Playing With Large Format cameras

fleur0002, originally uploaded by Toby Key.

I'm experimenting with a new camera for an upcoming project. I'm quite excited by the results.

Contemporary Large Format Photographers - Links to My Favourites

 Just a short list of contemporary work that I've found inspiring recently.

I'll be adding more soon. 

Alec Soth

Greg Miller

Richard Renaldi

Dan Winters 

Kwaku Alston 
Martin Schoeller 

Fleur de Guerre

fleur0006, originally uploaded by Toby Key.

One of the final images from my last shoot with Fleur de Guerre

Saffi Karina

Saffi, originally uploaded by Toby Key.

One of my favourites from my shoots over the summer. Saffi is currently in the Littlewoods TV ads, I must ask what Colleen Rooney is like!

Plagiarism ain't what it used to be

I was going through my old negative files the other day and I stumbled across some of my first medium format negatives. After leaving college I was advised by an old friend of mine, Stephen Mayes to buy a medium format camera, as this would suit the kind of work I was doing at the time (portrait series). I'd never used medium format before but I was a big fan of the hyper-sharp low depth of field portraits that were in so many magazines at the time, and I knew if I wanted the same grainless look medium format was the only way to go.

So I set about trying to get together a system and a working metod that would get me what I want. These days it's easy to dissect someone's technique, you can just go on to flickr, find a picture shot in the style you like and read the EXIF data. There you will find what camera was used, what lens was used and at what settings. Likely the photographer has some actions or presets to sell you so you can match the colours or a workshop you can sign up to and learn all you need to know.

Things were different in 1996. There was no flickr, no exif data, and a higher value placed on trade secrets rather than just monetising your technique so that Uncle Bob can take pictures just as good as you (sort of). Instead I had to pick a medium format camera, which basically boiled down to what I could afford whilst avoiding the 6x4.5 format which was, I was reliably informed at the time the sole province of wedding photographers, and rich amateurs who like to shoot glamour at the weekends. I know this wasn't true now but there wasn't much internet back them so your sources were rather more unreliable.

Anyhow I plumped for a Pentax 6x7 because it worked just like a big SLR, although it had several shortcomings I'd have to work around as I'd discover in due course, as indeed did all the medium format cameras of the time.

Next film choice, looking through magazines I'd decided that the work I liked best seemed to be shot on slower film so I plumped for FP4 as my slower choice with Tri-X as my faster film. Of course there was no way I could know definitively what others shot, and on top of that there was even less chance I could find out how those negatives were developed, or how or on what they were printed on to.

The upshot of this is that I couldn't just ape someone else as you can today. There was much more difference between camera bodies, film (or sensors if you will), and processing. Each decision that I made had to come to through a process of trial and error and a furthering of my own photographic knowledge. Each decision also took me further from actually copying others work and more towards making choices that would ultimately help define my own style.

So next time you are tempted to buy some actions or textures stop and think, is this advancing my photographic education or simply giving me a quick fix for average pictures?

When the weather is bad...

When the weather is no good I take the opportunity to shoot indoors

My Film Kit

My Film Kit, originally uploaded by Toby Key.

This is the my film kit. Biased towards portraiture but with a wide angle lens in there to cover all the bases.

If I'm shooting film this is my standard kit for a portrait shoot. It fits into one rather heavy bag.

2 x Pentax 67's with plain prisms. I load up both and alternate between them whilst the other is being reloaded. I've used Pentax 67's for over ten years. In many ways they're very basic cameras with obvious built in shortcomings, but I like very basic equipment it really makes you think as a photographer.

105mm Takumar - a great standard lens with a lovely rendering.

165mm Pentax - The portrait lens and the one that gets the most use.

55mm Pentax - The 28mm equivalent. Probably the sharpest and best wide angle I've ever owned and sadly probably my least used lens.

Set of extension tubes - because the 67's don't focus very close compared to a 35mm camera, not because I'm a macro freak

Silver/WhiteReflector - Pentax 67's only have a 1/30th Flash sync speed so most of the time reflectors are more useful.

Heaviest tripod I can carry (currently a medium sized manfrotto with a big Gitzo head). Despite what naysayers may say on the internet I never hand hold these cameras below 1/250th of a second because of the huge internal vibrations cause by the mirror.


I tend to rate both films at +2/3 of a stop when using a handheld meter, just seems to work better for me.

Minolta Autometer IVf.
I've had this meter for years and found it very reliable and accurate. When something works for me I'm very reluctant to change it

Waist level finder - Particularly useful if you want to shoot a horizontal portrait with the 55mm wide

Polarizing Filter - I actually mainly use this as a neutral density filter if I want to cut down depth of field

Yellow/Green Filter#11 for stronger skin tones.

Spare batteries
Lens cloth and Rocket Blower.
Black insulating tape

I also carry two other bags with flash kit, but one bag at a time.


Usually around 20 rolls of film

Some more filters that I rarely use but keep in the bag anyway.

I also have a large tripod which is pretty much essentail at everything but the highest shutter speed.

Most of this I'd keep in my car usually just taking out what I needed. Pentax 6x7 cameras are heavy weighing in at 1.75 kilos with the standard lens so carrying two with spare lens and accessories gets boring really quickly.

I don't have metered prisms so I have to trust my incident meter or use a bit of common sense to get the exposure right. I tend to give everything half a stop more than the meter reading unless I'm shooting transparency. One thing I noticed with these cameras over the years is how much the quality goes down if your technique is sloppy. If you shoot them right they are more than a match for 35mm DSLR (not bad for a system that came out in 1969). Get sloppy and the quality dips more quickly than it does with digital, especially when you have the extra steps that come with film like developing and scanning. Do one shoddily and you'll be wishing you took the 5d out with you.

I rarely shoot film for paid work with film these days, but use it to shoot for myself as it doesn't feel like I'm doing my day job and because it is demanding I think it makes me better both technically and creatively.

At the moment I'm trying to shoot seriously with colour negative for the first time, something I've never done before - I've always shot transparency and black and white. I'm always trying to learn new (or should that be old) tricks.

One of the things I like about this time of year is that things slow down a bit I and I get some time to review my work and work out where I want to go creatively over the next year. At the moment I've decided to re-awaken my interest in landscapes, which an area I've neglected over the past few years. I live near a number of small seaside resorts on the south coast and have always found them fascinating when the the crowds disappear over the winter. I decided to do shoot a personal project documenting the off season and use my blog to publish my favourite images as I go.

sharpness is a dead end

In the current world of digital photography we are witnessing a megapixel race that still shows few signs of abating. I've decided to go in the other direction for a while, removing and blurring detail so try and get to the essence of my images.

Getting a 'good' copy of a lens.

Sigma 50mm 1.4 EX HSM @F1.4 Camera EOS 5D

A few weeks ago I noticed that my faithful Canon 50mm 1.4 was becoming reluctant to autofocus. I decided to get a replacement and hunted the internet for the information on what to get in its place. Studying user reviews on the internet you'd believe that about half the products on sale are some way defective, and almost every lens I looked at had disatisfied customers beliving they had a bad copy of the lens or a lens that needed recalibrating to focus on their camera.

I have to admit I've never worried much about lens calibration. When I started shooting seriously it was all film and looking at the kind of 100% close ups that we now take for granted was not easy. You'd either use a loupe on a light table or a grain focusser in the darkroom neither of which were as good or as easy as the simple magnify tool in photoshop. Generally speaking I'd buy the best lens I could afford and would judge it by how good a big print looked I didn't nit pick down to the finest detail. Now you hear countless stories of forum addicts who'd have to send back 5 lenses before they got a good one. The only real issue with sharpness I had came when I had to adjust the rangefinder in a Bessa R before but generally I'd always thought that any softness in a lens would most likely be down to me, and I'd either adjust my camera settings or work on my focusing technique if I suspected it'd got slightly sloppy. Sometimes I'd go and have a sight test, just to be sure.

Then I bought a 5d mark to with its lens micro adjustment feature. Now I can put a lens and camera on a tripod point it at a suitable target and do some simple tests to work out whether I have a good or bad copy of a lens. I did this with my new Sigma 50mm and found it needed an adjustment of -10 which I thought quite big. I test it against my previous Canon 50mm and found to my horror that this lens came out as a +10. So now I discovered why that lens was no good wide open and risky at F2! I'd just put it down to the fact that I always handhold cameras and I shoot mainly portraits so the subject moved or I moved. I also tend to focus on the bridge of the nose when shooting portraits so I'd unconsciously adjusted my focusing for the back focusing Canon.

On top of this I found the Sigma would occasionally dial in huge focusing errors (gross back or front focusing which seemed totally inconsistent. I was faced with two issues, the micro adjustment (Which although I could perform on the 5d mark two I couldn't on my back up classic 5d so I had a lens that was good only on one camera) and the occasional 'freak' errors. I weighed up the pros and cons and decided that instead of returning the lens for another I'd send it with the 5d to Sigma for calibration. It made no sense to me to get a new lens which could be no better than the one I had, although this seems to be the kneejerk reaction of most enthusiasts. I felt that it was always possible that my cameras were out and swapping lenses with abandon would get me nowhere unless I got a lens with the same error. Best I thought to get the camera and lens matched together, eventhough it would mean doing without a camera and lens for an unspecified amount of time. I packaged up the lens and camera and sent it to Sigma Service in Welwyn Garden City.

On receiving the lens they said it could take 2-3 weeks to fix, which seemed a bit long for professional service but in the end I was without camera and lens for a week and got it back just in time to shoot a wedding assignment, which meant I had all my back ups for that job which was a great relief. When I got the lens back it went from 'maybe' being a bit better than Canon's 50 1.4 to being a lot better especially wide open and at moderate distance. Bokeh is certainly streets ahead of the canon as is vignette control, the Sigma is much brighter in the corners than the Canon, as well as being sharper. So all in I may well start calibrating all my equipment either as I get it or when it's due for service. Next is the Canon 50 1.4, which has a failing autofocus mechanism after a few years heavy use. We'll see if it gets closer in quality to the Sigma.

An old negative that I decided to re-visit.

Pure Monochrome

Doing things the old fashioned way. Pentax 67, Ilford FP4+, Lots of dodging and burning

Alison Cain, West Wittering beach

Shoot with Saffi Karina, shot in the middle of the day in bright sunshine, on a beach, just like you aren't supposed to do!

Portrait in West Sussex

From a portrait session last month. To book your session contact me through my website www.tobiaskey.com

Simplicity

Recently I'm feeling that I want to simplify my work. Although I love digital and the flexibility it brings to the shooting and post production process, I feel that I'm incrementally becoming less of a photographer and more of a photo illustrator, tampering with everything in an infinitely malleable digital file. Indeed, it seems the industry is going this way and never really asking the question "Should we do this?". With advent of the photoshop or internet model who will remain stubbornly plain in real life unless someone invents glasses that do 8 hours of retouching on everything you see, I'm simplifying what I do and trying to get by with film, a scanner with some contrast control and dodging and burning. Above is a picture of Lara unretouched and naturally beautiful.

New Treatments of old work

Just reworking some pictures for my new portfolio. It's amazing how time away from your old work lets you edit it better when you return.

Film to Digital and Back Again

I Read an interesting blog post by Mark Tucker on the subject:

http://marktucker.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/overheard/#comments

Co-incidentally I did a shoot yesterday that was my first all film shoot with no digital as a back up or exposure reference. What I found most amazing is that without really feeling like I was holding back I shot only four rolls of 6x7 (40 shots) wheras with digital I probably would have shot 300 or 400 frames. I also found myself directing the shoot a lot more rather than shooting through the OK pictures hoping to get to the good ones. Strange how the equipment you use totally changes your shooting methods without any real conscious effort on my part.

I'll post the results soon.

Good Taste - The most important photographic skill?

Like most photographers, I'm often asked for advice by up and comers, and it's usually technical. They want to know all the details about what equipment I use, what software, you know the usual thing. What I'm starting to think is that most beginners would do better to buy a cheap manual SLR camera, and then spend what they save on the camera buying books of photographer's work and if they live in the right place, going to galleries.

Why do I think this? Because the technical side of photography has never been easier and will keep on getting easier as digital technology develops. The basic skill of creating a well exposed, in focus, professionally acceptable but creatively dull image will decrease in commercial value as the gap between competant amateur and low end professional all but vanishes.

It will become less and less time consuming to learn 'technique' and mastering the technicalities of photography will at a basic level, have no commercial value.

So as a new photographer, what skills can you develop to ensure a career in this precarious business?

The answer is as simple as it is daunting - creativity.

That's why I suggest you get yourself down the library, buy books and go to every gallery show you can, because learning the history of photography and absorbing the work of others is the first step to being more creative.

And creativity is something you can't buy with a credit card at your local camera shop.

Welcome my new blog for my editorial and commercial work.  As regularly as I can manage I'll be posting new images, talking about the way I work and maybe even the odd product review. Stay tuned!