By special request, a not quite random selection of work drawn from my large format back catalogue. Have added some notes, along with a single digital image for good measure @ the end. Also captured in situ, as of course was the film.
No VFX need apply in real time, or until authenticity is made irrelevant by progress.
Until then, that's why god created perspective control:
My 1st ever shoot with the Linhof consisted of ten exposures, all Ottawa National Forest botanicals. That's where we were and what was there. Seeing the film later, I could sort of tolerate three of the ten.
The next step on my large format learning curve came when I hauled 120 sheets of 4x5 transparency with me to Switzerland. Even though I'd barely any clue as to what I was doing.
In for a penny in for a pound, I
guess.
After three weeks of guessing plus
another week waiting on the film, not only had I succeeded @ a better than 2:1
ratio, what I’d be shooting going forward had been set in stone.
And so much for spending a lifetime
working from my knees, praying for some plant to stop moving, finally clicking the
shutter, then finding out days or even weeks later whether or not it actually had.
I took my master class in large
format, architectural fieldwork primarily @ two separate, though hardly equal
historic sites.
Old World Wisconsin, a collection of vintage structures plucked from other places, gathered together and preserved as a museum
exhibit:
And the old copper mining town of Victoria, the very definition of vintage aging in place.
This is called 'Victoria Flies' for good reason, not readily seen via your phone:
It was @ an historic site along
the north shore of Lake Huron that I figured out Ektachrome could shoot high
contrast imagery in the mostly dark. Though if you look closely enough, you’ll see that even
dead geese waft in the slightest breeze.
Unleashed, I found other
treasures in the wild field. Shipwrecks don’t move per se, except sometimes Superior swallows them. When you make it all the way in lugging 50# on
your back and find it hasn’t, you damn well better score.
I was there to shoot something
else and this property’s private, not abandoned, so I passed it by three times
in the rain before at the end of the day pulling over on the public road, jumping
from the car and grabbing a quick shot just the same.
Turned out, this single sheet of
film is far better rendered than any of the other work I’d gone there to
do.
Take advantage of every
opportunity as presented, since the next time what you see might well be gone.
This black beauty was, when I returned.
Grab excellence whenever you
can get it, even if ad hoc & on the fly…
Once we’d traveled up the
Bayfield peninsula for to shoot, but the skies poured down rain. We sat in a
lakeside café while I bemoaned cruel fate.
Then this appeared. I bolted, threw
my gear together on the sodden pier, and desperately fired off four sheets.
It’s the only 4x5 I ever paid a
specialist to scan, as no one including myself could get out of the film what I
knew was in there.
Avoid filling your phone with sunrise/sunset images. While those can be undeniably gorgeous, they're just memories that outside the moment become indistinguishable, one from the other. So live it, instead.
Except on that rare occasion when the magic hour creeps in on little cat's feet and you're there well prepared, hoping for exactly that.
Then, strike.
Don’t neglect your roots, those
nourish and inform you. But never tie yourself too tightly to those, either.
Consider that as corporeal time
itself runs short, all construct fails with time.
And when chased down by the pack
of ravaging wild dogs we call progress, by all means spit in its face by acing
your last chance.
Then let it go.
Because when clinging tight to
what was, what will be turns even the wisest old owl to stone, rendering it
useless to ongoing need.
But by embracing the future come
what may, even old men might again learn to fly.
Mourning Dove Under Glass
