I Can See it For You Wholesale

A couple of weeks ago, I had a discussion about some of my work with a professional photographer and very experienced and knowledgeable printer whom I’ll refer to as “V.” The discussion was regarding a series I’ve been working on of infrared photographs of US and California flags.

V wasn’t very impressed with the work, which is not in itself necessarily interesting. After all, not all work will be to everyone’s taste, and of course not everything I produce is solid gold — far from it. But I found some of the particulars interesting:

He ranked the photographs in order from best or most interesting to worst or least interesting; this ranking was exactly opposite the ranking I would apply to the same photographs. This is a pretty awesome response, because it shows that what interests me in the photographs, the direction I want to take them, corresponds to something that isn’t just in my head — even if it isn’t necessarily something that’s crowd-pleasing.

Another interesting divergence is this photograph, which V referred to as a “snapshot”:

I say this is interesting because, out of the entire series, this is the one photograph which I would say is least like a snapshot. All the others actually do have snapshot qualities — some are snapped on the fly, many are made with little to no active attempts at “good” composition, etc. I think in this case, and in many cases, “snapshot” really just means, “photograph I don’t like but I’m not sure why.” (Alternate usage: “photograph I like but don’t want to acknowledge as a good photograph.”)

V gravitated toward photographs which had what he referred to as “human interest” — the photographs I included which are more street-oriented or psuedo-documentary. His specific advice as regards the prints themselves tended to go towards making the flags more visible and identifiable as flags, and to recovering lost detail in the flag markings.

I explained that this was basically directly contrary to my intentions. What drew me to this subject is the way infrared photography effaces the markings of flags and frees them (albeit temporarily, partially) from their habitual symbolic uses. So, the tendency of the flags’ markings to wash out is essential, whereas the “human interest” content is secondary — used to give a context for the portrayal of the flags themselves.

I don’t think this clicked solidly for V, because he tended to keep hitting these points as the discussion went on, regardless. He also characterized my explanation of the project as “symbolic,” which is sort of, but not really, in the right neighborhood. What I’m interested in is the way photography can, without physically changing an object, remove or suspend its symbolic value. I tried to convey that, with mixed success; after that he started calling it “non-symbolic symbolism.” Not really an improvement.

The funny thing is, I found this whole conversation to be not only entertaining and engaging, but also strangely comforting. I’ve never felt so good about being poorly or incompletely understood.

Of course, this is not to say that we should always celebrate when people don’t like our work, or when people don’t “get” our work. I’m not interested in producing work for an elite audience, however defined. But I am pleased to have elicited a strong response which is more than casually related to what I intend for this project, and I am pleased at having been able to articulate most of those intentions in discussion to my own satisfaction.

As to the project itself, I need to continue to produce work for it and to work on refining the sequencing. The balance and relationship between the more “documentary” photographs and the more (for want of a better word) “abstract ones needs to be improved; in its current form, the ambiguity regarding that relationship weakens the sequence, because it seems like two sequences that have merely been interleaved. If I can fix that, it will hopefully provide a better stepping-off point for viewers and make it easier for them to see along with me…

So, I finally leveled up with this IR flash mess I’ve been working on. I’ve got actual, honest to goodness results.

Warning: This is going to be very nerdy and tech-y. If IR photography isn’t your thing, just look at the pictures and move on, unless you want a serious soporific. I’ll put up a less geeky post on IR street photography later.

I’m not going to do a whole tutorial write-up thing on how to go about this, because there are already a couple of good ones here and here.

The first one does a great job of explaining how to go about putting a gel on your flash with a bit of space to prevent, you know, melting. However, the filter mentioned there has a non-optimal cutoff for IR film currently in production. The second one (which will be of particular interest to XA shooters) provides a film/filter pairing which is currently available and works great: Ilford SFX gel filters and Rollei IR400 film.

I tried this combination out with my Nikkormat FT-2, 2.8cm f/3.5 Nikkor-H (a great lens for IR work), and a Nikon SB-24.

Shooting wide open with the flash at full power produces usable exposures for subjects in the 8-15′ range, give or take, with some definite (but acceptable) overexposure for subjects close up.

This is reasonably consistent with the flash’s calculations for ISO 12 (which is what I normally rate IR400 at when shooting with an R72 filter), which suggests I may be able to engage auto mode — or, if subjects aren’t too distant, I may even be able to shoot safely at f/5.6, which would be lovely from a DOF standpoint.

With the Nikkormat and 28mm f/3.5, I’m shooting blind, because I’m working with an opaque infrared filter over the lens. (Note: for night photography, this can be omitted. However, since current IR films are sensitive to visible light, using them for flash work without a filter on the lens during the day is likely to be somewhat counterproductive.) However, with a 28mm lens, even wide open, I have enough DOF to scale focus reasonably well, and guessing the composition isn’t too hard.

BTW, if you’re curious about how scale focus works, this may be helpful:

Anyway, after all that technical mumbo-jumbo, what matters is, it works!

I’m even reasonably pleased with that photograph as such — successful test aside.

The one downside to this setup is that it tends to let through a little more visible light than I’d like — the SFX gels are a little loose in that regard. Not so much that I’m blinding people, but it bugs me just a little.

So, I’m also still fiddling around with alternative options. One not-really-successful setup is this:

It’s a thick eBay 89b filter intended for Cokin-type filter holders which I’ve taped to the front of a wonderfully cumbersome and powerful Sunpak 622. This setup works quite well for digital IR flash with my unmod’d D40, and emits very little visible light, but is completely useless with Rollei IR400. However, initial tests on a less powerful flash provided some exposure with Eke IR820. (Which suggests that the eBay filter isn’t a true 89b equivalent.)

I was hopeful that the Sunpak (which I got specifically for this project) would enable me to shoot with this filter/film combination through sheer power. And it does, sort of, but unfortunately the working distance is still too short to be really useful in the majority of situations.

That was shot at f/1.7, and you can see that even just at about 8′ feet or so, it’s already significantly underexposed. So, while this is not a failure, as such, it’s obviously of very limited practical usefulness unless I’m willing to get truly in-your-face. I’ll continue experimenting with different filtration options and see what I can get on this front.

US and California Flags

I spent much of Saturday printing this image in the Laney darkroom. (This is a negative scan; I haven’t scanned or photographed the resulting prints.) I had a fairly pleasant time of it, despite still being in recovery from the BBC plague. One of those days when my instincts lead in the right direction and the negative isn’t outside my modest printing skills. I also got some positive feedback from some of the old hands there, which is always nice.

The essential draw of the photograph, which I am somewhat ambivalent about, is its resemblance to a calla lily.

On the one hand, one of the things I love most about photography in general and about infrared photography in particular is its ability to subtly transform the familiar — to reveal the known world in surprising ways.

This is an example of that, and I believe a rather successful one; there are few objects which are more strongly locked in to their customary symbolic use than a flag; the vast majority of representations of flags fall into either nationalistic/patriotic uses or into very blunt subversions of those uses.

But here, motion distorts the flags’ shapes, and infrared light obscures their markings. Together, they allow the flags to briefly become something else.

I like that — a lot — but I worry a bit about the fact that the typical response to the image is, (a), “What is that,” and, (b), “Cool, it looks like a calla lily.” Not that I dislike the resemblance, but I’m always a bit nervous when I stray into the territory of “picture puzzles” and “fuzzygrams.” I don’t think the purpose of a photograph should be to befuddle or confuse (note: this is not a general rule for judging photography, just a personal preference for my own work).

I value the fact that this photograph documents the temporary transformation of a flag into a flower; however, that value is as dependent on the ability of the viewer to perceive what it “really is,” as it is upon their ability to perceive the way it is being transformed. And of course to say that it depends upon the viewer’s perception is also to say it depends on my ability to connect to the viewer…