Uncategorized – Photo Notes

Old Glass, Old Cameras, Old Film and Old Paper part 4

Turning to the Eastman 8×10 Commercial Model B.

For more than 10 years I used an Eastman 8X10 2D. This was a mahogany camera with 8X10 and 5X7 backs, without its stock sliding base and without its separate tail extension. It was rickety to begin with but it was beautiful in its own way, and I made do with it to produce some of my favorite 8X10 and 5X7 negatives. Because of wear on the wooden slot on the bed the front standard flopped around and the wood itself required maintenance of the screw holes with tooth picks and wood glue just to try to keep everything tight. I think this design went back to the Century Camera and Eastman Kodak kept producing these mahogany 2Ds in 8X10 and 5X7 into the early 50’s. Folmer Schwing and then Folmer Graflex apparently did the actual manufacturing.

In 1937 they introduced the Eastman 8X10 Commercial View Model B. In many ways it was just a metal version of the 2D. It is the ways in which it was different that are most impressive. First, the camera is all metal, made of a magnesium alloy, which made it rather light weight for a metal camera. The metal construction eliminated one of the issues with the 2D; the guides for tracking the movement of the front and back standards did not wear down or chip and crack. The camera also included front shift, which the Eastman wooden cameras never had.

Page from Eastman Professional Photographic Apparatus and Materials, 1938

When I got mine it was in terrible shape. It had been sorely neglected apparently for many years. There were spider webs inside the bellows with egg sacs, and there were plenty of pinholes for the little spiders to escape. Besides being filthy and presently un-useable, the camera was intriguing. I had never seen or heard of one. So I began a partial disassembly, got the bellows off by unscrewing the wooden frames from the metal body and contacted Custom Bellows in the UK, talked to Keith, and sent him the old bellows still on the frames to make a new one. in the meantime, I was able to clean the camera as thoroughly as I could. It did not shine. There seems to be a greyish paint over the alloy that on this camera was scratched and marred, and in some places coated with a residue which almost looked like something left behind by Duc Tape! Then the camera got even more interesting. A photographer friend came by to have a look and informed me that he knew about this camera, that it had been Charles Libby’s, and was sold off after the locally important Libby Studios had liquidated. Charles Libby is not a famous name around the world but in Spokane he was active from early in the 20th century on until he died in the 1960s. One of his Cirkut cameras is in the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture and one of his 11X14 studio cameras was just purchased a couple years ago by a young local art photographer. Libby made many panoramic group photos over the decades and actively photographed street corners in various neighborhoods as if trying to chronicle the city itself. When the Museum acquired his negatives, glass plate and film they began a long pr0cess of cataloguing and thus making available for researchers these sometimes 100 year old photographs of Spokane. https://ksps.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/the-photography-of-charles-a-libby-video-gallery/capturing-history/

At least one authority says that the Eastman Commercial 8X10 was manufactured from 1937 until 1940, and then after WWII was replaced by the Kodak Master, a sort of metal version of the Deardorff. If this is correct, then we might suggest that it was the camera’s magnesium alloy that led to its demise. In the December 1941 version of the Eastman professional catalogue there is a note tipped into the opening page which explains that due to the war effort, some of their professional products will be unavailable.

It’s likely that the lack of a supply of the magnesium necessary meant that Eastman Kodak decided to discontinue the camera rather than redesign it using aluminum. Magnesium was an important component of wartime manufacture of weapons. Mahogany was easier to get so Eastman continues with the 2D and waits until peacetime to produce the Commercial’s successor, the Kodak Master . This would explain the rather short date of manufacture from 1937 until 1940.

The camera weighs from about 11 lbs. (without lens, rear extension or accessory lens board), to nearly 14 lbs. which is pretty good for an all-metal camera. The attached front rail folds up nicely around an attached lens and the camera sits on its moveable base, a sliding block that was a good feature retained from the wooden 2Ds.

Camera folded up with tail piece attached. The sliding block is centered.

The hardware on my camera all works smoothly despite its years of use and then neglect.

The shift on the front standard has two locks which slide when loosened to not get in the way of the front rail when putting the camera away.

The new bellows from Custom Bellows in the UK was perfect, http://www.custombellows.co.uk/ giving me at least the 30 inch bellows draw of the original. The long bellows may not be so important to one who concentrates on wide angle work, but as I do a lot of close-up work it is an essential feature. This is true for even the normal lens, a 12 inch but I also use a 45cm. Apochromat Artar with a Packard Ideal shutter. I can focus to infinity with this lens without adding the tailpiece, but when I do attach the tailpiece I can use the Artar for closeup work .

45 cm. Apochromat Artar with Packard Shutter

Even at this extension, there is enough bellows for swings or tilts.

One additional feature that I was able to acquire is what Eastman called the “accessory reversible swinging lens board”. I found this helping to catalogue a friend’s massive collection and noted the little half moon tighten down plates, recognizing them as just like the pieces on the front standard of the Eastman 8X10.

The bellows, of course, was no good on this piece and I again contacted Keith at Custom Bellows. I don’t think they had ever come across one and I sent him pictures and he manufactured the bellows and I attached it, to get this working tilt and swing on the front standard. It is a useful item, though not as convenient as a permanently attached tilt like I have on the Ansco Universal. Ansel Adams for many years used an Eastman Commercial 8X10 with a modified front standard that mimicked the Ansco or the Century Universal. In a 1958 film available on YouTube you can see his Eastman at about 4:05 and also later in using it in a demo on a California beach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1sNvguh3Y8

Accessory Reversible Swinging Lens board

The camera is easy to set up. It takes me less than two minutes to mount it on a tripod and unfold and lock down the standards and siding block, ready to shoot! I do wonder at some of Eastman Kodak’s decision making over the years. Why would they ignore the front tilt solutions of both the Century Universal and the Agfa Ansco for this awkward attachment? Why would they insist on separate and ultimately lose-able back extension pieces instead of using the clever solutions offered by Ansco or by Calumet?

Nevertheless, this is my 8X10 camera of choice. Kathy has her 8X10 Ansco and since we both shoot most often at the same time, I don’t have the luxury of access to that camera. She does not find my Eastman appealing, but fell in love with the Ansco on first sight!

Just a note: I have seen some discussion on the Large Format Photographers site about the lens boards for this camera. All of my 6X6 lensboards fit perfectly into this front standard and Eastman itself in the blurb from its catalogue say that the 6X6 boards are the correct ones. I have come across a 6X6 board that was a little too fat (thick) so that I had to loosen the screws of the mounting plate and locks but with that it fit fine.

One more: I have no idea why this is a “Model B”.

Old Glass, Old Cameras, Old Film and Old Paper Part 3

Now to the Ansco Universal 5X7:

My Ansco Universal 5X7 is a recent acquisition. Several of my former students have remained friends 20 years after taking classes from me in either photography or religion. One of them sent a note a few months back saying that he and his wife were “downsizing” and wondered if we knew someone or if we would be interested in his 5X7 camera. He had, I think, never used it. 20 some years ago he had brought it to my office, an eBay purchase. Some “yahoo” who had it before had mounted a Wollensak barrel lens on a homemade lens board and attached a Packard shutter behind it, and instead of drilling a hole in the lensboard found it easier to cut a hole through the bellows for the pneumatic tube! We tried patching it at the time with some bellows tape but it was not going to work very well. I gave my student a Wollensak shutter mounted Rapax and forgot about it. So when he delivered it to us 20 some years later there was the Wollensak Rapax mounted on the camera, so dusty and filthy it had the aroma of old barbecue sauce! The hole in the bellows remained and now the corners were also pinholed to death. I set the camera outside and used a brush to sweep away as much of the dirt as I could onto the front porch. My wife and I discovered that this was the 5X7 version of her 8X10 Universal, down to the grey green paint on the wood. There were knobs missing and a ruined bellows, but she was excited to see this smaller version of the camera she loved, so I began dissasembling and cleaning, found a bellows replacement online and ordered it and began searching around through my non-organized stash of photo hardware for knobs. Meanwhile, a friend of ours was in the process of trying to sell off camera equipment and she had a similar camera that she brought by to our house with some other cameras for a third party to look at. She had a 4X5 reducing back that I enquired about for the Ansco, and she brought that in an Ansco case with an incomplete Ansco 5X7 Universal! When Kathy saw that my interest in buying the 4X5 reducing back got expanded t0 buying the whole kit, which had missing knobs but included the knobs missing on my project camera.

The completed Ansco Universal 5X7 includes the base from the second camera, the body from the first, knobs from the second for the front tilt and front slide, and a new bellows from Hong Kong that I installed. Flaws in the first, like the fact that the rear focusing standard would not tighten down sufficiently were eliminated by using the base and some hardware from the second camera. And now I have 2 5X7 backs, one with lines drawn for architectural correctness, and a 4X5 reducing back. The new bellows, as it turns out, has an additional 4 inches from the original which is a nice bonus. This camera is the new home for the Protar VIIa lens in the Compound shutter, mounted on a new lensboard made by Zbima 1 , an ebay seller.

My first 8X10 camera was an Eastman 2D from the 1930’s which had a 5X7 reducing back along with the 8X10 back but which was old and rickety when I got it, and got worse through the years. The front standard flopped around because the wood rails were so w0rn and sloppy and I had many bellows patches. Still, some of my best negatives were made with that camera. It had no extension rail. Most of these were lost over the years since they were only attached when needed. These common issues with the Eastman cameras were partly what made the Ansco so appealing. On the Universal, the rear extension track is permanently attached with a piano hinge and the camera folds up very neatly.

The tracking of the front and rear standards is metal to metal, nickel plated steel and the tendency to sloppiness of the Eastmans is eliminated. The camera folds up a lot like the Calumet C-2 all metal 8X10 camera, but unlike the C-2, it will focus both at the front and the back. It has front rise, front tilt, front shift. rear swing and rear tilt, while the 2D had only front rise and rear tilt and swing. The nickel hardware seems to have held up very nicely over the decades.

Plastic (Bakelite) knobs, nickel plated hardware

The back standard moves on double tracks, is fixed by a horizontal knob that, in the case of my camera, is reliable at even an extreme camera tilt, and the track itself is fixed by a vertical tightening knob that when loosened allows the track itself to slide smoothly, wood against wood and extend far to the back to make the most of the bellows draw.

Back track partly drawn out, bellows had more to go!

Because my lens of choice for this camera is the Protar VIIa, these features make the most of the lens’s front element, 16+ inches.

In cleaning up this camera one of the things I did was to spend time cleaning all the surfaces of greasy dirt and then waxing the wood against wood surfaces with paraffin, like the front shift, and polishing the metal surfaces with Renaissance wax. The advantage of having to change the bellows was that I could get at the normally hidden inner surfaces with the bellows removed.

Camera Front, base color slightly different than camera body

There are always some issues with older equipment. This camera could have been made from thee late 1930’s on through I think the 1960s. My wife’s 8X10 version, in fact, on our first trip with it started to come apart on the tripod, wood pieces becoming unglued on the base. She was a bit panicked. We took it home and I took it apart, camera from base, and found that a lot of glue was failing, so I got out the wood glue and renewed the wood connections. There is also a sort of dowel that runs at the seam where the rear rack fits into the base when brought down, and I did some repairs there as well. Even on my 5X7 there is some evidence that this dowel could be a problem in the future as the greyish paint has chipped off, showing that this point is a stressful one. Nevertheless, the Ansco Universal is all in all a very robust camera with a lot of nice features that make it stand apart from the contemporary Eastman and Folmer Graflex wooden cameras.

When I featured the Protar VIIa lens and Compound shutter I neglected to note the following word of caution. Convertible lenses were very popular for their economy of both cost and weight and they are capable of making fine images even a hundred years old. Edward Weston, in fact, used a Turner Reich Convertible for his Guggenheim trips in the late 1930’s. The word of caution is this: many of the lens components exhibit a focus shift when used singly, rather than in combination. Weston, it is said, used them singly almost exclusively. One of his elements gave him a lot of blurry negatives and I suspect he was not seeing the focus shift when he, as was his habit, closed down the aperture to extremes, thinking as others did in his day that the smaller the aperture the better the sharpness. Refraction, unfortunately, kicks in at some point on any lens, and sharpness declines. Focus shift occurs when you focus the single lens wide open, and then stop it down to gain sharpness and depth of field. Neglecting to check the focus again with a loupe after stopping down could produce a definite unsharpness in the negative. A good loupe and a good darkcloth will go a long way to returning the lens to its absolute sharpness.

Next time I am going to look at the Eastman Commercial 8X10 Model B, their all metal camera which was produced from the late 1930’s into the first year of American participation in WWII.

Old Glass, Old Cameras, Old Film and Old Paper Part 2

The main lens I have used on the Graflex RB 4X5 is an uncoated Zeiss Tessar that had a bad ding on the front making the filter ring inoperable. It made for an ugly looking lens. The Tessar lens design, dating back to the end of the 19th century is a durable anastigmat, a good performer and still in use in some modern lenses. The Zeiss Tessar came in several forms, the one I have, a f 4.5 was perhaps the most common, but there was also a f 3.5 in the first half of the 20th century, a fast lens for its day, and the slower f 6.3. The f 6.3 was known for being the all around best performer. There are some authorities who claim that the venerable Kodak Commercial Ektar of the 50’s and 60’s was a slightly modified version of that f 6.3 Tessar and the story continues with the Calumet Caltar f 6.3 lenses which, it is said, were designed and sold to replace the Kodak Commercial Ektars when they went out of production. I have a 12 in. Calumet Caltar for my 8X10 camera and an 8.5 in. Commercial Ektar for my 4X5, and both are nice and bright and very sharp, considering their maximum aperture is rated rather slow.

The Graflex’s Zeiss Tessar, at f 4.5 still does not produce a brilliant illumination in the old camera. The mirror shows its age and using the camera in a dimly lit room is just about impossible. Even when it was marketed that limitation was apparent and noted. It is best outdoors in bright light or in a studio brightly illuminated. The photographer must press his or her face to the opening of the lens hood, head keeping out extraneous light, and in that short dark tunnel the rectangle of light glows, a window to the world. That is, I think one of the attractive things for me in using the Graflex. This was reinforced when I mounted the new viewing hood from Hong Kong, as it opened much wider to reveal the whole of the ground glass.

Zeiss Tessar with adapter ring atttached.

Using the dinged Tessar produced good images but it really was ugly so I permanently added an adapter ring and now am able to use filters and a lens hood.

On a tripod the Graflex becomes even more useful for me. Before I got the NOS curtain installed I was limited to rather slow shutter speeds. This moved me towards more subtle forms of light.

Here’s another:

There are some idiosyncrasies to every camera, I suppose and the Graflex has its. Using the regular 2-sheet holders in the vertical mode presented a problem: getting my fingers onto the dark slides small wire pull ring, as the darkslide rested nearly flush with the back of the camera. For awhile, I used the RB back to point the holders down, necessitating pulling the slide from underneath the camera and that was awkward, especially on a tripod. So I bent a stiff wire with curved hooks on both ends and carried that in my pocket. I was able to hook the dark slide loop easily and pull it. Of course, things dropped into pockets get lost so my latest solution is pictured here, the hook attached to a rubber band wrapped in electrical tape and looped around the camera handle. I stretch the band, hook the dark slide and the hook remains out of the way but always ready.

You can read in Weston’s Daybook how he used his Graflex to shoot outdoor portraits in the brilliant Mexican sunlight, at 1/10th of a second, handheld. This sounds like an amazing feat! He must have never touched coffee! There are a couple things to note: First; the shutter speeds posted on the camera plate, which go from 1/10th to 1000th of a second are not to be taken literally. This is, of course true for any film cameras. In other cameras besides the Graflex, the numbers are rounded off and set into mathematical relationship to the aperture numbers , which ARE meant to be accurate. Even in the 1920’s photographers noted that the shutter speed changed on the Graflex depending on the context of the shooting: was it the first exposure after the camera had been sitting or was it immediately following a number of other exposures, i.e., how tightly was the curtain wound? Shutter speed testing was a crude affair compared to today. Second: 1/10th of a second was the number noted when the widest curtain aperture was used at its lowest tension setting. With the big mirror clunking closed one should expect vibrations to intrude into the slow shutter speed immediately following. For such reasons camera designers used mirror lock up. Today when we check shutter speeds there are several things that seem consistent. Lower shutter speeds tend to be closer to the mark, such that 1/30th of a second on a 35mm SLR on a well tuned shutter will probably be very close to 1/30th. On the same shutter, however, 1/1000th of a second might fall into the 1/800th area, and the photographer should call that good, because it is. When we installed the NOS curtain in my Graflex, shutter speed tests resolved that my 1/10th setting, the widest curtain at tension 1 produced consistently 1/30th of a second exposures. At the smallest aperture setting at tension 1, the shutter produced 1/1000th of a second! At tension 6 the same aperture setting produced 1/1400th. The speeds were consistent and THIS is what is important to the photographer. Weston knew that using his 1/10th setting he could get good handheld exposures in bright daylight and close down his lens aperture to adjust.

As an aside, the great photographer Paul Strand used over many decades a Home Portrait 5X7 Graflex which he had modified to produce 5X6 negatives. Ever the braggart, Strand claimed that his Graflex would do a 1/5th of a second slow speed, a feat that, he claimed, other Graflexes could not do.

In fact, the Graflex Shutter allows us to go past the Time exposure position to the “O” position in which the curtain is completely open. What keeps out light is the mirror which is down for viewing. If there is enough tension in the shutter spring, pressing the shutter release will lift the mirror as usual, and the curtain will more or less slowly roll down to a closed position. With my new curtain, at tension 2, this amounts to a 1/4 of a second exposure. On a tripod this is totally doable. and i have used it fairly often.

Next time I will turn to the Ansco Universal 5X7 Deluxe model view camera which I only recently acquired and restored and which has become the new home of the Protar VIIa convertible lens.

Old Glass, Old Cameras, Old Film and Old Paper Part 1

In finally picking up my blog after a long pandemic absence, I thought I’d talk about Adventure: the adventure of working with the old, the outdated, and the obsolete. The challenge is to make something good out of the employment of a collection of “past its prime stuff.” This is a meaningful challenge for me in that I can identify in some ways with these tools and materials.

The plan is this: over the course of several entries I will first deal with cameras and lenses and then turn to the use of the perishables, namely film and paper.

I will talk a little bit about the history of three cameras, the Graflex RB Series D, the Eastman Commercial 8x10Model B, and the Ansco Universal 5X7, which I use regularly. There are two histories to these cameras, the commercial history as a product, and the personal history, who owned and used them and how I came to them. So today I am going to focus on the Graflex RB Series D 4X5.

My RB Grafles Series D wearing its Wollensak 15 inch Tele Raptar

You probably know that the Graflex camera history includes the transitions of business partnerships, acquisitions and so on that led the Folmer Schwing operation to acquire the Century Camera company in Rochester, design a single lens reflex large format camera, the Graflex, and the venerable press camera, the Speed Graphic, get bought out By George Eastman and continue in producing cameras for Eastman Kodak until the courts rule against Eastman for monopolizing the camera market. Thus the camera company became Folmer Graflex in the late 1920’s and continued making cameras. The RB Series D was designed in the late 1930’s and RB stands for revolving back, which was great for the photographer who didn’t have to turn the camera sideways to change from horizontal to vertical shot. As historical context, Dorothea Lange used a 4×5 RB Series D to do a lot of her work in the late years of the Depression, including photographing her iconic Migrant Mother. According to a dating code I tracked down on the internet, my camera was manufactured in 1939 but was probably sold in 1940 some time.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother shot with RB Graflex Series D

I worked for a couple decades at a Jesuit University. The Jesuits, a Catholic religious order served in the Pacific Northwest as missionaries to various indigenous peoples, including in Alaska. While working at the University I became well acquainted with the Jesuit Oregon Province Archives which housed more than a hundred years of the photographic output of these Jesuit priests and brothers. Photography was, apparently an enormously important and popular way of cataloging the mission work of the Jesuit endeavors and there were many very talented and creative photographers in that history of the Catholic church in the Northwest.

Being a religious order, there were certain traditions for the passing on of one’s possessions when one passed on. A Jesuit photographer could not take his cameras with him, so they would usually go to other Jesuits who were interested in or working in photography. At my university, photography classes had a long history, and half of that history they were taught by Jesuits. My particular Graflex RB 4X5 went through such a passing on until a friend of mine who was a still active photographer decided he wanted to get a brand new digital Nikon! To finance it he had to raise cash and so he called me up, as I was the photography teacher of the film classes at the university. Thus I acquired a Speed Graphic kit with flashes, case, film holders, and thrown in an old dirty RB Graflex with a couple big clunky lenses not attached. The Graflex’ shutter curtain was torn in a couple of places but I was intrigued by this ugly camera box and so did some research and found a guy on the internet named Bert Saunders who sometimes made new curtains. I sent him the camera and he reattached the curtain but did not make one, instead sending me detailed instructions on dissasembly and repair. I think he was not feeling healthy enough to take on a big project. So my wife and I took the camera apart, stretched out the curtain along the dining room table, used lemon pledge and rubber cement and rejuvenated the curtain, reassembled, adjusted the tension and in fact we had a useable camera for several years before the curtain tore again and then again. Meanwhile I learned more about the Graflex, got a handle from the hardware store, began applying Neat’s Foot oil to the leather at infrequent intervals until the camera began to look nicer and nicer. The RB back started leaking light and ruining negatives and so I took that apart, replaced the felt and got it back together successfully. The viewing hood was in awful shape and after many homemade attempts to get it useable I found a place in Hong Kong to make a new one. I used acetone to take worn black paint off of some of the metal parts and polished up the brass underneath, and finally, Jerry Gordon of the Graflex Garage offered a NOS shutter curtain, new in name only. probably 70 years old, and he installed it. So at this point, this old Jesuit Graflex is in as close to new shape as it has been since 1940.

I did not find out who the original Jesuit owner was, but around the university there had been several photo enthusiasts, and one in particular, Fr, Leo Yeats S.J., figures into the story in another way. While I ran the photo classes and the darkroom, I was continuously trying to improve the equipment, finding better enlargers and enlarging lenses, for example. At one point an enlarger from the Chemistry Department was offered me, and I pulled it out of a closet where it had hid for a couple decades, and hauled it back to my office along with a box of photo junk. When I rummaged through the cardboard box I found an old lens and shutter, unboxed, with one lens cap, covered with dust and dirt. The shutter was a Compound, popular in the 1920’s with a lens labeled Protar VII. The Protar lens was designed by Paul Rudolph who also designed the Tessar, both in the late 19th century for Zeiss. These were anastigmat lenses, the cream of the crop in the day. The Protar VII was referred to as fully corrected and would function on its own as a taking lens, coming in a variety of focal lengths. There was also a Protar V, which was a wide angle lens. The Protar VIIa, on the other hand was a combination of two Protar VII lenses. Using two Protar lenses, one in front of and the other behind the shutter changed the focal length, making it shorter, but also increasing the maximum aperture, letting in more light. Generally, if the two elements were both of the same focal length, the maximum aperture would be 6.3, but if unequal elements were mounted, the aperture would be either f7 or f7.7. If, on the other hand, a Protar element was used by itself, behind the shutter, then the maximum aperture would be f12.5.

Protar VIIa in Compound Shutter: note fstop multiple scales

This sound horrible today, I suppose. The Protar VIIa was nonetheless a very popular lens and it was marketed by Zeiss and by its American licensee Bausch and Lomb as a tool of great advantage to the working photographer. One could have three focal lengths in one lens, and if another Protar VII element was added to the set then 4 or 5 focal length lenses, all fully corrected. That’s what was laying in the box of photo junk. I mounted it on my old Eastman 8X10 2D and tried it out. I found out that together the protars barely covered 8X10 but singly they were covering with movements. It turns out my set was intended for 5X7, covered 5X8 wide open combined while the 16 in component would handle ultra large format if necessary. The cable release attachment fell off on a photo shoot and I sent the lens and shutter to a repair shop in California. The head guy, Fred, called me up and with his German accent says. “Bill, I vas just showing your lens to my assistant. This is a good one! Let me go over the shutter. It will be worth it. It is a very nice lens.!” So I did and have used it a lot.

Back to Fr. Leo Yeats. There was a plaque on the wall of the darkroom I taught in for 19 years dedicated to Yeats, who taught in the same lab, a “photographer, scientist, explorer, aviator”… etc. When I left the job and cleaned out the filing cabinet I found a list of photo equipment and other things inventoried when Yeats died, including some things not found. On the list of not found was the Protar VIIa which had gotten into a box of photo junk. When they got rid of me they were eliminating photography altogether and told me to take any photo stuff as they would throw out the rest.

Kathy and I were at an outdoor art show one Summer with our booth of black and white prints and a lady stopped by, and seeing photos from the university remarked that her Uncle Leo had taught photography there. Leo Yeats. I told her the story of the lens and shutter, or part of it and she was happy that he was well remembered. It would be nice to find out that the Graflex was also his. It had come with two lenses, the Wollensak 15 inch tele-raptar and the Kodak Aero-Ektar f2.5, which I never tried to use but which has a sort of cult following. Both lenses were very useful for aerial photography and the Wollensak has a lens mount on front that holds two huge filters, a number 12 minus blue and a no. 25 deep red. These are both suggestive of altitude work. I sold the Aero Ektar and got more for it than I paid my Jesuit friend for the whole outfit!

Here are some sample images:

5X7 shot with Protar VIIa on Eastman 8X10 camera

4X5 shot with Graflex RB and 21cm Zeiss Tessar (uncoated)

5X7 shot with Zeiss Protar VIIa on Eastman 8X10- 2D

8X10 shot with Zeiss Protar VIIa on Eastman 2D. Shouldn’t cover really but it did.

Mushrooms, done with Protar VIIa on 5X7 film. When doing closeup work the coverage of lenses (image circle) increases enormously. This was also done with my old 8X10 Eastman 2D, which has been replaced by the all metal Eastman Commercial Model B.

Next time I’ll talk a little bit about the difference between using a Graflex and using a view camera, and some of the mysterious qualities I have found in my images made with the Graflex.

By the way, our name has changed from Cherryststudios. we are now found at https://www.kostelecstudios.com

Icons and Images, part 2

migrantmotherforblog

The little meditation in part 1 leaves a lot unsaid and although I see this more as a mulling over of the issues of why we take pictures in a certain way and not another, there is also the important reality that viewers respond to some images more strongly and appreciatively than they do to others. It is one question to ask why Dorothea Lange composed the above photo in this way. The second question is why we respond to it with such admiration.

That’s the issue of the second essential component of communication. The first, the speaker, is in this case the photographer, the image maker. The second component is the hearer, or in this case the viewer, the reader of the photograph. I want to set off to the back for now the image itself, and look at the two components, speaker and hearer.

People say of some images, “what a beautiful photograph!” and we understand the compliment, especially when we also admire the image. When the subject matter is, however, poverty, pain, grief, destruction, mayhem or war, are we as comfortable in saying “My, what a beautiful photograph”? Lange’s Migrant Mother is of the woman at a bad point in her life. The clothing of her and the children s worn, dirty looking and one gets that the children are not just being shy, but hiding from their own deprivation and shame before the camera.

colins cousin image

Colin’s image of the two cousins, suffering from the effect of tear gas is also an image of pain and suffering. Lange’s photograph has nice tonality, focused well, soft lighting, good composition. Mulvany’s photograph of the girls is likewise well done. So do we comfortably say, “what beautiful pictures”?

In part 1, I tried to discern the photographer’s approach to the subject and the choices made in the tripping of the shutter. I suggested that we all operate with mental templates that help us to work quickly, sometimes almost automatically as we respond to a subject and “capture” it. I noted the enduring image of mother and child, which exists as a human cultural icon which we might suspect played a role in the making of these two images. All of these guides work in the background for the photographer most of the time. They lay behind the other technical issues of focus and exposure and remembering to pull the darkslide. The picture is made. The photographer has spoken.

In this moment of communication, we the readers of the photographs perform our role, and both the appreciation of the “beauty” of the image, and any feelings of discomfort are what we bring to the moment. If the photograph is in a sense, the sentence spoken by the photographer, then the photographer’s part in the communication is limited to this word spoken, and rather than an ongoing conversation, we have a form more like a published poem, there for many readers to appreciate and respond to, and possibly for many generations of readers to come. The original speaker, on the other hand, is done with it.

Here we return to the photograph itself, which in place of the photographer becomes the initiator of many conversations. Now many will recognize Migrant Mother as a great photograph because it has become an ICON, significant historically as well as culturally. And many of those will appreciate it for that reason, its fame, its celebrity! Especially in a culture that has so much appreciation for fame and celebrity that is a natural response. For those in the know about the history of American photography, Lange herself is a celebrity. Migrant Mother was widely disseminated in its day, and not accidentally. For such public distribution was the reason for the hiring of the F.S.A. photographers. It had a social and a political purpose. Is it possible then, after such a history for a reader to appreciate Migrant Mother in a more neutral, non-storied way? Or do we find ourselves forced to recognize the famous picture, noting the socio-historical context and then also say, “It’s a beautiful image?”

I was sitting on a bench in the Art Institute of Chicago and on the wall above me was Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles. A girl came by to admire it and looked at me and said, “Wow, he must have been really crazy to do this. It’s so crazy!” I thought, as she walked away that Vincent didn’t make such a beautiful image because he was crazy, but in spite of his mental turmoils. She was reacting to what she knew of his story and less to what he created, the image on the wall. The painting is an image of calm and peace rendered in precisely thought out color relations and carefully constructed composition.

If we are able to admire Migrant Mother as image, seeing past its iconic state, and see it is a beautiful image, with all the dirt on the children and the shabbiness of their dress, with the obvious discomfort of the people photographed then our understanding of beauty is much more that what we might mean to say, “That is a pretty picture.” Like the photographer then our understanding of beauty is informed by more than the fall of light on the subjects. Precisely because it is of human subjects our sense of the beauty in the image is informed by the depth of our own human experience and our ability to embrace the fundamental truths of human experience, that there are times of joy and sorrow, trouble and peace and so on.

Returning to my initial point about the mother and child image as a cultural icon, for both photos above, I would suggest that the cultural values of caring for and compassion towards the weaker, smaller, younger, were sub-conscious elements in the taking of the photographs, and in the second part of the communication, for the readers of the photographs. Even without the caption that identified the two girls in Colin Mulvaney’s image, distinct from and apart from the social, historical context, we respond to the expression of those values. The photograph thus attains its power as a communication of values. That makes it not pretty, but beautiful.

Keep on photographing.

Bill Kostelec

June 7, 2020

Icons and Images: a meditation Part 1

Let me begin by acknowledging that the words icon and image are synonyms. Icon is a word current in Hellenic and Classical Greek, very old and means image. So the religious iconoclasts in various eras were in the habit of destroying statues and murals depicting scenes from the Bible. To the enemies of images, icons were “graven images” and against God’s law. In Eastern Christianity, on the other hand, icons are essential in the churches and their worship as windows into a spiritual reality. That’s the historical sense of icon.

In our times, icon and its adjectival form, iconic tend to mean something both more and less. We refer to “icons of Hollywood” or political icons, generally referring to individuals who stand out in celebrity and recognizability. My use here will fall somewhere between these two distinct uses of the term and thus I add image to the title.

Let me start with a truly iconic image, from Dorothea Lange, that we know as “Migrant Mother”.

migrantmotherforblog Dorothea made this image in 1936 while working for a Federal agency. In the well known story she saw this family and drove by, then thought better of it and returned doing a series of 4X5 photos with her RB Graflex Model D. This is an iconic photograph in that it is so recognizable by so many people over multiple generations. That is iconic in a modern sense of the word. Let me add another photo.

colins cousin image

This is a photo by Colin Mulvany of the Spokesman Review taken at the beginning of June, 2020. Colin uses Nikon Digital equipment. My initial viewing of this photo in the newspaper is the catalyst for the present meditation.

Long before Dorothea Lange, and reverting to the ancient version of Icon, there were in churches across Eurasia and later the Americas, images of the Madonna and Child, thousands upon thousands of such images. They were paintings, murals, frescoes and done by artists over many generations. Mother and child. The child was, to be sure, Jesus, who Martin Luther referred to as a baby, wrapped in rags and laying in a feeding trough. Often in the mother and child images the baby was freed from the dirty beginnings and swaddles in elegant cloth and gold. Still, the Christmas stories every year reminded the faithful (or not) of his humble beginnings. The Mother and Child image was and is a true Icon in the original sense and continues to be used as such.

When a photographer goes out to photograph he or she purposefully takes up the task of “seeing”. We all see only partly through the visual receptors of our eyes. We also see, and for me this is a significant, also through the lenses of our cultural and social experience. About 20 years ago my wife and I went on a photo exploration with a friend and ended up in a small Eastern Washington town once given over wholly to agriculture and now living in the shadows of its historical past, old farm implements and work trucks remaining like ghosts of the past. The three of us eventually ended up in an alley looking at remnants of faded and peeling paint on old windows and glass and iron bars robed in the patina of the generations gone. Why did the three of us. each one individually, all gravitate to this alley? To say that such places look good in black and white only partially explains it. We had seen the images of other photographers, in books and magazines where such things displayed themselves well. Part of the wisdom one gains in studying other photographers work is to recognize what does work well. Such image truths plant themselves as templates of sort in our minds and so a walk through the alley becomes a walk through a memory of sorts as the template guides our seeing. For a lot of photographers the body of Ansel Adams’ work serves as a restriction in the way they can visualize the landscape even as it serves to illuminate. The template is a double edged sword.

I started wondering about Dorothea Lange stopping at the pea pickers camp in 1936. She is drawn to the visually observable poverty of this family and she is very sympathetic, emotionally moved. But she is also a pro, grabs her big Graflex and approaches, makes her first shot from the distance as the woman and children eye her warily. Her final shot is the best. When she is framing it, looking down at the glass, and here my meditation takes over, a template helps her frame, the Mother and Child, whether she recognizes that or not, and with a final big Kachunk, the focal plane shutter snaps down.

Now obviously this is a mother with her children, so the connection is easy to make. Rather than take that easy route I want to think about the Mother and Child in a more neutral sense, in a more strictly visual, mechanical sense, so that image means less about a human arrangement and more about a visual arrangement, of lights and darks and composition. There is the rectangle, vertical in format, which acts as a frame around the figures, which makes the figures central, the point of focus. Portraits are so often in vertical format that we now use the word to describe it, the portrait mode. In the Mother and Child template the Mother, the caregiver is higher up than the one who is cared for. While often in portrait work the subjects eyes look back at the viewer, but not so much in Mother and Child.

Lange’s Mother looks away, past the photographer, viewer, camera. We know now that she was at least partly Native American, know something of her story, can find photos of her as an old grandmother with her grown children. But is any of that relevant to Lange’s photograph, which has now become an icon?

Colin Mulvany’s photograph was taken at a street demonstration after the death of George Floyd. That makes it newsworthy. The two figures in the image were tear-gassed by the police. They are not mother and child, but cousins, a younger and an older. Still, I wonder, whether or not the photographer in his approach to the subjects was not working with templates and influences and cultural and social history both personal and community shared? How could he not? He could have turned the Nikon to horizontal mode and captured demonstrators and policeman and location for context. Instead he creates a portrait, poignant, telling, universal. Does it matter that this was a demonstration instigated by the killing of Floyd, or promoted by Black Lives Matter? Does it matter that this is Spokane and not Paducah? It certainly does to his newspaper, which is why newspapers and magazines add captions. It does not matter to the photograph, the image itself, the icon that conveys more than the particulars even as it conveys less of them. The best photographers can instill in their fraction of a second image so much more than the moment, and can do so, I suspect, because they can intuitively incorporate the icons of our shared cultural and social history.

Bill Kostelec

June 6, 2020

How Do You Price Your Work?

We are in the final stages of preparing for our annual holiday photo open house, which begins tomorrow evening and runs through the weekend. Once again the issue of pricing our prints has come to the fore with its conflicting values and complications. Because we do not work as commercial photographers, but rather as fine art photographers, we do not get an income from our love for the camera and the darkroom, but instead hope to sell prints through gallery and open air exhibits during the year. We had what we considered a major show this Summer from twenty-five years of photographing in an around Spokane, had plenty of visitors to the museum gallery where it was presented for about two months, but didn’t make any money at it.

Viewer enthusiasm is great, but it takes real money to buy film and paper and chemistry, and especially as Kathy and I are both using 8X10 cameras, the costs are pretty hefty. Our open house, in which literally our house becomes a living gallery, has been a pretty good source of financial relief. This is our tenth year doing it so we have our hopes up. This brings me to the point: setting prices, a dirty business full of angst and stress. I am a firm believer in the democratic nature of photography as a medium. Even apart from digital, a photographic piece of art is reproducible. We work with film negatives. A printmaker using a copper plate to produce her images will print an edition, and no more. Having a negative means I can always go back and print the image again. There are two ways of seeing this: Because I have a negative, every print becomes less valuable due to the law of supply and demand; Because I have the negative, I can make prints available to a broader and bigger group of patrons, who may not, for example, be able to afford having an original etching made in an edition of 50. This second is what I mean by photography being democratic. I once was a painter and as a hopeful artist I took slides to galleries in Chicago to see if I could find some interest in my work. What I found was the gallery people and the patrons were from a different world than mine. I lived in a lower middle class neighborhood growing up, in a factory town that smelled of the smokestacks. The folks in the Chicago galleries were not the people I knew, and it seemed to me at the time, unlike them in so many ways.

Everybody responds to photos. I want as many people as can to be able to enjoy an image I made and possess it. But this means that I have to be very careful not to price my prints beyond their means. I also have to consider what it takes to produce my work in terms of time and knowledge and experience, and all the years I have put into perfecting my skills and my knowledge of the techniques required. Then there is, as I suggested earlier, the costs of supplies. Some people tell us we don’t charge enough. We have photographer friends who charge, what we think are outrageous prices and there is no way I could afford to own a piece from them.

Thus this frustrating and anxious process of setting our prices for the open house.

I thought I’d throw in this quick little blog to see if some of you have some thoughts on it.

Bill Kostelec, December 5, 2019

Art and/or Craft?

ART and/or CRAFT?

How do we distinguish fine art from craft? That question is loaded with presuppositions that are sure to create controversy and disagreement among practitioners of the various arts and crafts. In the history of photography and its place among the arts those presuppositions combined with the question of whether the camera was an automatic machine that mechanically produced images or whether it was a tool more akin to paint brushes and paints led to decades of photographers striving to make their photos look less like photos and more like drawings, etchings and paintings. For photographers who wanted to be artists, that was a source of anxiety well into the 20^thcentury.

We went to see the Group f/64 show at the “MAC”, the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture”, in Spokane and walked through the big room with prints from Edward and Brett Weston, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams. Group f/64 represents a collective of West Coast photographers who purposefully took up that battle to gain photography’s reputation as art. There were many images I had seen before in books and in films and there were quite a few, especially by Edward and by Willard Van Dyke that were new to me. I was especially interested in seeing Edward Weston’s contact prints as the bulk of his work was presented in that form and he remains one of the divinities of the American photographic tradition and his prints are very valuable in the art market.

I had read that people are sometimes surprised at how dark he printed and knowing this I was still surprised. There was a photo looking across a body of water to another section of shore that I would have tossed in the trash can and reprinted. I say that with a lot of discomfort. Though Weston was never financially successful he had many admirers and collectors in the 1930s when the bulk of the work in the show was done. Weston was a pioneer of sorts as he explored forms probing the universals that tie all that exists into a mysterious commonality. Sometimes a nude looks like a piece of fruit and sometimes a fruit looks like a nude. His artistic conversations took place with some of the Mexican expressionists and muralists and with American painters like his friend Florence Henri, with other photographers like Stieglitz and Charles Sheeler, with dancers and poets: his work represents the evolution of the searching, creative mind. In his Daybooks he talks about his artistic revelations with excitement, and he talks as well about his technical developments and growth.

He was very mindful of being an “artist”. Two of his most famous pieces, the Nautilus Shell and Pepper no. 30 were beautifully photographed, subtle, soft, delicate and mysterious. In 1930 photographs like these were opening the minds of other artists like some kind of magic mushrooms and were eagerly collected by painters and poets and others in his circle of friends. Today it is more difficult to see beyond or behind their celebrity, to understand why they stunned his admirers. That’s one reason that seeing his original prints really helps to understand his value and place in photographic history and why I wanted to see the originals.

One noteworthy thing about the Weston’s exhibited at the group f64 show, however, is that at the most, two prints bore Edward’s signature, a signature which affirms that he printed it, nor were there prints with his initials, a sign that it was an approved print made by of his sons. It could be that the Bank that acquired these prints gathered them from the many apparently circulating but unproven as Weston approved master prints. In other words, many of these images might have been rejected by Weston, throw aways!

In the Adams section there were again several images I was unfamiliar with and that is always a welcome thing. A large print of blowing snow and clouds on a ridge in Yosemite was masterful in its capture of the brilliance of the sun lighting the clouds and falling on the rock face and yet retaining the dark hard solidity of the rock itself. As a printer, I know how difficult this is to do and yet Ansel did it again and again. The image that we really found incredible was the biggest in the show, a very large Moonlight over Hernandez that seemed to find its perspective when we stood back about fifteen feet. Standing close, however revealed the perfection of the printing, the brilliance of the white crosses in the foreground grave yard, the subtle tones of the desert ground, the not quite full moon glowing in the dark sky above silvery clouds. I suspect that even if Adams had inadvertently exposed an unbalanced composition, the beauty of the printing would have still captivated us. Still, one would be disappointed in a weak composition. To put this again in a different form, the technical quality of Ansel’s printing is in itself a performance of extraordinary beauty. When one recognizes his mastery of the craft, and then couples that with a perfectly balanced composition, that makes the viewing of his original prints a necessity for the full appreciation of his work.

Looking at Edward and Ansel, two of my favorites like this leads to the topic of art and craft, a topic which has frequently come up between Kathy and me and with other friends in the arts. I once was a fine arts major in a small Illinois University, for two years before I’d had enough and dropped out. What I had enough of was instruction such as this from my first painting teacher;”Ya just gotta be creative man, just gotta do your thing…” What I was looking for was some technical knowledge passed along, like what brushes to use for what, how to lay ground most effectively. I recognized even then that there were certain technical keys to excellent work in any field. This middle-aged hippie painter had a different idea of art, one in which the key was unlocking the hidden genius and letting it pour out like, perhaps, Pollock’s paint drippings. In his scenario, the history of art was pushed along by the work of individual geniuses and their influence on contemporaries and artistic descendants. But it is not some mysterious spiritual quality called genius that makes an artist, at least not in and of itself.

I just finished reading a biography of sorts of Carleton Watkins, who was doing straight photography in a career that spanned the last 40 years of the 19^thcentury. Watkins is less well known by moderns simply because his life’s work was all located in San Francisco in 1906 when the earthquake came that broke little Ansel’s nose! The quake and the fire that followed eliminated all of his holdings of prints, his cameras, his 40 years of glass plate negatives and for a long time, his reputation. There are still many Watkins prints that were sold over the years including some with the royal family in England, but when it came time for the first historians to try to document a history of photography, Watkins was absent from the discussion.

Most of his career was spent with the wet plate process. His images of Yosemite, starting in 1861, informed the nation and the western world of the spectacular beauty of the place. The early history of American California is chronicled in his “mammoth plate” prints. It used to really irk me when the twin boasters Stieglitz and Strand would claim that no good photography was done between Hill and Adamson and themselves. It was the arrogance of the East Coast club, that ignored the artists of the West. Knowing now that so much of Watkins was lost to the earthquake I can more generously attribute the Stieglitz/Strand claims to their ignorance of a master craftsman and artist. (Still, the work of the Civil War photographers like O’Sullivan was available if they had simply cared to research it. These photographers, I suspect, would not have neatly fit into their personal narrative.)

Watkins claimed the mantle of artist. It was an important part of his self-understanding. And the late 19^thcentury community that bought up his prints, and the galleries that showed them and the prizes that were awarded his work all understand him as an artist without hesitation.

There were no gum bichromates, no scratching on his plates, no soft fuzzy lenses. Watkins amazed other wet plate photographers with the pristine excellence of his images. He had mastered the difficult craft of wet plate collodian and albumen printing but even more so, Watkins mastered the mysteries of composition, and the language of his medium, with its syntax and visual codes to produce images that can still stun an experienced photographer with their perfection.

Group f64 represented a struggle to claim the superiority of a photography that left behind the manipulations of the Pictorialists who ran the camera clubs, but perhaps they didn’t understand that it was really about re-claiming photography and the straight tradition that had already had a long and healthy run in the 19^thcentury. Still, that isn’t quite enough to explain and inform the other thing they craved, recognition as artists!

Artists like Watkins had to master the craft, the technical issues related to their work. For Watkins, that was a wet plate negative without flaws, clean and even and well exposed. That is mastery of the craft. But even before his exposure of the plate, Watkins, the artist, studied the scene, moved around, thought about how to include light and shade, contrasting values, energy lines of motion and a sense of depth in order to perfect the composition. He went to sometimes extreme measures, climbing a thousand feet with hundreds of pounds of equipment to find the right spot for his tripod. Only when he had perfected the composition and when the light was just right, would he expose. He knew that the camera lens was an eye that had its own perspective on the world before it and the photographic artist had to be able to see with that eye.

Where does the craft leave off and the art begin?

It’s a false question. When you read Weston’s Daybooks, you see him struggle and strive to perfect, through frustration to frustration to elation. This is the work of the artist. For the photographic artist this requires a different way of seeing than the painter or sketcher. The process is seeing through the camera and then producing a two dimensional image that is seen again, or re-seen, with the binocular vision of the human eyes. It is not capturing what the photographer saw with his or her own eyes looking at the scene, but what the photographer saw through the camera’s eye. Successful art in any media requires finely honed craft. The best photographic artists had mastered their craft but also learned the mind of the camera lens, if you will forgive this attempt to conceptualize. A perfectly exposed and focused negative of a boringly bad scene will never be art. An automatic camera cannot make art. An artist, however, could make art with an automatic camera.

Bill Kostelec, December 1, 2019

Carleton Watkins: Making the West American. Tyler Green, University of California Press, 2018.

December 2019

F-22 and Holding

We are back from a successful trip to the Olympic Peninsula and also from a one day outdoor art tour which was not so successful, but it’s over. In my two printing days this week I got four images finished and ready to mount for our annual open house in December and Kathy today finished two new images for the same event. I say this not because it is exciting news to anyone except us, but to give context to my absence from this blog and as a prequel to what is really exciting to us, an upcoming exhibit at the MAC, the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane.

As part of the prequel, we attended the exhibit just closing, a set of images from Edward S. Curtis on the North American Indian series he burned up his years and moneys on. The Spokane Public Library was one of the early purchasers of Curtis’ set and a couple Summers ago I served as a technical consultant to a library series that publicized the set and exposed weekly groups of visitors to some of the books and images. This last exhibit was, in itself, a powerful revelation of the role photography has played in out cultural history.

The next exhibit, opening in a couple days is even more pertinent to the work Kat and I do: “Museum Masters: Group f-64”. This show includes work by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, and Brett and Edward Weston. A long time ago in a land far away (Atlanta) I saw an exhibition by Ansel and Edward Weston at the High Museum. At the time I knew next to nothing about Weston and as they were in separate rooms, I spent most of my brief time looking at Adams work, while strolling through the Weston exhibit casually, walking past the cases that held his cameras and giving cursory glances to his 8X10 prints. Every time I recollect this I try to kick myself.

Group f-64 was probably formed at some California potluck with a lot of vegetarian food and plenty of wine. Credit for the name goes to Van Dyke and although the group exhibited together perhaps just once, one gets the notion that most of the members did not take it as seriously as Adams did. He wrote a manifesto on straight photography. It has an earnest quality and semi religious overtones. As with most religious tracts there is an air of self-righteousness as well.

To get a sense of what Group f-64 was about we must mention Pictorialism of course, and specifically one of its California evangelists, William Mortenson, who taught photo classes and worked in and about Hollywood. I have several Mortenson books, which go from informative and thought provoking to insufferably maudlin and, given some of the illustrations, more than a bit icky. Pictorialism is a broad term for the general thrust of late 19^thand early 20^thcentury photo club kinds of photography. The Salons, as they were called, involved a sort of culture of contest in which one submitted prints before the “judges” who might give helpful advice but also might be critical to the point of humiliating budding photographic “artists.” There were salons in both the U.S. and in Europe, and photographers submitted works across the seas. Many good things came from these clubs but the overriding theme of creating art in general caused photography to develop an affection for imitating painting and drawing, where, in that era, art was supposedly best expressed. There were early exceptions among the salonists, like Peter Henry Emerson who developed quite a following among what is sometimes described as the “naturalist” photographers. The Stieglitz circle, i.e., the photo-secessionists, made an early but incomplete break from that predilection to make a photo look not like a photo. Ansel Adams began photographing in the pictorialist mode, soft focus lens, dreamy landscape etc.

There were technical contributions to the revolution that was to come. The anastigmat lens was one component, sharp and decisive. There was the Kodak and Kodaking among the masses who could afford the camera. We have a 1903 annual printed by Eastman Kodak of winners of their contest, all photos made with an Eastman camera, and lo and behold, when amateurs got a camera they did not go for warm and fuzzy but did their best to focus and hold still. Arguments may have been going on in the darkrooms of the New York Camera Club but the Mother of the family in Iowa just wanted sharp and properly exposed pictures of her children! Then came, of course, glossy gaslight and enlarging papers. Artist photographers tended to print on gum bichromate or Platinum and with those media details sunk into the fibers of the matte surface, Glossy paper on the other hand showed what the daguerreotype revealed 60 years earlier, the sharp, etched detail that a lens could capture.

So when the history of photography is written, inevitably we hear about the theories and the personalities that argued them. When one reads Edward Weston’s Daybooks, on the other hand, what comes out is Edward trying out some commercial glossy contact print paper, and almost immediately swearing off the matte surface platinum paper he imported from England. He then goes into a joyous frenzy of work trying out some older negatives on the new paper and the rest is history.

The California photographers all seem to have been moved by the same spirit and their personal friendships established a mutual support society so that the formation of Group f-64 seemed like a natural event rather than simply a way of formalizing an aesthetic ideology. Nevertheless, there really was a significant ideological basis to what comes to be called, “straight photography.” Adams’ manifesto tries to clarify what straight photography must be, but he was not a great writer. He was a great photographer and a true believer. And he was a vociferous opponent of the Pictorialist photo clubs and their soft and fuzzy salons of pretty pictures and a vocal antagonist to the Pictorialists’ advocate William Mortenson, his fellow Californian. Group f-64 advocated for the presentation of the photographic tools and materials in their very best and most natural state, sharply focused images, cleanly presented printing with minimal manipulation of negative and paper, straight and not tortured into looking like and charcoal drawing or water color print.

They didn’t invent this way of photographing of course. Timothy O’Sullivan, Peter Henry Emerson, Eugene Atget and Mrs. Alfred Donaghue of Baltimore, Maryland all practiced to the best of their abilities a form of straight photography. The dominance of the Pictorialists and the photo clubs, and of Stieglitz and his coterie in New York made the 19^thcentury straight photographers disappear from the discussion, and that New York group made themselves the genius of its reinvention without really knowing the mediums’ own history.

Group f-64, in that context thus becomes very important and even as it disbands and the photographers disperse to their own careers, their impact will reverberate for the rest of the 20^thcentury, and in a sense they win the battle. Mortenson, once a famous man is hardly found in the histories of photography. Adams writes two photo series that establish the norm for a black and white photography that joins a workable scientific and technical base to a romantic approach to the American landscape.

What became of the photo salons? They exist today in the photo clubs, like we have here in the Pacific Northwest, full of photo enthusiasts with remarkably similar high end digital cameras talking about converting medium format lenses to full frame bodies and the wonderful results. Kat and I have judged, at the request of the clubs a few contests and it was always an interesting but frustrating experience. We looked at prints made by Walmart, for example, of a bug on a bright, bright green leaf that, we were informed, was made with 40 different exposures! We looked at a panoramic view of the inside of a famous local old theater that, we were told, was stitched together from 7 different captures. Kat has a 4×5 negative of the same angle but alas, she made it with one ¼ of a second exposure and the 90mm Angulon. We turned down another judging when given instructions to watch some online lessons on judging, only to find the teacher showing when to advise a photographer to remove an object or person from the image file to better the competition. We cringed. That is not straight photography.

The name Group f-64 is interesting. Although we do have a lens that goes down to f-128, these big numbers are not the norm for lenses after maybe 1935! Part of the change was the transition from the US system of numbering: 4,8,16,32,64,128, to the f system itself: 1,1.4,2,2.8,4,5.6 etc. It seems however, that a lot of very good photographers in those days worked with the assumption that a lens continued to increase in sharpness as the aperture decreased, so that Weston brags in his daybook of making an exposure at f-256 to get the very best detail. In truth, the image degrades due to refraction much earlier and even if apparent depth of field increases the resolution goes to pot pretty quickly. For contact printers like Edward Weston, that never really reveals itself. So the name that Willard Van Dyke suggested is based on that fallacy. But no harm done. We are careful when we are shooting, nevertheless, to try to not go smaller than f-22 with most of our large format lenses, and definitely not with our medium format lenses.

It will be immensely enjoyable, in the midst of this land of miraculously stitched together ink jet prints from a dozen exposures with saturated colors as overdone as super-sugary pumpkin lattes with cinnamon sprinkled whipped cream tops, to take a slow walk through an exhibit of cool, calm black and white prints from a few of our favorite photographers and once more remind ourselves of our aesthetic foundations and inspirations. We are, we laugh to ourselves and each other, lesser lights: group f-22.

Good shooting,

Bill Kostelec

McCain Rally, 2000

I was never a photojournalist, but I got a press pass to cover the John McCain Rally at Gonzaga University in 2000, by virtue, I guess, of being the only regular photographer on staff at the University. Gonzaga had a history of being oblivious to the needs of a full time photographer even though photography had played such an important part in the history and work of the Jesuit missions in the West. G.U. is, in fact, home to the Oregon Province Jesuit archives which holds an incredible collection of images from the 19^thand 20^thcentury missions. The public relations wing of the University nevertheless had a habit of hiring outside photographers in for special events, but I worked for Media Services in the Foley Library as a photographer and graphic artist. So I got a press pass.

I had 2 Leica M3s, one a gift from a Jesuit friend, Bill Yam, sick with emphysema who had worked as a photographer in the Phillipines in the 60s, and the second, a weak sister that had seen its better days and had a dim rangefinder that I had picked up locally for 500 dollars. But still, 2 Leica M3s! So I waited outside with the crowds for the bus with John McCain to arrive, scouted good locations and had one Leica with a 35mm Summicron and the second with a 90mm Elmarit.

There was a lady military vet in the crowd that caught my eye and so I slipped through the mix of students and older visitors in what I thought of as photojournalist aggression, polite but determined. When she caught my eye she smiled and I got the shot, what I still think of as my supreme “decisive moment” photograph. McCain Rally

There was a man with a big sign in the street out front of the COG, where McCain would speak and I positioned myself, he saw me turned and smiled and I got that. signman

When the bus pulled up I moved again close near the entryway I was told he would use and got a half dozen shots when he came through shaking hands with his wife Cindy close by. j9hnandcindy

pressingpalms

The best shot of McCain was, I think when he stood above, waving to the crowd and gave them a big thumbs up. McCain was an interesting candidate that year and a lot of young people seemed to be drawn to his ‘wild horse a little out of control’ reputation. thumbsup

I photographed part of the speech and was leaving the COG, walking down the steps. People were still coming in, including a guy with 2 cameras with straps identifying the newspaper from Cincinnati that he photographed for. He was very professional looking and he stopped on the stairs smiling at me and said “A real photographer eh?” I looked closer and saw he carried 2 Leica black bodies. “Yep.” I said and we went our ways. Though it was not that long ago press photographers were still shooting film and Nikons and Canons were ubiquitous. The Leicas were already becoming rarer on the scene.

I shoot with a lot of older cameras. Today I have a Kodak Pony 828 around my neck with some film I spooled from a bulk roll of 35mm TriX and even an amateur camera like that can produce a good image. Nevertheless, for me, using the M3 always feels special and I know in advance that the negatives will have a certain quality from the Leitz lenses.

McCain himself seems now like a leftover from the days when national politicians sometimes rose to the status of statesman and when mutual respect across party lines made it possible for good things to happen in the Halls of Congress. His empty seat will be hard to fill in our current social scene.

The smoky air has cleared today after a morning rain, first time in a month. So on to

Good shooting

Bill Kostelec

For the Love of Old Equipment

Recently a friend offered us some old cameras because she knew that we appreciated such things. We have had several contacts in the last months from people we didn’t know who heard we might be interested in film equipment they wanted to have a home for. It’s a sign of the times and the cameras almost always come with family stories related to them, so it has been a worthwhile experience meeting people and talking with them.

This last was pretty out of the ordinary as our friends Dad had been a physicist working in the Eastman Research laboratories in Rochester. She said many of their family photos were made on experimental films that staff would shoot in the R&D process and her Dad also brought home new cameras to use. Her cameras came in a big cardboard box, as most do, but in this case the box held treasures for which it was unworthy to carry. First off, and the oldest, was a Premo D, a 4X5 folding camera with a red bellows. Premo was from the Rochester Camera Company that was bought up by George Eastman early in the 20^thcentury, a common practice of his. It is a cherry wood box camera that opens front and back, has three shutter speeds plus B, and a meniscus lens enclosed in brass. 20180730_103503 With the camera came one plate holder, as the camera was designed for dry plates, and one plate holder altered to hold sheet film, the alteration done by sliding in glass plates so that sheets of film would tuck in above them. The camera was from about 1896, before the company was acquired by Eastman. It came in its own case with an instruction manual for “manipulating the Premo D” and an 1896 publication on the basics of photography. The lens was full of fungus but I carefully got access to it and cleaned it. The ground glass image looked sharp so I loaded a couple of my holders, found that the Premo accepted them perfectly and shot an image , a time exposure at the smallest aperture. 20180730_103529 The camera was intended to be a hand camera, meaning to be used without a tripod. I used a tripod. Using this Premo increased my respect for early photographers even more. I have a 4X5 Graflex D SLR from the 1940’s and its weight and bulk make hand held work doable, especially with its focal plane shutter. The Premo is very light and I doubt I would ever try to handhold it for a shot. The negative, shot on a light table with a cell phone, is surprisingly good. This is a camera worth using. 20180730_131118

The second camera of note is a Kodak Recomar 33, a 9 by 12cm. folder from 1935. 20180801_105654 It was manufactured by Nagel Kamera Werke in Germany. Nagel designed the Recomar in 1928 and Eastman bought the company in the 1930s, and it was Nagel who designed and built the Kodak Retina, the nice little 35mm folder. This model of the Recomar is marked Kodak and has a Kodak Anastigmant 4.5 135mm lens in a Compur shutter. 20180801_105750

20180801_110014_001

20180801_105939 It came with a single sheet film holder and I already had a plate holder and a pack film holder that fit the sliding mount of the Recomar. The ground glass screen slides up and off the camera and the film holder slides into its place. Not very convenient for a hand camera, but the body has a nice focusing scale and a triple extension bellows. The camera is in excellent shape but where would I get 9X12cm. film? In our camera case I have had a couple packs of Agfa pack film that came with a collection, both films expiring in the 1940s. Pack film holders are dime a dozen and mostly useless these days. When I realized these old Agfa packs were 9X12cm. I thought I’d give it a shot. I had never used pack film. It was before my time but it seemed easy enough. I loaded up the Super Pan and tried it. It was difficult to process, being thin and curly, let alone being 70 years old. Originally rated at 200, I tried ASA 50 and then exposed very generously. The one negative that sort of turned out from the half pack I shot was fogged of course, but also showed some mottling and flaking. But still, I had an image. 20180801_140631_001

About 20 years ago a woman I knew asked me to make copies of some old small prints she had. They were very interesting. Her Dad, who had just died, was captured by the Japanese on Bataan in 1942 and survived the Bataan Death March. The photos were taken inside a POW camp! The story is that one GI smuggled in a small 35mm camera but had no film. Another GI had smuggled in a roll of film, probably 620 or 120, and together they managed to secretly get into a dark place, slice the roll film down to size and get it to work in the 35mm camera and then secretly, and very dangerously take pictures in the camp. The photos were not the best but they were there! Whenever I think of that effort and ingenuity it makes me feel rather humble and lucky that I can take photos so easily. So every time I work with one of these old cameras and get a picture I feel excited and gratified.

A third camera I tried out was a little Kodak Bantam, again from the 1930s, with a Kodak Anastigmat Special lens. The pop up viewfinder was broken and had black tape on it, but I had another Bantam with a bad lens and I switched out the viewfinders. The complication here is that the Bantams were made for 828 film, a paper backed roll film made on 35mm stock without the sprocket holes, which of course no one makes anymore. Because I had a couple 828 spools I was able to spool some 35mm TMAX in the darkroom onto the paper backing from a Kodacolor roll and get my 8 shots. These were surprisingly good considering the guess focusing. This turns out to be a fun camera, slipping into my pocket, easily opened and ready to go. A drawback is the 7 or 8 shots per roll and of course the image area bleeds deeply into the sprocket holes of 35mm. It’s a nice special effect but I wouldn’t want it on every photo and the advantage of the 828 was its larger image area.

We are just back from a one week trip to the Olympic Peninsula where we used 2 1953 Linhof Technikas IIIs and a 1939 Eastman Commercial 8X10 equipped with a 5X7 film back. 20180812_153230

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Our newest lenses were from the early 1960s. After 3 days in the darkroom we have all the sheet film processed with happy results. So using older equipment is not a hobby with us but our “sitz im leben”, and our normal working procedure.

Try it, and good shooting.

Bill Kostelec

Using C-41 Black and White Film

adventures in processing and printing black and white chromogenic film

Today I was printing some 35mm black and white negatives I processed this morning in the kitchen sink. Printing negatives in the afternoon that were processed in the morning is not that unusual; the kitchen sink part is.

I have a good supply of Kodak c-41 process black and white film, mostly 120 but a half dozen rolls as well of 35mm. A couple years back a good friend gifted me with his refrigerated stash as he had gone digital in his portrait business. I was my usual skeptical self and didn’t shoot any right away, and then when I did, sent it off to The Darkroom in San Clemente, CA. It looked OK, pretty good, not bad. Still, sending it off was a pain, and expensive for someone used to just going into his own darkroom and processing. I found a video online from the Film Photography Project about using their kit to process C-41 at home and ordered a kit. I was intimidated by the temperature requirements but, Heck, I have six or seven thermometers and the kitchen has hot running water so I tried it.

It works.

film

A chromogenic film, the image structure is made up of dye clouds rather than silver clumps, and the first thing I found out from the 120 rolls was that it scans very well. The second thing I found out was that it requires long exposures when printing on variable contrast paper. I have been using this film in 2 very different ways: the first is an ongoing portrait project, very informal, in which I photograph individuals or couples upstairs in our gallery during a once a month food and music party we host. So often enough the subject lugs up a guitar or fiddle. I have 2 cameras that I use for this, my Mamiya C220 and the baby Linhof, 2X3 with its 6X6 back. I use one white lightning flash with a shoot through 42 inch umbrella aimed at the subject and within two and a half feet of the same. This light is very soft and the 400 ISO film gives me plenty of flexibility with f-stop and shutter speed if I need a little more depth of field.

The Linhof is blessed with a 105 Xenotar. It is a happy camera.

The second way I have been using this film is in the 35mm camera as I roam around public events. I haven’t been using it exclusively but have been alternating it with traditional silver films like Delta 100 and TMY. In the last month or so there have been several of these events in town and I finally got around to processing the C-41 films this week. To be more accurate, I finally accumulated enough rolls to mix my batch of chemistry, a Unicolor kit that has developer, blix, which is a combined bleach and rapid fix, and stabilizer. A friend who was in the business of custom color printing until the digital revolution told me that in the past there had been a Kodak process that divided up the bleach and fix and had some other differences that made it a superior process, but now we have what we have. So I use it.

westand together — At A march against school shootings

Some technical notes: I follow my thermometer to develop at 102 degrees, with the Blix about the same. I immerse the bottles in a hard rubber 8X10 developing tank in the kitchen sink, get the water bath at about 110 degrees and monitor the chemistry till it is just right. My negatives are punchier than my commercially processed rolls and when wet make me wonder if I have burned out the highlights. But no, they print easily with no filtration under a cold light head on Seagull VC or Ilford Cooltone multigrade paper. The chemistry is reputed to be short lived so I will want to process some more film in the next week and after that call it good. The instructions say 3.5 minutes at 102 degrees. For the second batch I do 4 minutes. The Blix calls for 6.5 minutes and I stick with that but I have doubled the wash time to six minutes at about 90 degrees. The reason I did this is that I had a persistent magenta runoff after the washing and the stabilizer, dripping down into a white tray, and I was getting ugly white splotches from the runoff. The stabilizer is supposed to make the film more permanent I guess but I don’t understand the process it does for that. The video showed these guys wiping down the wet roll with a folded paper towel and my friend the old film processor and printer about had a fit when I did that in front of him. SO I stopped doing it and started getting these ugly splotches. Hence, two changes I made; I doubled the washing time and then I made a photo flo final bath in distilled water. Now they come out nice and clean.

When our garden is in full bloom I sometimes load up a roll of color print film and it is nice to be able to process that as well. For printing however, we have to rely on our scanner and an ink jet printer, and it is hard for me emotionally to wax enthusiastically about the chugging of the machine.

pjammersinrain — The PJammers at a protest against school shootings

A couple of days ago we had a nephew here with his old Miata, newly painted a light blue. His Aunt visiting from back east was ironically wearing a matching light blue jacket. The black and white C-41 film rendered both the car and the jacket white! I’ll try out the next roll with a K-2 filter and see what happens.

I also picked up some Kodak Portra 400 B&W 120 rolls and I look forward to trying that out.

Good shooting.

Bill Kostelec

July 3, 2018

https://thedarkroom.com/product/film-developing/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8Y-OrZ6J3AIVEJl-Ch1New71EAAYASAAEgIhpPD_BwE

https://filmphotographyproject.com

My Nobel Peace Prize Winners

TutuCarter

In the 1980’s I spent about 8 years in Atlanta at Emory University doing doctoral work in the Division of Religion. It’s where I got deeply involved in photography. I was using 35mm exclusively for awhile but then an old photographer suggested I get a Speed Graphic, a “real Camera”, and I found a 4X5 Crown at KEH, which still had a walk-in store. As my photo work progressed I got some kind of reputation among some of the faculty, and when the Religion Department sponsored a small conference with former President Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu I was asked to make some photographs. The former President was in the library I worked in fairly often as his presidential library was located in the Special Collections area. I was teaching a religion class in the college at the time and had heard a couple students during a break talking about the “Bishop’s daughter”, another student in the class. I asked “Which bishop?” and they said, “You know, Tutu!” Well, I hadn’t known but when the department chair asked me to go fetch the Bishop across campus and bring him to the conference I did, and mentioned to him that I had taught his daughter in the now finished class. He got a bit excited and grabbed my hand. “She loved that class!” he said, which was kind of cool for me, as you can imagine.

So we went upstairs to the conference and Jimmy Carter was there with men in dark suits and wires in their ears and the two Nobel Prize winners embraced with big smiles and chatted like old school roommates. That’s how this photo came to be. I was using a Minolta 101 if I recall. Tutu had been a warm and funny companion as we walked across campus. The President though, at one point, gave me a cross look as he sat at the conference table. Being a strict amateur I think I was taking too many photos and so I backed off and sat with the faculty and he relaxed his next gaze in my direction.

The negatives turned out well and I made a contact print and some 8X10s for the Religion department and kept a contact print for myself. After getting the doctorate I moved to the Pacific Northwest where the air is dry and it is cool at night in the Summertime. And the first Winter my cabin in the woods burned down and destroyed my entire stash of 35mm negatives plus all my equipment and everything else the family owned except what we had put into a storage unit. Later on I found I still had the contact print.

Nearly thirty years later, while working at Gonzaga University, I learned that Desmond Tutu was coming to do the commencement address and I told the story of my photo to some colleagues who spread it around and I was invited to photograph him again, in a meeting with students. Kathy had previously dug out the contact sheet and scanned it, and got a nice copy of the photo from the scan, which we framed. Later on I found one 8X10 print from the original negative. Kathy went with me to the event as a second photographer and I was invited to present the Bishop with the framed photo. He had never seen it. He was excited again, and again warm and funny. He noted that he looked a bit different now and that I didn’t look the same either. He told me that he had driven Jimmy Carter to an emergency room in South Africa when the President broke his leg on a house project. They were still fast friends. The Bishop treasured the photograph, and took it home in his carry on luggage because he didn’t want anything to happen to it. And that’s my story of photographing 2 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates.

Bill Kostelec

January 24, 2018

Processing Film and the Good Life

The Good Life of Processing Film

The other evening, Kathy processed her first 8X10 negs in my BTZS tubes. She had processed 8 X 10 in a tray before but I was the only one using the tubes. It was also her first time shooting the 8X10 Eastman Commercial View Camera that I spent a lot of hours getting into shooting condition last year.

She was amazed at her negatives. We did the first two at 6 minutes in Xtol at 72 degrees, thinking that we could alter the time for the duplicate negs if necessary. It wasn’t. The next afternoon she made contact prints on a Foma contact printing paper and now apparently, I am going to have to find a hiding place to stash at least some of our 8X10 film!

My favorite format for sheet film negatives is 5X7. As I have always enjoyed framing and shooting 35mm film, the aspect ratio of 5X7 seems ideal to me. It is a lot like 35mm in that way. Having a working Beseler 5X7 enlarger with a cold light head also helps to add value to that format. Still, when we want to produce a large body of work, as in last Fall’s trip to the Eastern Sierra, we both shoot a lot of 4X5 and medium format. Film processing, as well as cost, contributes to that choice. We both process 4X5 in restaurant trays, used for, I suppose keeping food hot, a brilliant innovation that Alan Ross showed us a year or so ago. We used to use hangars in Kodak rubber tanks. It is an easy and nearly foolproof method and being very hands on, also satisfying. 8X10 and 5X7 film has been more problematic and the acquisition of the BTZS tubes was, and Kathy will now allow me to say this, a rather good move on my part.

I enjoy processing film more than I enjoy printing. The moment a negative first comes into the light is like (well not quite) when the newborn baby first is wheeled into the room. There it is, full of potential, full of promise and hope! (I’m not sure if I’m talking about the baby or the negative. Sometimes I get carried away!)

In any case, whenever I use the digital camera to make an image, the act seems so prematurely done, and so incomplete in a way that I find very unsatisfying. Sitting at a computer just doesn’t feel like a photographic activity to me, partly because of too many years in a sedentary sitting at the computer job. Processing film, on the other hand, makes me smile and hanging negatives to dry and going into the house, where Kathy inevitably asks, “How do they look?” is what I call, “the good life.”

Bill Kostelec