Coexistence

Canon's 5D mark II DSLR has been out on the market for quite some time.  Long enough for several high end videos to get shot through its HD video capability.  Some are almost feature length, most I suppose are merely add-ons to already exhaustive shoot days.  With this simple affordable camera, high end video has come to the masses, or at lease to the myriad of photographers who have one.  A once well defined boundary has suddenly blurred.  Still photography has always existed separate from that other world.  The world of Burbank, Hollywood, DP's and unionized card carrying member-only workforces.  That line seems to be vanishing fast.  I wonder how Hollywood will react when most still shooters can offer motion picture add-ons to the products they are already photographing still.  Turn the well established system on its head?  I think not.  Even though the likes of National Geographic TV is now excepting some of its footage from this camera, it'll always be a completely different medium from still photography.  They have coexisted for more than a century.  Both have their creative and commercial use and the simple fact that technology is racing to bring both mediums into the hands of a single person doesn't change that fact.  Regardless of what piece of equipment either form is shot from, broken into their most basic principles, one is still and one moves, and that will never change.

Vintage is the New Hip

If you read yesterdays post this is going to be the exact opposite, a departure from the fantastical technology headed our way.  There's a deep duality with me, I fully embrace the coolness of modern technology, and where it's heading and yet at the same time my deepest fantasy is to build a rustic mountain(or desert) cabin, furnish it with hand built furniture, stock it with produce grown form my garden and meat hunted.  To watch the quiet sunrise, far removed from the city where I now live.  To live as close to nature as possible, to observe first hand the changing of the seasons and the running of the deer (past piece).  If you know me you know I love to build things.  I have much more fun building something than using it, most recently I carved and built a model sailboat, which has been sailed exactly once. 
I'm definitely a journey/process versus destination guy.  So my next project is going to be a camera, a large 20x20 wooden camera, complete with a handmade lens and film holders.  Why so large, well I plan on shooting wax paper and collodion negatives contact printed on a variety of prepared surfaces, but I'm most excited about salt prints. 

Contact printing is sandwiching the negative and paper together in a glass frame and exposing it to UV light.  The size of the final print is equal to the size of the negative.  I'd like to exhibit the final work along side the materials used to produce it.  I've always had this feeling when visiting art galleries, when there is a plethora of information 'defending' the process by which the particular photographer achieved the images, that if what's being sold is the process than the process should also be on display.  Plus it would be really fun to describe the whole project, from building the camera to producing the final images.  Handmade throughout, no computers, pixels or inks.  Sometimes disconnecting is the best thing you can do.  Yes I know I'm writing a post about handmade on a computer, but hey what'd you expect, a handwritten blog post.  Ooh, now there's an idea, a snail mail blog, but then it wouldn't be called a blog but a snog (snail + log), of course I already use the word snog at Christmas time, Soy Eggnog; snog...

Cheers All!

Avatar is Only the Beginning

The name aside, the iPad represents something perhaps more profound.  It wasn't that long ago that an internal single gigabyte hard drive cost well over 4000K, and you had to insert a 'boot-up' disk in order to run anything.  I'm not that old and I can vividly recall a time before the Internet, a fact my future children will chide me for I'm sure.  Yes I am well aware that Apple isn't the first company to produce a tablet computer, but lets face it Apple takes things to another level of design, use, integration and coolness.  Already periodical publishing companies are lining up to get their subscriber based content fed through it.  Will it be their savior, only times will tell, but I'm getting away from myself.  At the same time Apple was developing this device, which I'm sure has been in the works for years, a director by the name of James Cameron was developing the technology to bring his latest piece to the screen.  Spending millions he developed the most complex 3D production equipment to date, and if worldwide sales are any indication people love it.  3D isn't new, but the quality has vastly improved from the early beginnings decades ago.  And with Sony and Panasonic announcing a line of home 3D television sets, ready for shipment sometime this year, is this the way media is headed.  I wonder how a 3D photography gallery would fare.  When you walk in you're handed glasses, like the ones you're given in the theater today, and wander huge three dimensional pieces that jump off the wall at you, as if you're walking through a desert sunrise or a Yosemite snowstorm.  Attached to these glasses could be earphones with digital recordings made by the photographer at the moment of capture, to transport you even deeper into the environment, losing yourself in the 3 dimensional beauty.  Or perhaps one step further, since motion capture and still capture are now being produced via the same devices, each frame is a moving 3D landscape, with sound.  Fantastical, perhaps, but not very far off.  If the point of landscape art is to transport your viewer, this scenario seems like a sure way to get them deeper into your creative.  And for me, if BW could be produced this way, what an experience that would be.  I'm very excited about these things, very different than whats come before.  With technology changing as fast as it is, who knows what Avatar has started, all I know is it's only the beginning.