Wide format, or "panoramic" photography for me has been synonymous with film and my Hasselblad XPan, since the turn of the century. Well, it seems, no more. On my recent trip to Iceland, for the first time, it stayed at home, and its usurper, the Sigma DP0, came instead. And I really enjoyed using it. You'll find all sorts of opinions and views all over the darker corners of the photo-net droning on about how awful it is, but I ignored all that stuff and just used it. Once you get into the groove, it's really fun to use. The weird shape makes total sense when holding it, and it's a great conversation starter (if you like conversations that start with "what the hell is that!?").

These little renditions below don't really do justice to the jaw-dropping impact of the detail and delicacy seen on a print or big screen, but they go somewhere, I hope, to explaining why the unconventional approach and, er, idiosyncratic software is worth the trouble. Speaking of which, maybe I'm just lucky, but unlike for certain well known pundits, Sigma's PhotoPro software is 100% rock solid for me. I can't remember the last time it crashed, if ever.

But anyway, it's all about the photos, not the gadgetry, and I'm pretty happy with this set.


















So... anybody want to buy an XPan ?

Well, things have been a bit quiet around here this last month. There are plenty of reasons for this, including usual summer house guests, spending most of what little time I have to dedicate to extra-curricular activities to a forthcoming website redesign, and preparing for (yet) another trip to Iceland.

Actually, this is my first since 2012, and first summer trip since, er, 2007 I think. I was supposed to go last year, but had to call it off for family reasons. I have quite a sense of trepidation about this trip, as from what I've been reading the tourist traffic has exploded, and I'm expecting to see a lot of changes, not necessarily for the better.

To try to get back into the groove I've revisited, again, my Iceland archive, and out of over 5400 photos (and that's just the digital stuff), I've managed to extract 82 which somehow start to express what I personally get from Iceland. Obviously, practically every "landscape" photographer on the web now has an Iceland gallery, with the standard Whereverfoss and bit-of-ice-on-the-beach-with-big-stopper photos, so that's pretty much killed that part. And of course there are countless books, mostly very repetitive. Of these I'd pick out Ragnar Axelsson and Marco Paoluzzo as two photographers who push the boundaries a bit. I'm sure there are others. On the pure landscape side, I still rate Daniel Bergmann and Hans Strand at the top of a very long list. I'd love to be able to say I've got my own vision of Iceland, but so far, I haven't.

It is certainly easy to imagine doing "something different", but when placed in any of Iceland's very numerous iconic locations, it is very, very hard to turn your back on the main attraction.

The following are a few non-iconic shots extracted from my selection of 82. Possibly they indicate the direction I might go in, but it's far more likely that I'll fall, again, to the temptation of the long exposure waterfalls. And so what. It's fun.

While browsing through various inter web channels the other day - in this case, I think, National Geographic - I cam across something which gave me a bit of a shock. The work shown here - Magda Biernat Photography: adrift - is basically exactly one of the main ongoing photographic ideas I've had in my head for years, and indeed have been quietly preparing. So there are no new ideas - either somebody else has already done it, or they are about to. I suppose the only solution is to stop procrastinating and just get on with it, or alternatively, ignore completely what other people are doing. Well, I do have an alternative idea running along the same path, more or less, but it's going to be harder to realise, and now, it will just look like a facsimile.

diptych by Magda Beignet, magdabiernat.com

What really grabs me about this idea is that it addresses an issue that I personally have with classic landscape photography, that it excludes, repels even the human element, and thus loses any real meaning beyond the superficial. The very fact that the photographer is there to take the photograph means that the idea of untouched, unreachable wilderness which is being hinted at just collapses. Magda Biernat's approach resolves this in a very elegant way. I'm sure all of see photographs we wish we could have made. What I saw here was photography I should, and quite easily could, have published, and that hurts a bit. Whatever, I ordered the book.

Infrared photography is a curious beast. It can yield spectacular results, both in blacks & white and colour. It relishes the bright, contrasty conditions which are anathema to many other styles of photography, allowing those of us in sunnier climes to carry on clicking away during the long hot summer. And yet, how many famous infrared photographers are there ? I can actually only think of one well known photographer who’s core body of wok relies on infrared, and that’s the late Simon Marsden.  Marsden’s work is so unique and recognisable that he successfully sued U2 for plagiarising him with the photo on their album The Unforgettable Fire. But most of time, infrared photography is basically just a shallow trick, a way of making unremarkable compositions look good purely due to the unearthly representation of light and shadow. 

Simon Marsden needed the IR look to convey his vision of gothic decay and uneasy spirits.  Some landscape photographers make good use of infrared from time to time, but sparingly. Personally I think that whenever the medium - infrared - is prominent in the description of a body of work, that work is going to fall flat. Either the work needs the look - in which case there’s little point in making great announcements about it - or the work needs to be salvaged by an unusual medium (quite often Kodak Aerochrome these days). Personally I feel Richard Mosse fits into that category, but I’m in a minority there.

I’ve played around with infrared for years, both on film, using Kodak monochrome and false colour, and on digital, using either a blocking filter on a normal camera, or more recently my Olympus E-P3 converted with an 830nm filter. Up until recently I’ve been quite unmoved by the converted camera, as the out-of-camera look is missing the appeal of film infrared.  The key characteristics of Kodak EIR were high grain and strong contrast, as well as a strong glow around highlights achieved at a critical - and hard to master - exposure level.  Actually getting a good exposure on EIR was very hit & miss.  Of course with a converted digital camera it’s all far too easy - with Live View you can even compose in infrared.  But still, the exposure can be a bit tricky, as the camera electronics are designed to deal with visible light JPEGs, and histograms and all that stuff can be a bit misleading. Also, some lenses are very prone to heavy flare in infrared, while being perfectly well behaved in visible light. I also get the impression that there is flare at sensor level too - apparently that is a thing.

Then, after you’ve got the shot, converting the purple/red tinged monochrome image to something that looks like IR as we expect it is also not that trivial. Actually Lightroom has got quite a good preset which can help to get pointed in the right direction, but it’s not enough. I’ve started experimenting with Silver EFX Pro to see if I can get a look I’m happy with. If that works out, maybe I’ll come up with some idea that actually benefits from infrared. But no graveyards - that’s been done.

A few weeks ago I participated in the workshop run by Ragnar “Rax” Axelsson and hosted by Leica Fotografie Internal, in Hamburg. My motivation for attending was as a long-time fan of Rax’s photography, and at the same time a hope that a few days of mentoring by a dedicated black & white, people and storytelling photographer would give a useful nudge to my dedicated colour, people-less and non-storytelling photography. Oh, and add to that my total lack of Leica ownership. Well, spending a couple of days two years ago with Neil Buchan-Grant in Venice certainly expanded my horizons, so why not.  Of course, in that case I had my relatively strong relationship with Venice to fall back upon. Of Hamburg I knew precisely nothing.

The workshop attendees were not exclusively wealthy Leica owners. A few were clearly ultra-wealthy Leica owners 😊. And a handful were, like me, non-Leica owners, and a few people even confessed to prefer colour.  So I wasn’t totally isolated.  And of course I got to pretend I owned a Leica for a weekend, as I casually laid it on the table at Starbucks.

Unfortunately the weather on my first day in Hamburg was worse than dismal. Incessant, bucketing rain, empty streets, terminally grim.  It wasn’t even that kind of bad weather which is good for photographers. Nope, it wasn’t even good for ducks.

We had a quite loose assignment. Apart from a directive to produce at least one selfie (Rax has a sense of humour), the general idea was to produce a coherent series of some 20 photographs, which could be edited down in one to one sessions to 6, together with a set of 6 from previous work which we were asked to bring along. Finally the completed work was to be presented to the group.

Well, most everybody else wandered off and produced some nice black & white street photography. You can see some of it here.  I’m quite impressed with what some people managed to produce. I certainly didn’t manage to tune in to Hamburg street life in that what.

Instead I reverted to type and tuned in to waste and desolation. I fixated on a few hundred square meters around the new Überseequartier U-Bahn station, which emerges like a buried alien artefact in the middle of an area of mostly disused dockland being transformed into Living Spaces for Bright Young Things etc. I found the state of transition quite captivating, if hardly up-lifting. However it did offer plenty of opportunity for a formal approach to urban landscape.

The selection curated by Rax narrowed down to 5 photographs, as can be seen at the end of the LFI gallery linked above.  I respectfully disagree with part of his selection - my own set is here.