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Author: Uncle Dick

29 Jul

Posted at 08:10h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

I'll have something for the rest of you later in the week. Today is for the analog landscape and portrait artists. Some people see them as a dying breed - what with the rise of ever-larger or ever-smaller digital sensors. But they are not unhealthy at all - just selective in what they photograph and what they use to do it. This Fujifilm GF 670 Professional camera is sitting in the secondhand cabinet at Camera Electronic - ironically on an X-system plastic plinth.  It is one of the last of a very long line of traditional folding cameras - remember the Zeiss Ikon camera you saw here a few months ago. But this one gives no quarter at all as far as lens quality and resolution. It is superb.   The format that the camera seems to support is 120film in a 6 x 7 cm gate. However, if you prefer a sqaure format you'll find that there is a switchable mask inside the camera that can pare it down to 6 x 6. You choose as you load the film. Users of other...

27 Jul

Posted at 09:54h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

You. The reader. The photographer who spends five minutes on one of my essays every two days. Is it me? I hope not. I should be terrified of causing anyone to do anything. Whether it worked out well or ill there woild be great danger of them coming back to complain or praise and I am so very shy...

17 Jul

Posted at 09:57h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

The question. If you are known to be connected with the photo trade - seller or shooter - or with the art or science or hobby or culture of it - someone will bail you up at a barbecue and ask you. You can grasp your chest and sink senseless to the ground but they'll still pester you as the ambos stretcher you away. " Is the Flapoflex better than the Digiclunk? Which lens should I get? How much discount do I get? Hello? Hello? Are you conscious?  Hello? " Save yourself the theatre and the St. John's fee. Have an answer ready instead. The short one will be to name the camera that you own. Just a word will be all that is needed to send your questioner off to someone else armed with this - they'll ask the same question again and get a different answer. Then off to a third one...

15 Jul

Posted at 09:43h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Yes, but in a crude form. The users of hairy and burnt sticks to make marks on dried wood pulp or rough cloth can certainly make interesting images. Many of the results are very colourful and decorative. The results can be large or small at will, and the makers seem to have avoided the horrors of colour management and resizing as they work. I'm not sure how much oil paints cost, but they cannot be more than inkjet cartridges...

13 Jul

Posted at 08:46h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Old advertising principle: you don't show a product you can't sell. Getting the crowd het up is the basis of a lot of advertising. Loosening wallets is a complex activity - there is an entire industry trying to analyse how to do it - but it's no good getting them ready to spend if there is nothing to spend on. When they are finally ready for the snake oil, have the bottles handy. This is a problem with some of the semi-advertising I do in this column. I see an item in CE, feature it a week later, and then find that it has sold out in the interim - leaving any readers who have gone into the shop on my say-so rather put out. I apologise for this, though I'm not sure why. Likewise, I have been dying to tell people to buy some things , but until the shop stocks them, I need to keep mum. At least the featured product today was there when I photographed it, and is a darned good idea. Similar products like it from other makers are also darned...

10 Jul

Posted at 08:53h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Aside from the fact that it is 15% over-saturated, 30% too dark, and has noise everywhere. The sun is in the wrong position and the flare from the lens is excruciating. There is no fibonacci curve or golden mean or rule of thirds anywhere in the frame and I suspect that even that is skewed - all the internal angles are greater than 90º. The paper is matte and the ink is gloss and several of the head jets are filled with dried insects. But it's perfect. Why? because it is a photo of something that is dearly cherished by someone else and you have presented them with an enlarged copy of it. The recipient of the gift sees through the thumb prints and coffee rings to the heart of the image, loves what you show - and takes no notice of how you show it. Contrast this idea with the famous set of platinum art prints made by Irving Penn in the 1950s of discarded cigarette butts picked up from New York gutters. Exquisite workmanship, fine art printing, careful technical brilliance....

08 Jul

Posted at 09:10h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Say what? Oh, no, we're not going to roast that old chestnut again. Climb the barricades, wave the HCB banner, and throw Leica rangefinders at the police. Would throwing Argus C-3's be more appropriate? They've got sharper corners. The age old debate about artificial versus natural light probably started when the first photographer put his cigar out in a pot of magnesium powder. It would have continued unabated through the tungsten and fluorescent tube era on to flashes - trays, sheets, bulbs, tubes etc. Purity, authenticity, sanctity, and artistry would have been invoked by one side to deny the chance for others to see in the dark and equally so by those who wanted to illuminate the world. In the last decade the fight has been taken out of the ring by the development of powerful amplifying circuits and noise-rinsers that let the nominative sensitivity of a sensor rise to fantastic heights. Starting with the Nikon D3 and continuing with their products - and those of other major makers  - the ability to photograph in places too dim to see in has become...