Working with the Mamiya Press 6x9

I love old cameras. Usually I prefer to shoot medium format film, and always in black and white. Ebay is a great place to find old cameras, and if you know what you're looking for you can also get some great deals. Recently I purchased a Mamiya Press View 6 x 9 camera. With 120 size film I can get eight images per roll. When I first attempted to load film into the camera I followed procedures similar to other medium format cameras, but the spacing between the frames was really messed up. I then took another roll of film and experimented exposing the film, re-rolling it, and exposing it again several times until I could see the pattern of how the camera worked. I discovered several little quirks about the camera, So I made a short video to explain exactly how to load this type of film back.

Once I managed to load the camera correctly it was really fun to photograph things. This particular camera has a rangefinder. When you look through the viewfinder there is a smaller square in the middle of the few that is amber colored. As you focus the camera the Amber Square Will show a different image then the image at large, And by matching up the two images the subject is in focus. No autofocus on this camera! There is also no automatic winder or shutter activation. Every time you wish to take an image you have to activate the shutter and check the shutter speed and aperture to see that they match whatever measurements you have taken. There's also a dark slide on the phone back that has to be removed before you can take pictures… However, you can click to shutter without removing the dark side and that would result in no image. Another complication is that when you activate the shutter you can then take a picture that process is separate from advancing the film, so you could possibly advance the film over and over again without taking a picture or in like fashion you could taken several photos on a single frame of film. If you wish one exposure on one frame you need to concentrate on advancing the film, activating the shutter and exposing that frame, and immediately advancing to the next frame. It's a lot of manual steps, and it's easy to mess it up and double expose of frame or advance of frame thinking you've taken a picture when you haven’t?

So, in talking to students about this process of using film cameras instead of digital there is a consensus that it is much more complicated and much slower. There is less of a consensus on whether that's good or not? I'm going to come down on the side that it's great to take time to be deliberate and create images that are thoughtful and intentional. In the digital age it's so easy to shoot lots and lots of images, but that's no guarantee that any of them will be good! Shooting with film cameras is a useful discipline to help train your photographic vision. Often there is no autofocus, sometimes there isn’t even a built-in light meter, and the number of images on one roll of film is quite limited. Taking a lot of bad images can never add up to one good image, and yes, it is possible to miss photos because of how much slower it is to operate a film camera. I have chosen to use film cameras whenever possible for the sheer joy of it! And this old Mamiya 6 x 9 is certainly fun!

Street Photography in Songkhla, Thailand

A lot has been written about street photography. There are a great many interpretations of what makes or is included in good street photography. It is my hope that images in this genre will capture the essence of daily life. Perhaps even a glorification of the common, or as Aaron Copland the composer entitled to one of his pieces, “fanfare for the common Man.” While I teach my students to look for strong graphic compositions that easily capture the attention of a viewer, my street photography tends to be more inclusive and have an almost theatrical quality. In the past critics of my work labeled my street photography as “Peoplescapes”, and sometimes I believe that is an accurate description. It is my goal to show the glory of daily life as an emotional evocation of nostalgia and respect for the simple life. During spring break we visited the Southern Thailand town of Songkhla. Every evening the market that lines the road to and from the ocean is a vibrant market where local folks can shop and pick up some dinner on the way home. The images below are from one of those evenings. I hope they represent the relaxed and comfortable lifestyle of that quiet seaside community.

Jalan Alor Map

Dinner at Jalan Alor

These days "Street photography" has become a popular genre. However, I feel like anyone wanting to take on the task of becoming a street photographer must have a few rules to live by. The number one guiding principle should be respect. Respect for the people you're photographing, respect for their privacy if they want it, and respect for the environment around you. As a photographer, I never feel that I need to steal a photograph. If someone doesn’t want their photo taken, just move on in search of the next opportunity. Also, I don’t really blend in too much, but I don’t get in the way either. I try to move quietly, slowly and deliberately in a way that does not draw attention to myself, yet is not sneaky. Every photographer has their own perspective on life, the meaning of images, and the purpose of photographing. My hope is that my images elevate the common by recording the simple and prevalent attractiveness of daily life. The American composer, Aaron Copland, wrote “Fanfare for the Common Man” as a tribute to the workers who built and farmers who fed our nation. There is a lot of photography out there of the darker side of the human experience. I do not wish to add to that body of work. As a buddhist monk once said to me in Thailand while I was working on my street photography project there, “The world is full of misery, this is not news to anyone. What we really want to know is if there is a reason for hope?” So, at the risk of sounding pollyannaish, I hope my photo will will be positive and portray the best in people and places.

Last Friday a group of us from the photo class took film cameras to one of the famous night food streets here in Kuala Lumpur, Jalan Alor. The street is packed with all sorts of vendors. Their are plenty of seafood restaurants, a place for you can get almost anything on a stick, the famous and controversial durian fruit, as well as typical consumer items (fake luxury goods). Jalan Alor can seem like a tourist trap, but in fact the food is wonderful, diverse, and plentiful, while prices are only a little higher then street food other places.  It was a great place for dinner and an interesting place for street photography.

For this photo shoot I chose to use the Mamiya 7 medium format camera with a 65mm ƒ4 lens. The film was the Ilford Delta 3200 120mm film. I shot using ISO 1600. Some of the photos were hand held, but most of them were taken with the camera mounted on a tripod. For example, the group shot of all the kids (not the one at the table) was taken while the camera was on the tripod, with a shutter speed of 1 second. I took two images, and one was clearly sharper than the other... but the kids did hold still for the long exposure!

Night Photography in Kuala Lumpur

Into the Night 

by Paul S. Ubl

Being a photographer often requires a certain anonymity. Some have called photographers voyeurs.  In point of fact we are observers of light, shape, pattern and behaviour.  At night our ability to stand in the shadows, to be outside the action, or simply be unobserved can be an enhancement to our work as photographers. At night everything takes on a different appearance. During the day everything is washed with the bright light from the sky. The entire observable heaven is a light source. At night the only light is the light we create. It shines as far as it will and no farther. Thus, at night we are surrounded by darkness, with random areas of light. To be a successful night photographer I would suggest two concepts. 

First, there is always light. If you keep your camera on a tripod you can open the shutter for as long as you want. One time I left my camera open for 4 hours while photographing a night landscape in Alaska. It would be hard to do that in a city! 

Second, most good night photography is done where there is light! I know this sounds contrary, but when photographing markets or street scenes the areas are usually well lit. This is why subjects look so interesting. The subjects are in the light while the area in general is dark.

Here are some contact prints of a night shoot if KL infrastructure. I was using my Mamiya 7 with ISO 400 black & white film.

For this photo shoot I was trying to record the grand infrastructure of the city. Sometimes it appears ominous and imposing while other times busy and bright and full of activity. We stumbled upon a highway overpass in that was complete but not open to traffic. We parked  in the car end wandered, with all our equipment in tow, to the top of the overpass above several busy roads. The view of the city was beautiful in that area and was well lit with traffic lights and commercial activity. It was strange to be in the middle of a forbidden space without the fear of being there. We could stand in the middle of the road, sit along the median, wander back and forth, and simply take all the time we needed to observe from any angle without a single worry about traffic. It was a very fortunate moment. About a week later the overpass was opened in the photographic experience we had would have been impossible at that location. Still, up there, above the traffic on this open expanse of road we talked about night photography, took photos from a variety of angles and after a few hours felt we had done some good work.

Night photography should not be mistaken for pictures of night. The successful photographer must look for light in the darkness. John Sexton has often said, “Light is the only subject!”  When photographing at night you must use the artificial light to create mood and shadow and composition. 

Here are some of my selected images:

Sunday Morning in Ipoh

Photography Field Trip to Ipoh

Teaching at an international school is a wonderful experience for variety of reasons not the least of which is the great sense of community. Recently, in a desire to provide my photography students with a new experience, I offered an early Sunday morning field trip to parents and students to go photograph the old part of Ipoh, here in Malaysia. It is about a 200 km drive from ISKL to the old quarter of Ipoh. We left school before 6 AM, and arrived at our destination while the light was still excellent. For the next hour and a half 22 of us wandered the streets looking for photographic opportunities. Many of the buildings are quite old, having been built nearly a century earlier. There are also many noodle shops, dim sum restaurants, and a variety of small markets. We ended up at one of the most famous dim sum restaurants, "Foh San", on Leong Sin Nam Road. For a wonderful blog about the top 10 dim sum restaurants in Ipoh, follow this link:

http://www.j2kfm.com/ipoh-famous-dim-sum-outlets/

On this trip I chose to shoot with a Mamiya C33 twin lens reflex camera. The camera takes 120 film, and with it you can get 12 images on a roll of film. This particular camera does not have a built-in light meter, so I used a program on my iPhone 5 called "pocket light meter". This great little application uses the meter in your phone camera to emulate a traditional handheld light meter. Even better, it will take a photograph of what you are metering and save it to your camera roll with all of the metering data attached in a sidebar. It's a little strange to use such a modern piece of technology to help make such an older piece of technology work well, but it really is a great effective use of software. There is a free version of this application, and a couple in-app opportunities to spend a little more to get rid of ads or donate to the developer. Here's a link with information about the app and a link to where the app can be downloaded from the app store:

http://www.pocketlightmeter.com

Now back to the photos of Ipoh. You can see from my contact print that I was a little bit torn between photographing architecture and photographing culture. In the end the culture won out, and I printed three images of individuals either getting ready to open their shops or preparing food. These small cafés, which often spill out onto the sidewalks, are some of the best reasons to visit southeast Asia. Sure, the food is wonderful, but these buildings and the surroundings, and the way the cooking stations and the tables are arranged are an endless source of fascination. There is a patina to everything that indicates decades of patronage. These places have history! I don't necessarily know what the specific histories are for these places, but I know that it comes through in the photographs. The food at Foh San Dim Som is really great, but a few years ago the owners either tore down the old restaurant, or relocated to a modern two-level facility. They can seat a lot of people both upstairs and down, and they're always crowded, but it doesn't have that same sense of history. Most of the places are small, and with a group of three or four you can easily find a table, but with our group of 22, we really needed the larger establishment.


Images created with the twin lens reflex camera also have the look of a certain era in photography. The square format with all of its edge detail unique to each camera, the slight amount of guesswork needed because of parallax (the difference in view through the top lens and photographing through the bottom), all place the images within a certain timeframe in the development of photography. Modern digital tools try to emulate that look and feel, but creating it with film and film cameras is quite special. For this series of three images I chose to print on Ilford multigrade portfolio paper with a pearl finish. For a non-fiber base paper it has remarkable depth of tone and is able to render shadow and highlight details with good separation.

I would classify these photos as "street photography", and my goal was to capture natural, normal looking  "people scapes". This is a term several critics have used to describe my street photography. The idea is that the picture represents an entire scene not just a portrait or close-up. When Ansel Adams took his large 8 x 10 view camera off into the wilderness to photograph the great landscapes of nature, those were not intimate portraits of nature, a grandiose and majestic views. In some small way I hope that my landscapes of the urban environment show a majestic pride among the common and evoke the sentiment of composer Aaron Copeland's "fanfare for the common man." I want the viewer to find beauty in the everyday common experiences of the people around them, and I hope by photographing these scenes to separated them from the mundane and elevate them to visually uniqueness. When we take the time to notice the patterns built up around the normal work lives of regular people, those patterns sometimes contain beauty. Years of thought about efficiency and convenience make things the way they are, and the casual glance can never reveal what a single photograph captures for later study. Sometimes I almost feel desperate to capture the moment before it is lost! What a silly sentiment since all moments are lost except the few that we capture in the still frame. Yet even those are an interpretation. Once many years ago, in a conversation with late fashion photographer, Richard Avedon, he reminded me, "every one of your photos is a self-portrait". So these urban people-scapes are a portrait of me because I value their unique mix of complexity and simplicity, and I hope to dignify them through my choice to preserve their lives on film.

Film Processing

Processing black-and-white film: 

A New Method for Traditional Results

This text is an outline of what my photography students do in my classes, and is an excerpt from my book "Photo 1", an iPad textbook available on iTunes at this link:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/photo-1/id510252720?mt=11

• Pre-Soak 1-3 min.

The steps are pretty simple and the chemicals are easy-to-use as long as you follow the instructions. The first thing you need to do is turn on the water and let it run for a minute so that the temperature isn't too hot or cold. Then fill up the film tank, agitate, and let it sit for the next minute or two while you mix the developer. The standard temperature to use is 20C or 68F for all your chemicals.

• Film Developer - 20-40 min.: (Mix 1:2 - one part developer to two parts water and use once. Discard after use). Agitate briefly about every five minutes.

Getting consistent results is important, so I like to use a weaker dilution of developer and only use it once and discard the mixed solution. In the past, people would sometimes use developer without mixing it with water, and use it many times. This would cause the developer to get weaker over time with somewhat unpredictable results. I prefer to use developer mixed one part developer to two parts water. This weaker dilution allows for a slower more compensated development. (I will explain compensation development in a moment.) Thus, the weaker developer can be used one time and discarded. Every time you develop film you can use developer of exactly the same dilution and consequently, the same development strength. This consistency allows for more predictable results.

Now about compensation development: When I was in high school I used to go down to the Anchorage daily news in Anchorage, Alaska, and work with the chief photographer. I was a high school student with time on Saturdays and holidays, and chief photographer was generous enough to take me under his wing. We would go out for the day and take pictures, but when we returned to the newsroom there was always a whirlwind of activity. We had to process our film quickly. We used strong developer and short times to get the film processed, dry, and proofed in about 45 min. Then we would rush out to the editor with the contact prints for him to quickly make a selection of images to be printed for tomorrow's newspaper. Time was always of the essence. Quality imaging was second to information. These photos were for tomorrow's paper and then on to the recycle bin…

At the same time, photographers like Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Irving Penn, Minor White and others were more interested in fine arts photography. They were shooting with sheet film and using protracted processing methods to ensure maximum tonal quality. They would use tray development to allow the negatives to soak without agitation in a tray of water after a brief time in a tray developer. This soak time would allow the negative’s shadows to catch up with the highlights. Thus the term “compensation development.”

So,while not strictly compensation development, I started to realize that excellent results could happen with roll film if I just agitated less and let the film tank sit for long periods of time. Instead of processing the film for 8 to 12 min. I change my development time to 20 or 30 min. Agitation would happen every 5 min., but I wasn't too strict about it. The results for my students were amazing. The negatives were richer, easier to print, and possessed beautiful tonal quality. This is why the instructions I give for processing film do not follow those norm usually found in textbooks.

• Stop Bath - 1 Min.: (Do not mix, but use straight from the bottle. Do not throw it away. Save it to the original bottle when finished)

After the film developer you can throw away the developer and filled the tank with stop bath. This is a simple acidic acid solution which is very dilute. However, it is still strong enough to burn off any of the developer still in contact with the film. Development is thus “stopped”. A little agitation and at least 30 seconds in the solution will be enough for the stop bath to be effective. Stop bath often contains an indicator which means it will change color when it is no longer effective. Because of this, save the stop bath in its original bottle and do not pour it out. It can be used for quite a long time.

• Fixing - 5 min.: (do not mix, but use straight from the bottle. Do not throw away. Return it to it's original bottle when you're finished) 

Fixer is a stronger chemical, but it is still dilute. The purpose of the fixer is to wash the film with an acid bath that both cleans off any unused silver from the emulsion while at the same time chemically etching the used silver into the plastic base. When you are finished with the fixer you can see your image on the film. It is finished, but you have to remove all of the acid from the film to preserve the negatives. I have a chemical called hypo check which allows me to put a drop into the bottle of fixer to see if it's still good or not. If the fixture is used up a precipitant will form and the fixer is no longer effective. Because of this, please do not throw away the fixer, but save it in the original bottle when you are done.

After the fixer, the film is light safe and the lid may be taken off the tank. You should rinse the film briefly before moving onto the next chemical. This will get rid of most of the fixer residue and allow the final chemical, hypo clear, to do it's job better.

• Hypo clear - 2 min.: (use this chemical straight from the bottle without dilution. Return to the second hypo clear bottle when you're finished.)

Hypo clear chemically neutralizes the acid in contact with the film. This is really important, because without it you can rinse for a long time and still not have perfectly clean film. With hypo clear you can move on the your final rinse and wash your film for about 5 min. and be confident that it is clean and acid-free and ready to dry.

After the hypo clear the film needs to be rinsed for 5 min. in running water. This can be under a tap in the original film tank, or you can remove the film reels from the tank and put them in a film washer. After the final rinse the film is ready to hang up and try. If there are a lot of minerals in your water you can use photo flow to clean the film before you hang it. Photo Flo is a very weak detergent that is mixed with lots of water to create a solution for the film to be dipped in before hanging. Film that has been dipped in the Photo Flo will dry clean and without water spots. Do not rinse your film after Photo Flo, just hang it up and let the water and bubbles drip off…

I have a film drying closet where the film can hang and dry without dust and dirt. If there is a lot of foot traffic around your film, you will need to find a way to isolate it in a closet or covering of some kind so that it can dry without becoming dusty. Anything that comes in contact with the emulsion side of your film while it's drying will become embedded in the emulsion and be there as a permanent flaw. 

It takes about two hours for film to dry. There is a strong temptation to look at your film right away, but just wait for it to dry so it doesn’t get damaged!