDs...)

So let me pin some colours: I love rock. It's my cultural background. R&B was always aspirational: it totally makes sense to shoot Hi Def pristine Hasselblad H3 39megapixel shots photoshopped to oblivion as part of the Merc 'n' chick 'n' gold scrapbook; but the only aspirations we had in the John Peel music pub on the estate in '79 was to be in a loud band.

So at this noiseless best of times, I ask again: what's so bad about noise? Ladies and gentlemen, a message From The Jam.

PS - on the subject of doing it the old way, I should pick up the pushed Tri-X shots of Hugh Cornwell's latest recordings in ToeRag studios. He did it for real, so I figured I should too. I'll share the results soon.