m e g a p e r l s

I have just spent some excess US$ in my PayPal account at LensWork: a one year magazine subscription, the On Being a Photographer book I wanted to read for a long time, and a print by Brooks Jensen.

I have been listening to his podcast for quite a while now, and while I don’t always agree, it makes some good listening and provides food for thought. In a previous podcast, he talked about his philosophy of selling his prints for US$20 each, which created some debates. After some digestion of the pros and cons, I tend to agree with him. Of course this works a lot better if you don’t need to make a living out of print sales, but it appears that his prime objective is getting his artistic vision out and, for him, that works best with this concept.

So I was curious what you would get for $20. It seems an incredibly low price for a print of such an experienced photographer and printer.

I haven’t said it publicly, but one of my goals I set myself at the beginning of this year is to sell one print of my photos (the others being getting more exercise and continue Japanese language studies — no progress so far on both counts). I don’t care about profit and loss, not for that single one anyway, all I want is to sell one print to someone at a reasonable price. I have to think about what is a reasonable price for myself. So I have been thinking about how to do this logistically. Who should print it and how? For starters, I don’t have a darkroom and to be honest I am not a great printer and have no time, so I am happy to pay others to do it for me. I haven’t made any progress on this so far, but I am looking forward to looking at Jensen’s print so see what is it that one is getting for that amount of money.

I really enjoyed looking through this photo book. From what I understand, the photos are about the town Tagawa which used to be a major centre of coal mining and cement production in Japan.

What’s interesting is that while the photographs are documentary, the style is clearly that of street photography, which illustrates how much - or better - how little of a distinction there can be between those categories.

Lockers at dusk, by Dirk Rösler. 1s at f16 on Polaroid 79

I don’t know why I keep shooting large format. It is cumbersome, heavy, slow, expensive, prone to error and the final results could probably be achieved with even the digi on a tripod [but then perhaps not]. Yet, it is so enjoyable somehow and I have successfully tried several times lugging out the monorail and tripod while being on the road with baby. It just about works.

Yesterday the missus went out for an afternoon to see some friends and it was just me and Theobald at home alone. So when we took a walk I decided to take the view camera with me and see if I could pull it off, shooting large format while being with a one-year old.

We took a walk around the neighbourhood (not using baby car, I have to add). It was about to rain again and getting dark at around 5pm. I almost did not even manage to set it all up, but in the end I shot two pictures, one at an ongoing football match between university teams and this one. I made the interesting observation that not being able to fully concentrate on taking pictures is quite challenging, but at the same time it prevents me complicating matters and ‘think’ only of essentials. This intuitive way of working seems to cut out a lot of the preconceived things going on in the mind, things that normally get in the way of takings pictures freely. The constrained way of working makes you take risks, which is a good thing.

If you like flatpack furniture and photography, you may be interested in this DIY large format camera that has just come out. Unfortunately nothing on the web yet, but I learned about it in an ad and review article in B&W Photography magazine. At around £150 not a bad deal (no lens, of course), but some tools and glue etc required to put it together. Sounds like a fun project. Plus, since it is made of wood, you can screw on other things you like to have, like viewfinders or grips. And you can say ‘I built this camera myself’!