Free Flowing Little Pleasures

What would life be without my morning pour-over? Today it's a Brazilian variety. Freshly ground, of course. The prints in front of me are from last night. They were still damp in the morning. The new darkroom in the basement is bloody cold and the prints take ages to dry down there. But now that I've brought them up to the warm living room they are literally drying in my hands. Fast. With a nice strong curl, which is getting stronger as I keep sipping my coffee. Delicious. Maybe I should get one of those T-shirt presses to flatten them. I leaf through the prints. This one's on Ilford FB matte paper. 20x25cm. The shadows have almost no detail. And the matte paper pulls it even further down the scale. Or so I think. But in the negative the shadows are fairly empty anyway, so I reckon it's alright with how black they appear. The blacks with this paper are actually quite gorgeous. They have a charcoal quality. I wonder: could this be related to the paper developer at all? I've been using Adotol Konstant, which is the Adox packaging of some old Orwo formula. This coffee is delicious... the chocolaty notes are coming through now. Not completely sure about the lady in the shadows though. I guess it's alright. There just isn't any more detail that I could've brought out there. And isn't it nice when straight lines make burning and dodging a child's game? The exposure was 17 seconds at Grade 2 on my Focomat 2c, but the sky needed 50% more for some tone. So I dodged the dark triangle at the top - which really is the underside of an overhanging highway - for 8 seconds with a straight card during the main exposure and then simply burned in for 8 seconds from the top of the building. Thus, the sky got its additional 50% and the dark rectangle remained at the original exposure for minimal shadow detail. Kentmere 400 film here, exposed at EI400. I can't fault it. It's good. But then almost anything seems to be good when shot with the Rollei. Except maybe Foma 400. What a disappointment those two rolls were. One was so bad I threw the negs away. That was my first and last try of Foma 400. It just doesn't have any speed. Cheap but no speed. Shot at EI400 they looked at least 2 stops underexposed. The coffee seems to get even tastier now. Isn't 20x25cm a bit small? Or am I just too used to 24x30cm. Maybe I should let the thought simmer and see how I feel about it later.

Back On Track

Finally, after folding my darkroom in Istanbul 2 years ago, I've set up a new one in Düsseldorf. This time it's in a basement washroom, not the nicest of spaces, but with running water. It required the swapping of a very old window that wasn't tight and let in cold air with a new, double-glazed one. (which I blacked out of course). I'd had shipped my Focomat 2c from Turkey before and today I set it up in one corner, behind which I'd painted the otherwise white walls matte black to prevent reflections.

So, on Valentine's Day, and also on day of the carnival in the Rhineland, I'm BACK ON TRACK.

More Light

One beautiful German word is "Abendstimmung", which would translate as "evening mood", although in German it has a bit more gravitas I think. Funny, I can't think of a good Turkish word or phrase that would express that mood. That's the beauty of languages; each has its own landscape of meanings that correspond to the cultural cosmos of the people speaking it. Anyway, back to Abendstimmung. Three years ago I visited an exhibition called "More Light" ("Mehr Licht" in German) in Düsseldorf's Kunstpalast, which explored 19th century oil studies in open nature. There I saw this painting by Carl Robert Kummer titled "Abendstimmung an der Elbe", depicting an evening scene at the river Elbe in Dresden. I was so impressed, I had a hard time moving on to other paintings, and even came back to it several times, studying it further.

The clouds, especially the ones on the diagonal, the silvery water, and that bold arc of the river...what an inspirational painting. 

Just like those 19th century romantic painters, I guess many of us try to make our own Abendstimmungs when the evening light starts to shift to the purples and reds, right? Well, here are two of my humble attempts made along the Rhine last year.

∼

A major exhibition usually has an exhibition catalogue; I try not to miss those. They tend to have loads of informational essays and one can enjoy the paintings (or photos etc.), although in admittedly inferior reproduction, for many more years. Look, the lovely small Elbe painting even made it to the cover of this catalogue!

Views of a Landmark

Legend has it that in the year 1632 Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi flew with wings he cobbled together, supported by strong scirocco winds, from the top of Istanbul's Galata Tower all across the Bosphorus and landed in Usküdar, about 3.5 km towards the east. Many historians dispute the truth of this story for various reasons, one being that the only source mentioning this event is a short entry in the travelogue of the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi. He concludes that sultan Murat the IVth watched the alleged flight from his palace and eventually declared "this is a man to be scared of; such people should not be kept alive" and exiled Ahmet Çelebi to the farthest corner of his realm, Algeria. There, at the ripe old age of 30, Ahmed Çelebi died. His nickname "Hezarfen" means "man of a thousand sciences".

Hezarfen's departure point, the Galata Tower is one of the most prominent landmarks of Istanbul and therefore often appears in my  (and others') cityscapes, intentionally or not:

While I was crossing Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn, I was delighted to see the tower reflected in the window (of one of the bridge's support structures). In order to add an extra layer to the photo, I waited for one of the many fishermen pull his protein out of the sea. Or maybe it's the tower that's the extra layer!

Sometimes the tower is just "there"...

...and sometimes I make a conscious effort to photograph the tower. This is very much a cliche, a view from the garden of the Süleymaniye Mosque over the chimneys of the neighbouring medrese (a school in the Ottoman days).

All three photos were made on the same day whilst on a short trip to Istanbul over last Christmas. I used to bring along analog cameras and B&W film on my travels. But it's become so cumbersome with the security procedures and the constant anguish that the film might get fogged in the x-ray machines, especially now that CT Scanners are being gradually installed, that I now prefer a Nikon DSLR while travelling. I still use my old manual focus Nikkors though, as they are extremely rugged and perform like a charm. Here, the first two pictures were made with the humble but superb AI 50mm/f1.8 and the last one with the AI 200mm/f4.0 Nikkor, which again is optically excellent and relatively compact.

Totally unrelated to my musings above, I'd like to recommend this documentary about Dorothea Lange. It's been uploaded to Youtube just a few days ago. I watched the 2 hour documentary twice, I found it that good. What an amazing photographer she was but what a sad end she had to face.

Roads, Swallows and an Inner Dialogue with Plossu

After his young employees show him a creature they created with AI, a creature writhing on the ground, with movements the AI "imagines", Miyazaki's reaction  hits the nail right on the head: "Every morning...I see my friend who has a disability. It's so hard for him just to do a high five, his arm with stiff muscle reaching out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can't watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is... I am utterly disgusted....I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."

Recently I fell in love with the photography of Bernard Plossu. And I began to wonder why. That's when I thought back to the Miyazaki quote, especially the bold bit. Whoever created this stuff had a human sensibility that I could connect to.

Although I haven't been as much of a nomad as Plossu, I felt that the notion of "the road", for example when looking at this photograph of his, might have lifted his heart in a similar way to mine when I took this one.

Or when I look at his pictures of swallows, let's say this and this, I imagine that Plossu felt a similar kind of excitement as myself, the moment I took a picture of two rows of swallows on electric lines next to ancient Roman columns.

I even love it when he seems to be goofing around, taking a picture of his camera, because I did the same recently (who hasn't, right?), whilst I was photographing with my Rollei again after a two-year break (it felt quite weird initially...and I was so surprised when I reached the end of the roll after only 12 exposures!)

And there's even more. I find it charming that Plossu's been using nothing but an old Nikkormat with a 50mm f1.4 Nikkor for the majority of his work. Even his preferred look of his prints speaks to me: "The printing is still traditional black-and-white, no gimmicks, no black skies, nothing fancy—when something is gray, it has to be gray."

You see, it's all these imaginary threads that we weave in our minds that bond us to another person. On a deeper level, there's also the consolation that - although it very often does not feel like it - we're not alone!

Now, the million dollar question I ask myself is: what if tomorrow Plossu turns out to be an AI. It isn't so hard anymore to imagine such a future.

* In this post I used links to some of Plossu's photographs, which means there's a risk that you will not see the pics if the link is removed. I will not directly insert the pictures, as they are copyrighted material. These days not many people seem to respect this though. For example, Instagram is awash with Plossu's photos under #BernardPlossu. I have no idea if this is lawful.

Thoughts about Luck

When I was a wee boy, my worst habit was, my mother always says, that I used to run away. I would disappear. The search party would eventually find me in a neighbouring village. Even in mid-winter, with snow and ice and what not. Mind you, this was in rural Germany, where most people knew each other and each others' kids. Still, my escapades could've turned ugly. And now that I'm a father, I can understand how terrified they must've been.

I don't know whether it's the embers of that old habit that doesn't want to die, but I still enjoy wandering off. Preferably on an early morning with a camera. If the stars align, luck could be on your side.

Talking about luck in photography, I used to love this kind of "lucky coincidence" snapshot, but I'm not a big fan anymore. I mean, unless you are a true wizard, how many times in a lifetime can you pull a hare out of your hat? And if the only talking point of the photo is such acrobacy, without any other redeeming quality, so much for the worse.

Maybe it's an age thing, but nowadays I gravitate towards "quiet observation and contemplation". The photographer Robert Adams (one of my favourites) recalls that when asked how he found his pictures, he said, I paraphrase: "they happen where I stay long enough". I personally find this so profoundly true. Don't rush, give it time and you might start to see beauty even in the most mundane looking things.

Palace Street

Close to where I lived in Istanbul there was this 1st floor balcony where someone had copied Millet's famous painting "The Gleaners" on the wall. It made me smile every time I passed the building. Sometimes the man who lived there - maybe in his late 60s - sat in front of the painting, enjoying the sun, watching the odd passer-by. I often met his eye, but never approached to ask whether it was him who'd made the painting. Not that I was shy. Sometimes I just do not want to know, because the mystery feels more appealing. In hindsight, I probably should have tried to make a photo of that scene.

There was another wall-painting that I also loved. It's a well-known character of a famous Turkish cartoonist, the late Latif Demirci. That one I didn't want to let slip. On a grim day during Covid and amidst the economic crisis, I made this photo.

There is one nuance I should explain for the non-Turkish speaking reader. The street sign on the right, which is actually only half of the complete street name, reads "Palace Street".

A New Beginning

I had posted this photo on my old blog 8 years ago. In this day and age it's probably daft to post a picture of  - of all things - a flower. But it's a print that I come back to and it has taught me a thing or two; small lessons for myself I hadn't written about in that old post, so I thought why not do it now. Here it goes...

- For close-up photography, I should first try to use my 55mm/2.8 micro-Nikkor before reaching for the 105mm. The way the shorter lens describes three dimensional space is just wonderful. I almost feel like a bee suspended in mid-air, looking "into" the flower.

(As superb as the 55mm/2.8 micro-Nikkor is though, I find it very difficult to use for subjects that are roughly in the 3-4 meter range, like a full length portrait. The focus throw is so short, if you are the tiniest bit off you miss critical focus.)

- The line that runs down in the background is the corner of intersecting walls. It wasn't a deliberate choice; the plant just happened to sit in that corner and I didn't bother to move it. Not sure what you think, but I ended up enjoying that compositional detail. In a not too in-your-face way, it breaks up an otherwise homogeneous background. Without it, the picture would be even more banal than it is now and probably wouldn't work for me anymore.

The photo is printed on Ilford FB Warmtone semi-matt paper. A paper that has always amazed me with its gorgeous surface. It probably isn't suited for every photo, but it can be stellar with the right one. Yep, good things don’t come cheap. Still, I think every darkroom printer should at least have tried it once. It is even more beautiful after selenium or sepia toning. By the way, the colour comes from sepia toning, of course.

As for the film and development, I must've been in a very experimental mode back then, because instead of changing only one variable at a time, I changed everything at once. This is one of my very first (if not the first) Fomapan 100 roll. And in those days I was trying out various two-bath developers. Here I used a modified Stöckler developer for the first time. I'd read about it in an article by Wynn Bullock in one of the Lustrum Press "Darkroom" books and wanted to give it a go. I still can't quite fathom how the neg turned out so nice. 

Some time later I became disenchanted with two-bath developers because literally everything that was written about them in the famous darkroom cookbook turned out to be false: there is significant development in the A-bath, how long you develop in the A-bath does effect the amount of development you get, therefore the A-bath can not have an indefinite life, development is temperature sensitive. I really don't know what the authors were thinking. The final nail in the two-bath coffin was when I tried to develop Delta3200 in Thornton's version. That was the worst combo I've ever tried and made me go back to good old D76, which I've used ever since.

But now, looking back at those Fomapan 100 negs that were developed in Stöckler and how exquisite it (the film? the developer? both?) has rendered the highlights in the petals…hmm...one wonders. I think I should first give 35mm Fomapan 100 a try with good old D76. See how that turns out and then take it from there.

～

Let me finish with some news. I've had my Focomat 2C enlarger shipped from Turkey to Germany. Dare I say, a new darkroom might spring to life in the foreseeable future.

One Gone, One Left

It was bound to happen sooner or later. The Eucalyptus tree that dried up a few years ago for unknown reasons has been cut down. Because I'd very much enjoyed this pair in the last 20 years or so, I'd written a post about them some time back.

Looking at the stump, now barely worth a second glance with all the litter around, it's hard to imagine what a majestic element it was in the landscape.

I find it difficult to remain optimistic about the remaining sibling. People will continue to take comfort in it's shadow...

…and in the hot summer nights it will continue to watch over the chit-chat under its leaves. But for how long?

Stardust

Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck playing Stardust

the bass line, chug chug chug chug...

the consolation of watching infinity

in a river flowing, a cloud drifting, a child laughing.

The Print Experience

Do we appreciate a painting more, or let's say at a higher, more sophisticated level, if we paint ourselves? What about music, literature, poetry? At least from a craft point of view it has to be so. Only when we practice a craft ourselves do we have a much better understanding and appreciation of its history, theory, practices, challenges etc.

In my archive I have a set of a dozen photographs by Turkish photographer Fethi Sabunsoy. It was 2003 when he gave them to me, a few years before he passed away in 2007 at the young age of 57. In the 22 years since, I have returned to these prints again and again; like you would open a small poetry book and re-read the same poems that you have read hundreds of times before.

This picture is one of the gems in the set. He took it in 1998, in an old, traditional coffeehouse in Gaziantep, a city in southeast Turkey. Every time I flip through the photos I stop at this one (and many others) and stare at it for a very long time. The wonderful mood, the silent poetry pulls at my heartstrings. And man, the print! Fethi was a first-rate craftsman.

But let me put print quality aside for a moment. The first thing that always springs to my mind is, what a huge risk to place a window that bright so prominently right on the corner. Fethi must have had time to contemplate the composition and he went for it. As far as I'm aware, in those days it was his regular practice to include the film rebate in the print - a la Cartier-Bresson - so it's very likely he correctly assessed that the rebate would pull in the window and that the risk of a totally unbalanced print was minimal. In any case, what he’s done is masterly.

Every time I hold the print, I tend to scrutinise the glasses and ashtrays on the table. The way light has rendered their edges is just so delicate, so sublime!

Then my eye always wanders to the cheap, lonely light switch, dangling from a thin cord that appears to have a knot in it. I'm sure, before pressing the shutter Fethi noticed this switch, saw how it was illuminated by windows perpendicular to each other, rim lighting it from two sides. He possibly even saw this switch as the "punctum" of the picture (this is the first time I said punctum on this blog) and made sure he placed it in front of deep shadow. Again, absolutely delicate and rendered pin-sharp.

The calendar on the wall also never fails to catch my eye. The date reads 17, the rest is not legible. On the back of the print Fethi has dated the photograph as 18th April 1998. Most probably, on the day the picture was taken the calendar had not been attended to yet.

What else? The sense of depth thanks to the diagonals, the chair in the far window frame, the question why the tables are all racked together (in preparation for a planned gathering?), a portrait of Atatürk hanging in the deep shadows in the upper left corner...the little details and questions go on and on.

I know that Fethi printed this picture on long-discontinued Forte Polywarmtone paper, lending it a lovely chocolaty finish. It is fiber based, 18x24cm in size. Before the year 2000 Fethi was using a Nikon F90x (later he switched to a Leica M6). And if I'm not mistaken, he was using the AF 28mm/2.8 Nikkor (alongside the 50/1.4 and 80-200/2.8 Nikkors). So it must have been this combo he used here. The film was most probably Ilford HP5. I've seen the negative of another photo from this trip to Gaziantep and that was HP5, so that is what my assumption is based on.

On the back of the print Fethi wrote: "The corner of an old coffeehouse is quiet and calm, awaiting the people who will come for a chat".

How a photograph can transport you to another world...

Thank you, Maestro!

Big Dreams

"A man dies the day his dreams have died" - Yaşar Kemal

~

I recently came across a short street interview. The backdrop is a city in southeastern Turkey. The interviewer and interviewee are both young man in their early 20’s. 

Q: “What is your biggest dream?”

A: “My biggest dream?...(pause)…I had a big dream…but I can’t remember it now”

Both start to giggle.

Q: “You can’t remember your biggest dream?”

Another short pause.

A: “I swear I can’t remember what it was”

 

 

A few days ago, Instagram recommended me an account. I recognized the name; it was an old friend from university. Back then we were both in the Track & Field team. I ran the long distances, and he was a very good 400m runner. After graduation he made his PhD in the US and then became an academician, a sociologist, at a university in Turkey. The last time I saw him was about 17-18 years ago. What intrigued me with his IG account name was that it ended with “music”. I went ahead and checked his feed and was almost knocked off my chair. He had turned into a musician, a guitarist, a singer and songwriter. Had produced 2 albums and 30 songs. Was doing live gigs and producing video clips. Had his music videos on Youtube, his songs on Spotify. He had grown long hair, and – to rub it really in - it was still black! I’d had no idea that he had all this in him. I haven't asked him how he felt about this transformation, but from my point of view, it all looked like he was living his big dream.

The Rhine and a Poplar

When I first saw Gursky's "Rhein II" I was mesmerised. The 1,9 x 3,6 meter print was hanging high on a wall in the Istanbul Modern museum and it had a presence that gets lost on a screen.  That feeling of awe has stuck with me ever since. Now I live minutes away from the Rhine and it has become a muse, not least due to the lasting impression of Gursky's masterpiece. During my walks I enjoy observing how the seasons, the time of day and the kind of light changes the mood of the river. 

At a very sweet spot there is a poplar tree, which has become a subplot in all the photos I make of the Rhine. On this particular overcast day last January, the waters were high and the tree was half submerged. The sky had a delicate range of pastel blues, a kind of softness that always strikes a chord with me.

Only while writing this post and looking at Gursky's website did I realize that 19 years after "Rhein II" he made "Rhein III". Clearly, it's a river that lends itself to decades of exploration.

The Golden Horn

The golden colours of the Golden Horn in Istanbul at dusk have been immortalised in paintings such as this one by Aivazovksy, from 1845. If you look closely at the painting you'll see white sails at the lower left of the setting sun, close to the shore. That's roughly from where I made all three photos in this post. 

Over the course of almost thirty years I must have walked and photographed on the same shores many hundreds of times. Saturdays, my feet took me there almost automatically. It's a place with a certain magnetism.

The earliest photo at the top is from 1996. Looking at the clothing, it must've been late fall or early winter. I was still a young man and had started my first job in October that same year. Here, on a Saturday afternoon I was taking in the bustle on the piers of the Golden Horn, my camera loaded with Fuji Sensia slide film. Back in those days fishermen would sell their daily catch right at the shore.

The second photo is about 20 years later. In the mean time I'd married, have had a child, have been fully shooting B&W film and have become a decent darkroom printer. The afternoon light over the Golden Horn is still glorious at times. At the back is the Suleymaniye Mosque. The boat at the far right is named "Golden Boy".

Life went on, it got harder by the day, and Istanbul also kept evolving and growing (massively). Towards the end of the pandemic I started to increasingly use an old digital SLR, but with my much older manual lenses. Still, I kept being drawn to the same place. Like here, on the 11th December 2023 at 13:43 (thank you EXIF file). See the funny rainbowy spot on the back of the bench? Somehow the lens (a Nikkor 28mm f2.8 AIS) managed to  produce this little trick.

The tremendous change in technology from the earliest to the latest picture goes without saying. But I keep thinking about a more subtle change that has happened in parallel. Here's an anecdote. Sometime around 1998 or 1999 I rose very early and went to the Suleymaniye Mosque (have a look at the B&W pic again) to photograph the Golden Horn from up there. The mosque has a garden facing the waters and I was taking pictures from the garden. It was a cold day and the place was completely deserted, until a man approached me. It was the imam of the mosque. He asked what I was doing. I explained. I asked whether I could make a portrait of him. He accepted. Then he asked me whether I'd like to come up and enjoy the view from the domes of the mosque! Of course I did. And so we went up some narrow stairwells to the top of the mosque, climbed out from a door  into open air and began skipping from dome to dome. He was very accommodating and I made pictures from up there towards the Golden Horn...with a tripod! But the light was too harsh, or more likely I wasn't good enough; the pictures turned out to be unremarkable. Anyway, the reason for this anecdote is, I believe this would never happen today. Obviously, increased security is one reason. But also, with the rise of the smartphone and mass tourism, that garden has been packed with phone yielding crowds ever since. Today, I think the imam would rather sit in his office, either for his peace of mind or maybe to doomscroll on his social media feed, only popping out from prayer to prayer. And that thought keeps nagging at me ever so slightly.

One Year Later

It's been a year of many changes that came with a move from Istanbul to Düsseldorf. Photographically, without a darkroom, it's been a year of almost only digital photography with a single old DSLR. I've enjoyed and was often amazed by the capabilities of the digital sensor, and have tried to come to grips with raw converters and other software. For the time being I've stayed away from proper digital printing though, only using a Canon Selphy for the occasional 10x15 cm print of barely acceptable quality.

But at the same time, I've found a new appreciation for film and the darkroom. Simply because it can be completely, inherently detached from the MADNESS that social media and AI have become. Still, I'm a bit surprised that I don't miss film & darkroom as much as I thought I would. I was tired of having printed for decades, with the prints just piling up in boxes with no other use. That weariness still lingers. But we'll see: I find myself constantly searching Ebay for a good and reasonably priced enlarger, so the spark must still be somewhere inside me.

The only black and white film I shot this year was high up on the Anatolian plateau in Turkey. I was holidaying on the Aegean coast in the summer when I received some disturbing news which caused me to embark on a two-day drive across the country. On the second day, heading south on a meandering and deserted road I saw puffy clouds on the horizon. They were rising from the Mediterranean Sea, 1500m below that horizon line! I was so mesmerised by the view that I pulled over, set up the tripod and exposed several frames of FP4+ through my Leica M6 with the 50mm Summicron...similar to the iPhone pic below. That film is still in Turkey, waiting to be developed.

And that's about it. Next year earth will continue its journey around the sun, light and shadow will move across our lives in their own wonderful ways, whilst we go on about our own little journeys,  hopefully in good health, with our loved ones around us.

Let me end with a quote from Montesquieu: "We must create a happiness that can follow us in every age."

Dry Spell Ahead

My personal circumstances are about to change drastically (I'd hinted at it in a past post). Now, for the first time in 27 years I won't be having a darkroom. I don't know for how long. As this blog is intrinsically linked to my being involved in printing, this post will presumably be my last for some time. But like these snails, I'll be waiting for the first morning dew for another rejuvenation*.

If you're reading this, I reckon you've been here before. I hope you found a bit of yourself in here, a common ground which bonds us all together.

So, good luck and take care until the next time!

* I can only guess that that's what they do :)

Vivian and Other Strangers

Sometimes I think about Vivian Maier. Not her posthumously discovered photographic archive, but how she had kept it all to herself throughout her whole life. Decades of serious photography and seemingly no urge to show it to anyone! You might remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Self-esteem is right up there in the pyramid. We tend to want the pat on the back. There is a reason for the like button on social media after all. Maybe Vivian thought about her photography in different ways; ways that were completely detached from what we would call "achievement"; the simple love of a picture as a memory for example. Or maybe other forces were at play; maybe she was discouraged by a male dominated milieu. Being a nanny, was there anybody who would've taken her work seriously? It's also a possibility that she just didn't feel like pushing her own work. Without the pushing and promoting nothing tends to happen. The whole thing is a mystery I wish Vivian didn't take to her grave.

∼

I usually don't stop a person on the street to take their picture, preferring to photograph in the confines of what's available without my interference. But here I was, on the ferry in Istanbul. It was a cold spring day. No matter how cold or wet though, I tend to travel on the upper deck, in open air. The ship was approaching the pier, and the passengers began to make a move, when I saw this young man with his dog tucked into his coat. I didn't think twice, hurried over and asked permission for a photo, which he kindly accepted. "Please, don't bugger this up!" whizzed through my head as I quickly focused the Rollei T (loaded with HP5) and exposed two frames. Thank you, dear stranger!

∼

I've been using Ilford's cheaper Kentmere range more and more and find both the 100 and 400 speed versions are perfectly fine films. Here are two prints from my last roll of Kentmere 400. It was developed in home-brewed D76 stock solution, together with another roll of the same film. You know what?...if someone had told me these prints were from 100 speed film, I wouldn't have doubted them one moment; the grain is that tight.

The first is a picture I made whilst having a quick and lonely dinner in a local Kadikoy* restaurant. I'd been observing the scene, the comings and goings for a while, then when I thought all looked right, I raised my Leica with 35mm Summicron, focused, waited for eye contact, and exposed one frame. As I lowered the camera the chef ordered the waiter to add the photo to my bill :)

* A district on the Asian side of Istanbul.

After dinner I strolled around in the streets. I've always liked the night-time look of some of the stand-alone cafes by the pier in Kadikoy. They can have a Hopperian air with the neons and the lonely souls. Here, I didn't want to get too close, as I wanted to include the enveloping darkness of the night in the picture. The same camera, same lens, same film, and the same suspense for the "right" moment. 1/30th (or maybe 1/60th) at f2. Man, the Summicron never ceases to amaze me.

Many years ago, I showed my mom some of my pictures. "Why do you take pictures of people you don't know?" she asked. Her question still makes me chuckle today, although I have often asked the same question to myself.

~

Finally, let me show you some prints and the Kentmere negs. The prints are on 24x30cm Ilford Classic and slightly selenium toned. It's a bit difficult for me to get even lighting on my viewing board (oh the irony!), so no perfect reproductions here (although I've fiddled around with the file quite a bit to get a decent look), but they should give an idea. They look much better to the naked eye ;-)