Second week back at university this week and I got there nice and early to settle into the studio. I’d already sent through my presentation mentioned in the previous post to Sam, the tutor on email so I was ready to talk it through.
When a few more of my classmates arrived the room got noisier and it was good to hear people chatting and having a laugh, and whilst this is a new group to me I always talk to people that I don’t know and try to become a part of the team.
Present and Correct
We got into the studio area and sat in front of the tv near the white scoop and took it in turns to discuss our ideas for the brief of “The Matter Of The Black Country”.
Up first was Gin, he utilised some of the images from Tom Hicks work and said that he was interested in doing a similar style of photography.
After a round of applause Claire took to the floor and showed us her ideas and how she is attracted to waterside images. She shared some images that she’s previously made and one I noticed immediately was English Bridge in Shrewsbury. She talked about photographing in both day and night as there is a good mixture of light and textures. Claire talked about being inspired by the works of Richard Bellingham and I thought that I’d recommend Todd Hido might also be worth looking at.
Callum then stood in front of the large screen and was talking about Black Country people in industrial settings in a chain manufacture foundry or similar. Sam was talking to Callum about perhaps working to get into an industrial factory before Callum showed us an image of a frame made of concrete rebar. Sam had told him not to make life too difficult for himself. With regards to the industrial elements I think I would suggest Maurice Broomfield as a possible avenue to research.
Evie ex[lained how she’d done a brainstorm too and had come up with the canal being her ultimate choice for the brief. She shared images of the canal system of the black country and how it was so important for the industry to grow and thrive during the industrial revolution.
Then it was time for me to stand up and be counted, I explained my slides, except I’d done it on Word as. a PDF rather than a Powerpoint, which I will ensure I do next time.
I shared the thoughts I’d had and that I’m not from the Black Country or not even anywhere near it, so that I’d probably be visiting Dudley in the near future to go and take some photos. Sam seemed interested in the Street Photography part of my chatter, thinking that it woudl be good to capture the people who make the black country. As part of a trip to Dudley, I could probably go and take a look at the architecture in the Dudley Zoo as it’s a well regarded piece of brutalist architecture designed by The Tecton group. Looks like a day out to dudley.
Lily was up next talking about taking photographs of working class people in the Black Country with inspirations of Loach that we talked about last week and she was particularly inspired by John Gay. Pretty ambitious already she’s talking about shooting on film and making 16×20 large format prints with postcards by the side.
Grace had a quick slide on documentary street photography in the Black Country.
Joe had a couple of pages regarding portraits of the football fans of Black Country teams and creating with them, a photo mosaic of the Black Country flag.
Courtney was the last to present and said that she was looking to take photographs of tradiotional black country foods in an environment of industry. She was Bilston based and is always baking and cooking so will likely create some old family recipe food and then photograph it.
Taking Action
Sam is painfully aware that us students are often learning about using PC’s to manipulate the photos we are taking, and not used to how files should be exported. Some of my earlier images that were edited with noise reduction or multiple layers etc came out super large file sizes. Some of the cameras that we are shooting with produce massive files too, the Hasselblad X1Dii is a 50MP camera that produces 80MB files, my Leica Q3 is a 60MP sensor producing similar size image files.
Sam took the time to explain how to use an “Action” in Photoshop to resize images so that they can be shared more easily over the web/email or onn Instagram etc..
An action is similar to a “Macro” in Microsoft Excel in that it is simply a recorded list of instructions that remove the requirement to go into menus and click on settings etc. It is a simple “bot” of sorts and can be cleverly created to reduce workload on the photographer.
Sam suggest creating a folder for web ready files that have been processed, to keep them away from the master files.
- With an image open in the main Photoshop window.
- Open actions window
- Click the create new action button which is a square with a + in it.
- Start Recording the Action.
- Open Image menu, then Image Size dialogue box.
- Resize pixels. Width 1900 pixels for landscape or height 1900 for Portrait format.
- choose Bicubic (Smooth Gradients)
- Press OK.
- To save the image in it’s new format and filesize.
- File / Export, Save for web (legacy)
- Choose location
- Save
- Save as a jpg
- Stop action
- When you want to resize and export the next image,
- Select the action you recorded, you can rename them to be something more useful if you like.
- Click on the Play button
in my example the end file was 570KB which is half of a MB. the original file was 80MB in size.
It’s a Hassel
As we’d cracked on with this it was time to have a play with some digital medium format cameras
Sam pulled out a couple of Hasselblad X1Dii Cameras which are beasts. He connected them to the macs in the studio so we could see what we were shooting.
After opening the Hasselblad Phocus software and checking the cameras were connected we began.
So that we could identify the shots we’d each taken, we chose the Job info and then “Choose a folder” to drop all of the images into. We selected a new folder on the desktop so that Sam could find them easily after the shoots conclusion.
We were using a Softbox with the Broncolor head. We connected the Aodelan flash trigger to the Broncolor unit and aligned the channels. A quick test confirmed that the flash connected receiver would trigger from the hotshoe connected transmitter.
On the Hasselblad/Broncolor triggers that come with the Hasselblads you need to remember to insert the CR2032 battery before and remove after the shoot as they do not manage battery particularly well.
Sam said we should play with the cameras for a bit, one with a 100mm Macro mounted and the other with a 35-70 zoom lens, and then next week we’ll be editing the images in photoshop
Flash Softbox overhead. Sam calls it vader lighting and we were learning the cameras more than the lighting so we pretty much left it alone.
These are some of the images I was involved with, there are some that I set up and took the photo, and some where I am a subject in the image. Bear in mind that this is to just get to grips with the Hasselblad X1Dii and the tehering in the studio, so these are straight out of the camera with no editing.
Next Week
After we’d finished shooting Sam told us he’d send us over the photos so we can select one or two to play with next week when we look at retouching using Split Frequency techniques. Then in the afternoon we’d be back to playing with the cameras again, unless we needed more time to work on the photoshop techniques.
Negatives
After the rest of the crew had left for the day, and while the studio area was still available I took the opportunity to pull out the negatives I’d developed last week and get them scanned on the negative scanners. I managed to get the four sets of Ilford HP5+ 35mm 400ISO films scanned in.
The quality of the scans aren’t great as I wasn’t paying utmost care and attention, as I just wanted to get them ready so I could create a contact sheet to go alongside the images in the negative storage binders.
There were some nice images and I’m sure the scanner has made a few of them look more blurred than they actually were in real life. Some of the negs were very dark and I think this is down to the fact that it was the first roll in my Leica M6 and I had trouble engaging it on the sprockets so the back door was open a few times etc.
Some of the images, seen bleow, are from the Batman Unmasked exhibition I visited in July, and then some from around Manchester and Shirehall in Shrewsbury as well as a few photos from Bath and Bristol. Getting a contact sheet made up will allow me to select if there are any photos I want to choose to enlarge in the dark room. None of these fit in with the Black Country theme but there are a few of some arcitectural views that I’m partial to.
Summary
It was a good opportunity to join in with a few of the new classmates. They’ve had a year together already and only seen me milling around as a level 5 last year. It is a bit nervy to try and fit into a new group, and most of the people in the group are really friendly whilst being motivated to take photos. Normally I would have sat back and waited to be invited to join in on one of the camera setups but when a few people weren’t doing it I thought I’d jump on and get started. As it worked out a few of the others who aren’t part of the main crowd helped out and we all worked together. It was a good introduction to me as they’d not really seen anything from me.
My presentation was about the right sort of level as the others who had bothered to put something together, but there were some who hadn’t produced anything to share and talk about. I’m not surprised about this, groups have people with varying levels of engagement and I guess they’ll all come good. Maybe they just don’t feel comfortable presenting.
The Hasselblad cameras were a good experience too, it’s evident that they are quality pieces of kit and they’re constantly being referred to as the price of a mortgage. Not quite but a second hand body only will set you back at about £3k, which is a good camera for the price. Not sure how much the lenses go for but got to be over £1k each I’d imagine.
The controls on the X1Dii were quite intuitive, as were the controls on the Phocus software. The tethering software did seem a little unstable and needed to restart itself a few times and we did keep forgetting to put our own names in to the filename box so there was a few photos that require a name change when sent to us.
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