It’s funny that the old film vs. digital arguments seem to be coming around again, maybe prompted by the loss of Kodachrome and the fact that with it we’ve lost a major expressive tool.  The digital protagonists probably thought that they’d nailed film’s coffin shut, but it does seem to displaying some strong undead characteristics.

The interesting thing, based purely on random observation, is that the demographic of the film follower crowd seems to be split into two parts: the older, traditionalist group, and the much younger crowd, who are maybe looking for something more “authentic”.  For example, ex-Flickr community manager Heather Champ shoots exclusively with film.

I’ve got a foot in both camps. I shoot film in my XPan (the only film camera I’ve got now apart from an ailing Ricoh GR1) and the rest is digital. Both mediums have their advantages, and anybody’s preference is going to be dependent on a lot of subjective factors.  However, one characteristic of film, especially slide film, which I think is a big deal (as does Bob Boyer), is that the creativity happens up to the moment you press the shutter, and from then on you’re pretty much fixed. On the other hand, shooting RAW with digital - and honestly from my perspective I can see little point in not shooting RAW - from an exposure point of view essentially comes down to cramming as much information as you can onto the memory card and sorting it all out later.

And this might be the critical point: digital photography requires you to spend more and more time in front of the computer, and opens up far more options than are good for you (here’s some compelling evidence of just how tasteless things can get).  Of course these days slide film goes digital too, but there’s a very critical difference: when I scan slide film, I’m trying to get the most accurate representation I can of the film on the lightbox.  I’m not trying to fix the white balance, or recover highlights or shadows (forget that!). I’m just trying to coax every bit of subtlety of tone, contrast and sharpness I can, while preserving the colours. I already know what I want the image on the screen to look like, because I can just glance over at my lightbox to see it.

For me this is far less tedious than going through a bunch of RAW files and tweaking them - and never really feeling quite sure that I’m doing the “right thing” - for example, I almost always add about 50% definition in Aperture. Why 50% ? I don’t know, just seems that more is too greedy and less is leaving money on the table.

It can take for EVER to scan a couple of rolls of XPan film to 48-bit, 4800dpi “archive masters”, but somehow it’s a good place to be, and every now and again the results just captivate me in a way no digital image of mine ever has.

Update, 14 Jan 2011: Following discussions with various people I’ve come to realise that the bulk of this program was filmed in 2009. I’ve updated the text accordingly. I don’t think it changes my conclusions. If anything it reinforces them.

Like many people I was captivated by the recently widely circulated movie extract of Polar bears destroying the BBC’s expensive and ingenious collected of “spycams”, narrated by Dr Who, er, sorry, David Tennant. With a bit of fiddling with proxies I was able to circumvent the archaic wall around BBC iPlayer and watch the whole movie.  And it was very enjoyable, even more so because I, along with the other 11 people on board the yacht Jonathan IV, spent a few days in the company of two of the stars of the movie, back in August last year. We encountered the “mother with single cub” in Sallyhamna, where the beached fin whale provided many a free lunch to many a bear last summer.

“Our” bears, at Sallyhamna on 15th August 2010. Whale backbone clearly visible

A screengrab from the BBC’s film at the same place, maybe late August ?. The rock to the right of the mother bear is easy to spot in my photo, above the whalebone.

When we were there, it certainly looked like these two would not survive much longer. The mother was very thin and seemed apathetic, not even trying to feed. The cub was tiny. So the “feel good” story coming from the movie that they did actually make it out onto the sea ice was really nice to hear.  Well, to start with it was, but then I started having my doubts. Both the timeline in the movie and some geographical facts raise some serious doubts.

The story of the bear’s escape seems to be too good to be true, for several reasons. First of all, the sea ice conditions.  Although the program was very vague indeed about the actual facts, they seem to imply that the bears left Svalbard in the vicinity of Sallyhamna in late summer. Let’s be generous and say October.  Well, looking at the sea ice extent map for October 2010, and even taking into consideration the fact that the East Greenland sea is the only area where the ice extent at that time was anywhere near the historical mean, it’s still one hell of a long swim for two unwell, under-nourished bears from north west Spitsbergen. Especially as it is likely that the cub had never swum anywhere before.

Sea ice extent map, October 2010. (Source NSIDC)

The sequencing is also pretty strange. We first encounter the two bears fishing for kelp down by the sea at Sallyhamna at about 19:30 minutes into the film. However, there is a clear view of the whale carcass during this sequence, and it is quite evident that this scene was shot after the exposed part had been fully stripped, sometime in August. But there is no mention of this. The scenes of the bear feast on the whale (around 31:00) must have been shot around late July [correction: shot in summer 2009]. Quite a lot later, after the episode with the raid on the goose colony (and where was the cub at this point, anyway ?) and the inspection of the walruses, we get told that the mother picks up the scent of the whale, and heads off towards it.  Well, fine, but the scenes we then see of her and the cub back in Sallyhamna (around 46:00) give me a strong impression of being shot at the same time as the sequence at 19:30. 

Frankly, I’m very skeptical that we’re watching the same animals here. And certainly there must be more than one female & cub bear pair around!  Had a crew somehow monitored the same pair from the time they left their den, through the summer, to the late autumn, well that in itself would be a story worth telling. The fact that they didn’t - and that this female was not tagged in any way - makes me think that they built up a narrative from a collection of unrelated shoots. This is clearly standard for wildlife documentary, but in this case I think it steps over the line. Of course, I could be wrong…but I’m afraid I’m not.

A later shot shows a mother and cub walking out along a peninsula, apparently according the the narrative heading north to find the sea ice. Problem is, as far as I recall, there isn’t anywhere that looks much like that near Sallyhamna.  And finally, when we see the ice rainbow, apparently the mother bear’s cue to take to the waves, and then we see the bears slip into the water (51:21), well, sorry, but this is without a doubt another Sallyhamna clip. All credibility is lost, I can no longer kid myself that there is a truthful story being told here.

This is where the action takes place. In August 2010 the sea ice edge was at least 100km north.

So what we end up with is an entertaining fiction with some educative truths mixed in, but largely submerged in sentimental mush. Sure, there’s some remarkable filming, in particular the sequence of the bear stalking the seal under the ice, and sure, the bears are cute, but somehow pretending that starving, stranded bears on Svalbard are a sign that they will adapt to rapid climate change is just dishonest and a disservice to the conservation movement.

Polar bears aren’t built to live on land. Don’t take it from me, take it from experts like Ian Stirling (Polar Bears) or Steven Kazlowski (The Last Polar Bear). Unfortunately, these days it seems like the BBC is more interested in entertainment.

I’m not naive, I don’t expect wildlife documentaries to present a linear narrative, and I completely understand that, realistically and practically, to tell a story which portrays the life of any animal you need to spend as much time in an editing suite as in the wild. But it is usually implicitly if not explicitly made clear that some compromises were necessary. In the case of “Spy on the ice”, too much is glossed over and dressed up as fact.

Anybody who actually subscribes to this blog (hi there!) would probably wonder why I update it so infrequently, and think that I’m really lazy or something.  Well, I guess I’m sometimes lazy, but really, I’m just so fragmented.  I’ve got at least 3 unfinished articles at the moment, and they’re quite lengthy, and possibly not terribly interesting.  And it wouldn’t take a lot to finish them, but then I hardly want to publish them all at once because that would be too much.

And then there’s photography. Looking at the galleries here, I suppose you’d get the impression I’m basically a “nature photographer”, which is an accurate enough description - sometimes. If you look at my Flickr stream, depending on where my mood is at, you might get a slightly different idea, although I do try to present a certain degree of coherence. Certainly sets like Film Noir are not typical nature photographer ... or are they ?

And then if you could look at the vast reams of unpublished stuff on my computer, you might begin to wonder of I’m actually seeing a doctor for this schizophrenia thing…

I quite often discover new photographers on Flickr who speak to me in whatever way. Unlike, I suspect, quite a lot of “nature photographers”, I’ve got pretty wide tastes when it comes to other’s work.  So, for example, I really like “Sleek Miss D’s” work, especially the Ghosts set.  I suppose I might at times approach similar territory.  At the same time I really admire how she’s managed to convey the disquiet which comes from being compelled to take on a corporate identity just to survive (well that’s how it comes across to me) - but I don’t think that’s a place I’d go to, photographically. I’ve also discovered “Wintercove” in the last few days, and her visions from Alaska are just painfully beautiful, and possibly a but closer to my comfort zone in the photographic starchart.  And then there’s “Raul Loves Photography” who’s main interest, as far as the evidence on Flickr is concerned, is a million miles away from mine - and yet I find his explorations of portraiture captivating.

I’m not a great contributor to the community on Flickr, although I do try. I try to avoid commenting just for the sake of it, and making trite comments, although it’s often hard to find the right soundbite ... and I know people appreciate encouragement.

So, with this completely spontaneous and unrehearsed blog post, from down here by the Lago di Lugano, buon anno!

Back in the mists of time when cameras like the Holga first appeared, they were pretty much born out of necessity. Within the cultural and economic constraints they existed in, they were the best that could be done, and certainly better than nothing.

Being elevated to a cultural chic platform certainly changed all that. Suddenly that unfocussed, badly vignetted, flare ridden and imprecisely framed look was the next Big Thing in Cool. And it turn into an industry. The Lomo look became a major trend, and made a virtue of what was, to all intents, just bad photography.  Some interesting and possibly even good art came out of it, but these days it’s really just got out of control.  The painful limitations that the devices impose can only be held up as virtues for so long.

Nevertheless, when I saw the announcement of the Sprocket Rocket panoramic camera from Lomography, I was interested. I even briefly thought of buying one ... until I saw the price. It is quite frankly ridiculous.

The Sprocket Rocket’s main claim to frame is that the image area includes the film rebate, or “sprockets”. Yeah, well, whatever. A cute effect that wears off after about 1 photo, and can anyway be pretty easily faked in Photoshop. Oh, and it’s panoramic, with a “super wide angle lens” - apparently something like 30mm, f/13, although the website doesn’t tell, and plastic, of course - and a couple of knobs which let you wind the film forwards - and backwards - to make absolutely damn sure that you get overlaps and other magnificently arty imperfections.

And speaking of imperfections, well here the Sprocket Rocket really shines.  It appears to be just about impossible to take anything approaching a “good” photo with this POS, and the “badness” of what it does produce is just, well, bad. Not interesting, not arty, just gouge-your-eyes-out ugly. Massive vignetting, weird colour, no focus, and of course, sprockets.

Yours, for ONLY $89.00.  Oh. And you’ll need a “scanning mask”. That’ll be another $30 or so.

Really, you can do so much better than this with any number of easily obtained vintage cameras. You can get the distressed look if you want, but you get to choose. Creativity means nothing if you’ve got no part in the process.

Lomography: it’s cool-speak for “laughing all the way to the bank”.

As my regular visitors (if I have any) will be able to see, I’ve done a bit of redecoration around here.  The current design is well over a year old, and I’ve decided it needed to focus a bit more on photography. At the same time I’ve cleaned up some stuff, and fixed some bugs - although doubtless I’ve missed some, and introduced some more.

Before

After

I had already snuck in a few changes, like making the navigation look a bit more like navigation, and adding one of those trendy lightbox doo-hicky things to the photo galleries.

I’ve also added global search, but thoughtfully hidden it at the bottom of the footer as a sort of post-modern pun (or bad design, not sure which).

Oh, and some of those little social network thingies hanging off the right edge. That’ll give me cool points.

The most obvious change is showing a random photograph upfront, linked to its gallery. After all, this is supposed to be a photography site. Sort of. So I’ve also booted the “other blog” from the home page. The latest “other stuff” is now summarised, remarkably, on the other stuff page. And finally added some permanent links to what I fondly imagine to be more interesting stuff, under the photo.

So that’s about it. There are a few other changes and little fixes I want to make over the coming days, and then when it’s all settled down I need to make the leap to version 2 of Expression Engine. Hopefully nobody will notice.  If indeed there is anybody to notice.

Then maybe I’ll get on to actually adding some content.