I have a love of design – be it print, product, architecture – and as a practicing designer I have a very strong view of what I like. I like my design to me minimal yet authoritative, perfectly set typography does it for me and furniture design needs to be minimal, classic and functional. “So what?” you may ask.  Well, at first I was too busy following set rules that I missed the fact that my landscape images should just be another part of my creative design process; my images should hold the same values as the other design processors I’m so passionate about. So, after a year or so of sunset chasing, I put away my bucket and spade, stopped visiting the seaside at sun up and start hacking away at my own creative path.

If the seaside was going to be reserved for holidays, what do do? I started exploring my local path, the Peak District. I knew I didn’t want to be turning out wide angle views of the ‘edges’ as is the norm so I started exploring the less noticed elements; the grasses and the trees.

I’ve had a love of trees for as long as I can remember, as a child I used to play for hours on “Church Field” opposite my house: an overgrown no-mans-land, making dens in the trees and dams in the steam which was shrouded in scatty looking greenery. I spent days exploring my local Wollaton park, home to many a fine tree. The football team I’ve supported all my life even have a tree as a badge – it was all destined to happen!

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In the world of scanning there are three categories: the flatbed, the dedicted film scanner and the drum scanner. In recent years the only ‘pro’ scanner that you could buy new at a reasonable cost was the Epson V750: a flatbed that is capable of handling 35mm to 10×8 film. However it has always been the dedicated film scanner that has been the master at scanning medium format and 35mm film. The ‘gold standard’ is the Nikon 9000 (or 8000) but with no warranties or repair in sight these are becoming much rarer and good second hand units are now costing more than the original retail (the same is true of the Minolta Dimage Multi Pro).

Plustek announced a new competitor in this arena over a year ago, but it was only at the start of the year that units were getting into people’s hands. There is a decent thread on the scanner on the rangefinder forum.

I received the scanner last week and I won’t go into a box unpacking video as people have already done this. I also won’t be going through how Silverfast works as what people are really interested are the results – and again other people have looked at these in depth.

What I will be looking at is resolution, highlight and shadow quality, negative scanning, the film holders and speed of operation. Now most people wouldn’t be able to look at a single image of a scan and place the image quality’s place compared with other scanners. The only way to give a good indication of scanner quality is to show the same film scanned across a few different scanners. To this end we’ve scanned a range of film on a well calibrated Epson V750 and a Howtek 4500 drum scanner.

Resolution

Most people are interested in how much resolution can be extracted from their film originals. This is the equivalent to the megapixel race (the only difference being that you can always get your film original scanned on a better scanner sometime in the future). So how good is the Opticfilm 120?

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For many years a couple of Ebony models ruled the roost when it came to the top level of luxury in 5×4 field cameras. The two Ebony models bearing the magic designation of “U”, the 45SU and SV45U, were unique in that they offered asymmetric tilt and swing on the rear standard, something that was otherwise only found on some models of the bulky Sinar studio monorails.

It seems that asymmetric movements were originally devised to make life easier and quicker for studio work shooting products or tabletop work, but many landscape photographers toting the top-end Ebony models have found them to be pretty useful for getting set up quickly in changing light with a minimum of frustration. I’ll not go into an in-depth description of the advantages of asymmetric movements here but to keep it short it means that for many shots using tilt to increase apparent depth of field you don’t have to go through an iterative process of focusing, tilting, refocusing, tilting again, refocusing again, tilting again etc.

Ebony 45SU

The 45SU and SV45U quickly became the must-have 4×5 cameras for many working pros or well-heeled amateurs, despite the weight and cost penalty. Both models weight in at over 3kg and currently over £4,500 brand new, and second hand dealers currently want over £2.5k for a used camera. Among British photographers especially the 45SU was the model of choice for anyone who could afford it and/or justify its price, as undoubtedly the influence of Joe Cornish played a part in this, Joe being a 45SU owner for many years.

As an amateur, the 45SU always felt like one of those cameras you’d buy if you won the lottery, but as I don’t play the lottery I was resigned to never owning one. So I was quite happy with my “poverty” model, the short-bellows Ebony RSW45 which I’ll mention in passing during this review. For what its designed for, that is lenses up to 180mm, it is superb. Simple, exceptionally well made and easy to use, but still not cheap despite being the bottom-of-the-range model. The thought of shelling out a few grand to upgrade to a 45SU is quite a step, but it was the only way you’d ever get those asymmetric tilts……

Until now

On the largeformatphotography.info forum earlier this year Hugo Zhang, the public face of Chamonix cameras posted up that there would be a new 5×4 model of camera out this year. The posting initially boasted the camera would be yaw-free, which wouldn’t necessarily have interested me, but as it turned out they actually meant this new 045F1 model had asymmetric rear tilt. Now this really got my attention, as it is to my knowledge the first and only sub-£4,000 field camera to offer the photographer the comparative luxury of asymmetric tilts. I’d been toying with the ideal of getting a camera with longer bellows for a while, probably a Chamonix, so this addition of asymmetric tilts pushed me over the edge. The cost at the time of writing this is $1,030 plus $65 international postage, which seems a good deal given its only marginally more expensive than the standard 045N2 model.

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We’ve already discussed Sebastio Salgado’s Genesis exhibition, but this month also sees the release of 50 selected platinum prints also on display in London, at Phillips de Pury. As someone who prints with inkjet, silver and more recently alternate processes, including a recent start in platinum, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to view these exhibitions together on the same day. I have tried to approach it open minded, but realised the artisan in me couldn’t help but want the platinum images to be ‘better’.

So I joined the queue at the National History Museum before opening and went straight to the Genesis exhibition (another review here). This is a vast, epic exhibit, a real ‘blockbuster’ as I heard someone next to me remark. The images themselves focus on the natural world, encouraging us to reflect on our own lifestyles and our impact. Many images also feature indigenous peoples in their traditional dress. Salgado’s inkjets are large and printed hard, very black and white yet managing to retain just enough highlight and shadow detail to make the image sing. This was no display of subtlety in the mid values, this was high impact printing. Most images work perfectly, but a few I found too ‘overdone’ to my taste, with a hint of an HDR type look. The inkjets themselves, are printed on a gloss paper, so that the blacks are incredibly dense.

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With no rock outcrops or rain forests the task in London would appear to be particularly formidable. There are numerous parks, commons and heaths, many of which are absolutely lovely but they tend to be well cared for and have a manicured feel. Parts of Richmond Park and Hampstead Heath are slightly more unkempt, but they’re well photographed. That’s another criteria in this hypothetical challenge: to avoid standing where numerous other photographers have set their tripods.

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There are literally hundreds of books about composition out there and I think I’ve browsed or own most of them (my wife would probably say all of them) and there is one thing that is fairly consistent across them all and that is a surfeit of superficial platitudes. Very rarely does a book look beyond some of the generally accepted ‘rules’ or try to dig deeper into the reasons why some compositions work and some don’t.

© George Stocking

The other aspect is that most composition books are not targeted at landscape photography. Now you wouldn’t think this is a real problem but there is something special about landscape photography that makes composition such an important part. The typical landscape photograph (or painting) does not have an intrinsic narrative, unlike photojournalism, portraiture, sport, etc. The main tool a photographer has to engage with the viewer is composition. Yes there are definitely aspects of narrative through the use of animism or anthropomorphism (choosing scenes that suggest the objects have an animated spirit of some sort – e.g. the tree as a person; old man. etc.) but I think most people, especially most ‘romantic’ photographers, will agree that composition is one of the most important, if not the most important tool in a landscape photographer’s arsenal. As such, the best person to ask about pure composition is a landscape photographer/artist, perhaps closely followed by a proponent of still life.

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Can you tell me a little about your education, childhood passions, early exposure to photography and vocation?

As small boy I was surrounded by strange boxes of junk my dad would buy at auction for a quid a box. Aside from old radios and general detritus there would occasionally be a very old camera for which the old man would get some film. I would then set my toy dinosaurs into a makeshift garden diorama and photograph them in various stages of battle. Many years later when I was sixteen I attended Chesterfield Art College and used a darkroom for the first time. Seeing my first image appear in the developer was the moment, as it were. Even though I knew an image would appear I was still surprised when it did. It was really then that I knew what I wanted to do so I started a HND in photography at Leicester College and then completed a further 6 months study at the now sadly defunct Picture House. All these years later thankfully I’m still being surprised by photography

What are you most proud of in your photography?

Whatever I’m currently working on. Once a project is finished it’s finished and I want to move on. I find it increasingly difficult to look back at older work and still remember how I felt about it at the time. Retrospective revelations about what I was thinking can be fairly illuminating and may then influence the next set of photographs. Building upon old ideas and taking them somewhere else seems to have allowed an evolution to the work. Mentally I always feel six months behind each project. I make the photographs then work out why afterwards.

In most photographers lives there are ‘epiphanic’ moments where things become clear, or new directions are formed. What were your two main moments and how did they change your photography?

“Downgrading” to the Holga (toy camera with a fixed focal length plastic lens) was a fantastically liberating experience. The sudden absence of technology forced me to approach landscape photography in a completely different way. One shutter button and a focus ring that seemed to make no discernible difference no matter which way it’s twiddled offered a complete oneness with the subject matter in front of me. I found it was something I could apply to my other landscape work with relative ease after a while. The other revelation came from mostly shooting in fairly awful weather conditions. No sunshine or chocolate box photographs, not that I have anything against that type of photography but it just doesn’t interest me. The landscape is a tactile environment especially on a rainy or windy day. There’s so much more going on and the harder I have to work to get an image and the more I lose my sense of humour the more interesting the result seems to me. I want to have to work hard; it should never be easy.

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Now the logic behind the technique is the same and you can look at the previous article for my thoughts. In short, instead of setting the white and black point to neutral, it sets the points 10% away from both black and white as neutral because it’s the middle linear part of a film that has neutral colour, whereas the deep shadow and bright highlights tend to have colour casts.

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Click here to download issue 57

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It was my first visit to Iceland and after the first three days of depressingly incessant drizzle and grey mist (at around 6 degrees it was unseasonably warm), it turned out to be an excellent trip. Inevitably, given it’s heightened popularity at the moment, some of the locations we visited were rather too busy for comfort but I wasn’t going to let this stop me taking photographs and the now famous ice beach (Brei‚àÇamerkursandur) proved to be one of my favourite locations despite the crowds. I was enthralled by the variety of sizes, shapes, textures, colours and light to be found at the ‘ice graveyard’, for effectively, that’s what it is. Chunks of ice, broken away from a the ‘terminal’ end of a glacier and washed out from the Jokulsarlon lagoon after a journey lasting perhaps hundreds of years, only to be left stranded by winds and tide on the black ‘volcanic’ sand beaches that are characteristic of most of the Icelandic coast. Slowly they melt, transform and disappear.

We visited the beach four times over a three day period, at times in very challenging conditions; strong gusty winds and drizzle combined to blow rain, salt-spray and sand into every orifice. However, we were lucky enough to find the beach full of this wonderful ice debris (sometimes the winds and tides blow it out to sea leaving the beaches are bare), and to experience a variety of weather conditions and light. Rogue waves would regularly have us beating a hasty retreat back up the beach with tripod and gear in hand and the ‘perfect’ shot washed away (or a new one created). At first I was daunted by the confusion of shapes and lack of ‘structure’ but after walking around for a while just looking, I started to get a sense of what I wanted. It’s easy as an inexperienced photographer (landscape or other), to be drawn to the obvious. But, as beautiful as they can be, I didn’t want to just take ice ‘portraits’. I wanted to try and make use of the ‘transmitted light’, the shadows, the movement of the water, reflections, the ice shapes and shapes between the ice. I hope that’s what I achieved.

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I’m sure that I’m not unique in this and, in my case, it probably betrays a life-long frustration at my inability to paint anything other than a skirting board.

However, these four images (amongst many others) struck me as being reminiscent of the work of some of the artists near to my heart, in this case Bonnard, Monet, Klimt and Kandisnky.

I would stress that this is entirely accidental and in no case did I consciously set out to emulate such masters.

Perhaps with more conscious consideration I could have done each of them more justice, but I like the accidental and spontanious nature of these.

Bonnard

Kandinsky

Klimt

Lyveden

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Gameshope

Border stells were constructed from the early 1800s when a rising demand for fresh food was fuelled by the burgeoning urban population of the industrial revolution. In the economic climate of the times, sheep production was found to be the most profitable use of the remote hills and glens. A shortage of local timber meant stells had to be constructed from stone in the form of a ‘drystane’ dyke or wall. They were used to isolate sheep for various treatments without the inconvenience of having to transport them often long distances back to the valley farms. Once inside the stell, they would be safe from straying and could be easily caught for further examination. Nowadays, stells are used only at lambing time and are largely redundant, with many falling into disrepair.

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Maroon Bells crowd – © Dale Keller

Along a 200m stretch of shoreline 2 or 300 photographers had lined up to take essentially the same composition. Apparently fights have even broken out when one photographer gets into another’s frame. The prospect of hustle and bustle and a bit of argy-bargy weren’t the things that attracted me to making landscape photographs. 

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The classic tilt shift lenses for modern DSLRs are the original Canon 24mm, 45mm and 90mm lenses and the new 17mm and 24mm lenses which show a much improved design (a new 45mm and 90mm are expected late this year).

The Nikon have only their original versions of the 24mm, 45mm and 85mm which although good don’t match up to the new Canon designs (come on Nikon!).

There were very few third party lens manufacturers that make tilt shift lenses. There are a few adapters – the Mirex that we’ve previously reviewed allows the use of Pentax, Mamiya and Hasselblad medium format lenses; the Hartblei lenses which are effectively medium format lenses in custom mounts and the occasional custom setup.

Schneider are currently the only company to offer a ‘universal’ set of tilt shift lenses – at this point they have a 50mm and 90mm plus there will be a 28mm released soon. Robert White kindly loaned us a 90mm in Nikon mount in order to assess the lens and we took it to Devon to test it out.

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Joe Cornish’s Questions

 “I’ve noted that you use the 645DF+ in the very inspiring films made for Phase One. I was kind of expecting to see more of the Linhof . After you moved to digital have you changed your shooting style to use less view camera movements in your picture-making than you did when using the 4×5″ – Anders Torgers

Absolutely not! The Techno is still my main camera. Phase One, of course, do prefer to see their own cameras used in their own films! I use the Phase 645 for a few different purposes, mostly for ‘stand off’ work – especially with the 80mm which is a wonderful lens – but if you’re asking me which is my ‘go to’ camera, it is definitely the Techno.

“How do you discover the locations that you photograph? Is it luck when you get somewhere or hours of research?” – Nikki Gibbons

A lot of my locations are places I already know of course and I enjoy trying to find new inspiration in them. I also have a healthy diet of fresh locations provided by doing commission work and workshops. Luck certainly plays a part! The eye witness experience is paramount, I do read maps but I don’t usually spend hours of research at home because ultimately it’s about the light and the moment.

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