Many of you might not know this, but I actually write for two blogs. My second blog has, as a rather modest subject, me! Anyway that’s not important.

What is important is that I want to give away something to somebody to whom it might mean a lot or for whom it’s a dream which is hard to reach. You can guess what it is from the image. I’m giving away a parachute jump. Anyone can apply and there are no rules or fine print. So if you’re interested. Read on:

http://gadandsexy.blogspot.nl/2013/05/pass-it-forward-yes-im-giving-something.html

Thanks

Footwear Legends

I came across our anonymous photographer while working on a project. She didn’t announce herself as a photographer but while talking to her I was struck by her keen inside into street work and photography in general. I asked her if she does any work of her own and she told be about Footwear Legends. While most street photographers would focus on scenes at eye level this project differentiates itself by diving all the way down and find character in peoples footwear and legs.

The project according to our photographer:

“The project dates back to the summer of 2012. I was on a Paris metro, which was so crowded that there was no choice but to lower your eyes or else breath into the back of someone’s head. As soon as I started practicing this habit, I saw a completely different, parallel city scene. I’ve never paid so much attention to peoples feet before. I noticed the different shapes of toes seen through open toe shoes, and then of course I started to explore shoe design and the splendor of colors.
A few months after I tried on Spanish vintage boots, bought for a ridiculous amount of money in a second hand shop, I’v never felt so sexy. Unfortunately, they weren’t mine. But those two events culminated into my new passion, footwear. As told by somebody, who shortly before had no clue who Christian Louboutin or Jimmy Choo are. However this is not about brands, it’s about people who decorate their legs and make steps which I want to capture. I call them Footwear Legends.“

From the get go I completely adored this project. Flipping through the Tumbler stream of images you’ll discover an amazing amount of diversity. From down right erotic too funny and interesting. Apparently we say a lot more with how we adorne the the lower extremity of the leg then we realize. Our anonymous photographer gets around so expect to see a wide a wide plethora of cultures getting around and becoming Footwear Legends.

I’d say that this project deserves our support and attention, so check it out and/or follow at the addresses bellow.

http://footwearlegends.tumblr.com/

http://www.facebook.com/FootwearLegends

I’ll be following this project closely and post any updates on it in the future. Thanks to our anonymous photographer for the text and image attached to this post.

After having it on my to-buy list for a couple of years I finally went ahead and got the Epson R2880. The initial reason I wanted one was to print better quality digital negatives for my Vandyke brown process. However I did a couple of really nice shoots in the past month so I thought why not actually make a really nice black and white print on proper paper and see what I could end up with. A quick trip to the photography store where I went completely nuts and bought 10 sheets of Ilford Gold Fiber Silk A3+ paper, which set me back about 50 bucks. You might think that just going to a lab and having them print your image is way cheaper, and you would be right, however in my experience they usually don’t manage to make proper black and white prints. When you do have a lab that’s able to do so you usually want them to print samples first and then decide. That means a lot of driving to and fro and still not really being in control of the process. In short I much prefer to just do it all myself.

So with my nice box of paper under my arm I headed home. I spend a week looking at my photos deciding which would be best to print. While processing photos in the back of my mind I dove into books and posts to figure out how to get the most out of the printer but also how to not waste a piece of paper that costs 5 bucks.

In the end I went with the experience I have printing negatives and the ICC paper profile from Ilford. I double checked my print for details that might not be so obvious on screen but would stick out like a sore thumb on a print. I zoomed in at a 100% print size and went over the photo inch by inch. We’re talking here about a 21 megapixel file at 300dpi so I took my time doing this.

After I was satisfied with all the details I did some extra sharpening and decided to open up a levels adjustment layer in photoshop and set my black out put to 5 instead of zero. Now this isn’t strictly necessary when working with profiles but this image has a lot of blacks in it and I felt that on semi glossy reflective material the blacks at this level would be black enough.

Alright next step. I loaded up the color profile from the Ilford site into photoshop, I’m not going into the details on that as the documentation on the Ilford site is perfect and the ICC profiles are very easy to find, kudos to Ilford on that one.

So here we go. I always resize my prints myself and never let the printer software do it, I’d recommend that you do the same. Often times it’s best to let your printer manage color but using the Gold Fiber Silk profile I didn’t go that route this time. I let photoshop manage color, and selected the Ilford Gold Fiber Silk profile from the drop down list. Next step was to set color matching to Relative and of course, send 16-bit data to the printer. I generally avoid printing in 8-bit mode, I feel it’s much safer for nice gradations when you just opt for 16-bit. If you have the information why throw it away, right?

Alright, next step is to also in your printer configure dialog to setup photoshop to manage colors (anything but colorsync). When you accidentally forget this photoshop will detect that you fumbled up your color settings so don’t worry.

Now this is very important, printing on fiber paper even if it isn’t glossy it’s very important to:

1. Have your photo black cartridge loaded (you can exchange them as long as  you put the cartridge you removed in a sealed plastique bag).
2. Set the paper type in the printer config to Epson Premium Glossy.

Really make sure that you have those 2 points setup correctly.

Okay moving on to things-I-do-because-they-make-me-feel-good. While still being in the printer dialog I set the Epson R2880 to print with Super Photo 5760dpi (so highest quality). Then I switch off fast printing, almost everyone leaves this switch on, however I’m not in a hurry and I like to give the ink some extra time to dry before it roles out, dust is our mortal enemy in printing.

So last step is to clean my printer and the space around it with a very soft lightly moist cloth to remove any dust that might fall onto my print (yeah I know I go a bit nuts, but I have had instances where I had to reprint because of this).

So after hitting print it was waiting for the first stroke of the print to pop out so I could judge it. If I don’t like what I see I can hit cancel and save ink, the rest of the paper I would then use to test print settings. However in this case that wasn’t necessary at all, I could immediately see that the blacks were really black and didn’t have any color fringing going on when gradating to lighter grays. With the biggest smile on my face I just waited for the rest of the print to finish.

Am I such a brilliant printer? No, I’m not. Without getting any money from Ilford for saying this, but the reason I got such a wonderful print on the first go is because they did their work properly! Ilford provides seriously perfect color profiles for their papers and there’s nothing in my article about printing to it that you can’t read in their documentation. In short they did a really superb job.

And of course the lovely Epson R2880 with Epsons K3 inks. Especially for the money they go for these days you just can’t go wrong with it.

Okay it took me some time to figure this one out. Turnout that there’re Holga’s with a working sunny/cloudy switch and there’re Holga’s where it doesn’t change the F-stop at all. The rule to this is actually fairly simple, if you have a glass lens Holga (the GN) you really do have 2 F-stop settings, the plastic lens Holga’s have one F-stop setting and changing the little nob to cloudy or sunny won’t change a thing. For me at least, mystery solved

Go check it out! Lot’s of new work

Theodoor Thomas Photography.

For the first time since a year and a half I developed a film again. I had the honor to develop the now discontinued film Fuji Neopan 400, which is an amazing black and white film.

It was as though I never stopped, the measuring of chemicals the smell of fixer and the ticking of the clock. I know Meatlove sang about “paradise by the dashboard light”, but I seem to find it by a bunch of highly toxic photo chemicals.

I’m not going to turn this into a rant against digital; my film is hanging to dry and one remains decent around a lady. I just want to say, film I love you and you’ll always have a devoted follower in me.

Yours truly,

Theodoor Thomas

(Update 22-04-2013: The article bellow describes using the back with the GN glass lens Holga)

Yesterday I finally got my Holgaroid back in the mail, it traveled all the way from Hong Kong to my doorstep in The Netherlands. Opening the box it came with the back (without film) and a diopter lens to correct for the new film plane distance as with the instant back that moves a couple of millies backwards. It also comes with a new frame you can click into your holga instead of the 6×6 or 6×4.5 But let me first start of with 2 questions and their simple answers.

Q: Polaroid doesn’t make film anymore so why would I want one?

A: Correct they don’t but FujiFilm does and since instant film is still used in science labs they won’t stop making it tomorrow.

Q: I never shot instant film and I have no clue what film to use?

A: Fuji Film sadly discontinued there ISO 400 color and black and white film which would have been perfect for the Holgaroid. But fear not we have tricks up our sleeves! So there are 3 films still available

1. FujiFilm FP-100C Professional. Which is an ISO 100 color film
2. FujiFilm FP-3000B. Which is a ISO 3000 Black and white film
3. FujiFilm FP-100C Silk. Also a ISO 100 film but with a satin finish

Metering and Corrections

Okay, let me start of with the simplest mod you can do. You ready? here it goes: Don’t install the new frame! Now that was easy. Alright I’ll tell you why. Holgaroids can’t do full frame FP film size so your image will always land on the left side of the film when viewed horizontally. The reason is that the Holga lens can’t cover the entire frame (the Diana lens can here is a guide how), so you get a round feathered image. Now I don’t care too much about the round feathered image but I really didn’t like the fact is was round and feathered on one side and a straight line on the other. The straight cut off is caused by the frame they give you with it. Just don’t install the frame and it all looks even.

One of the first things I started sweating and stressing out about is how to figure out what to set my light meter to now. Usually you can get away with using an ISO 400 film and applying the sunny 16 rule, if it’s clouded all you do is throw it in flash/clouded mode and you can continue. You can’t use your Holga this way anymore!
When you move your film plain back it will effect your f-stop, when you stick something in front of your lens less light reaches the film plain. See the problem here? The Holgaroid does both… On top of that we only get to choose between 100 ISO film and 3000 ISO film. If we had a 400 ISO film we could have gotten away with only shooting on high noon and the camera set on it’s couldy/flash setting, but we don’t have that.

ISO 100 Film

All isn’t lost! And to be honest in some ways it makes it even easier to shoot inside. Let me explain. So we loose a whole load of light due to the Holgaroid mod, then we load it up with ISO 100 film which is also less sensitive. Because you’re loosing so much light you can now actually count the seconds! The only thing you need is a tripod (and I would get the cable release mod as well, I have it and it works very well).

Here’s how it work. Grab a light meter and set your Holga to the cloudy/flash setting. Normally that would make your Holga work on F16. I know there are a lot of posts out there that say it’s F8, they’re wrong, sorry. Anyway due to the new distance of the film plain and the diopter lens, that turns out to be F32 now How’s that for crazy! Set your lightmeter to ISO 100 and keep cycling the shutter speed until the display says the F-stop is 32. In side on a cloudy day next to the window that will give you a shutter of 2 seconds more or less. Easy to count no problem. So that takes care of the ISO color film. Let’s move on to the ISO 3000 film.

ISO 3000 Film

So this is cute, mega sensitive film! But now it will over expose on a sunny day in the Holgaroid and still under expose inside. Worse still it will just underexpose a bit inside which means we can’t use a cable release as the shutter will be n’th of a second and we can’t really count that.

Okay lets go with outside first. The solution is really easy. When you get to much light at 100th of a second (the shutter speed of the Holga) make sure you get less light. You can go about this by just using an ND filter but why not use a cheap black and white color filter, they eat up light as well and you get to be a little bit more creative. Usually a stop or 2 on a sunny day with that camera on sunny setting is really more then enough. Red filters tend to eat away just that. If you don’t have a red filter that fits your Holga you can also just get a cheap gel. It really doesn’t matter much as the Holga doesn’t have a high quality lens anyway and lets be honest if you want images like that you’d probably not be shooting with a Holga to begin with.

Inside the same trick works but I’d use a ND filter, you want to get in to the second(s) range again so you can count of your own exposure time. Pretty straight forward really.

Flash

Flash with the Holgaroid works well when you want some fill flash and/or fixing people into place. I use an external flash for this as I seriously doubt that the build in Holga flash is strong enough to do even that (I own a flash less model so this is pure speculation on my part). You have to experiment a bit with flash to see what it does for you. But I can already tell you if you don’t have something like a mega flash unit but rather a simple hot shoe flash just start by giving it two flash exposures and see what you get.

Conclusion

I realize that instant film isn’t the cheapest thing out there so I imagine that at the price of a Holgaroid and the cost in figuring these things out, most people just decide to skip this project all together. However it’s a lot of fun and often the results are really wonderful. So if you’re considering getting one and you’re reading this I’d say go for it! With the information supplied here I’ve saved you a pack of film it cost me about 10 shot to get all exposures and numbers figured out.

If you want to support polaroid and instant film have a look at http://www.polaroidconversions.com/ as long as there’s a community and a healthy user base we can keep having fun with this.

Women by Bas Adriaans

This rather generic, but aptly, named book by Bas Adriaans saw the light of day 4 months ago. Back then I gave it some attention on this blog with a short description and a link to Blurb where you can preview and buy the book. However I would like to give a bit more background information on how this book came to be, it so happens that I had the privilege of being a close observer of the blood, sweat and maybe even tears, that made Women what it is today. I’ve seen many preliminary versions of the book, different formats, shapes and sizes. When finally he decided on the photographs he spend months tinkering with the order in which they had to appear in the book.

But who is Bas Adriaans? A little excerpt from the book.

“Commercial and fine art photographer Bas Adriaans (1971, Eindhoven) is already an Interior Design graduate when he is accepted into the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague to study photography. His zeal for the medium does not go unnoticed. Before long he is offered a select opportunity to assist acclaimed Dutch photographers Jan Zwart, Bert Teunissen, Gerrit Schreurs and Johan Vigeveno. After he completes his formal training in 1997 he enters the professional sphere and finds his commercial portfolio growing steadily with a diverse range of editorial, advertising and corporate assignments.

Throughout he continues his conceptual explorations of the female form which have since become part of an impressive series of fine art nudes.”

As the text reads Women comes forth of the above mentioned conceptual exploration. I know Bas Adriaans to live and breath his passion for the female form in photography. When talking to him he’ll regularly mention his latest discoveries and thoughts on the subject. A lot of women in the book he boldly approached on the street, politely expressing his interest and presenting them with a business card and a link to his portfolio. He treats his subjects with respect and has been known to stand in the kitchen himself to prepare lunch before the start of the shoot. However when the shoot starts it’s business, this is where his zeal truly shows, he expects the best of himself but also from his models.

The book shows some of his best work, often sensitive and beautiful but at times erotic and enticing. The angel dressed in a delicate white shirt revealing just the rounding of her bosom, the anonymous details that hint toward a fetish. What on one page is carefully concealed is revealed in detail on the next. One thing you’ll notice is that Bas Adriaans stays away from full nudes or portraying the female genitalia. He hints but never fully reveals.

Women by Bas Adriaans is available in three versions softcover, hardcover with dust jacket and printed hardcover. As mentioned the book is available through Blurb which means only a limited part of the proceedings go to the artist, which is a shame considering the amount of work that went into this publication. However if we buy enough of them we might get Bas Adriaans to do Women Part 2, who knows.

Order your copy or preview

If you want to know more about Bas Adriaans you can find his portfolio at http://basadriaans.com

Rapture

Rob Verbunt a recent graduate of the Academy of Photography in The Netherlands. Graduated with his project Rapture. By his own description:

Rapture shows an intimate series of images about being enraptured, achieving or passing borders and the thin line between appropriate and inappropriate, pleasure or displeasure.
In Rapture, living the images while shooting, was as important as to publish them. To enhance the imagery of the theme, pinhole photography, long exposure times and the mixing of light with different color temperatures were being used.

His choice for equipment and lighting complements the idea of the project very well. Flowing lines and soft shapes erotic in nature while at the same time in darkness seems to suggest to some forbidden fruit. As still often in our society our automatic response is one of disapproval when something feels too good or when – being enraptured.

His work reminded me of Magnum photographer Antoine d’Agata and in particular his Stigma project. Where the work of Antoine d’Agata on Stigma is confronting and at times harsh, then Rapture is much easier to relate to and kinder on the soul.

More project information and the photographs can be found on http://fairbuns.nl his official website.

Women, an overview of 15 years of portrait and nude’s by Photographer Bas Adriaans. It’s available now for order on Blurp.

Preview or get your copy: http://www.blurb.com/books/3590226