Island of Poel - Baltic Sea

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

From a recent weekend trip ...
The last is a 100% crop of the second last.

[Rob C]

Chris

I think I understand your quest, but I think you have, instead of the solution, found the same problem that haunts me when I try to do landscape in any way: the main subject matter is missing. I don't know what's missing for you, but for me it's always the human element as dominant. For b/w to work it has to shine; your surfers shot lacks that - it's too grey and gritty in a situation that screams for gloss and brightness.

Neither am I sure the tonalities in the other shots lend themselves to back/white that much; I get the feeling there's too much confusion in them for b/w to handle. It's a medium that almost demands concentration on a specific. Or colour. A great beach looks great when it agrees with the idea of a great beach, which is all about freedom, about joy. I see no joy in the kites. I see Capa's war. Maybe that's where you wanted to go?

Not much help, I know.

Rob C

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Thank you for your words and reflection of the images - really helped me on my own reflections. And actually: I am not totally happy with the images myself.

Technically it was a first trying out of my newly repaired Mamiya Universal + lenses - the gear I'm going to use in Mallorca in winter.
One part was the attempt to use the 100 mm retractable lens as a poor mans movement camera (Scheimpflug rule) - which IMO is a pain in the butt with that camera - I definitely want an Arca F metric 4x5" with a rollfilm back in the future.
The other thing was the b/w film - something went wrong in the development since I had to change the mixture of the developer - a component (Part "C") was missing and I had to use more of another part instead. The negatives therefore look a bit underdeveloped.(Doh ..). Anyways I think I'll stick with a more conventional and less sensible material in the future and use T-Max rollfilm. The first image is a b/w conversion - the colored version looked too much like a postcard shot to me, but maybe I should change something there and try using the colored version.

Thematically I believe the shots are partly about the contrast between humans and nature, resp. their own human nature. The crowd at the beach somehow had a repellant effect on me - therefore I was retreating behind the dune and taking a distant perspective. Same with the second image.
Maybe thats my main purpose in photography: Human and nature or human and his self-created environment (city). I personally am struggleing between misanthropy and philantropy. Seeing how we treat nature and how perverted our relation towards nature (even our own nature) often is, I become misanthropic, seek for loneliness and want to be on my own. When I see how others struggle and really try to better things and solve problems I become philantropic and feel like helping and understanding others and have fun.

I am not happy with the tonalities as well, partly the broken development of the b/w film might come in here - not sure yet. I tried to save something in post, but failed. What I clearly see is, that I have to practise much more with the film workflow again - my visualization of the images is still far worse than it used to be.

There are some other images which maybe worked better - I'll add them to the thread later.

Seeing your other thread the following thing comes to my mind:
Do we just start getting the winter blues ....?

[Rob C]

Hi Chris

I wonder if you are making life difficult for yourself? You mentioned T-Max, which is a film that I have never used; it came in at a time when I was working exclusively in Kodachrome and b/w was far behind me, not because I didn't love it, but because of the nature of the work I found.

Now, anything I read about it in technical revues etc. seemed to indicate that it was a difficult material to handle well; that it required very exact exposure and ditto processing. Can I suggest that, if it is still available - I no longer buy any film to add to the clutter of unused stuff already in the freezer! - that you try out TXP 120? I found it to have great latitude and that I could pull miracles out of it, not by extending development which I never did, but simply because of its flexibility and lack of violent contrast. The latter might well be due to my standardized D76 1+1 processing system and rating the film at 320 and exposing for the darkest part of the important bits in the shot. The opposite of tranny exposure, in other words. However, it worked. I did not like it at all on 35mm, where I found Ilford's HP3/4 versions better to my purposes. That flies in the face of received wisdom, where many 35mm shooters swore by TXP.

Perhaps I understand now what disturbed me about the beach shot with kites. You mention trying to avoid the people: that's exactly my point I think, when I said the subject was missing. It wasn't so much it was missing as you wanting them to be out of it almost altogether: you were trying to express the feeling of them intruding into the otherwise virgin space! That's a difficult concept to do for anyone, certainly without captions to steer thought and perception!

Rob C

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Yeah - virgin space ! Thats it - the ripples in the sand without footsteps in them except some wormholes ... Intruders !

Actually I didn't exactly know what I wanted. I didn't think of it consciously. I also have some other shots I'm going to add later this day when I'm home. What really annoys me is, that the sharpness is not as I wished. I want a tech camera. Fiddleing with the Super 23 back is PITB. Dot.

Concerning TXP vs T-Max: Tri-X was my film in former times and I loved it, but it is not made for scanning and causes gritty skies in a scanner. T-Max is said to be much better for scanning due to its thin and monodisperse structure which causes less grain-CCD interaction artifacts (Pseudo-Moiree, Grain Aliasing, however one might call it). I also want to test more the SPUR DSX 120 film (Agfa Copex Rapid rebranded) with their modular developer.

I will need some more experimentation to find the material I will use constantly. In the moment T-Max is on the checklist, and I have bought 10 films 100 ISO and 10 films 400 ISO and I hope my Mallorca stay will bring some answers. There are also various interesting developers for T-Max from SPUR Photo (HRX-R and SD 2525) which tend to give better sharpness (HRX 3) or Microcontrast (SD 2525). My first non-scientific tests will be T-Max with Kodaks T-Max developer against HRX-3, later SD 2525 as well).

[Christoph C. Feldhaim]

Here are some more from the mentioned weekend ...

[popnfresh]

The B&W and color shots of the kites had the most potential, but there is far too much of that grass in the foreground in both of them. What matters in those shots are the kites, the beach chairs with the awnings and the people. The grass brings nothing to the composition. There were several ways you could have framed the scene to make it more interesting. I probably would have gotten much closer to the girl in red by the water and used a wide angle lens to capture just her and those interesting crescent shaped kites.