Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Back, but Busy

Yes, I'm still alive and back from Tokyo, but really rather busy right now so I've let the blog posting slip. Expect normal programming to resume in another week or so.

Meanwhile, you could do much worse than check out this short photo essay from BBC about a Bangladeshi ID picture photographer still using the same huge, juryrigged camera he's had for almost sixty years.

As a technical note, what he does is take a picture not on film, but on to photographic paper. He develops that paper directly in the camera - part of the reason the camera is so large is that he's got small bowls or trays with developer and fixer in there, and just sticks his hand in and develops it blind. The negative print is then contact-copied onto another paper, developed again and you have the positive, finished image. By redoing the contact copy he can make multiple prints of the same image. As it's all contact-copying, with no enlargement involved at any step, he's probably getting pretty good-quality images too.

Me, I'm thinking I should try to build a similar setup sometime.

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