Fujifilm

DEFINITION 32 | THE PAGE THAT STAYED BLANK

BY BERT STEPHANI

Yesterday was my deadline for a new KAGE story. Yesterday was also World Photography Day. In the two weeks leading up to yesterday I was aware of both facts and determined to shoot a great story. So I took a blank (virtual) page and grabbed a(n Apple) pencil and ... nothing happened.

Usually the hard part of starting a new story is just to write those first few keywords down. But once that’s done, the rest flows into a finished story pretty easily. It still can be hard work, but it isn’t difficult, not really. It’s just a matter of forcing myself to get going and then do the work.

But this time, the story just wouldn’t come and believe me, I tried. I had some ideas, but they all seemed artificial and forced. So I just kept a camera close and shot whatever caught my eye.

For a moment I thought about investigating which story was hidden in the random images:

The dark tones reflect the cloud that hangs above us in these trying times. The obscured self portraits are a sign of insecurity and the clouds symbolise the fear of change. However I clearly look for light, light at the end of the tunnel. Not everything is lost, after all, the compositions express a desire for order and new structure ...

Bullshit of course. These are just images ... or is there more?

Definition 022 | On the times, and changing

Definition 022 | On the times, and changing

To suggest that there’s been a lot going on in 2020 so far would be, well, the understatement of the year.

We drove inland from Sydney on the weekend to visit a friend (now that we’re allowed to travel locally), passing through lands that were scorched by the bushfires in December and January, flooded with rain in February, and quarantined for coronavirus ever since.

But what I was thinking about on this trip was, ironically, the things I didn’t need to think about. The many, many things that are just easier for me, as a whitefella in Australia—even as a recent migrant…

Definition 014 | The Past Carries The Present

Definition 014 | The Past Carries The Present

My last essay, from February, seems like a postcard from a bygone age. Me, at home; a life in the arts; what different meanings those have now.

Two days after posting the essay, my father died; by the following week I was in Toronto with my family, putting him to rest on a windswept hill, as snow fell around us…

Definition 006 | Home is where the art is

Definition 006 | Home is where the art is

I seem to be accumulating identities.

When we first started talking about this project for 2020, I thought I knew what it meant, more or less.

But the reality is, I don’t find it much easier to define myself now than I did at the end of high school, when we were supposed to be choosing careers, and figuring out our plans. I mean, I know what I do, and where I’m from, and where I live - but are any of those defining…?

Vegetable, mineral

Vegetable, mineral

I’ve been away.

Well, we’ve all been away, obviously - the last essay we posted was back in June, and it’s September now! But I’ve been back in my old home country, where I grew up.

Things are different there now - as I anticipated last year, my parents have downsized out of their Toronto home of 56 years.

This was also the first summer they didn’t spend July and August up north on the lake by themselves, they decided to was better if there were some younger folks around to help out while they were up on the island - so we drove up with them, stayed for a week, carried the groceries, and cooked. We also played some cribbage (which didn’t go so well for me)…

Time In Motion

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GENERATOR

Guidance: Decorate, decorate.

Assignment: Today you must shoot moving vehicles or individual motion, using a lens closest to 135 millimeters (35 equivalent) and your best camera.

Photography & Text By Derek Clark

Shoot vehicles or individual motion. I started out using a tripod in the middle of the day with a variable ND. I hated the colour cast and I just wasn’t getting what I wanted. So I moved to nighttime, still on a tripod. I shot light trails over a motorway, but that’s been done to death. In fact, I have a slide that I shot on the opposite bridge to this one from 1979 or 1980. Light trails with a horrible green colour cast, but it worked and it was an important shot in my early development in photography.

So I took the camera off the tripod. I shot handheld out of focus shots of moving vehicles, eventually arriving at the idea to shoot moving vehicles with a moving camera at around a 5-second exposure. Vehicles moving, camera moving and time is moving.

Authorised By

Authorised By

We’re coming up on a federal election in Australia; so it’s safe to say some people are on edge.

But it’s hard to discern left from right out on the streets - unless they’re standing next to a sign in a t-shirt, handing out ‘how to vote’ cards, of course.

Will we continue on the conservative path that’s seen three prime ministers (and two deputy prime ministers) in the past six years? Or return to a more liberal - though that word means something else, here, as the Liberal party are the conservatives - some would say progressive, considerate way of running the country…?

In The Second City of the Empire

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I’m a street photographer, and for me that equates to candid pictures without asking permission. But for this latest Kage assignment, I wanted to get out on the street and ask if I could take peoples portrait. I went out with a Hasselblad 500c/m with an 80/2.8 and an X-Pro2 with a 50/2. I wanted to capture the men of Glasgow with as much character on their faces as possible.

An old man near the train station was causing a bit of a commotion with a piece of religious artwork. Although he looked impoverished, he had actually commissioned an artist to create this painting and having just collected it (on his wheelchair), he wanted to show it off.

I was given a poem about a female athlete by the man with the silver hair and I was asked on several occasions if I was from the press. People are suspicious about cameras these days. It seams that if you shoot with anything other than a phone, you must be press or up to something dodgy, even with an old Hasselblad.

Around one in three said yes to having their portrait taken. In the end I only used two shots from the Hasselblad due to a problem with the lens. Medium format film or a 1.5 crop sensor, can you tell which two are from the Hasselblad without looking at the metadata?

One day late

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By Jonas Rask

I was supposed to get this story done and uploaded yesterday.
But I didn’t make that deadline.
Obviously.

We weren’t supposed to dig into our archives and reuse material that had already been shot.
But I dug into my year old gallery.
Obviously.

So, why was I late? Why did I dig? - Because I was lazy and didn’t get my portraits shot? Not really.
I shot self portraits. I portrayed my good friend Donald, I portrayed fellow photographer Frederik Vohnsen, I portrayed my kids, nieces and nephews. All within the last 14 days.

So I didn’t need to be late, and I didn’t need to dig.

I have this camera. It’s nothing fancy. It’s old.
I love that little (big) thing. It shoots packfilm. Old Fujifilm FP100c or FP3000b. It’s a fantastic feeling to shoot a portrait of someone I know with this camera. To show them the positive, then go home and develop the negative using bleach and a glass-plate. It’s oldschool charm that really makes you commit to your craft, and to your portrait.
But the Fujifilm FP100c and FP3000b are no more. I have collected a lot for storage in my fridge, but they’re way past expiration already. And when they’re done - then no more. Then only digital noise.

So, again I’m late. They’ve all expired, and I have to dig deep into the corners of online stores to find the few remaining packs for me to maintain my storage.

So I’ll continue to be late, and I’ll continue to dig.

The below images have been shot using a Polaroid 600SE camera and a Mamiya Sekor 127mm f/4.7 lens.
Some are shot on FP100c, some on FP3000b. Some are scanned as positives, some have been scanned as negatives.

Shock, Recognition

Shock, Recognition

What does it take to recognise someone you know?

I wonder sometimes about this - about how little information you could be given about someone, and still know them; from a description, a sound, a gesture they always use, a certain way of doing things.

And it’s what I find I miss about people when they’re gone, too…