Oops! If you visited here between 9am and 2.30pm today (Saturday) you may have seen this photo with “blah blah” written underneath it – a scheduling mix up with WordPress meant a placeholder was inadvertently published before I had even written the post, so apologies for that!
Like many Dublin-based photographers, I spent a few hours on Wednesday morning photographing the parade, and did so from an open top bus parked on Parnell Square. There were photographers to my left and right, and we all happily snapped away as the parade made its way past. There was the usual mix of Nikon and Canon cameras, a Sony or Fuji thrown in too, and a few point-and-shoots. I was amused though by the contrast between the photographers to my immediate left and right. On my left was a photographer using two 34-year-old Nikon film cameras, and on my right was a photographer capturing images in 3D. It was like I was sandwiched between two extremes of the world of photography. And it set me thinking about the challenges both of them must have faced during their shoot.
Before I get to that, I have a little bit of news regarding the blog. I found out last night that this blog is one of five finalists in the Best Photo Blog category of the Irish Blog Awards 2010. I’m thrilled with that, and owe a big thank you to the judges and the category sponsor - pix.ie. About 50 photoblogs were initially nominated for the category, so to get to the final five is a real treat. The winner is announced next Saturday night, so fingers crossed!
Anyway, back to the photograph above, which I took specifically to show the contrast between the two types of photography (or I suppose three, if you include my own use of digital to create 2D images). Indeed it struck me that the three of us could have been viewed as representing the past, present and future of photography. I don’t think that’s quite accurate – film is a long way from dying out and 3D images will never (I suspect) become the norm for photography. But the three of us, standing on that bus photographing the parade, would have been an interesting case study for a photographic historian.
Each of us faced challenges related to the equipment we were using. I think realistically mine were the least likely to intrude on how I took photographs that day. Yes, I needed to watch the ISO I was using to keep noise levels down, and I needed to ensure there was no dust on my sensor to stop big out of focus blobs from ruining my images, and I needed to ensure that my memory card didn’t get full at the wrong moment. But these really weren’t big asks.
My neighbour on the left had a tough gig – it transpired that he owned two Nikon D3x cameras (top of the range digital SLRs) which, through circumstances he couldn’t control, were in Roscommon that day so he dug out two old film cameras and picked up a stack of film on a 3-for-2 offer in Boots. It was his first time shooting film in many years. I wasn’t jealous of the fact that he wasn’t able to review what he was capturing as he took shots, nor of the fact that he had to change film (without exposing the new one to excessive light) every 36 shots. I would probably be jealous of the quality of the images – the colour and grain that only film can offer – if I was to see the end result, but not of the possibility that everything would come back from the lab (or after hours of his own time in the darkroom) at the wrong exposure or out of focus.
On the right, the guy who was shooting in 3D probably had more technical issues to overcome later than me or my film-shooting neighbour. He had some to overcome at the time of shooting too of course – to get 3D images right he was required to take two images at the same time of the same scene with the cameras offset by roughly the distance between a human’s two eyes. He was dealing with this by using a bracket to keep the cameras mounted the required distance apart (mounting one camera upside down so that he could achieve that distance), and by firing both shutters from a single external control which he had wired to both cameras. However if he wanted to zoom he had to manually zoom both cameras to the same setting – and if he got that wrong it would be “game over” in relation to creating 3D images. And in terms of composition and framing his images it must have been hit and miss regarding what would make for an effective 3D image and what wouldn’t. In post-processing he would have an additional layer of things to worry about – processing both images the same, compensating for the slight variations between the two images that the cameras would inevitably introduce as they wrote out JPEG files, and of course the technical aspect of creating the 3D images.
His setup suggested that he was going to apply the “old-fashioned” approach to 3D, where each image is coloured red or green in post-processing and viewed using glasses with the same colour gels. Effectively you end up with a monochrome image, unlike the more modern approach that 3D cinemas now take which uses polarizers to maintain colour. If this was to be his approach this use of this older technology for actually creating and viewing the 3D image could be viewed as a nod to the past as well as to the future, but I don’t know enough about the mechanics of creating 3D images to be sure that he wasn’t actually going down the polarized image route – and I sadly didn’t get a chance to discuss it with him.
I suppose the thing that strikes me most about all of this is that, whatever equipment you use, be it tried and tested or cutting edge, there will always be challenges to overcome, technical issues to deal with, creative avenues to explore, and an element of the unknown in terms of what photographs you are going to come away with. But isn’t that all part of the fun?
Another great post Ronan, best of luck for the awards, if there’s any justice….