If You Can't Shoot With the One You Love Honey…

Shoot With the One You're With

I don’t like carrying a camera around when I’m out and about with my better three-quarters. She flies and when she’s home, I’d rather be looking at her than through a viewfinder. Sometimes though there’s an image that’s screaming to be made.

Calgary has a new public library designed by Snøhetta. It’s a wonderful structure and replaces a decaying building across from City Hall. Light and airy, it maintains a sense of intimacy and even with high ceilings and even with an open plan quiet, even when full of people.

We had coffee at Luke’s (not the main floor cafe, but the one right inside the collection area) and spent a wonderful afternoon wandering through the building. We went from top to bottom and then the light went “boink”. I turned to my wife and said: “Sorry love, the light.” and dashed out to the entrance.

The main entrance is an arched tunnel lined with wood and is supposed to connect downtown and the East Village (a formerly rundown area in the midst of redevelopment). The arches reflect the Chinook arches that form here during the winter when the winds from the big ocean tumble down from the Rockies. In reality, the tunnel connects the backside of the Big Blue Playpen (New City Hall), the rail yards and the East Village. Downtown is about 3 blocks away. But hey, as an architect’s statement it’s no more arty bollocks than any any other architect’s statement.

The alignment of the passageway and the sun was right on. It was the golden hour (yes, 4:15 in the afternoon is the golden hour in November): the colour of the wood and the shadows of the passersby was in a word “WOW!”

OH NOES! No camera. Wait, iPhone 6s, 645 Pro app, problem solved. This app is probably the best camera app out there and it’s one of the reasons I’ve stuck with the iPhone ecosystem for as long as I have. If there was an equivalent for Android, I’d have switched a long time ago.

I made these three images. I’ve also posted the monochrome versions that I made using NIK Silver Efex. I do shoot all my cameras as RAW + Monochrome JPEG and 645 Pro is no exception. In this case I didn’t like the render so I used NIK instead. I had to work fast as figured I had about 15 minutes of light and couldn’t be arsed to fiddle fart about. This is one of those cases where “we’ll fix it in post, get the images first!”

Shadows, New Calgary Public Library

Shadows, New Calgary Public Library

Skaters, New Calgary Public Library

Skaters, New Calgary Public Library

Arches, New Calgary Public Library

Arches, New Calgary Public Library

You couldn’t have predicted it, you could have sat there day after day waiting but, with a chinook arch (ironically enough) overhead and the sun sliding behind the mountains flooding the tunnel with light the camera god looked down and smiled.

Not fantastic images, but a very good example of timing, luck and

Photographing Copenhagen: Getting hygge with it

Been looking at my blog and it's been over a year since I've written anything. There's a reason for this. See, I've got this gig re-doing training materials for an old employer. Sure, it's just 20 hours a week, but at the end of a 4 hour stint in Powerpoint, LibreDraw and diety of choice knows what other software you really don't have that much creative mojo left especially when you're up to your armpits in the Canadian Air Regulations, a soul stifling document if one ever existed. I think only Lord Vetinari's clerk Drumknott's soul would take flight reading that benighted document. I digress.

I was fortunate enough to visit Copenhagen this past May. My eldest son works for an architecture firm there and has his four year residency visa. I was able to stay with him and his significant other (which makes it affordable as hotel rooms are astronomical, even at a modest inn). Their place is in Nørrebro, right by the train station. He describes it as "the hood" (with tongue firmly planted in cheek). It's a neighbourhood in transition, hosting migrants from many countries; one can see the first mosque in Denmark from their balcony.

Photographing in Copenhagen can be challenging, not because of the subject matter but because of the environment. Copenhagen is held up as a model for the modern bicycle-centric city. Thing is, they've made it more pedestrian hostile than New York (if such a thing can be imagined!). To make way for the bike lanes, they've narrowed the sidewalks so the buses and cars can still use the streets. Narrow sidewalks mean tap dancing around shop displays (more often then not of bicycles for sale), Danes, parked bicycles and you're often forced into the bike lane just to proceed down the street. And if you think that you're safe in a crosswalk with a red light showing for bikes and green light showing for us lowly foot travelers, think again. More than once I had to resort to my broadest NooYawk "Hey, I'm walkin' here!"

I digress, again. 

Cafe society is alive and well and stopping for a smørrebrød, Tuborg and akvavit. There are over 40 brands of the latter. Akvavit is to Denmark as pastis is to Provence.                           

Friends Dining

Sometimes, if you look up you can see DEATH on holiday (naked, I might add, I doubt that Albert or Susan would approve)

DEATH takes a holiday

I process all my black & white in NIK Silver Efex but since DxO bought NIK from Google, I decided to plump for DxO Photolab and FilmPack 5. This is the result of using the Velvia 50 preset. 

Tag, Hoodie and Bottle

The heat broke for a day as I was headed up to Helsingør in a sometimes steady drizzle. (No wonder Hamlet was gloomy). This was taken as we pulled out of Bispebjerg, one stop away from my son's apartment with my iPhone using the 645Pro Mk III camera App. It (to my mind) is probably the most underrated, app on the market. It feels like a camera.  

Scratched Glass

Ducking out of the drizzle after a rare passing thunderstorm at Hellerup station I saw this fellow traveler huddled against the wall doing the same. The first is with Silver Efex, the second is FilmPack and I can't remember what preset. I usually don't remember because it's really not all that important. They both remind me of a frame snatched from "The Sweeney". (I used the Scots word for "dreary, gloomy, bleak, miserable, grey, depressing, devoid of sunshine" in the caption. No doubt there is an Danish equivalent)

Dreich at Hellerup #1

Dreich at Hellerup #2

Not my best oeuvre but as they say, "A bad day's fishing beats a good day in the office"

Once you get your head wrapped around the idea that people on foot are invisible to anyone on wheels and therefore fair game (hit the photog and level up!) photographing in Copenhagen is quite interesting, especially once you are off the tourist trail and a become attuned to the tempo of the city. Next time, I hope to go out at night as I get the distinct feeling there is a side to Copenhagen that isn't all that hygge and would be very interesting to pretend to be a Brassai and have a look at that.

Pictures At An Exhibition

There are two things in life that draw me into a region of space-time where the idea of time passing has no real meaning: bookstores (new and used) and art galleries.

I had such an experience while in London a while back. The good lady wife was knee deep in horticulture at the Chelsea Flower Show so I hoofed it down the embankment waving at the Battersea Power Station, MI6, on along to Westminster and then over Blackfriars to the Tate Modern. I was tempted to stop at the Tate Britain as they had a Hockney retrospective but as much as I like Hockney, the Modern was my goal.


The spaces there are amazing. The Turbine Hall is a massive space and currently (hah) devoted to a sound installation where as you walk through the hall you are hit by different sound loops. The effect is not dissimilar from "On the Run" from Dark Side of the Moon.

On The Run

There's another bit of synchronicity here as the architect of the Bankside Power Station, home to the Tate Modern is the same architect that designed the Battersea Power Stations as featured on the cover of Pink Floyd's album "Animals". The more you know...

I digress.

The Tate Modern is a wondrous place. Even when busy, it has the size to allow you to retreat. Time stood still for me as I wandered the halls. Oh the ideas, the dangerous disruptive ideas churning away in there. As I wandered I was struck by the number of people walking at a seemingly brisk pace, raising a camera or smartphone, click and on to harvest the next image. I had started make some images but for some reason I stopped; perhaps the artwork was too captivating.

Along the way I had an "AHA" moment. A project presented itself: "Pictures at an Exhibition". I became interested in the question: "How do people interact with the gallery and the artwork?"

Harvesting Art

In bygone times you would sit, sketchbook and pencil in hand, and "commune" with the artwork: drinking it in, responding to what Walter Benjamin would refer to as the "aura". You would write down what you felt, make some sketches, trying to understand the technique, trying to read what the artist is trying to tell you, trying to answer questions and seek clarification through contemplation.

I did see some of that, two men in close, hushed conversation as they tried to work through what was being shown, but unfortunately many where like a botanist from the Age of Exploration, pithing butterflies on blotters and pressing flowers in books.

What's It All About

Maybe I'm not in tune, may that's the way of the world now: capturing mementos of things seen in museums for later study (possibly), but heavens, the Tate has most of this available on line now: better exposed and annotated.

Am I trying to obfuscate what a gallery is for? Is in fact the taking of pictures the latest in the democratization of art? Berger writes that once art could be reproduced it was democratized, making it available to all, taking it out of the hands of the moneyed classes and making it available to everyone. Am I trying to block that democratization? Once art has been liberated from the artistic power structures, Berger writes, they try to stuff the genie back into the bottle by surrounding it with complex terminology and controlling access: restricting how close you can come to the artwork and "curating" (controlling access) artists' work.

Interestingly, the Tate Modern is complicit in this in some regard. I was at the oddly named Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark just prior. Both galleries had Giacometti. Louisiana encouraged you to interact with the sculpture; the Tate had little white strings around everything and if you got too close an exceedingly bored docent shooed you along. I realize that London isn't a quiet little village outside of Copenhagen and that the two societies are different, but it is interesting. Oddly enough, none of the Danes even thought to touch the Giacometti; it just wasn't done.

Docent

The last picture in the sequence is not from the Tate Modern, but The Photographers' Gallery.  This is an intimate gallery in London and well worth seeking out. When I was there they had the three finalists for the 2017 the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and a remounting of Roger Mayne's installation "The British at Leisure".

Catalogues

Technical Notes

These images where all made with my iPhone 6s using the 645 Pro Mk III app. This app shoots Raw (dng) and allows you to save a .tif image using the emulsion of your choice along side the RAW file. It's my go-to photo app and truth be told, it's what's keeping me on the iThingy. I haven't found a suitable Android equivalent yet.