A group of young people in Italy. I asked if I could photograph their group
and they instantly coalesced into a line. Sometimes you just have to ask...
I took a trip to Europe in 1996. No reason for the trip other than to get out of town and try out the new, at the time, Mamiya6 camera and its trio of lenses. A 50mm, 75mm and a 150mm. The camera was a rangefinder model and made 6x6 cm images, just like the Hasselblads I was using at the time for work. Kodak gave me a bunch of film to shoot with; no strings attached. While the 50 and 150 were nice to have I got the most use out of the normal focal length; the 75mm (equivalent field of view in Leica world format would be 50mm).
I had no itinerary and no family in tow. For the next seven or eight days I set my own agenda and roamed through Rome at random. I shot through several hundred twelve exposure rolls of black and white film and one day, just for something different, went through about 60 rolls of color negative film.
My favorite hotel in Rome is the Victoria. It's at the top of the Via Veneto, just across a busy street from the Borghese Gardens. It's an older property and at the time it was also very laid back. I'd eat breakfast in their very regal looking dining room each morning then grab my camera bag and head out for the day. I kept a journal so I could share interesting locations with friends who might also head to Rome.
At the end of each day I'd head back to the hotel to dump off the day's shot film and to clean myself up for dinner. I had a friend in Rome who is a native. I met him one day at a restaurant. He was Italian but studied photography at Queens College in London. One night he and his wife took me to a secret restaurant that was off the beaten tourist track. It was Fellini's favorite restaurant in all of Rome. He made me swear never to share the name or location. The walls of the restaurant were covered with signed photos of Fellini, some even on set of his most famous movies.
There is something very freeing for an artist or photographer about being unencumbered by schedule or a companion, if your goal is to explore the visual space of a city.
The issue when I got back home was that there were far more fun negatives than I had the bandwidth to make into prints. I rushed through an overall edit and picked out 30 or 40 negatives that just popped off the contact sheets and made prints of them for a show and for a portfolio. Say 40 negatives out of several thousand. We were busy parenting, working for clients, being part of a sandwich generation. For one reason or another the negatives sat in a binder on a shelf, undisturbed for the next 28 years.
Last year I bought a copy stand, a light source and a set of negative holders in various sizes and experimented with using a Lumix S5, in its high res, multi-shot mode to try "scanning" some of the images from Rome. Yes, it's really just copy shots of negatives but I'm still going to call it scanning.
The process worked. I practiced for a couple of protracted work spells until I ironed out most of the kinks involved in shooting and then post processing the negative files and now it takes about 30 seconds to insert a strip of film, blow the dust off (there is always dust. No matter how careful you think you are), line up the negative and then shoot the copy. You'll nearly always need more contrast in post but you want to shoot "flat" in the capture to make sure not to burn out highlights or drown the shadows.
Now I can walk into the office, grab some negative sheets and get down to a much more granular approach, to really seeing what is in those negatives I shot so long ago. I can bang off about 20 frames per hour with some fine tuning of exposure to get into an acceptable target range.
In Adobe Lightroom I bring in all the raw files and on the first one I use custom Tone Curves to convert from negative to a positive image. Then I batch apply that setting to all the images in the folder. Now they are all very light, very low contrast positives. They all require a bit of work in post to make them satisfactory. Mostly adding contrast and clarity.
It's a fun way to revisit negatives that escaped attention the first time around. And, the passage of time makes them seems a bit exotic. Like a window into a totally different era. Here are some scans I liked yesterday.....
When I was scanning the streets I saw this father/daughter scene from a distance.
You can see the first shot just below. I hoped they would continue in the same basic "pose"
as I walked through the crowd, past the dog and over to the little family to grab this
shot. Scanning ahead is a good skill for someone who wants to shoot in the streets.
The wide shot that presaged the shot one frame above.
Sometimes good shots are made good by the process of distilling down.
I must have had my cloak of invisibility with me on this day because I stood about eight feet in front of these two woman and made six or seven exposures with a fairly big, medium format camera.
I wanted a range of expressions because it told some sort of story with no discernible
plot. Like movie stills. They never seemed to notice me...
Hard to imagine that there was once a time when the Spanish Steps weren't overwhelmed with tourists.
A random portrait. Yes. I asked permission.
These women were modeling for a workshop or photo class. The one on the right is the same
person as the one in the direct portrait just below.
I asked this young woman for permission to photograph her.
She was happy to oblige. We had a very brief conversation, I took
a few frames and we moved on. I have a print on the office wall that's
24 by 24 inches. It looks fantastic. 30 seconds of photography
but a pleasure to look at almost 30 years later.
Yes, I went to swim practice this morning. It was wonderful.
