Ice

After weeks of drizzle, rain, snow, clouds, and generally yukky weather, we are finally going to get a couple of days of sunshine. I decided it was high time for a little hike what with the Forest Rat gallery opening and Art Walk over. I haven’t taken any photos lately so that I could concentrate on printing and framing.

Deer hunting season opened last weekend so I decided to stay out of the way by avoiding the open woods and instead just wandering along stream beds at the bottom of some ravines. The thermometer in my car read 23 degrees as I hauled out my camera pack and tripod – a little cooler than I expected on a day that was supposed to reach the 50s. The sun was still low in the sky and wasn’t offering much warmth yet. It seemed especially cold down in the ravine where the sun would not reach until later if at all and with all the icy cold water splashing around.

The water was high from all the rain. There was really too much water to get good photos of the falls. A rushing torrent of water hurtling over a sheer rock edge is impressive when experienced in person, but so much water blows away details that a photograph needs to make it interesting. A frame that is all rushing water just looks like a white smear.

Today I concentrated on the small steps and ledges hidden away from the main force of the water. The freezing temperatures covered the stones along the edge of the stream with a transparent film of ice making it hard to walk without slipping. It also created some interesting shapes as the ice formed around any twigs, logs, or rocks within splashing distance.

I worked my way up stream until I came to a waterfall that some people call “Angel Falls”. The fall is very tall and narrow. The basin at its feet is grown thick with twisted pine trees. If you are far enough back to see it all, then trees block the view. If you get in front of the trees, you are so close that you can’t get a decent shot even with a wide angle lens. So again I spent my time picking out small ice covered splashes here and there around the foot of the big fall.

The fall finally drove me away by raining down ice chips. I’d be intently staring into my viewfinder focusing a shot when I would hear a ka-chunk and then a rattle as ice would break loose from the cliff walls above me and chips from pebble size up to baseballs would come flying down at me. I had to jump in front of the camera to shield it from getting whacked several times before I got the hint and went away.

MDW

Why 35mm?

It has been a while since my last post. Sorry about that. There has been a lot going on in my life that has taken time away from photography. Things have settled down a bit, but this Friday is the Canandaigua Art Walk and the official opening of my studio/gallery on Main Street so I have been printing and framing madly so that there will be something on the walls for people to see.

During all this framing the question came up as to why standard frames come in sizes like 8×10 and 16×20 while my camera produces prints in 35mm format. A “full frame” 35mm photo will not fit in an 8×10 frame unless it is cropped. I try to avoid cropping since it reduces the available pixels when it comes time to enlarge, but sometimes it just has to be done. However, I crop mostly for composition reasons and rarely if ever to fit a particular frame size. Sometimes I custom make a frame to evenly fit a print but most often the mat (which serves several purposes) fills out the print to fit the frame.

Let’s start with 35mm. What’s up with that?

You know a 35mm print is wide and narrow as compared to an 8×10 frame. It reminds me of the deal with letterbox formatted movies. When you view a movie in its original letterbox format, the top and bottom of your more square – ish TV (unless you have one of them thar new fangled wide TVs) is black. In fact it seems that motion picture film is to blame for the 35mm still photo format.

In the infancy of photography (starting around about the 1830s) photographic images were produced on metal or glass plates. Although some early work was done using paper as a substrate, smooth solid glass produced a much sharper image. (The flexible celluloid film base like today’s roll films was not produced until around 1889.)

The glass plates were large. They required a large camera. You know the scene - a photographer is taking a photo in the old west of some notorious bank robber - he has his huge camera propped on a tripod, his head is under a black cloth while he focuses, as his assistant lights some flash powder on a tall stick and POOF in a cloud of smoke the picture is taken.

This was all well and good for still photos, but soon people got the idea to create motion pictures. Thomas Edison among others worked on this idea. To do a “movie” many still images needed to be passed by a light source so rapidly that they would fool the eye by blending into a continuous stream of motion. Solid glass or metal plates were not going to cut it!

The guys at the Edison lab were eventually able to get their hands on some flexible roll film perfected my George Eastman (Kodak founder). For some reason they decided to slit the 70mm wide strips in half to 35mm and they punched holes along the edges to run over gears in a machine called a Kinetoscope – the first movie projector.

Now getting back to the large format cameras. Large format cameras (or view cameras) are still in use today. The large film size and some other design features that we won’t get into here allow these cameras to produce very high resolution images and give the discriminating photographer great control of the focus, depth of field, and perspective of the image. They take beautiful photos and have a long and glorious history. On the other hand view cameras are, well, big.

Ever see a picture of Ansel Adams, the famed nature photographer, taking one of his photos? I remember one scene where he had a platform built on top of a car and he was standing up there with his huge tripod and 8×10 view camera that looked about the size of a small refrigerator! This setup is great for dramatic landscapes taken from spots where either you or your minions can lug this kind of equipment.

The average person does not want to haul this stuff to a family picnic. Professionals that work in fast paced fields like sports or street photography can’t haul this stuff around either. People like me that like to hike miles into the woods, climb gorge walls, or push through thick underbrush can’t carry anything that big. Soooo, back to that 35mm movie film.

People wanted a “miniture” camera that was affordable and easy to carry. Although there were many different sizes available – my first camera used something called 620 film – some manufacturers took short chunks of leftover 35mm movie film and built small cameras around that format. The german company Leica was the most successful at it and by the 1930s, 35mm cameras caught on in a big way. Eventually they outstripped other sizes in popularity.

So in the end we have large format cameras with a long tradition (from the very beginning up to the present)  in photography especially in portraiture. The most popular films sizes for these cameras? - 4×5 and 8×10. Thus the standard frame sizes of 8×10 and 16×20.

We also have the widely popular 35mm “miniature” format cameras that many professionals and most amateurs use. The 35mm format is so ingrained in our psyche  and in our installed base that even the advent of digital cameras can’t break it. Theoretically a digital camera could use any size format that fit the chips. Probably a different size would actually work better for chip makers, but 35mm is what people understand and what millions of lenses and other equipment is based upon.

Eventually I think the digital age will bridge the gap between “film” formats. But it ain’t going to happen anytime soon!

MDW