Urban Motion Blog

© Ben Anderson

I recently noticed that my photography had become less dynamic. I think this is mainly because I’ve been concentrating on shooting medium and large format cameras. The cost of film & processing, the bulk and considered nature of shooting heavier equipment, had subconsciously altered how and when I chose to pull the trigger.

Predominantly this manifested itself in a shift away from recording life moments as they happen toward planned excursions with a camera. This has been both good and bad, some of the photos I’ve taken on MF/LF are without doubt my best work, but at the same time this has caused me to lose some of the spark I enjoyed about photography.

What I needed was to keep a foot in both camps so in an effort to address this I recently picked up a camera that provides is the exact opposite of the studied moment, an Olympus MJU II, a fully automatic point and shoot 35mm film camera. More photos to follow.

© Ben Anderson

If there’s one thing which torments me more than anything else as a ‘serious photographer’, it is finding time to go out and chase my project aspirations.

My wife and three children all vie for my time (and rightly so, they are after all the most important people in my life), as does my busy corporate career. This means that I’m often left with only snippets of the weekend or the hours after darkness available for shooting, neither of which lend themselves especially well to involved and engaging project work.

The flip side of this situation is that when I do get out there it is all the more satisfying precisely because I know just how difficult it has been to find the time to get the shots that I want.

And now I’m attempting to shoot with a large format camera – could I really make this any more difficult for myself? I guess I must be addicted to having some kind of obstacle to overcome (or something to moan about!).

I’d be interested to hear from you if this sounds at all familiar.

© Ben Anderson

I primarily shoot using a Mamiya 7II 6×7 rangefinder, it’s a wonderfully simple camera to shoot with. The camera has a couple of viewfinder idiosyncrasies to overcome when you first start out with it*, but once you know what to expect from the framing it is really rather liberating to use. It is quiet, relatively compact, and above all incredibly portable.

The fact that it is a rangefinder means the camera is very easy to hand hold, removing the necessity for a tripod in all but the most extreme situations. This means you can shoot quickly and inconspicuously in many more situations than when carrying a cumbersome tripod. The upshot of this is that this camera has become almost like an extension of my body, it is with me almost all of the time. So it is particularly wrenching when the camera breaks. And it has done it twice now.

I don’t get much time to shoot which means I plan what I’m going to do – I like to take random meanderings from what are normally A-B routes, this way I find new rat runs for commutes whilst also reccying new locations to shoot. I also spend a fair amount of time using google maps satellite view to explore possible locations (as I know others do). Turning up at one of these locations to have my camera freeze after frame 1 is disappointing to say the least. The most recent time this happened I wasted 2 rolls by reloading to check if it was just some bizarre jam. Alas No – another day wasted, another month and a bit away for repair: 3 out of 11 months without the camera to date.

With the camera now safely back in hand I’m shortly heading out to run a roll through, hopefully this time 7 will once again be my lucky number.

* with a 65mm lens, parallax issues mean the frame lines crop peoples feet for full length close up portraits, and images at infinity are approx 20% larger than the frame lines.

Introduction

Put yourself in this scenario, you have just received an e-mail about one of your online photos, the sender would like a hi-res copy for print (be it a competition entry/client/magazine/whatever), this is great news, but where did you put the original media??? If you’ve been taking a lot of photos for a while you could be wading through an awful lot of files or film to find one image, and that’s time that you either don’t have or could better spend on something else.

This is where Digital Asset Management (DAM) comes into its own. In this post I will describe the methods I use to store and catalogue my photographs in order that I can quickly locate the original media for any print or digital file. These methods add a very small initial overhead to storing your photos, but deliver an easily searched and cleverly indexed image catalogue.

For my purposes I use some software called Iview MediaPro, but Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, or any other photographic/media cataloguing software will work just as well. In order to use this method successfully you will need to have some of this software installed on your computer.

Organising your files

Folder Structure

I organise all of my files in a very simple, but very powerful hierarchy of folders on my hard drive. The folders can easily be archived onto other media and backups can be taken at any point.

I have a folder for each year. The folder format is: YYYY

In the year folders I have a folder for each shoot based upon the year month and first day of the shoot. All of the digital originals and film scans for that shoot go into this folder. The folder format is: YYYYMMDD_Location_Subjects_OtherInfo

In the shoot folders I have a folder where I keep all edits, in my case PSD files. I DO NOT catalogue edits. The folder format is: EDITS

© Ben Anderson

File Names

Digital cameras do pretty well at giving your photos unique file names, but some will re-use the same filenames after counting though a particular range. By storing your shots in ‘shoot folders’ as described above it’s very unlikely that you’ll get duplicates in one place that will overwrite one another. Cameras insert a lot of metadata into the headers of your files, this metadata can describe exposure, time, date, image resolution, camera model, and much more, all of this is information that your catalogue software will import.

Film scans on the other hand contain none of this information, if you’re lucky you will get the scan date/time and scanner model. It is VITAL that you use a numbering system for your scans. I use a very simple but, again, very powerful system which I will now describe:

I store all of my negatives in film binders, be they 135, 120, 4×5, or 8×10. Each binder is numbered, the first being 0001. The negatives are inserted into archival film pages. Each page is numbered, the very first page being page 00010001 (the first 4 digits are the binder number – this stops pages being put in the wrong binders later), each individual frame is simply the frame number on the film. So, if I scanned frame 9 on film page 1 from binder 1, it would be named 00010001-9.tif This makes it exceptionally simple to locate an original film frame from a scan.

Cataloguing

What Now?

Conclusion

You now know how to effectively keep track of your photographs, so get to it, the sooner you start the better. If you have a backlog of photos to be catalogued it will be daunting, but you may find some gems you’d previously overlooked or forgotten about. Have peace of mind that you will always be able to find your original media.

© Ben Anderson

I’ve always been a bit of a gear head, so much so that I’ve picked up a lot of photographic equipment over the last few years, 8 cameras (all used, not collecting dust), lots of glass, various tripods, all manner of lighting gizmos, and basically all the associated paraphernalia.

So why is less more? Because if you have less gear you have less choices to make and are forced to concentrate on what really counts – your photography!

It’s taken me a while to appreciate this, and I think it’s only really now that I’ve covered pretty much all the major formats, P&S digi, P&S 35mm, 35 SLR, 35 RF, 1.6xcrop DSLR, Full frame DSLR, 6×6, 6×7, 4×5, & 8×10, that I KNOW from a hands on perspective what matters to me in order to achieve the right aesthetic.

With this in mind I’m going to be slimming my collection down to my Sinar P2, Mamiya7, and 1DMKII. This means good bye Leica M6, goodbye Rollei 6008i (I may yet keep this), and a fond farewell to various other 35mm cameras, most of my lighting gear (except 1 metz), all my Manfrotto’s, and about as much of anything else I can. I guess I can finance a couple of years worth of film and dev from the proceeds.

Downsizing is cathartic, liberating, and hopefully will lead me to take better pictures – which is what it’s all about, isn’t it?

© Ben Anderson

Often as I’m browsing around the net I’ll find an image that instantly makes me sit up and take notice. More and more often these images will have been captured on medium or large format film. See my earlier post about Mark Brautigam’s work.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I’m being limited by the equipment or format that I’m using and this had definitely become the case with 35mm digital – that’s not to say that I had become the best of the best within that genre, but that I knew I had something more to offer — or perhaps more importantly, something more to learn by moving up the format ladder. With that in mind I obtained some medium format equipment and started to use it with gusto – I think some of the results have far surpassed what I had imagined I could obtain.

You may be smirking and asking yourself how the image above demonstrates this – and I would forgive you entirely for thinking as much, but for me the image above is most definitely a step in the right direction for my photographic sensibilities. Film, and the larger formats, simply exude a higher aesthetic than I’ve seen possible with digital media. Digital work often comes across as far too cleanly, aseptic even — not all of the time granted, but much of it.

So, I’ve seen where I want to go, and I’ve leapt onto one stepping stone on what is undoubtedly a larger crossing, but the lure of large format photography is incredibly strong. Do I continue to leap? Or do I hold myself in check, take stock of the geography, and learn the lie of the land before moving off?