The impossible project shocked me, recently by announcing that not only have they completed their color film (and I use the term loosely), but they’ve ported it to the Ultra Bigger than Jesus Large Format size of 20×24. From the information available it looks like they’ve attempted to make it an integral system. Integral, meaning like the film that spits out the front like the Polaroid’s most people know, as opposed to peal-apart systems that most photographers use. Fuji still makes the peal apart stuff for medium format and 4×5 so the Impossible Project folks may just be trying to position themselves apart.
Now Ultra Bigger than Jesus Large Format (UBJLF) polaroid film is one of the most amazing photographic products out there. The goddamn camera is 20×24. You could fit a small child or dwarf in it. The ‘normal’ lens is like 600mm (yeah, that’s a guess). There are only a few of these cameras in the world, and usually they would be accompanied by a tech from Polaroid. One color exposure is $50 dollars. That’s right, fifty dollars per exposure. God help you if you get one of those wrong, which I often do.
The examples from the Impossible Project that have been posted thus far online look like what I’ve seen from The Impossible Project since the beginning. Meaning images that look something like what expired Polaroid used to look like. Everything is a little lower contrast, and a little more dreamy. I suppose it’s an amazing feat that they even managed to resurrect the systems to produce this stuff at all, but still it’s easy to miss the incredibly high quality we used to get from Polaroid themselves.
The example above is from their ‘shade of color’ film. This is apparently different from ‘color film’ because it lacks a whole lot of contrast and saturation. You’ll notice that they even went so far as to note the ‘temp range’ in the technical date. Who has time to check the ‘temp range’ when your beautiful hipster friends are wafting around in nature so playfully? You’ll be only converting Celsius to Fahrenheit when all the girls have already taken their tops off and started rolling down the hills! You might be able to catch them in their cigarette breaks, which works very well for hipster porn art star Ryan McGinley. Of course he’d be halfway through a roll in his Contax by the time you’re all set with your SX-70.
http://ryanmcginley.com/
As you can see, they move fast.
The trip was a massive success.
Alix’s Volvo was spacious and comfy.
We had food that was very bad for us.
I wonder what would have happened if I moved the lever…
The Red Roof in had HBO, and only a few bugs.
There wasn’t much to do when we got there, so we watched TV and went to bed.
The next day, we had a not too early morning, and made our way to a Bob Evans.
Colin needed some help because he had an infection in his elbow, so we went to a drug store.
There were other perks too.
Of course you can’t go anywhere without running into a photo star. Hello, Terry. Glad you have your pants on.
I had a reaffirmation that film is not, in fact, dead.
And god bless it, I could still buy a roll of Tri-X when I needed it.
We apparently needed to take Colin to the E.R.
It only took 4 hours out of our time.
But the weather was nice.
Tyler and I eventually gave up on Colin, there wasn’t anything we could do at the hospital, so we went to the Virgin Mobile Freefest.
(Pictures from the show, I shot on film. They are forthcoming, pending development).
The drive home from the show was too long, but we stopped at waffle house.
I named this blog Upside Down and Backwards not because I particularly enjoy view cameras (I do), but more because I feel like I’ve lost my path somewhat over the last year. When I left college I imagined myself excelling in my field based on my passion alone, and my eagerness to be involved. Quickly did I learn that neither zeal nor aptitude make a success story in this business. My short comings in other areas, coupled with the general market for photography led to making ends meet in retail photography.
It’s a skilless job. It requires only a knowledge of cameras and the patients to deal with the general population. It is not a place I want to wake up in on my 30th birthday.
These circumstances have lead me to seek a graduate education. It was somewhat inevitable for me I think, although I’ve come to it a little earlier than I figured, but I think it’s the right time. I now look forward with trepidation to the process ahead of me.
I’ve built a little bit of a life in Brooklyn and therefore I’m not seeking to leave. The immediate schools i’m looking at are SVU, Parsons, Pratt, and the ICP Bard MFA program. The are also some schools in the surrounding area I’m considering. RISD, and MassArt at the moment.
I get the question “why grad school?” a lot, and honestly I’m still considering that answer myself. It has a lot to do with my aptitude as a photographer and an artist, and what I think could be a strong set of skills as an educator. More than that I’m hoping to expand my critical eye. The are lots ways to be involved in my medium beyond making pictures.
I’ll have more on this as I figure it out. It would be a mistake to assume I know what i’m doing.
That’s right readers. I’m on the move, and look at me go! I’m taking break thanks to Sukkot, a particularly weird Jewish tradition that keeps me from working for ten days. I’m all for it!
I’m in Jersey, if you can imagine it. Home of my freckled better half, but it’s only temporary because I’m heading to the Virgin Free Fest in Bodymore Murdlerland (thank you, The Wire).
I brought:
1. Canon 5D II
2. 24mm 1.4 Canon prime (not mine)
3. 21mm 2.8 Carl Zeiss prime (definitely not mine)
4. 40mm 2.0 Voigtlander prime (all mine!)
This was silly because I wont be able to use any of these fine instruments at the show. “No Professional Cameras”. Wankers!
5. Olympus Stylus Epic
6. Six rolls of Kodak Plus X b&w film.
It is this combination I plan to use at the show itself. Point and shoot. That’s what the old Epic is for, and god bless it.
But overall, man oh man do I over do it with cameras or what…
I’m actually in the car typing away on my fancy man iPad and it’s getting to be about combos time.
Enjoy your weekends.
Signing off.
Happy New Year Ya’ll! Or at least ya’ll of the Jewish persuasion. I have most of this month away from heavy lifting at the store. So I’m sorry if I haven’t kept up the blogrollin’ I usually muster. I spent half of last week between my couch to play video games (hand eye coordination exercises, of course), and my computer to scan images for a photo restoration job I’ve been working on. There was a lot of X-Files episodes goin’ on right here. I’ll tell you.
But a lot of things happened! At least in the world of photo consumerism. Avast ye advanced amateur/cheapo pro Nikon users. The D7000 is here. 16 megapixels! 1080p Video! Those home made pornos have never been sharper! At least that’s what the Nikon literature would imply. However film grouches like myself are both saddened and excited to see Kodak say THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE 400 speed pro color negative film. You’ll no longer be able to choose betwixed 400Natural Color and Vivid Color. (Natural Color for pasty white chicks, Vivid Color for flowers). There remains only a new Portra 400. One emulsion to rule them all.
Nikon also released some lenses that are too expensive for god himself, Samsung copied a Panasonic/Olympus camera, and Nikon Copied the Canon G11. Ahhhh photo consumerism.
Of course in regards to my last post, no follow up would be complete without another entry into photo collectorism. The fetishism of cameras continues on ebay but in this case I must admit I went weak in the knees. 
I love old Hasselblad cameras. I used to own one before my Mamiya 7. They’re simple, elegant, and straightforward machines capable of making excellent pictures. They were good enough for NASA too! Check out this flippin’ yellow Hasselblad SWC (Super Wide Camera). I’m waiting for my gracious benefactor to come along and recognize that as an artist I need to have this camera. Not to use, but for inspirational purposes. It’s only 33 and a half grand!
The folks who spend a lot of their personal money (as in, money not soon to be recouped by incoming business) on cameras perplex me. I sold a 90mm Leica Summicron lens to a fellow with an M9 yesterday. It was used, and about $1200 dollars. Now this isn’t altogether ridiculous for this type of lens. Even Nikon charges $2,000 dollars for their flagship portrait lens. These things just cost a lot of money, okay, fine. However what was interesting to me is that he asked me what the difference was between the 90mm lens and his 35mm lens. Lets quantify this, monetarily. The camera costs $7,000 dollars. The 35mm lens he bought new costs $3,000 dollars. Right now that’s a $10,000 dollar camera kit that he doesn’t understand. He just brought that number to $11,200 dollars with the purchase of the 90mm lens. Because of the way rangefinder cameras are designed, they require certain prerequisite photographic knowledge. Barely anything on them is automated. Framing your image is approximate, you can’t use lenses longer than 135mm, and even a 135 is a stretch. Using lenses shorter than 28mm requires separate viewing windows which further complicates the process, and you can’t focus close up at all. They’re exceptional within their limitations, but only a seasoned photographer would accept those limitations and be competent working within them. Buying a Leica before you know the differences between a wide angle lens and a telephoto is like buying your 14 year old son a race car, with the idea that once he gets his permit, and eventually license he may do very well with it. Especially considering you could get a greater performing Canon or Nikon for half of this money.
What are these jobs where you just bleed money? How come nobody told me about them when I was in college? It sure doesn’t seem like you need to be all that smart.
Outside of working on things that make me money, and things to distract me when I’m not working on things that make me money, I haven’t been very productive. Not a single picture shot. What I think I’m going to work on next is getting some old work ready to show around. I might print a couple of Blurb books and send them out. I’m also looking into graduate schools, by asking around to my MASTER of Fine Art friends. But that’s another post altogether…
Where is it?
How do you become a pro? Well apparently you have to pay Yahoo $24.99 per year to be a real pro. Which I did, this morning, as my free Flickr account neared the 200 photo mark. I guess amateurs can’t handle 200+ pictures. Which is a lot, I mean that’s 200,000 words. I can barely get through an entire New York Times article (on my iPad) some mornings, before I get distracted by something else on the device I can poke at. It’s pretty dope being Pro, I gotta say. I now have access to better systems to organize my work, and I can add HD videos to my page. Most dopest though, is the added statistical functionality. I now know how many people have visited my site per day, what they’re viewing, and how they navigated to what. This basically equates in real usage to me being able to know just how many times pictures of my girlfriend were clicked on, versus my usual pictures of street trash.
Someday, somebodies gonna dig my street trash. For now, people just seem to like my girlfriend. I don’t blame them, she’s foxy. People like to look at foxy things/people on the internet. Some times people pay a lot of money for foxy things on the internet. If you’re a photographer, you probably think this black paint Leica M4 is among the foxiest.
A brassed out Leica is to photographers what high heeled pumps are to podophilias. These lusted after gems evoke mental images of Dennis Hopper saying ‘Maaaaaan!’ in the jungle (even though he was using meterless Nikon F’s) and Garry Winogrand trumping up and down the street snapping his camera at all the skirts he walked by. It’s just straight sexy. I guess it also comes with that piece of red string.
A brassed out Leica is to photographers what high heeled pumps are to podophilias. These lusted after gems evoke mental images of Dennis Hopper saying ‘Maaaaaan!’ in the jungle (even though he was using meterless Nikon F’s) and Garry Winogrand trumping up and down the street snapping his camera at all the skirts he walked by. It’s just straight sexy. I guess it also comes with that piece of red string.Lets all let the current bid ferment a while. Somebody out there wants to pay $2,581 dollars for a camera that looks like it was dragged behind a rickshaw in the war of Vietnamese aggression. And there are still 20 days left in the bidding. I would not be surprised if this particular camera fetches well over $10,000 dollars. I find it a little odd that it’s being described as ‘in original condition.’ Only if Sly Stallone were to be accepted as ‘in original condition’ by an international panel would I accept this Leica M4 as such.
This is the kind of purchase that makes me wonder. I use a camera similar to this called a Bessa R4a. It is the modern incarnation of this design. It has a better finder, an internal automatic meter, and a shutter with speeds up to 1/2000ths of a second. While the black beauty posted above was made some time between 1967-1975. It has no internal light meter, frame lines that end at 35mm, and is really really old. Arguably, the Leica is a handmade camera, built to a higher standard. But still, my R4a was $570 dollars brand new, and a far more capable picture taking machine. But that doesn’t stop gentlemen from driving their yachts up 9th avenue to the store to sink a fudge ton of cash into a kinda cool object with history. What sort of stupidity is this? It won’t even get you laid!
Admittedly my Bessa R4a “did not admit of discrimination whereby the love of display, the superiority purchasable by money, or the essential comfort of the individual could be expressed.” This quote from a quote from the Bikesnob book, taken from an original New York Times article in 1909 about why automobiles were surpassing cycling in popularity. Basically it means you can’t show people you’re a baller unless you buy some useless flashy shit. Enter black paint Leica M4. Next time I’m ready to ball I’m going to buy a chrome one for 7 or $800 bucks, which are readily available, and have these guys repaint it black. That’s if I get tired of having a light meter, or frame lines for the lenses I actually own.
Here’s a sneak preview of that day:
Bessa R4a – Voigtlander 50mm ƒ1.5 Nokton – Kodak 160NC
We stopped by the PDN Curator show opening at Milk last Thursday night and some good folks for Fuji were there. They gave us an Instax camera for the night and we shot away! Of course we came for the art, and stayed for the free wine! The work was pretty good, but it was overall ruined by Baboo’s awful reproductions. Seriously I’m not much of an art snob but I know how work is supposed to look on the well.
1. Some of the prints were wall mounted behind glass, some were bare. They apparently ran out of glass.
2. All of the prints were mounted to foam core board and held on the wall with large thumb tacks.
3. There was a large notation under every print letting us know that not only were the works printed by Baboo, but they were also printed on Moab Legion paper. I don’t know if Moab or Baboo should be more embarrassed, because one of the two parties made the images look like utter shite! Smudged detail, speckling patterns all over, and for whatever reason the shadow areas looked like a noisy mess.
Seriously the repros in the issue of PDN looked better. I will now never use Baboo, or Moab Legion paper. Nice job!
