Jim O’Connell Photographs, The Blog.

I just wrote a reply over on Lightstalkers to a young photographer of eighteen, asking about what it takes to be a working photographer, The comment before mine brought up the subject of beards, so I started with that:

The beard is a must if you decide to pursue landscape photography. For that it should be big, bushy and unkempt.

Grizzled and stubbly is good for many other types of photographers, but be prepared to fill it out on a few weeks’ notice if you do the type of photography which will take you to places where being clean-shaven carries as much credibility as wearing a frilly pink dress.

Just kidding, of course—JR’s comment above made me smile.

As a photographer, be sure you have an absolute handle on the technical aspects of photography. You’ll need to be proficient, to the point where you can produce a well-exposed, well-composed and well-focused shot whenever you are called upon to produce one. Learn to prepare yourself and your gear. For me, it’s stepping off the train, I have a personal ritual of checking that the ISO on my camera is suitable. (checking that it’s not still on ISO 800 from the night before when I’ll be shooting in the daylight.) After that, I check that autofocus is set and that exposure compensation isn’t dialed two stops in the wrong direction and that my battery isn’t about to die. (That’s also when I pull a piece of gaffer tape from the sharpie pen I’ve wound it around and tape my 5D’s power switch on, because it’s in an easy position to get bumped to off, most likely at the worst possible time.)

Kind of a pre-flight check, but the thing is, I do this not even when I’m “shooting,” but all the time. I always have some sort of camera with me, so I give it a once over, generally as I leave the house and look at the light or step off the train. Doorways, I guess, are my trigger.

When I was teaching myself light, I used to carry an incident meter and meter everything, in much the same way. The thing is, you’ve got to have your camera ready at all times. You don’t want to lose a shot that you’re expected to take, because of something stupid like a full roll of film or a memory card you forgot to format.

Next, master the “straight shot” – a picture devoid of artistic tricks and arty overtones. Unless you have a quite unusual editor or a lot of personal clout, it’s better to not shoot your work pictures on a fisheye Holga using cross-processed expired film.

After that, when you’re comfortable taking a competent shot on ten seconds notice, start to think about how you can take a better shot. How can you add something that you see and no one else sees, something profound and inspired. Having studied music, this is something I think of as “virtuosity.”

While the world has hundreds of perfectly competent musical performers, to get to First Chair, you need virtuosity, a term that has it’s roots in the concept of being touched by God. This is the thing that tells you that the violin piece you’re hearing for the first time must be done by Jascha Heifetz, or that the photo you’re seeing for the first time could only have been done by Diane Arbus.

When you have that, it doesn’t matter what you shoot, because everything you choose to shoot will matter. This comes through being relentlessly demanding of yourself and editing your stuff with a cold, unbiased eye.

Of course, orchestras are filled with musicians who will never be first chair, musicians who are fine technicians and probably have comfortable, enjoyable lives, doing what they love to do and there are just as many photographers doing the same. Nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn’t recommend striving for that when you’re eighteen. Dream big.

Most of the world’s significant images were made by people with cameras not as advanced as whatever you probably carry and captured in less than a sixtieth of a second, often by people your age.

Go read about John Filo and his Kent State photo:

http://edition.cnn.com/COMMUNITY/transcripts/2000/5/4/filo/

Here’s a guy about your age, who reflexively shot something he found mildly interesting and not only won a Pulitzer, but helped bring the end of the Viet Nam war, without going more than a couple of hours from his home in a small Pennsylvania town.

(Plus, he did it with a Nikkormat, half a roll of Tri-X and probably a 50mm Nikkor lens, a setup that would probably cost you $50 today in decent shape used. I don’t like gear discussions, but I find something joyful about that.)

OK – I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent and ranted too much, but good luck to you. Wherever you wind up, you’ll want a solid body of work to open doors and show people that you can do what they need you to do. After that, keep looking for those three or five photos that will define your career and make you live forever.

by Jim O’Connell | 15 Mar 2009 11:03 | Tokyo, Japan

I got an email today from someone asking about portrait lenses.

Looking at her Flickr stream, she seemed to be using a Nikon D-80, which is a DSLR with a cropped sensor, so my answer leans a bit towards users of those cameras. For a long time, I used a Nikon D-100, which has a similar sensor.

Basically, the most important factor in a good portrait is not the lens or the camera that you use, but the level of connection and intimacy you can create between your subject and the viewer.

She asked for a recommendation for a prime lens, but in the end, it wasn’t my first suggestion. Shooting with primes is great, but it can be a lot of work. If you’re shooting a few hundred frames in a session, this can lead to a lot of pictures that look quite a lot alike. Getting something good in a short amount of time often requires a lot of different compositions.

In general, I despise most discussions about gear. No matter how much you try to speak in very general terms, someone will undoubtedly chime in to argue that the new Smegron 3-1500mm f:13.5 zoom that they heard will be announced at Photokina two years from now is the obvious best choice for portraits. These things are a matter of taste, which is really impossible to quantify. For example, one of my favorite portraits ever is one of the painter Francis Bacon, shot by John Deakin. I like it because it’s raw and unflattering, shot in close with a wide lens. In effect, he did it wrong and it works astoundingly well because of it.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote to her, perhaps some of you may find it useful as well:

Hi -

It depends a bit on the camera you use. If you are using a camera with a cropped sensor, like most of the digital SLRs on the market, you may find some of the more traditional portrait lenses to be a bit tight in composition. Still, if you like a close-cropped face in the portrait, something like an 85mm lens is still a good choice with a lot of flexibility. The 85 is a classic portrait lens for 35mm film photography. Being a slightly telephoto lens, it adds a bit of compression to the features of the subject, which is very often flattering. Wider lenses, especially those below 35mm, can be a bit unflattering, at the extreme making the subject appear moon-faced.

The kind of telephoto compression to which I refer is the effect you may have seen with a long telephoto lens, say a view down a crowded street from far away where the people appear almost stacked upon each other. When you read about lens equivalents with cropped sensors, they may say something to the effect of “a 50mm lens becomes an 80mm lens” but this is deceptive. A lens with a 50mm focal length will not have the telephoto compression of an 80mm lens, so you can’t expect the little bit of flattering that you’d get with an 80 or 85 millimeter lens.

That said, a 50mm lens is capable of taking excellent portraits, on any DSLR, regardless of sensor. You just need to get up and move your feet to do your composing. The same with an 85mm lens. It’s a lot of work to shoot a dynamic portrait session with a prime lens, but the benefits can be worth the effort. With any prime, you’re going to get good optics and a wider maximum aperture than on most zoom lenses. The wider the aperture, the more control you have over “bokeh” or out-of-focus blur, which can be good for isolating your subject from a distracting background. Wider apertures also let more light into the camera, allowing you to not only shoot in lower light, they help autofocus do it’s thing better and faster.

So for a good prime, I’d recommend getting the fastest 50mm prime you can justify getting. A 50mm f:1.8 can be had for between $80 and $120. That’s a simply fantastic price for a lens that fast. A bit faster f:1.4 will run you about $300. Canon makes a f:1.2, but it costs about $1,500. I have one of these and while it’s a real beauty, it’s a beast as well. It weighs a heck of a lot more than the others, which is a real consideration when shooting all day. I shot a model in my little studio the other day using that lens and others and after a couple of hours, my shoulders were simply aching. Still, the simply creamy blur it makes in out of focus areas makes it worth the pain—sometimes.

But you know what? If I had one lens to use for a portrait session where there’s be a lot of different poses and styles, where I need a lot of flexibility in composition, I honestly wouldn’t be shooting with a prime. For one thing, I often work in small spaces—my studio in Tokyo is about the size of a 1-car garage. Other times, shooting dancers, I’ll be on stage with them, with not a lot of space to move around.

In these cases, I use a zoom. On Canon, I like the 24-70 f:2.8 L zoom and on Nikon, I like the 28-70 f:2.8.

Both lenses are real workhorses. F:2.8 is about the fastest you can get in a zoom and they are pretty expensive and heavy, but I find them to be a good trade-off between price, weight and performance.

First, I’d take a good look at the lenses you own now. Even the “kit lenses” that come as an option for most DSLRs are often great, flexible lenses for portraits. After all, the makers know that a good percentage of new users will be soon taking their cameras to weddings or pointing them at newborn babies, so I suspect they optimize for those situations. In that case, you might best improve your portraits by getting a good flash with a diffuser or working on your composition. Get on your feet and engage your subject—your portraits will improve.

Shooting in your camera’s RAW mode makes a big difference as well. With that, you can go back and make subtle corrections to lighting and white balance, which is crucial for getting good skin tones.

Still, if you want a good prime, I’d try out a good 50mm. They’re just too much of a good value to pass up.

Good luck!

Jim

Today, I spent the afternoon shooting in Ginza. The street that runs along the side of Mitsukoshi, where the Apple store sits, is a broad, East-West avenue that they close to traffic on weekends.

Ginza Arrows is what I call one set I made, using the traffic markings on the street:

If you’re going to be around Portland, Maine, in November or December, be sure to drop in to Ed Pollack’s gallery “A FINE THING” to see some of my photos, along with some of his other friends in his “Friends of ED” show.

Ed’s putting together a show of the work of his friends and I was quite touched that he asked me. I’ve known Ed for more than fifteen years and when I lived in Boston, my favorite way to spend a Saturday afternoon was at Ed’s with a bottle of wine, going through the books and prints that he’d discovered that week. He’s not only a great source of knowledge on the art and artists he likes, he’s also got incredibly good taste.

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it to the show, so if you do stop by, let me know you did.

Not far from Minowa station on the Hibiya line is a nondescript temple called 浄閑寺—Jokanji. From the street, it looks like many other Tokyo temples, but behind the new main building is an old cemetery that has one particular point of interest, a crypt and monument to twenty-five thousand prostitutes interred there. Being so close to Halloween, I was looking for a spooky story when my friend Joe mentioned the place.

I didn’t find a ghost story.

What I found instead was a very sad, shameful story about the women and girls used up by the sex industry of Japan. I’ve tried to make this story about the temple itself, but understanding the temple requires a bit of background on the times and the places involved, mainly that of Yoshiwara. This isn’t trying to be a history of Yoshiwara, as plenty of those exist. This piece is about my research into Jokanji, the Throw-Away Temple. I will add to this and make corrections as I find them. As always, I welcome any comment or criticism. There are a lot of parts I may include in the future, such as the nearby memorial associated with Nagai Kafu, a writer whose stories dealt with the lives of these women

During the Tokugawa era, in present-day Senzoku 4-chome, there was a licensed prostitution area called Yoshiwara. The area had been moved from near Nihonbashi in the late 1650’s after a devastating fire leveled much of the city and the new area was known for a time as Shin-Yoshiwara. (新吉原, New Yoshiwara, though eventually the “New” was dropped and people simply referred to the area as Yoshiwara.) For 300 years, the area was home to thousands of women and girls, many of whom were sold by their families as young girls.

Yoshiwara was a walled-in, tightly-controlled area. Patrons entered and exited the area down a curving street headed by a gate not unlike the tori that stands at the entrance to the temple. Transactions were negotiated outside the walls, at nearby teahouses and even samurai were required to leave surrender their swords before they could enter. The women could not, of course, come and go as they pleased. Most were enslaved by debt they could never completely repay. During their service they could leave only for the death of a parent and once a year to view the cherry blossoms in Ueno. For most of the common prostitutes, the only real way out was through their own death.

On on November 11, 1855 the Ansei Edo Earthquake (安政江戸地震, Ansei Edo Jishin) a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck Edo (The old name for Tokyo) with intermittent aftershocks over the next two weeks. The last major quake to hit Edo had been in 1703, so few if any of the residents of the area had ever experienced a major quake and hadn’t given any thought to earthquake safety.

Buildings collapsed and fires spread rapidly through the city. Unfortunately for the women enslaved in Yoshiwara as common prostitutes, if they had survived the building collapses, they were far more likely to die in the resultant fires. Yoshiwara, after all, was a walled village with only two exits, both narrow, to control the passage of people in and out. Fear of looting slowed the evacuation as well.

Woodcuts I examined at the Taito-ku Library in Kappabashi showed the fates of some of the different classes of people in Yoshiwara—one showed an elegantly-dressed Oiran or high-level courtesan being rushed from the area by two samurai. One samurai was on horseback and both had their swords, indicating that they had been dispatched to rescue this woman, as swords were not allowed in the quarter, even for samurai who were habitués of the brothels. Another print showed lower-class prostitutes clad in the common plain blue kimono that was mandated for working girls. (This rule was ignored by those whose status was higher.) The prints showed the lower classes, both men and women, panicking in the streets, crushed by heavy roof tiles and buildings, crawling through the streets in despair. One showed the interior of a brothel as it collapsed, women and customers tossed about mid-coitus, while a prominent sign on the wall says “火の用心” or “Be careful of fire.” Another showed looters, some themselves trapped under rubble, greedily swallowing gold and silver coins and later “recovering” them as they passed through their systems.

At the time it was a commonly-held belief that earthquakes were caused by an imbalance of the good and evil forces of Yin and Yang, so a major quake, to some, was a sign that social change was needed. (Often referred to as “correlative cosmology.”) The quake was centered northeast of the city and Yoshiwara, too, was northeast of the palace. In Buddhist tradition, the Northeast is known as “Kimon” or the direction that bad luck follows. In 1855, the Northeast of the city was the hardest hit by fires, with the West of the city largely untouched. Yoshiwara in particular was among the worst hit.

Yoshiwara went into a decline and the brothel owners’ profits fell. To counter this decline, the owners brought in more women and lowered prices. Conditions worsened and disease became the norm.

While there had been about fifteen-hundred women working there in 1700, by the turn of the 20th century, there were some nine thousand women working in the area as prostitutes, all in the same small quarter. Most of them suffered from syphilis or tuberculosis or both. Typhoid broke out occasionally. Rarely did a common prostitute live to see her thirtieth birthday. While some historians may glamorize the era in its heyday, life for most of the women working in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries was a miserable existence at best. There was a very high turnover.

At the time of the Ansei quake in 1855, there was a severe shortage of coffins, so much so that people resorted to using sugar casks and barrels as makeshift caskets for even the more wealthy of the dead, so for someone of such low social status as a common prostitute, there would be no such ceremony. Bodies were simply piled until they could be disposed of.

This certainly must have set a precedent for later. When a woman of Yoshiwara died, she died with little pity or notice. Brothel workers would take her body, wrap it in a cheap rush mat, carry her out and dump her at the gates of the nearby Jokanji temple. In all, an estimated 25,000 women were thusly interred. The practice became so common that the temple became known as “Nage Komi Dera,” (投込寺,) the “Throw-in Temple” with all of the connotations of being a dumping ground for unwanted, forgotten women.

Why Jokanji was chosen isn’t clear. It’s not the nearest temple and getting there while carrying a body would have required a fairly roundabout route, at least using the paths shown on maps of the times. Yoshiwara itself was surrounded by rice fields, fairly impassible most of the year. In November, the rice would have been cut to stalks and the ground itself a thick, sticky muck.

The most direct route would have required the use of the front gate, which I find hard to imagine, as it would have been quite bad business to carry dead prostitutes past incoming customers. More likely, the back entrance was used. A woodcut from the time by Hiroshige shows the area, with its narrow roads between the rice paddies.

Most likely, they used unmarked service paths between the rice fields which would have offered a direct and discreet route straight to the temple, avoiding the streets.

Around the turn of the century, as Japan opened up after the Meiji Restoration, international pressure started to force some changes to the area. By Meiji 38, (1905,) the practice of dumping bodies there was largely stopped and a monument to the women was erected at Jokanji, but it’s reputation as a dumping ground and the nickname “Throw-in Temple” (nege-komi-dera) stuck. When I first went looking for the place, I wandered a bit before asking a pair of shopkeepers for directions. “I’m looking for Jokanji. A temple in this area…”

“Jokanji? I don’t know it…” the more senior of the two said.

“It’s the throw-in temple,” the assistant offered. “not far from here.”

“Ah, yes—of course!”

He then directed me a couple of blocks away to the entrance to the place. I parked my bicycle outside the temple, becoming a bit dubious that there would be anything worth seeing, as the building is quite new and modern. As you enter the grounds, there is a long wall to the left, behind which is the temple’s cemetery. It’s like most other neighborhood cemeteries, narrow lanes of plot after plot of family monuments. I hadn’t thought of this at first—I had assumed the place would be devoted to the victims of Yoshiwara, but the bulk of the space was used by normal families, most with no likely connection to the mizu shobai or water trade, the sex industry in old Edo. It was, after all, a cemetery before Yoshiwara and continues as one to this day.

A temple worker saw me wandering among the plots and waved me over to the back. “It’s over there” he explained, knowing that I was most likely looking for the monument, without my asking. Once you turn the corner, the monument is obvious, much larger than any of the family memorials. Further down the lane is a large tree. The temple worker explained that the old entrance to the graveyard was beyond that tree and that’s where the bodies were typically dumped.

It’s a grim place on a late October day, so close to Halloween, though there are fresh flowers every few days and ritual incense is burned each day. On the left are sotoba, the wooden sticks that typically bear the deceased’s Kamiyo, the name the person is given after death in the Buddhist tradition. (As most of the souls inside were anonymous, I don’t know whose names are upon these sticks.)

Each day I went there to photograph the place, I’d see a couple of Japanese sight-seers come by with digital cameras to take a few snapshots.

Atop the monument is a seated Buddha holding a staff with six rings affixed to the top. The pillar behind is deeply inscribed “Shin-Yoshiwara-Soureitou,” (新吉原總霊塔) roughly meaning simply “Shin Yoshiwara Memorial.” An older photo of the memorial shows the pillar alone, sitting atop its stone lotus base, indicating that the Buddha figure was added later.

A small shrine sits at the base in the front, with an offering plate (¥7 was in it when I visited) and a place to burn incense, cups of sake and flowers.

Above the standing figure is a red lacquer ‘Hira-Kanzashi’ hair ornament of the type a girl in Yoshiwara might possess, affixed to the wall.

Along one side there are a couple of small, barred windows, through which you can see earthenware pots containing the ashes of some of the people interred there:

Along the other side is a locked iron door, leading to the interior of the crypt:

Through the bars, if you let your eyes adjust for a few minutes, you can see that it’s quite large inside. Just inside the door is an iron ladder leading down about three meters to the floor. The walls are lined with shelves on which the pots were stored, but for the most part, empty, as the jars most likely fell and broke in later earthquakes.

Interior of the crypt

Crouching near the window of the door, trying to get a photo, I could smell the interior of the crypt, a cool, earthy smell. It’s much like the smell of an earthen basement, but not quite. It was a familiar smell though, one I’d smelled before, but couldn’t place. I realized after a bit where I’d smelled it before - it was the scent of the bones I’d smelled in the catacombs below Paris.

Addenda, to be streamlined into this at some point:

Matt Treyvaud, of No-Sword was kind enough to provide a translation of part of the inscription on the Nagai Kafu memorial I mentioned. I don’t know a lot about Nagai, so I felt remiss in neglecting him; I’m happy to have this, as he’s obviously an important chronicler of the place and time.

Young people of this world

Do not ask me about this world’s

Art or arts of any times to come.

Am I not a child of Meiji?

When those ways became history, were buried,

The dreams of my youth vanished too

[...]

The last of Edo’s ways are become smoke.

Meiji culture, too, is become ash.

Young people of this world

Do not speak to me of this world’s

Art or arts of any times that may come.

I could clean my clouded glasses

But what could I then see?

Am I not a child of Meiji?

Am I not a child of long-ago and long-gone Meiji?

I had hoped to dig into that a bit more, but haven’t yet had a chance, so I appreciate his help in this.
On another note, Kristen and walked through Minowa, Jokanji and Yoshiwara today and at the end of the day we exited Yoshiwara through what was once it’s back gate and found ourselves at the spot from which Hiroshige had drawn the first image in this post:

I have no doubt that it’s the same spot as in 1830, there was no other road leading from that side of Yoshiwara. Making that realization together with Kristen and having the reference image on my ipod was a remarkable moment.
Oh, I should also mention that I’ll be at Donald Richie’s book launch party this Sunday (Nov. 2, from 5:00 PM) at “What The Dickens” in Ebisu. The book is called “Botandoro” which is a type of Japanese ghost story. I am helping in the arrangements for the party, arranging for the exotic dancers in particular.

This started out as an email from a friend who was looking for feedback on his photography, but I decided to take a bit of time and fill it out a bit:

Pardon the delay in replying.

First, I guess a few general thoughts:
First of all, keep in mind this:Every photo that you take is a self portrait. Not your face, of course, but a part of a lifelong portrait of the sort of person you were when you walked this earth. These are the documents that you leave behind as a statement: “This was my life–this is who I was.”
Pretty heavy stuff, but if you think of any dead photographer that you admire, think of how well you think you understand who they were. It’s like that for us, too. Probably moreso, as we have the ability to disseminate any photo we take farther, wider and faster than they ever did. Hell, make explore on Flickr and you probably have an audience bigger than your local newspaper.
Think about that and ask yourself if you’re doing it the way you think is best.

Photograph your life with sincerity and interst, while avoiding banality. Everyday things can be fascinating, but perhaps every little thing isn’t. Are the things you photograph things that you’d write a paragraph about in a book?

Just as anything can be written about, anything can be photographed. This is where things get tricky.

I’ll assume for a moment that you know how to operate your camera—after all, just about anyone can take a properly-exposed picture at this point. The engineers at the camera companies have made it possible for a child to pick up a camera and push the button and get something that’s perfectly-lit, free of blur and technically, well, perfect. That hasn’t been an issue in years.(Of course, you can choose to use your camera in a way that it relies upon you for all of the exposure settings, but that doesn’t enter into this discussion—for now, I’ll assume that you have the ability to make an acceptable photo.)

Photography is a non-verbal form of communication. At its best, it has all of the eloquence of the spoken word, all of the subtlety of a well-played musical instrument. I’m not speaking metaphorically, I mean that photography is a form of language.

What do you want to actually say with your pictures? Think about that. Do you have a message that you want to convey? Do you have some thought that you would put into actual words that you have instead chosen to express through photography?

A competent photographer, however well-schooled in the visual vocabulary of photography, however skilled with his technique, yet lacking a real message is merely acting as a technician. There’s nothing wrong with technicians, of course—the world needs lots of them, even as photographers, to take photos of people and things, but in that capacity they may be artists, but rarely ever will that person be a Virtuoso.

What happens when you transcend the medium, your subject, even yourself, is that you achieve virtuosity. The word virtuoso has been applied mainly to musicians, but it applies to photography as well. The word shares a Latin root with virtue, of course and therein lies the key to understanding what it truly is. When the product of your artistic endeavor becomes more than the notes played, more than the shadows captured on film, more than the words typed dutifully onto paper and manages to grab the audience’s heart and mind, you’ve achieved virtuosity—something akin to a religious experience.

Virtue, after all, is one thing that brings us closer to God. It’s at this point that real communication occurs. This is what it’s all about.

That’s what all artists strive for. It’s why we take photos for the love of it. Photography at its heart is a cold, scientific, technical process. Take a three-dimensional space and use a lens to render it into two dimensions. That’s it, after all—that’s all we do.

When you think of it in those terms, it doesn’t sound very interesting, but then neither does tapping out notes on a piano keyboard or scratching a pencil across a pad of paper. To achieve virtuosity in any of those fields, you need technical ability, of course and some would say, natural born talent.

Once you are a virtuoso, though, the expression of that can be as simple as a single line on paper, a few lines of a haiku or a few notes from your instrument. Rarely does it require overpowering your audience with the technical aspects of your craft.

Sometimes, one achieves virtuosity while striving for the technical. Karl Blossfeldt’s masterwork, Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) was one example that comes to mind. In the 1890’s Blossfeldt set out to document the forms that plants take, in a fairly clinical, precise fashion with his camera, in hopes that it would be a useful reference work for students. What happened was that this book, with its gorgeous, abstracted botanical specimens, touched the hearts of the artists of that time.

His simple, clean, technically-perfect photos transcended his original intention to become a seminal influence upon art for years to come.

Here, a common relative of the buttercup, the Aconitum or Monkshood, becomes almost human in its form, but not merely visually, it shows movement, emotion and expression. The lines and curves of this simple plant have become beauty, music, dance and passion.

These works struck such a chord with the members of the burgeoning Jugendstil and Art Nouveau movements that his forms sprung from the pages of this book and crawled through art and architecture throughout Europe and America, rendered in iron and stone and the stained glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Alfons Mucha, René Lalique, Antoni Gaudí and countless others. Blosfeldt’s work, of course, was not the sole basis of these movements, but each piece became an important part of the cabulary of the meent. The actual plant forms, of course, had been in the gardens and forests since time immemorial, yet it took Blossfeldt to elevate them this way.
Edward Weston did this as well, but perhaps with more awareness of how they’d be received as he shot his bell peppers that evoked nude human forms:

As well as nudes that could be mistaken for bell peppers. ;-)

People have been rephotographing these subjects ever since. You can buy books of poses and lighting techniques, scour eBay for the same cameras these artists used, research film, whatever, but you’re not likely to make a photo that touches the genius of the original. You won’t do it because it’s neither your voice, nor your words.

To make a photo that matters, you need to find your voice and find your message. When you actually feel the spirit and find the words, you’ll know that your work is on track and that someone, somewhere, will care deeply about it. If you are persistent and determined, it’s something that you can achieve, though perhaps not on a regular basis, or with any feeling that it was your hand that created this beautiful thing.

After all, that’s why we have personified virtuosity with the concept of the Muse. The Muse, is a spirit that inhabits the artist’s heart with confounding irregularity. She loves to both delight and torment. She promises eternal devotion to your genius, for you to wake and find her gone without so much as a note of explanation. I’ve written about  muse before:

Muses are fickle creatures though—they’ll abandon you at the drop of a hat, or come rushing back when you least expect. It’s a roller coaster that, while it often lifts you to dizzying, spectacular heights, ultimately leaves you standing weak and nauseous on the sidewalk.
Of course, the idea of a “muse” is mythological, but it’s a mythology that has persisted for thousands of years and like most persistent mythologies, it’s workable in practice, even though it’s got no basis in science as we understand it.
If you want to take fascinating pictures, be a fascinating person. Do interesting things and you will make interesting photos. Take honest photos and people will connect with them. Fortes fortuna adiuvat, after all.

Well, I’ve been sitting here in the café for quite some time now, so I should wrap this up for now. I’ll come back and rework it, I suppose, as I’ve touched on a lot of ideas that I’d like to explore some more. Please leave your thoughts below, or just say hello if you’ve read it. I don’t have the readership I once did, so at times I feel lie I’m reading to an empty room.Do sign your name as well, as it’s not always apparent from just logging in, especially from Yahoo/Flickr.

Saturday night I’ll be in Kabukicho at an intimate pole dance party, shooting a bit, hanging out all night, having some drinks. You should come by. My dear friend Yuri is organizing the event and it should be a really nice time.

イベントするので

是非来て下さい！
10/11(土)Saturday

新宿歌舞伎町交番から徒歩５分
5min from Kabuki cho police box.

職安通りドン・キホーテから徒歩５分
5min from Don Quixote Shyokuan St.

お蕎麦屋竹村から徒歩すぐ
Soon from soba restraunt Takemura by walk.

の　K’S CAFE (1F)
TEL 0362281465
Kaneshima bld.2-22-8 Kabuki-cho Shinjuku
にてイベントがあります。

☆ Pole dancer’s 　　
　　dream night TIP ☆

@ K’S CAFE
Entrance F/M 2200yen +1Drink
Open 23:00 - Close 4:00

ポールダンサーと仲間がつくるホームパーティー風イベント。
Pole dancers and their friends sets home party style event.

バー、曲のリクエスト受け付け、コンパクトDVDプレイヤー、プロジェクター、ポール、本、ソファ、サボテン、ビーガンケーキなどのあるフロアで楽しく遊んで下さい♪
Bar,music request,compact dvd player,projector,pole,books,sofa,cactus,vegan cake etc,available.

そしてイベントの収益を何かよいことに使うためのアンケートに御協力下さい。
Please fill some enquete/questionaires to use profit from the party for something good.

<TIP>よいヒント・秘訣をみつけ、シェアする心地良いコミュニケーションの場です。
That is where you find <TIP>to share and cozy comunication.

映像、写真、音楽、本、衣装など持ち込み歓迎です。
クロークはありません。手荷物はコンパクトに、紛失のないようにして下さい。
Bring your films,photos,music,books,costumes,etc.
NO cloak room.please do not lose and compact your stuff.

☆前売りチケットもあります。お問い合わせは、かおる、ゆり他ダンサーへ☆
Reserved tickets available.Please ask Kaolu,Yuri and other dancers.

Why am I so excited about a camera that looks like it’s from the early part of the last century? While camera companies are doing their best to scrape their film camera divisions from their shoes, Fujifilm and more interestingly , Cosina, are coming up with film cameras that wouldn’t gotten stares snapping photos of the 1939 World’s Fair. (You could easily find film to fit it at the fair, too.) Folding bellows cameras started going out of vogue as amateur cameras at the end of World War II. So who in their right mind would release a medium format folder in this day and age? Fujifilm and Cosina, apparently…

I suspect that Cosina’s president, Kobayashi Hirofumi had a hand in this. Under Kobayashi, Cosina has made some baffling but brilliant design decisions. For example, when they decided to start making cameras for themselves under the Voigtländer name, the design they chose to improve upon was something from the 1920’s—an early Leica camera that didn’t even have a range finder for focusing. (Keep in mind that this is a company that had been building cameras for other companies for ages—it wasn’t that they didn’t know how to make a range finder focusing system, it’s that they chose not to.) When they did start putting range finders on their cameras, they made them as bright and as easy to use as the best that Leica has to offer

When they decided upon the lens mount for these cameras, it too was a design considered obsolete by the rest of the industry, the 39-millimeter threaded mount that was abandoned by Leica in the 1950’s. Canon used it too, plus lots of other companies, but nobody’s made a new one in decades. Perhaps there was a hidden market. Cosina makes fantastic lenses. The quality of the glass is superb and the image quality fantastic. Their lenses are also tremendously well-made and affordable. The lenses I have by them have held up for me for years of abuse. They’re basically brass, glass and steel, with no electronics to fail and no structural plastic. The markings are etched into the brass, not screen printed on, so they’ll never wear away. They look and feel like lenses from fifty years ago. So why the screw mount?

Leica used to use a screw mount. They made hundreds of thousands of cameras with that mount before they introduced the “M” mount, a bayonet type in 1954, with the M3 camera. Lens mount changes are never done lightly—for photographers, the lens mount on a camera body can be the most important consideration in choosing a camera, because one typically can’t use a lens made by one company on another company’s camera body. As a pro photographer will spend thousands and thousands of dollars on lenses, they wind up being committed to that maker.

So when Leica changed their mount, they made adapters for their users to put onto their old lenses so they could be used with full-functionality on the new bodies. This is still the case, actually. You can pick up a lens from 1935, say an old screw-mount Elmar, screw it into an adapter and pop it on the Leica M8, their latest digital and it will work just as well as ever.

Same thing with the Voigtländer lenses. By going with the screw mount, they probably doubled the number of bodies that these lenses will work flawlessly on. There’s an awful lot of prewar Leicas sitting in closets waiting to be rediscovered by young photographers. They were so well-made that a good number of them only need a roll of film to be put back into service. Many of the lenses also come with external finders as well, which is a good thing because these early cameras had finders that are now dim and hard to use.

While many will extoll the virtues of the old Elmar lenses for shooting, if you want some variety Cosina/Voigtländer lenses are the only new options if you want something with modern coatings to reduce lens flare and give accurate color. Compared to antique Leica lenses, they’re a real bargan, too—I’ve gotten most of mine for around $300, where similar Leica lenses would be several times as much.

I have a couple of old Leica bodies, an M3 and an M2 that I got at reasonable prices, but for the most part, I use my C/V lenses on them. Here’s my M2, with a 50mm C/V Heliar and external finder:

It’s a wonderful combination. The Leica body is solid and reliable and the lens is one of the sharpest lenses ever made for any camera. Very affordable, too, if you can find one.

Edit: No discussion of Voigtländer cameras would be complete without a link to Stephen Gandy’s excellent and exuberant site CameraQuest. There is more information than you can shake a stick at there on all things Cosina, plus it’s probably the best place to buy them.

So back to the folder…

Back in the day, the larger 120 format of film was more popular for amateur photographers. It’s several times larger than 35mm film, so the increased size made up for the all-too-often lower-quality cameras and optics in cheap folders and box cameras. The folding design and bellows made them compact and light, something that would easily slip into the pocket of an overcoat, or on a strap on your shoulder all day, unlike a non-folding design. The bellows were cloth or leather, both prone to getting pinholes from wear at the corners, though, so often they didn’t age well. Still, when combined with good lenses, they are capable of taking fantastic photos, at resolutions that far outstrip what you can get with a digital camera that any mortal can afford.

120-size film fell out of favor with amateurs though, with the 35mm SLR craze of the 1960’s and 1970’s. It stayed around mainly for wedding photographers, I’d guess, but was at risk of disappearing as they all switched over to digital a few years ago. Thankfully, it found a niche with the Holga. A Holga is a cheap Chinese plastic camera that’s wildly popular with creative amateurs, due to its quirky, heavily-vignetted style of photos. If nothing else, Holgas taught a new generation how to load and handle 120 film, which is a daunting prospect at first, as the film doesn’t come in a canister, it’s simply rolled on a spool with a heavy light-proof paper backing.

After using a Holga for a while, many people ask what other medium format cameras are out there. How can they improve their image quality, while still using this wonderfully-detailed film? I think Fuji’s folder is uniquely positioned to be that camera.

It will be light and handy. Given that it has a lens shutter, I’m guessing that it will sync a flash at any speed, a limitation with other cameras. Some modern material will keep the bellows light-tight and the range finder will be bright and a sheer joy to use. They call it dual-purpose because you can switch between 6×6cm and 6×7cm, which is a simply huge amount of film to store your image on. I hope they did this in a way that you don’t have to open the camera to switch formats, but even if you did, I could happily live with it. After all, there’s only about a dozen shots on a roll of 120, so you don’t have to wait long between changes.

Sure, there are other options for medium format, but most of them are too heavy to carry around unless you’re out “taking photos.” This will be one you can toss into a backpack and take everywhere.

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on one. When I do, I’ll give it a thorough review.

Dual-purpose camera on the way from Fujifilm

Fujifilm has revealed additional details on its upcoming medium format film camera, the GF670.

Shown as a prototype at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, the GF670 is expected to be released in 2009. The GF670 is a portable folding camera jointly developed by Fujifilm and Cosina. It features a mechanism for switching between two film formats, 6×7cm and 6×6cm. It is fitted with a 80mm f/3.5 fixed lens, which is composed of six glass elements in four groups. It has an automatic lens shutter, an SPD sensor with both automatic and manual autofocus. The ISO ranges from 25 to 3200.

While Fujifilm will release the GF670 under its own brand in Japan, the medium-format camera will be renamed the Voigtlander Bessa III outside of Japan, where Cosina will take charge of its distribution.

[From British Journal of Photography - Dual-purpose camera on the way from Fujifilm]