Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

Went out yesterday to christen the camera and to visit Joe Cornish’s gallery in Northallerton to try to choose some artwork for a building in town our company is working on. As always, Joe’s pictures inspire although I was dissapointed that there weren’t more of his Time to Wonder pictures on the walls. This was because Steve Lewis’ exhibition had opened the night before. I like a lot of Steve’s pictures, particularly this image of Afon Conwy in Wales. Wales is a much undiscovered country for landscape photography (apart from the Gower and Snowdonia) and it’s nice to see some unique images of such unspoilt areas.

Joe was just taking a group of people out on a one day workshop but stopped for a chat and was pleased to hear of another Ebony convert. He also recommended NPS Media for E6 processing. Anyway, we asked at reception where local would be good to take my camera and Liz recommended Aysgarth falls or Sutton bank. We figured Sutton Bank would need low light to work well and so went to Aysgarth and were treated to drizzle, drizzle and more drizzle. The drive over was quite exciting however. There were many locations and great old farm buildings (one particular one with a tree sticking out of it’s roof!).

So we returned home slightly despondent and swore to get out today, which, touch wood, is beginning to look pretty nice.

I was also looking around for reciprocity times yesterday and discovered Steve Gosling’s pinhole photography using Zero Image cameras (found via Zero Image site, which was found via Motivation. Images, Ideas, and Thoughts About Photography. Although I had seen his pictures previously I hadn’t paid attention to the black and white material. These pictures have a beautiful aura and are well worth looking at.

The pictures I’ve attached are of my new home made dark cloth (sewing machine guidance from Charlotte).

Jeremy visited today, just after I received my new focussing screens for The 5D. Swapping the screens over was dead simple and working with a 5×4 crop on the 5D is wierd but strangely pleasing.

After playing around with compositions using the Ebony the night before, I realised quite how scary it is to tip the whole camera over whilst you are trying to find yourself good camera positions. To this end, the 5D is now going to lay an extended Large Format support role in that it will be use to do the initial scoping of shots and also be used whilst getting the camera/tripod into a good starting position. I’ve been reading about some people using the 5D as a metering tool but I think I’d still like to use the spot meter (Although a combination of the both might be interesting, I’ll have to think about that).

Jeremy was a great guy and I’ll be working with him on the development of an online gallery webiste system to promote and provide central, audited print & framing services for photographers who would typically not get that type of exposure. I showed him the new David Ward site (which now has full checkout built in) and he was suitably impressed. Especially with the ‘invert’ button; although he did prefer white on black apart from the blog and article pages.

As the evening wears on I’m receiving my wifes tuition in sewing so I can make my own simple dark cloth using some off cuts of synthetic crushed velvet which means we should be out taking photographs sometime tomorrow. I’ll get some pictures of the final item tomorrow.

And so the Ebony is back again today. It arrived this morning and a quick check showed that it was all working well, if a little sturdier (tighter) that the one I had first. This evening Charlotte asked if I would like her to make a dark cloth for me out of some lightweight synthetic velvet she has left over. Obviously I can’t turn down a great offer like this and so we designed a small, tube based dark cloth with a single hole for access to the ground glass. I’ll get a photo together when we make it up tomorrow night. In the meantime, I’ve been back on the website for David Ward and adding a simple sales enquiry system to the site. This should allow customers to put together an order for framed, unframed or card style pictures and for it to be manageable using the administration system.

I also spent some time reading an excellent thread about contemplation in large format photography which I found through the ‘Contemplate – Musings on Photography’ website. My take on this is that any format can be used to get to the area of the photograph, but it’s very difficult to make an accurate composition on the viewfinder of most SLRs – not impossible though. The ground glass of a large format camera gives the photographer a real window into the picture they are capturing. The fact that it’s a different, slower process is just something that can nudge people into a different way of taking.

So Robert White have efficiently ordered a pick of my Ebony and it was taken away at 3pm today. I don’t feel so sad as I’m still waiting for the my BlackJacket and it should be back for the weekend (crossed fingers). If it is back, I’m planning on taking at least 5 shots each of the Fuji Velvia abd the Fuji Acros that I got with the Quickload back. This should get me over the ‘fear’. I also ordered a Canon ‘Black Mask’ focusing screen from Calumet America. As I’ll be using the 5D predominantly as a hand held 4×5 camera for finding shots and getting shots that I couldn’t with the Ebony, this mask will be very useful in ensuring I know what the crop ratio is. Hopefully this will arrive early next week.

One of the things I plan to do in order to be more open about my photography is to publish every image I take with the large format camera. This will mean that I can’t hide behind the volume of shots I take and that if there are any lessons to be learned from my mistakes, they will be very obvious. I intend to have multiple parts to my gallery pages that can be filtered to show ‘best’, ‘all’ and ‘include screw ups’ filters. I have thought about buying a small voice recorder to keep a record of all of the details of my photographs. I’ll continue thinking for now but in the meantime I bought a Moleskin (old school) and 2B pencil will have to do.

Well it’s been unpacked and although I can’t actually play with it properly (no Arca Swiss mount yet) I have been trying it outside in the sunshine. First comment it, working on a ground glass large screen is astonishing.

You can actually see the details of the picture. The default ‘3D’ effect is something that is a little unnerving and something I will have to be very wary of when composing. I’m worried that our brains are so hard wired to recognise the 3D edges of things that I will find compositions that are based on this effect. It’s the classic symptom of wandering around a wood and thinking ‘this would make a fantastic photograph’ and then the actual photo is a jumble. All of the information was in the 3D edges of the trees and branches and the receeding lines were all in your head and not actually on the ground glass. Anyway, the usual trick in these cases is to just close an eye to get the ‘flat’ effect.

The Schneider loupe is very good, I can focus as accurately as I can set the knobs. The assymetrical tilt makes it very easy to set up complex scheimpflug configurations (as long as you have something on the 1/3 line). I’ve obviously yet to compose in earnest so we’ll see what happens. A nice feature of the Schneider loupe is a rubber neckstrap with quick release ends. I’m going to have to take a photograph of these to show what I mean. A nice design touch.

One downer is that one of the knobs has been attached slightly at an angle. This means it wobbles as it rotates. Although this is not affecting the camera as far as I can tell, I will be contacting Robert White to ask their advice. My only worry is that the camera may have taken a knock which could affect some other aspect of operation.

An important lesson learned about the Ebony very early on is to always screw down the rear tilt knobs before picking the camera up. If you don’t do this, you pull the camera very quickly into a full rear rise. If you’ve got no bellows extension this looks like it could damage the bellows. I’ve been caught out by this one twice but luckily stopped before I pulled up too far.

Another interesting observation is the the base extension knob locking wheels don’t rotate along with the main knobs. Sometimes causing the bed to lock itself up. This is not a problem once you’ve noticed what is happening.

Overall my impression is of a very workmanlike tool. It is by no means a delicate work of art. I would have been a lot happier had I received a manual with the camera but I think I’ve read around enough to know what most things are doing. I’ll try to write my own guide to the operation of the camera sometime soon. Hopefully I’ll be out taking photos before then.

The Arca Swiss plate from Really Right Stuff arrived today and is a great fit for the camera. I also phoned Robert White today about the eccentricity on the focus knob. They were very nice about it and are arranging a pick up to replace it with another 45SU that they have in stock. They agreed with my assessment that if it’s received a knock, who knows what else may have been rearranged. So I’ll be back without the camera for a few days (and the weather so good too). Ah well, I don’t have my BlackJacket yet so I can’t photograph in earnest. The truth is that I have a nervous feeling about taking a photograph with the camera. There is a lack of risk associated with digital that means you don’t have worries about screwing up. The mindset now is more ‘I must not make a mistake’. At the end of the day, a mistake just costs some money now, wheras it didn’t before. The other thing is that mistakes become a LOT more obvious. Wheras I would filter my 800 photos down to 10 good ones (if I’m lucky), I now have to take 10 good ones. This brings up all sorts of doubts about how good I actually am. I’m sure once I’ve gone through 10 frames and sent them to be processed, this fear will start to recede. This is one of the main reasons why I wanted to keep the digital camera, so I could still experiment and take risks.

Anyway, with the goal of getting to know the camera a little better, I took it out into the garden today to play around a little. Firstly taking a (virtual) photo of the setting sun and getting good scheimpflug on the fence and trees, also playing with aperture and depth of field. I can still see a reasonable picture to focus at f16. Next I thought I’d see how close I could focus. With full bellows extension, I could get to within a meter of the flowers in the picture with my 210 Symmar S. Also the Symmar S has a HUGE image circle (at least I couldn’t get to the edges of it).

I then played around with lining up next to a wall for swing and taking a shot next to the ground for extreme front and rear tilt (almost horizontal plane of focus). It was strange to watch the focus move from the base of the blades of grass to the tips all the way across the lawn from my tripod to 20ft away.

Here is a photo of my current bag layout. More photos are in the previous post (they seemed more appropriate there)

Myself and Charlotte went out to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to see the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition that is on. I have to say that I was a bit dissapointed. The majority of the exhibition was small items and photographs of old work. Some of the older work is interesting to see to put his early work into context but the only item that stood out was a submerged wall in a lake with a dam. Unfortunately they only had a couple of photographs of it.

We went across to the other side of the park (3km) only to find out that the other gallery shuts at 4pm (not notices anywhere say this and there was a queue of people who had walked across who had to turn back). We did see the ‘hanging trees’ which were interesting pieces but they don’t have the resonance of the other sinuous stone wall peices or his natural constructions. His most recent work seems a lot more brutal and lacks the empathy that I see in his ‘well known’ work.

OK, I’ve finally bought myself a Large Format camera. Pay day was yesterday and within seconds of seeing my pay cheque hit the bank, the order was in with Ken from Robert White. He also was very kind enough to find my a rear lens cap for my cheap Symmar S. So sometime today (hopefully) a 45SU, Schneider 4x loupe and cable release should be arriving. At this point I’m going to be very excited and put it all together and have that weird feeling of ‘what the hell do I do now?’. Well we’re off to the Yorkshire Sculpture park this afternoon and if all of the bits I need arrive (which I don’t think they will, I’m still waiting for the dark cloth and the arca swiss mount from America) then I’ll give it a go (much to Charlotte’s embarrassment I’m sure). What will probably happen is me taking it out to the backyard and using a couple of old T-Shirts as a pseudo BlackJacket dark cloth.

On a side note, I’m working with a colleague on a project to build a fine art gallery website and in return for some of my input, he’s going to be purchasing a couple of lenses. So the final range of lenses I will have will be Schneider Super Symmar 80XL and 110XL, Rodenstock Sironar S 150, Fujinon A 240 and 300. The Symmar S will likely be donated to somebody on the Gower course next year.

So the Ebony has arrived. It came in a very nice silver embossed cardboard box and had no manual. So the first thing I did was to extend the bed using the right hand side geared wheels. Very smooth action but then got stuck. I discovered that this is because on the left hand side, the locking nuts were rotating with the geared axle, causing the geared motion to lock the bed too. When I loosened these off all was fine. The next step was to try it with lens on. I put the Symmar S 210 on and put the whole beast on the dining room table and looked into the ground glass. WOW.. The image looks very 3D. In fact it looks so 3D I had to close one eye to find out why. The answer is that it is 3D, each eye sees a slightly different image and there is a definite sense of depth in the picture. This could be disconcerting when composing as it creates form in the image that won’t be shown in the final picture. OK, so I’ll be closing one eye to check final composition :-). The Schneider 4x loupe also arrived and it was a lot bigger than I expected. the front opening is about an inch across. Saying that, the picture shown is perfect for focus. The ground glass grain is only just visible and I can see more focus detail than I can probably focus accurately with the geared knobs. I showed the whole thing to Charlotte and she said “Why is it upside down?”, but apart from this philistine comment she was appropriately impressed. I also tried so rear tilt in order to show Charlotte the focussing abilities (it seems she is being asked why is Tim going back to using a film camera, and a victorian “head in bag” one at that). Just a quick check to see if the camera will fit in my photo bag (Lowerpro Pro Trekker II) and it does, with a lens on to boot. Hopefully I’ll get the dark cloth and mount soon and I can take it out for a test run!

As mentioned elsewhere, I’m working on a website for David Ward that will also include a gallery. I’m also working on a generic fine art gallery for a colleague. During this process, the inevitable conversation about protecting images came up, as mentioned in a previous post. Over the last couple of days, I’ve worked on a plug-in for the image processing module of the website that will allow some extra flexibility in protecting images. This topic was discussed to death on The Online Photographer website. His conclusion was very close to mine and that is that, without completeley disfigouring your photograph, you can’t stop people using it illegally unless you remove it from the internet completely. So, if you want to show your pictures, it’s more important to make people aware that they are copyright and that the user should license them for use. My solution to this is to write a plug-in that appends a panel below a photograph if it is displayed above a certain size. This panel can have a background colour to match the website and so it won’t look like part of the photograph until someone decides to save it or use the photograph out of context. The information in the bottom panel should provide the copyright mark and information on how to contact the photographer and a link to the website where prominent licensing information can be found.

I’m also thinking about providing an extra feature for registered users so that they can view a higher resolution, better quality version of the photograph if they have registered their name and email address. I’ve added the ability to add a watermark if someone really wants one, but I hope they don’t.