The Persistence of Memory

March 18, 2014 / Richard R. Barron

This is a previously unscanned, unprinted image from Villanueva State Park on my 1999 New Mexico photo tour.

I recently updated and re-edited a post on our travel blog from a photography trip I made to New Mexico in 1999, Villanueva. Named after the tiny village on the Pecos River where I borrowed a summer house, the original purpose of the expedition was to shoot black-and-white, mostly medium format, film.

The re-edited trip report reflects that spirit of photography at its roots: careful, ponderous black-and-white compositions that spoke to the history of photography and the elegance of the desert.

After publishing the re-edit, and being very happy with it, I revisited my negatives and my journal comments from the trip. It turns out that the reality isn’t nearly as romantic as the trip report indicates. For starters, I wasn’t just shooting medium format, and I wasn’t just shooting black-and-white. The truth is that I was shooting whatever extra, unusual, experimental, and expired film I had sitting on my shelves.

Those films include…

Kodak Professional 400 35mm color negative film. The company that sold us film in 1999 accidentally send us five 100-foot rolls of this film. When I tried to send it back, they sent me the correct film (36-exposure Fuji film), and told me I could keep the 100-foot rolls, no charge. I never saw this film in any Kodak catalogs, and it yielded fairly terrible results, so it might have been some kind of repackaged grey market fraud.
This is the small travel diary I carried for a while. It filled up pretty fast; the first entry is this July 1999 trip, and the last entry in it is October 2002.
One roll of Kodak Plus-X 35mm film that had expired in 1990. I never bought Plus-X and didn’t like it, so I have no idea where I got it.
Kodak T-Max 400 medium format. This was another film that was gathering dust on the shelves at my office, because even though I wanted to shoot medium format at work, I almost never did.
Fuji Super G 100 medium format color film. I’m sure I had some of this stockpiled at the office as well, and just never used it. I seem to recall that it was past its expiration date.
Fuji Super G 400 35mm film. I only shot one roll of this, exclusively “snapshots.”
Kodak T-Max 400 35mm. I shot about two rolls of this, which was my go-to film at work. These, too, were expired rolls.
Kodak Verichrome Pan medium format black-and-white. This film gave the best results of the trip, thanks to its wide latitude, excellent tonal quality, and ideal response to filtration. Kodak stopped making Verichrome just three years later.

Travel Journal, July 1999:

The air here is so clear, just like I remembered. Nature is far more the master on a daily basis, far sturdier, far less caring than at home.

Mountains are so much more significant than we are. Then again, a mountain can’t reach out and kill me.

Ansel and Georgia saw this same desert light. It still has an excellence.

Over the years I have attempted to reduce the number and weight of cameras I carry when I travel, both because it is more fun to travel light, and to prevent the kind of hybridization of imaging that occurred in travels such as Villanueva. The problem with too many cameras and too many films is that it requires too much attention, attention that should be on spent on composition, light, the moment.

I’ve done a pretty good job learning this lesson, though it took a while. Lately I usually travel with just one camera and a superzoom lens, and a tiny point-and-shoot in my pocket. My energy, hopefully, is spent on the genuinely important things in photography, including the most important one, having fun.

This previously unscanned and unprinted negative was shot in the village of Villanueva. Like the image at the top of this entry, it was made on the excellent Verichrome Pan medium format film.

The Messy Days of Photography

March 1, 2014 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

Robert looks at an image in the Oklahoma University Copeland Hall journalism darkroom in 1984. The enlarger in the corner behind him was the "good" enlarger because it had a color head you could use to control contrast with multi-grade black-and-white paper. Everyone wanted to use it, so we often waited until the middle of the night to print. — Robert looks at an image in the Oklahoma University Copeland Hall journalism darkroom in 1984. The enlarger in the corner behind him was the “good” enlarger because it had a color head you could use to control contrast with multi-grade black-and-white paper. Everyone wanted to use it, so we often waited until the middle of the night to print.

1984. College. I am the Chief Photographer for the Oklahoma Daily newspaper and the Sooner Yearbook. It’s 4 a.m., and Robert and I have been printing since midnight. The Kodak Indicator Stop Bath has turned purple on us twice as we exhausted it. The Dektol print developer is getting brown. Robert lifts a print out of the fixer and holds it up in the amber glow of the safelights. He frowns. “I’m just not pleased,” he says.

A young journalism student named Darlene works on an assignment in the darkroom at Copeland Hall. She had penetratingly dark, beautiful eyes, and came to my house to let me photograph her.

It was a messy time in photography. Not only was the chemicalness of photography demanding and volatile, I shared the darkroom in Copeland Hall with other photographers, almost none of whom seemed to understand the difference between fixer and water. As much as I cleaned, I couldn’t keep up with the mess.

My main shooting method was 35mm Kodak Tri-X, possibly the most popular black-and-white film of all time. I usually exposed it at ISO 250 or so, and souped (processed) it in a developer called Microdol-X at 1:3 dilution. You can poke around on the net and read all sorts of opinions about this combination, but it worked very well for me. Good sharpness, good tone, fine grain.

In the summer of 1984, I worked briefly at Color Chrome, a photo lab in Norman, Oklahoma, making custom color prints. It was a different kind of messy than the black-and-white darkroom, but it was still pretty messy. The funniest thing about working there was that the setup, with each person in a separate room, connected by a shared dark hallway, required us to carry our exposed paper to the processor at the end of the hall. To keep from bumping into each other in the total darkness, we simply said, “Hello… hello… hello… hello…” until we got to the processor.

For most of my film career, I used this device, a bulk film loader, to load 100-foot rolls of black-and-white film into 36-exposure cassettes. The process worked pretty well, and was decidedly cheaper than buying individual boxes of film.

Toward the end of my college days, I hooked up with the Associated Press office in Oklahoma City, where I was sometimes able to scrounge work as a stringer. It was during this time that I first started using a product called Crone-C, which was an additive for Kodak’s D-76 developer. Supposedly it helped increase ISO sensitivity and improved shadow detail. I was not amazed by it. We used it to try to boost our Tri-X to ISO 3200 and beyond, with iffy results at best. It smelled suspiciously like isopropyl alcohol.

In late 1985, I was hired by the Shawnee News-Star in Shawnee, Oklahoma. I was partnered with Ed Blochowiak, a seasoned and talented photographer. We shared a tiny darkroom with a light-trap rotating door, allowing people to come and go without exposing film or paper. Ed had a number of different chemicals in that darkroom, most of which I’d never used.

Kodak Recording Film 2475, possibly the worst photographic film I ever used.

Diafine was interesting in that you could process your film at any temperature from 65˚ to 75˚ with no adjustment in developing time. It was a two-part developer, three minutes in the “A” solution, then three minutes in the “B” solution. I used Acufine during that same period, which was a short-time developer for push processing film to high ISOs. Ed also had some DK-50, which I tried repeatedly and hated. Finally, there was HC-110, which remained one of my favorite developers until the demise of black-and-white. There was also some oddball trick to push process Tri-X to ISO 6400 that involved HC-110 and allowing the film to bask in the vapors from hydrogen peroxide. It didn’t work.

There was a handsome handmade cabinet under the enlarger. I think Ed may have made it himself. In it were wood slats perfectly sized to hold row after row of Kodak film boxes. The cabinet held old, expired, and experimental film because in those days, we didn’t use boxed film; we hand loaded Tri-X using the infamous Watson bulk loaders.

One of the oddest and least successful of the boxed films was Kodak Recording Film 2475, which Kodak marketed to police surveillance teams. It was a holdover from the 1960s, and gave much poorer results that push-processed Tri-X. Still, I pulled out a box or two once in a while to play with it. The real comedy of the film was that it was Estar-based plastic, and was insanely curly. It was like trying to uncoil a Slinky.

This is a corner of the small darkroom Ed Blochowiak and I shared in the 1980s. Note the chemistry: in pouches on the pegboard are developers DK-50, D-76, Microdol-X, and Dektol. On the shelf to the right are developers Diafine and Acufine. The sink holds tanks for fixer and rinsing.

When I started working in Shawnee, I had a Nikon FM, a Nikon FM2, and a Nikon FE2, with Nikkor lenses: a 28mm f/2.8, a 50mm f/1.2, a 105mm f/2.5, and a 200mm f/4. It was a pretty decent setup in those days for someone right out of college. Despite their capability, I yearned for better lenses, particularly with larger maximum apertures, and within a year I also owned a 24mm f/2.0, a 105mm f/1.8, a 180mm f/2.8, and a 300mm f/4.5.

My obsessive penchant for carrying backups for everything was adjudicated on my first day in Shawnee, when the shutter blades literally fell out of my FM when I opened it to load it.

In 1988, I came to The Ada News, which at the time still had the word “evening” in the title. My first day here I was evaluated by a college student who ran the darkroom prior to me. After she pronounced, “Yes, he knows what he’s doing,” and left, I spent four hours cleaning up her awful mess. But since I wasn’t partnered with anyone else and I could keep my darkroom how I wanted it, my messy days of photography were over.

Scott, Robert and I gathered at Oklahoma State's Lewis Field one very cold night in December 1991 to cover the Ada Cougar's in a state championship game. — Scott, Robert and I gathered at Oklahoma State’s Lewis Field one very cold night in December 1991 to cover the Ada Cougar’s in a state championship game.

Observations on Film, Filtration and Our Roots

February 27, 2014 / Richard R. Barron

Wall, branches and vines, Byars, Oklahoma, December 1999, made on 6x7 Verichrome Pan Film with a deep orange filter. — Wall, branches and vines, Byars, Oklahoma, December 1999, made on 6×7 Verichrome Pan Film with a deep orange filter.

This is my 105mm f/1.8 Nikkor near the end of its life. As you can see from the hood and the focus ring, I got a lot of use out of it.

I touched on black-and-white filters in an entry not long ago after a photographer webfriend of mine, Tom Clark, said he was returning to black-and-white film combined with one of his very favorite lenses, the Nikkor 105mm f/1.8. I had one of these jewels for most of my film-based shooting career, and it was an amazing piece of glass. I used it hard and eventually used it up, and got rid of it some years ago.

Tom’s post started me thinking about black-and-white and medium format imaging, but the fire was stoked a week later when a nice young lay named Michaeli came to my office to borrow a lupe so she could examine her medium format color slides. I showed her a few prints of some of my 6×7 stuff from back in the day, and she really enjoyed them.

Micheali, who preferred that I did not included her last name, looks over some of my 6x7 prints. I am very pleased when I learn that photographers from her generation are interested in film and medium format photography. — Micheali, who preferred that I did not included her last name, looks over some of my 6×7 prints. I am very pleased when I learn that photographers from her generation are interested in film and medium format photography.

I have no film cameras at the moment. I believe Robert still has a Nikon F4, but I don’t know if he ever shoots with it any more. Like most of us, the commerce of imaging has led us to think digital. All my work is digital now, and it is very rewarding, but I did some great work on film, and it’s fun to remember.

This is the original digital file, an image of the iconic Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, Utah, made in 2005.

One aspect of shooting film that I was thinking about last night, and looking up extensively on my iPad as Abby and I watched television, is black-and-white filtration. As much as I tried, I never really mastered it, probably because I only had limited occasion to shoot scenics in black-and-white (see the 1985 through 2003 entries on my travel site to see some of my attempts), and by the time I was making a point to travel and shoot the land several times a year, I was mostly shooting digital.

One thing I did create last night was a very dramatic example, using Adobe Photoshop’s channel mixer’s black-and-white presets, of red vs blue filtration.

This is Delicate Arch rendered with a simulated blue filter.

This is Delicate Arch rendered with a simulated red filter.

As you can see, back in the day, a filter could make or break a black-and-white image.

The way we tell our stories in photography is often so much about how we render tonal qualities.

All Mixed Up?

January 29, 2014 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

This is the image file in our example today, a mission church on the Pecos River in northern New Mexico, shot on 6x7 color film in 1999. Beside it is Abode Photoshop's channel mixer dialog. — This is the image file in our example today, a mission church on the Pecos River in northern New Mexico, shot on 6×7 color film in 1999. Beside it is Abode Photoshop’s channel mixer dialog.

For decades before the internet and expensive color printing presses, many, or even most, photographs were in black-and-white. The first films were all black-and-white. In practice, the first color film was Kodachrome, introduced in 1935.

My career followed a similar evolution. In high school and college, our newspapers were 100% black-and-white, and our yearbooks only had one color section, which we had to send to the printer at the start of the year. When I became a career photojournalist, we used color so infrequently that we referred to its occurrence as a “color project.” It wasn’t until 1991 that my current newspaper, The Ada News, got the equipment to produce in-house color.

So there was a lot of black-and-white for a long time. As color became more common in print (including some very handsome hardcover books my wife and I have made in recent years), and with the advent of the digital era, black-and-white has evolved from the norm to largely a form of artistic expression.

It’s easy, staring at an smartphone or a tablet, to be satisfied with nothing but color images. But there are those of us who see black-and-white as more than in homage to our past, but as a very compelling visual option.

The question then becomes: how do we get our digital color images into black-and-white, and what is the best way to do this?

One option is to set the camera to black-and-white mode. I do this once in a while, since it forces me to “think” black-and-white at the time I am shooting. The downside is that it limits what I can do with the images later.

Another option is the “app” option. “App” is lazyspeak for “application,” and there are various applications, like Instagram or iPhoto, that have one or more black-and-white options.

My go-to workflow for black-and-white from a color image file is Adobe Photoshop’s channel mixer function. The channel mixer is more sophisticated that mere grayscaling, and offers some of the best options for fine-tuning how the colors in the image are converted to grays. I am particularly fond of the channel mixer in more recent versions of Photoshop, which offer presets that emulate the way black-and-white film responded to filtration.

If you have the software, it’s worth a try. Black-and-white still has the potential to amaze.

The result: two very different ways to render a color image in black-and-white using the channel mixer. On the left is the blue filter emulator, and on the right is the red filter option. There are several other filter presets in between, including infrared.

Playing Around with Our Past

October 30, 2013 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

A work of art that makes works of art: the Kodak Stereo Camera of 1950s vintage.

Since Halloween is approaching, I decided to watch what might be my favorite scary movie, The Blair Witch Project. In the movie, the three film students use various media to record their hunt for the legendary witch, including a CP-16 16mm movie camera. Especially popular with television stations’ newsrooms in the 1960s and 1970s, these well-made, bulky film cameras were gradually phased out with the introduction of faster, more cost-effective news gathering methods like videotape. Many of them ended up in the hands of film schools, where they were checked out to film students. We assume in the movie that is the case with the characters.

This is a scan of a piece of cut film from the Kodak Stereo Camera. You can see that the second and fifth frame are nearly identical; they were made at the same time by two different lenses.

It inspired me to play around with some antiquated technology of my own. Four years ago, fellow photographer Robert met up with my wife Abby and me in Baltimore to help us shoot Abby’s daughter’s wedding. In addition to a couple of digital SLR cameras for shooting the wedding, he had a 60-some-odd year old Kodak Stereo Camera. We made a few amusing images of Robert holding the camera, but despite loading it with film, we didn’t actually make any images with the Kodak.

Here are two images made by the Kodak Stereo Camera. I assume they will give a 3-d effect if viewed properly.

Some time later he left the Kodak at our house, telling me to feel free to shoot the film and have it processed. This week I did just that. I took a modern DSLR with me (one of my D80s) to use as an exposure meter and to make a few comparison frames, and walked around the patch on a sunny afternoon at our home in the country. I found that the Kodak worked perfectly.

This Kodak Retina camera is one of the photography relics my wife bought for me a couple of years ago. It takes a roll film that hasn't been made in about 40 years. — This Kodak Retina camera is one of the photography relics my wife bought for me a couple of years ago. It takes a roll film that hasn’t been made in about 40 years.

When I had the film souped, I expected the C-41 film processing machine at our local Walgreen’s wouldn’t be programmed to cut the film in the right place, since the Kodak makes two frames at a time (one with each lens, thus the stereoscopic effect) three frames apart, and those frames are square, not rectangular like conventional 35mm frames. I was genuinely surprised that the film was cut in exactly the right place. I suppose this might be because their machine scans the film in some way and automatically cuts between frames.

The images from the stereo camera looked pretty sharp, considering they were made on color print film. According to the internet, Kodak produced a Kodaslide image viewer to allow the images to be displayed with the 3-d stereo affect. I don’t have such a device, and my efforts to scan images and view them on the screen stereoscopically have failed so far.

It was an interesting experiment in experiencing what it must have been like to make pictures nearly 60 years ago.

A Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 50mm f/2.8 lens of 1963 vintage sits on the mount for my Nikon D80.

While I was at it, I pulled a Zeiss lens off a German-made Exa II camera of 1963 vintage and held it by hand on the mounting ring of my D80. I made a few images of the glass sculptures that live in our kitchen window (which I photograph all the time.) The 50-year-old Zeiss lens, though not multi-coated, held up pretty well compared to modern glass. Contrast was significantly lower, but overall the image was decently sharp.

I have a dozen or more cameras from the years because Abby bought a batch of them for me from an antique store downtown a couple of years ago. I look forward to playing around with them more in the future.

Shooting glass with glass: these items in our kitchen window are always fun to shoot, as on this occasion with a 50-year-old Zeiss lens held by hand on my Nikon D80.

Coming Around Again: The 20mm

March 21, 2013 / Richard R. Barron

The AF Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 is instantly at home on my Nikon D2H.

When I bought my first Nikon in 1982, the Nikon FM fully-manual SLR, in its handsome box was a fold-out wall chart of all the Nikkor lenses available in their system, nearly 90 in all. I framed that wall chart and hung in on my dorm room door. I would think about photography and look at the chart. It was like camera porn.

I photographed Anna in a mirror the day I decided to sell my first 20mm, the f/3.5 of early-1980s vintage.

In April 2011, Robert and I were walking around The Plaza in Santa Fe when we came across a camera store. Unable to resist the siren song of well-treated used cameras, we went in. They had a nice, but overpriced selection that included, among other legendary photographic tools, a manual-focus Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 and an AF Nikkor 20mm f/2.8. Both were in great shape. The 20mm particularly caught my imagination because in my early days of shooting, I owned two different versions of 20mm Nikkors.

In 1983, I saw Nikon’s tiny 20mm f/3.5 at the long-defunct Lawrence Photo and Video in Oklahoma City. Although I had a 28mm, the 20mm represented the threshold of ultra-wide photography, and thinking I would never get a crack at the amazing but ludicrously expensive 18mm f/3.5, I bought the 20mm.

Getting good use out of it, however, turned out to be vastly more difficult, since an ultra wide requires a lot of patience, practice and time, sometimes years, to master. My efforts only led me back again and again to my 28mm, and within a couple of years I sold the 20mm.

In 1985, I started working at The Shawnee News-Star in Shawnee, Oklahoma. One of my beats was to cover the Oklahoma State Cowboys football program. At a game at Lewis Field in Stillwater in the fall of 1986, I saw someone with the “new” 20mm f/2.8 Nikkor, which sported a great big, cool-looking lens hood. From the moment I saw it, I wanted my old 20mm back, but instead I bought the new 20mm and put it in service.

I photographed Anna again on the day I came home with my second 20mm, the f/2.8 manual focus version from the mid 1980s.

As the years went by, I did begin to hone my skills with ultra wide imaging. The 20mm served well, and with the years, the metal lens hood took a lot of dings. Soon it wasn’t even round any more.

Then came digital. My first personal digital SLR was the Nikon D100, whose meter did not operate with older manual-focus lenses. A photographer I knew who still shot film had long expressed an interest in the 20mm, so I sold it to him. That was in 2004. Since then I always wanted the autofocus version of it. The focal length combined with the 15x24mm sensor size my cameras made the 20mm what we might call a “standard” wide angle instead of the ultra wide it was with film.

I turned down buying the 20mm in Santa Fe in April 2011, and again when Abby and I saw it, still under glass at the same camera store, in October of that year. They wanted $400, which was just too much for a focal length I could achieve with a zoom. It wasn’t until I saw one that was well-used and had a minor flaw, which always works to my advantage, on eBay for less than $200 that I gave in a bought one. The big price break for a very minor flaw is ridiculous, since it has no effect on the operation or image quality of the lens, but most people don’t make pictures as much as they collect gear totemistically.

I put it into service immediately, and it is an excellent lightweight alternative to my 12-24mm zoom, and it’s a full f/stop brighter than the zoom. Image quality with it has been superb.

After nearly an entire basketball season with the 20mm f/2.8 AF Nikkor as my primary wide angle lens, I find the image quality and handling to be everything I hoped.

The “Hand of God” Technique

December 16, 2012 / Richard R. Barron

In my silver-based film days, I had three enlarging lenses, a 50mm that belonged to me, and a 50mm and 75mm that belonged to my newspaper.

As we all know, each of us is a product of our era and circumstance. I entered photojournalism in the early 1980s. It was during a period in which black-and-white photography was probably at its zenith. Kodak, Ilford, Fuji and Agfa were all making exceptional silver-based black-and-white films. Most of the images I made for newspapers were in black-and-white.

One concept I learned early in those days was that of grabbing the viewer’s attention, and one way to do that in the 1980s was to darken the corners of the frame, leading the viewer’s eye to the center of the image. As the decade progressed, we photojournalists, either on our own or influenced by each other, used this technique more, and more dramatically than ever before. In the darkroom days it was called “burning” or “burning in,” since after exposing the print to the baseline amount of light, we could open the enlarging lens to a bigger aperture, and using our hand or a piece of cardboard, we would expose the corners to more light from the negative, making that part of the print darker. (If you are confused about the “more light = darker image”, just remember that when printing a photographic negative, everything is exactly that, negative.)

By the late 80s, the technique was being used so frequently and so overpoweringly it began to be known as the “hand of God” technique. Photographers were burning the corners of their prints so much that they were sometimes black.

The 1990s brought more use of color in newspapers, and this corner-burning technique looked wrong in color, so it slower faded from vogue. To this day I still sometimes burn corners in Photoshop, but only to equalize exposure so the corners aren’t too bright. In the end, the objective is to give our audience, in my case the reader, an image that unhesitantly explains the subject.

This images is from 1988. The technique was to expose our print, then open the aperture on the enlarger all the way and "burn down" the corners. The idea was to propel the viewer's eye into the center of the image. — This images is from 1988. The technique was to expose our print, then open the aperture on the enlarger all the way and “burn down” the corners. The idea was to propel the viewer’s eye into the center of the image.

The “Undisputed King” of the Wide Angle

November 8, 2012 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

The biggest event I photographed in my months in Illinois in 1988 was a visit from Vice President George H. Bush. It was then I heard him utter his famous line, "No new taxes," which turned out to be a lie. — The biggest event I photographed in my months in Illinois in 1988 was a visit from Vice President George H. Bush. It was then I heard him utter his famous line, “No new taxes,” which turned out to be a lie.

When I was 25 I worked for a short time at a newspaper in Ottawa, Illinois called The Daily Times. It has since merged with a neighboring newspaper and become simply The Times. In my short time there, I shot well, in part because I was partnered with another young photographer named Harold Krewer.

Harold was friendlier than I was in those days, and more outgoing. In years since then, however, particularly after getting married, I am about as outgoing and friendly as anyone I know.

Harold and I loved to shoot news and sports. To add spice to our daily routine of grip-and-grins and rubber chicken luncheons, Harold and I would challenge each other to, for lack of a better term, shoot-outs. We would set out in opposite directions and meet back at the office in an hour with what each of us hoped would be the better image. We both shot well when we did this, and it kept us sharp.

One thing that became more and more apparent as this activity went on was that while I probably had an edge with telephoto lenses, particularly my 180mm, Harold established himself as “the undisputed king of the wide angle.” I can’t recall with total certainty, but I think his go-to lens was the Nikkor 24mm f/2.8, a staple in many photojournalists bags of the era. He made that lens sing. The angles and compositions he got with it were aesthetically and geometrically amazing.

I photographed these two girls at a street festival in Streator, Illinois, in 1988 with one of my favorite lenses of the era, the Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED. In recent years I have replaced that lens with the excellent AF-Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED.

Like all photojournalists, I use wide angle lenses all the time. My bread-and-butter lens on the job in the last few years has been the excellent Tokina 12-24mm f/4, which is a lens designed for 15x24mm image sensors, so its analog in the film era would be roughly 18-36mm. I’m good with it. I am not, however, the wide angle artist that Harold was.

I talked to Harold on the phone recently. He left journalism some years ago to pursue a career in his first real love, railroads. It was good to talk to him, and particularly neat that he remembered, word for word, the phrase, “undisputed king of the wide angle.”

This is my Tokina AT-X Pro 12-24mm f/4 DX lens, my standard wide angle. Note that the lens hood has a black band around it, which is a piece of bike tire inner tube. It helps hold the hood together because two weeks ago a football player knocked it out of my hand onto the ground. The hood, which is plastic, cracked, but the lens was undamaged.

The New Normal

September 17, 2012 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

This is Nikon's 35mm f/1.8 lens mounted on one of my D80s. As you can see, it is compact, and I can attest that it is also very lightweight. — This is Nikon’s 35mm f/1.8 lens mounted on one of my D80s. As you can see, it is compact, and I can attest that it is also very lightweight.

During the heyday of 35mm photographic film, single lens reflex (SLR) camera bodies were very often sold with a “normal” lens on them, a 50mm. There were several reasons for this; the 50mm was small enough that it fit into most photographer’s hands easily, it was cheap to manufacture, it was lightweight, it usually sported a fast (meaning large) maximum aperture, and, most significantly, its angle of view on a 35mm film SLR approximated the perspective of human vision. When you looked though a 50mm lens mounted on a camera, you saw a bright, clear image that was akin to what your eye saw.

Abby made this wedding portrait in evening light. As you can see, even with the tree-filtered sun in the image, there is little flare or ghosting, and the image is perfectly sharp.

Enter the digital SLR camera. Unlike the ubiquitous 35mm film camera, digital cameras continue to be sold with several sizes of sensors, and as a result, the 50mm is a normal lens on some cameras, but a short telephoto on others. On some early digitals like the Kodak DCS315, a 50mm lens gave the field of view of a 130mm on a film camera. Most of the digital SLRs in the field today have sensors of the so-called APS-C size, which is about 24mm x 15mm, or approximately 1.5 times smaller than a 35mm film frame. As a result, the 50mm gives a field of view equivalent to about what a 75mm lens gave on a film SLR.

That left the photographic world with a gap. What was the new normal lens? As it turned out, advances in computer aided manufacturing allowed lens makers to build small, cheap zoom lenses to sell with their new digital SLRs. These became known as “kit lenses,” since they were sold with a DSLR as a kit. These zooms, typically 18-55mm focal length, filled in for the normal lens on the APS-C sized sensor, which, if you do the math, is about 33mm.

Shallow depth of field can isolate a subject very effectively, like with this pair of reading glasses in our living room.

What is decidedly lacking in the kit zoom is a large maximum aperture. Why does this matter? Large maximum apertures give a nice, bright viewfinder images, allow us to shoot in low-light situations, and can give us shallow depth of field to isolate our subjects. To this end, last year before Abby’s family reunion, I bought her an AF-Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX, since I knew there would be many low-light situations coming up for which her superzoom would be too dark. It turns out that this is one of Nikon’s gems, and everything we shoot with it is solid gold. Abby misses the ability to zoom, but at a wedding we worked Saturday night, she did a great job of “zooming with her feet,” and she made many great images with the 35mm f/1.8.

As I started to pen this piece, I prowled around the house and the pasture for a few minutes to come up with a few new examples, and once again had no difficulty at all making some rather nice images. The examples I shot today were made at f/2 or f/2.8, since that is exactly the point of having such a lens.

Finally, the price is right. I think we paid $199. I highly recommend it.

I found this board with rusted screws in it down by one of the barns where Dorothy recently had a garage sale. This image is sharp, with that nice large-aperture selective-focus effect not possible with smaller-aperture zooms.

Little Skills

August 15, 2012 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

In the darkroom era you could purchase dodging kits made of wire and precut cardboard shapes, but I made my own by epoxying a quarter to the end of a piece of wire coat hanger, and a dime to the other end. A facsimile of the dodging tool is still available today in programs like Adobe Photoshop.

When I was first coming up through the ranks of photographers in the early 1980s, the technology of imaging was quite different than it is today. For example, the dominant professional camera of the time was the Nikon F3, a machine that was very much like a photographic sports car. I didn’t have an F3 in the 1980s, largely because it was out of my price range, particularly in college. (Eventually I got a used one in 1998.) But I did watch a lot of professional photographers use them. Since I was a student at Oklahoma University during the 1985 football season, during which OU won a national championship, I saw photographers from from The Dallas Morning News, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and even Sports Illustrated, and watched with awe and fascination as they handled cameras like the F3.

Digging through Dorothy Milligan's house the other day (in advance of having a big garage sale for her), I found this roll of Kodak T-Max 400 film I hand loaded for her about 15 years ago for her to use to illustrate her "Byng News" column. That was long before I became her de facto son-in-law. — Digging through Dorothy Milligan’s house the other day (in advance of having a big garage sale for her), I found this roll of Kodak T-Max 400 film I hand loaded for her about 15 years ago for her to use to illustrate her “Byng News” column. That was long before I became her de facto son-in-law.

As I grew into a career as a professional photographer, I honed all kinds of little skills, such as being able to…

Load a roll of film into my camera in about eight seconds.
Load a camera in the dark.
Load a camera in the rain and keep the rain out of the camera’s interior.
Guess exposure to within about one f-stop.
Shoot while walking backwards.
Load film onto a stainless steel reel.
Process a roll of black-and-white film in just ten minutes.
“Push process” ordinary Kodak Tri-X film to stratospheric ISO values.
Dodge and burn my prints, and print quickly.
Hand roll 36-exposure film cassettes in about ten seconds.
And the big one: manually focus.

Okay, in today’s autofocus-saturated world, the last skill is particularly hard for younger photographers to appreciate. The truth is that for the first 20 years of my career, I neither had autofocus, nor did I need it. And to this day, I have a couple of extraordinary manual focus lenses (a 400mm f/3.5, and a 200mm f/2.0) that I can manually focus swiftly and precisely. Realistically, I could never afford to replace them with modern autofocus versions (about $8000 and $5000 respectively), nor would I really have any need to replace them. But I have them, and bring them out once in a while to keep my game and my eye fresh.

Many of my little skills became obsolete in the digital era, but some translated well. This evolutionary process has been a happy journey of learning for me, and I am excited to see what’s next.

Yes, walking backwards while shooting is an acquired skill. It takes more common sense than hand/eye coordination, in the form of actually looking behind you once in a while. (Photo by Robert Stinson)

Tech Pan and the Great Grainlessness Quest

December 10, 2011 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

Long before the digital revolution, my friends and I struggled to find the ideal way to express our photographic vision using film. Film was a fickle mistress at best, since it took a fair amount of finesse plus a huge amount of memorization to utilize film.

A lot of photographers in the film era settled on a favorite film. My grandfather used nothing but Kodachrome. Another friend of mine used nothing but Fujichrome Velvia.

This was the first frame I ever shot using Technical Pan Film, of water running in a stainless steel film developing tank. It was a dazzlingly sharp and grainless shot that was completely uninteresting.

I, on the other hand, was very much into black-and-white. When the mood strikes, I still gravitate toward the simplicity and elegance of a grayscale image. To that end, I worked with a lot of different black-and-white films over the years. I tried AgfaPan APX100, Ilford’s 400 and 1600 films, and even the occasional NeoPan 400.

In the end, I kept coming back to Kodak films. I never loved the tone I got from Pan-X or Plus-X, preferring the tonal range of the ever-forgiving Tri-X, a 400-speed film, but at the cost of a fair amount of grain. For a while I was souping my Tri-X in Microdol-X, a supposed fine grain developer. In terms of tonal quality and utter forgiveness of exposure errors, I loved Kodak’s Verichrome Pan Film, which was only available in 120 size.

It was with all these variables in mind that my photographer friends and I were pretty excited when, in the early 1980s, Kodak introduced Kodak Technical Pan Film. Developed as a lithographic film (meaning that it was not a continuous-tone film, but pure blacks and white only) for industrial uses, Kodak introduced with the film it’s own developer, Technidol, a compensating developer that allowed the film to be used for full-tone imaging. When processed in Technidol, Tech Pan was rated at about ISO 25, but promised to have the grain and resolution of large format image, like a 4×5-inch view camera makes, from a 35mm camera.

We eagerly loaded up and … uh, what now? The immediate problem was that anything in our regular photographic pantheon we wanted to shoot required 400 speed or higher film. To use Tech Pan, we had to make up stuff to shoot. That, of course, resulted in super-sharp, super-fine-grained images of our desk lamps. Then we discovered just how difficult it was to print this film, which was manufactured on a super-thin Estar-AH plastic base, which showed absolutely every speck of dust no matter how clean we kept our darkrooms.

In the end, I wasn’t really able to integrate Tech Pan into my work flow. In total, I doubt I shot more than ten rolls of it. Once in a while we found a legitimate use for it, but by then the film and/or the developer had expired, and had to replaced before we could shoot. I have maybe five memorable images made with Technical Pan Film.

This is one of the very few legitimately interesting images I made on Technical Pan Film, in the Wichita Mountains of southwest Oklahoma in about 1984.

Just What We Needed: Another Wheel

September 28, 2011 / Richard R. Barron

In the 1990s, Kodak decided, as they had many times before, to create a new film format, one that would “revolutionize” photography for the common man. This new format, like disc film, 35mm half-frame and 126 before it, would do away with the annoyances of 35mm film and make loading a camera easy and foolproof. It was called the “Advanced Photos System” and the only thing it revolutionized was the way big companies thought they could bully their customers into buying something they neither needed nor wanted.

My grandfather's Kodak Bantam camera; throughout his life, this was the only camera he owned, and with it he made literally thousands of beautiful photographs. — My grandfather’s Kodak Bantam camera; throughout his life, this was the only camera he owned, and with it he made literally thousands of beautiful photographs.

Essentially, they were reinventing the wheel. Again. All we ever really needed from a wheel was that it was round.

Now the photographic industry is re-reinventing the wheel. The newest iteration of this reinvention in digital photography is called “mirrorless,” and it is supposed to be a fusion of small point-and-shoot cameras with the advantage of interchangable lenses like digital SLRs. It isn’t what we need, and in many cases, it isn’t what we want.

I can tell you that what I am witnessing in the field adjudicates my opinion on this matter: more and more people are using their mobile devices instead of separate cameras to gather photographs of their lives. The future of cameras for people who aren’t photographers isn’t in yet another format or yet another design, but in something that is convienient for them. Image quality for the common man takes a back seat, and not just a back seat but a seat at the back of the bus. People show me photos all the time of their kids or friends or even of news events with the admonition, “I know the quality isn’t very good, but…” They just don’t care. They care about their kids and their own lives and their memories, which are all easiest to record with, very simply, whatever is most convenient. The sidelines of games on high school senior night are crowded with parents, and easily 80% of them are holding up their smart phones to make pictures or video. Even if the average Joe has a digital SLR and a digital point-and-shoot and a new mirrorless digital, he doesn’t want to lug all that stuff around. (I also know this because all of the digital SLRs my students bring to class are in pristine condition.) He just wants to pull his smart phone out of his pocket and shoot. Then he just wants to pull it out later at work and show all his friends what he shot on his phone, or push a button the instant he shoots it to upload it to Twitter or Facebook. Those 2×3-inch photos on his phone are what he wants.

It must be infuriating and annoying to the average person now, in 2011, to be told yet again that his camera isn’t good enough, and that some engineer in Japan has come up with something better for 700 of their hard-earned dollars. Add to that the fact that the language of the advertising is increasingly ingenuine. We’ve come to expect that from ads for perfume and sports drinks. But in the past, camera makers more or less stuck with, “Our camera is better.” But now we have ads that practically tell us we will become sexually aroused if we buy their equipment. Here are a few examples of the paradigm:

“Experience It” ~theme for Nikon 1 system
On a photo forum, a reader writes, “Thanks for the suggestion to look into the mirrorless cameras. I am attracted to them.”
“Nikon 1 J1 for the freedom to capture, communicate and connect to life. Your zest for life is fueled by a desire to communicate all that you experience. Share the very incredible world that is yours with Nikon 1.” ~on the Nikon 1 page.
The Pentax Q promises, “a sensor that carves out an entirely new camera category.” (I am not sure about the name “Q”. Is it aimed at the Star Trek market, or the LGBT scene?)
“A whole new image.” ~Sony NEX mirroless page. (The page also says these new cameras feature a “huge” new sensor, which is about 13x9mm. Remind me to mail a dictionary to Sony.)

I suppose you could argue that more choices in the photography world give us more chances to make an informed decision. The only smart informed decision is to shoot with what you have. The only people who need more or better cameras are those who shoot literally thousands of images a week. Everyone else has, quite honestly, enough cameras, because, quite honestly, they aren’t photographers. Thus this is a mandate to you to get that 2005 digital camera out of its dusty bag and go take some pictures, and leave the engine of commerce to the MBAs.

Beautiful images like this 1949 picture of my aunt and mother aren't made by Samsung or Nikon or Sony, but by people with hearts and spirits. — Beautiful images like this 1949 picture of my aunt and mother aren’t made by Samsung or Nikon or Sony, but by people with hearts and spirits.

Update: The Barber Peak Experiment

July 21, 2011 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

I am reenergizing this after a dormancy period. Please consider participating. I had a lot of fun with these two new images…

This is the original image, scanned from a 35mm negative. Click it, then click it again to download the full-sized version so you can edit it.

It stared in 2000, on a trip called The Shooting Spree. Coming south out of Farmington, New Mexico, just after sunset, I saw the moon rising to my left. As I moved along, I saw a handsome peak ahead, Barber Peak, and stopped to photograph the moon rising behind it. At the time, I was mostly shooting black-and-white film, and didn’t have all that much experience with shooting the night sky in the desert. I made three exposures at about f/8, of 30 seconds, one minute, and 90 seconds. With the ISO 32 film I was using, all three frames ended up too thin (that’s filmspeak for underexposed or underdeveloped), and the best of them, made at 90 seconds, doesn’t print or scan very well.

I still thought it was a seminal moment, and, after some ponderance, decided to play around with it in Photoshop, and share it with a few friends and see what they could make of it. I got some interesting results.

My readers are welcome to download the full-size version by clicking on the thumbnail at left, then clicking that image to get to the full-sized file, then saving it to your hard drive. When you are done editing it, email the result to me at groups@richardbarron.net and I will post it here.

Here are the results of the first round of efforts, including a couple of my own, which were quite amusing. They might give you some ideas about what you’d like to do with this image…

An Ode to Film

January 1, 2010 / Richard R. Barron / 1 Comment

In 1998, the company bought me a film scanner, and the computer to go with it. Within a few weeks of tweaking and adjusting, I was scanning everything. That left two 500-sheet boxes of Kodak Ektamatic SC black-and-white, single-weight paper sitting on the shelves in my office. For a while I kept them, just in case I needed them, but by the following summer, I realized I would never use them, and decided to conjure some kind of fine art project I could shoot and print on this abandoned black-and-white paper. Since I have always been drawn to the high desert, I decided to go on a driving tour of New Mexico. That tour, in July of 1999, yielded less than I had hoped, since I am, by profession, a news and sports shooter, with little experience at the time shooting fine art in the desert. I might have made 15 passable images, but it served to inspire me to return and shoot black-and-white again in September 2000. My film was usually Panatomic-X for 35mm, and Verichrome Pan Film for medium format. Occasionally I would play around with Technical Pan Film or High Speed Infrared, or even more rarely, Ilford and Agfa films.

I have boxes and boxes of black-and-white prints spanning a couple of decades. When I get them out, I am reminded of the pleasure black-and-white shooting provided me, and of how much my photography owes this heritage.

Approaching thunderstorm, Puyé Cliff Dwellings, New Mexico, July 1999

The Greens of Summer

July 23, 2009 / Richard R. Barron

My grandmother, Lydia Batten, in about 1943, photographed with the tiny Kodak Bantam camera

A friend called me yesterday to mourn the demise of Kodachrome, the once-popular color slide film that was originally introduced in 1935. Kodak is discontinuing the film after 74 years because of dwindling sales in the digital age, and because there is only one lab remaining in the world that is able to process this unique film, the only film that is developed using the complicated 17-stage K-14 separation process. My own experience with Kodachrome is somewhat limited, but my grandfather, Richard Batten, shot thousands of Kodachrome slides in his lifetime, most of which are in my possession, and are in excellent condition. He used a tiny Kodak Bantam 828 camera. He is, apparently, the one from whom I inherited my photographic skills.

Kodak’s 828 film was unique. It used the yellow paper backing common to medium format, but measured 35mm wide like the much more popular 135-size film. The actual frame is slightly larger in both directions than a standard 35mm frame. Also like medium format, you didn’t rewind the film when you were done; you loaded it on the left to start, shot, then took it out on the right when you were finished, leaving the spool on the left, which you moved to the right side to act as the new take-up spool. It worked fine unless you lost the spool.

My grandfather must have been a very patient man to make so many excellent photographs with such a tedious and taxing tool. Of course, even today, patience is often what separates mediocre photographers from great ones, regardless of their cameras.

The manual focus, manual exposure Kodak Bantam 828 camera.

Moving Pictures

Category: Photographic Film