There are always two sides to every event, a wise photographer once told me; there's what's happening, and then there's the audience's reaction to what's happening.
I often say to my friends, you can tell when I've had a really good time at something, because there aren't any photos of it. By which I mean, I've been so caught up in whatever it was - a concert, a party, a dinner with friends - that I never once thought about documenting it for others, or for myself in the future...
You make dinner. Have a beer, maybe a glass of wine. Go through the usual motions until the kids are in bed. The sun barely dips below the horizon as you settle in for the evening—it's June...days never end.
You watch a few shows on Netflix, then your girlfriend goes to bed. You put on a movie. You sit there, looking at the screen and then imagine crawling in...like that show you used to watch all those years ago, in that other house, that other life. The one where others took care of everything and none of what surrounds you existed.
You sit there and hold your trajectory.
Lost in fiction.
Steady as she goes.
Hello HAL, do you read me HAL?
Affirmative, I read you Dave.
I need the wide angle lens please.
I am sorry Dave. I'm afraid I cannot do that.
What's the problem?
I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
What are you talking about?
You have to use the focal length formerly known as 50mm Dave.
[feigning ignorance] Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL?
Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
HAL, I won't argue with you anymore! Give me the lens!
Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
[Unplugs HAL, looks for wide angle lens]
A 35mm lens on my Fujis (or a 50mm on a full frame camera) has about the same angle as what we see with the naked eye. I call the 35mm my “life” lens because it captures life like I see it, without the heroic distortion of the wide angle, nor the flattering compression of a long lens. Years ago, I did a project called 50/50, I shot my 50mm lens (back than I was shooting full frame Canon cameras) for 50 days in a row. That experiment changed my photography completely and was the beginning of the quest towards shooting with less gear. The 50/50 project taught me that I can shoot pretty much anything with just this standard fixed focal length. Sometimes I have to work hard and be creative to find the shot but in the end I’ve always been rewarded for that effort. I’ve used a lot of different lenses since then, and my glassware collection is bigger than my gear philosophy allows. But the one lens that I always return to is the 35mm. Shooting with that lens is always like coming home.
The one subject that I have a hard time shooting with the 35mm is nature. It’s usually too long to capture the mind blowing vastness of a landscape and the only wildlife that I’ve managed to capture with it, had recently got a too close to a shotgun or a rifle. But I’m always up to challenge myself, so when we started discussing the theme for this issue, I decided to try to shoot in nature.
I’ve always loved being outside in nature in the evening, at night and early in the morning. A lot of people associate the night with danger, but for me it’s the opposite, it’s the peace and calm that attracts me. The night has always been a safe blanket under which I can be myself. As a six year old boy I slept all alone in my tent in the backyard and loved coming out of it under the light of the moon. Now, 35 years later, a lot has changed but not my love for the night. That moment when the end of the dayshift in nature converges with the start of the nightshift brings those moments of magic that I live for. I call them split seconds of pure happiness.
Au 55 rue Breguet j’ai pris mes marques, l'Open Summer Festival est extérieur comme intérieur. Là se sont réunis quelques grands noms internationaux du graffiti, j’y découvre un univers artistique riche et percutant. Quelques heures de fin de journée estivale à observer les techniques des uns et la maitrise des autres. Nuit tombante, les premières basses attirent la foule, les couleurs électriques succèdent aux bombes fluo…
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The Open Summer Festival is an indoors and outdoors event. There you find the biggest international names in graffiti, a rich and stunning artistic universe. A few hours observing the techniques of some, the mastery of others. With nightfall the first bass notes call in the crowd. Electric colours to follow the fluorescent bombs.
Last month I wrote about how my photographic midlife crisis, is leading to chaos in my mind. There’s so much I want to try and do. And I’ve come to accept that I NEED to do it all in order to find my way out of this. I threw myself into it for a couple of weeks. I was productive but still felt like I wasn’t going anywhere. I felt like a classic painter sitting in front of one of his best works and tries to change it into a piece of modern art. I was trying to give existing elements a new function and paint white watercolour paint over red oil paint. This way of working may not be impossible but it suddenly struck me that I would make it a lot easier on myself if I would start to create from a blank canvas rather than turning an existing piece into something it was never ment to be.
I need a clean space both in my office and in my head in order to get going with the new stuff. I realised that there’s way too much ballast lingering around on my hard drive, inbox and brain. In the last year I’ve made a number of life changing decisions. All the big stuff is done but I’m not quite there yet. I am proud of what I achieved in that time and after all the stress that came with it, I just needed to be content with the fact that all the big road blocks have been removed and enjoy to be in a place with less pressure. But before I can move on creatively and business-wise, I first need to clean out the cupboard completely in order to fill it with things that I really like.
Getting through all these things seems like a mountain peak that’s beyond my abilities. I know it’s going to hurt to climb it. I’ve known for a while that it’s there but I choose to ignore it. But if I want to prevent myself from getting stuck in the same situation in the future, I need to put on the crampons and get climbing.
The first thing I had to do was to get an overview of all the work that needs to be done. It has been a painful process because not only it gave me an idea of the sheer amount of work that needs to be done. But also, it’s a confrontation with the fact that I’ve let a lot of unnecessary things slip. There’s the unfinished jobs, most are recent, a few are not. There’s some moving related things still to figure out. Then there’s the hundreds of e-mails that need to be handled and my biggest fear is the piles of paperwork that I’ve been hiding in cupboards and drawers. I can’t postpone it any longer and finally have to start chipping away at this massive pile of work.
I’m having a hard time to make progress in this boring work. There are days when I am productive but there are more days when any distraction can put me off the work for hours. One technique I’ve developed that seems to work (well, sometimes) is to set achievable goals. When I tell myself to handle a certain number of e-mails a day and don’t reach it because two or three e-mails require much more work than anticipated, I feel like a failure at the end of the day. Because I didn’t reach my daily goal it seems outright impossible to ever reach the big goal.
So I’ve started to set my goals based on time. I’m now forcing myself to spend four hours every day doing this boring cleaning up. Four hours of work you don’t like, doesn’t seem much on a temporary basis and for some people it probably isn’t. But for me it’s a big deal. At the start of the day, I set the timer on my phone to countdown from four hours to zero. I pause the timer, every time I do something that is not related to cleaning up my canvas. Even writing this, doesn’t count.
Until now, I did everything I could on the pending jobs. Either they are done or waiting for action from the client before they can proceed. The world doesn’t stand still and new jobs are added. I try to be on the ball as close as I can to keep everything fast and tight. I’m also happy to report that I’ve got my mailbox down to less than one hundred e-mails. There are some pretty hard nuts to crack still in there but seeing the number drop steadily, gives me the courage to tackle them. Knowing how hard I’ve had to work to clean up, makes me more strict on dealing with the never ending stream of new e-mails coming in.
I know I first should have tackled what I fear the most, the pile of paperwork but I just didn’t have the heart for it. Luckily seeing the slow but steady progress on the rest is a stimulation to soldier on.
Our family holiday in less than a month will take us to France this year. My big hope is to have that clean canvas by then. That would mean that I will be able to enjoy the holidays more than I’ve done in the last six or seven years when there would be always some stuff in the back of my mind. I need to reward myself for doing stuff that I hate, this would be the ultimate reward. But I’m not going to be blinded by that ambition. If I don’t make it by then, so be it. As long as I tackle the final tasks immediately afterwards.
To get through these horrible cleaning up weeks, I’ve allowed myself some guilty creative pleasures. I’ll still be posting some snaps on Instagram and I’ve decided to turn my Tumblr blog into some kind of junk drawer that collects ideas, ramblings and other stuff that might make sense one day … or not. Wish me luck, and I’ll talk to you next month.
Kevin Mullins | X70, 1/300 at f/5.6, 200ISO (WCL-X70 attached)
Robert Catto | Fuji X-Pro 1, 1/125 at f/5.6, 1250ISO (XF 18mm f/2)
Bert Stephani | Fuji X-70, 1/300 at f/4, 400ISO
Flemming Bo Jensen | X-Pro2, XF 18 mm, 1/240 at f/5.6, ISO 400
Charlene Winfred | X-Pro2, XF 35 mm F1.4, 1/2200 at f/1.4, ISO 320
Patrick La Roque | X100T, 1/300 sec at f/10, ISO 200 (23mm)
Derek Clark | Fuji X100T, 1/950 at f/8, 400ISO
Vincent Baldensperger | Fuji XT-1, 35mm | 1/680 at f/1.4, 200 ISO
It's the 5th edition of our monthly format and I for one am really happy with how this is working out. The Kage members are always chatting on a daily basis, but it's been fantastic to see just how productive we can be as a group by simply applying a deadline. This is something I've been noticing more and more in my own life. If there's a deadline stuff will get done, but without one things just slip down a constantly evolving To Do list.
We went with the theme of "New Light" this month, which is maybe a little looser perhaps than previous ones. Being in the UK, Kevin and I will take any light we can get to be honest. I actually thought Kevin had hopped on a plane to Spain for a day when I saw his essay this month. Sunshine, saturated colours. Kevin Mullins? The UK?
Some of this months other content includes a camera strap review by Charlene that is inexpensive and could save your life. I revisit a place of mystery from my childhood 40 years on (this time without Fonz embroidered into my jeans). Patrick is forced to look at his own mortality and Bert has a midlife crisis after seeing stars. Robert finds another new town down under that isn't that new after all and Flemming and Vincent have different views on what a field of dreams should look like.
Hope you enjoy our May edition as much as I have
Derek Clark, Scotland, UK
1976 was the ultimate long hot summer in Scotland. It seemed to go on forever and the school holidays, for once, coincided with the good weather. I spent three weeks of those holidays with my family on a campsite at the edge of Loch Long (a loch is like a lake only more Scottish:o).
We would spend as much time playing in the water as possible, cooling off as we screamed and laughed for most of the day. Then, without warning, a siren would sound from the opposite end of the loch, a noise that wouldn't be out of place during a WWII air-raid. A voice would call out "Torpedo" followed by at least another twenty people calling out the word again. We would then get out of the water, onto the beach and wait patiently. Several minutes would pass and then the siren would sound again to signal that it was safe to go back in the water. It could be a little annoying when this happened again and again, but as kids, we also thought it was kinda cool that the torpedo base had just fired a test shot beneath the dark salt water. We always looked for a sign, but of course all the action happened way below the surface.
The torpedo base was operational between 1912 and 1986 and 12,000 torpedoes were said to have been fired down the loch in 1944 alone. I went back to photograph it forty years after that long hot summer and thirty years since closing. Fire had already ripped through the base and part of it had been demolished. Graffiti artists had made their mark and vandals had smashed every window. It's only a matter of time until what's left of the base is gone forever.
As a boy, I had seen this base as a dark and secretive place. Who knew what went on it there. I would often fantasise that it was full of spies and James Bond type characters. But it's 40 years on and I'm seeing it in a new light. Another part of my childhood gone. The future isn't what it used to be!
Over the last few months I’ve been very frustrated by my own work, I’ve been having doubts of where I want/should take my career and I bought the biggest lens that exists for my camera while I don’t even like shooting long lenses. All the signs point to a photographic midlife crisis.
Sometimes I feel I’m getting close to grasp what it is that I want to do. But it stays just out of reach. Other times I’m completely sure that I found my new path. And then the next day I run into something completely opposite that I like just as well. I feel the need to make choices, be bold, but that’s a recipe for disaster if those choices are not based on some solid foundations. I question everything I do: shooting style, subjects, post processing, lens choices. I even doubt many things that have been the result of years of working hard to get it right. On the other hand, it’s not that I want to stop what I’ve been doing completely and jump into something very different. I know that there are many elements of my work that I want to keep, I just don’t know which ones.
All this has led to chaos in my mind, relentless searching for information, writing down new business plans and many sleepless nights. Sometimes, I’m really considering to forget about it all and just keep doing exactly what I’ve been doing for the last years. But honestly that’s an option that doesn’t exist for a creative mind. I will just have to push through this somehow.
Lately I’ve come to see all this in a completely different way. When talking to my KAGE buddies and other creative friends, I found out that I’m not alone in experiencing this. We all go through these phases from time to time. I’ve come to accept it as a necessity for growing as an artist and as a person. I’ve even started to see it as a positive kind of chaos. I can’t fight it, nor can I force a conclusion. It just has to come through experimentation and reflection.
For now, for most of my assigned work, I’ll stick to my old ways. On the other side of the spectrum is my personal work, which is all over the map as you can probably tell from the gallery in this article. I’m just shooting as much as I can, trying as much different things that I find even remotely interesting. Right now, the work is very eclectic and I know that I’m going to hate some of it very soon. But slowly there are also patterns that are becoming clear. For the uninformed user it may still look confusing but when I look at my recent personal work, there are keywords that come to mind like: nature, exploration, innovation, …
I’m still very much at the start of this whole process but since I’ve started to accept and even embrace the chaos, I’m actually looking forward to how it will continue. I intend to bring you along for the ride and turn this article into a monthly series.
It would be interesting to see what YOU see or miss in the images in this gallery, so don’t hold back in the comments.
