On May 14, thousands gathered to watch Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton sign a bill into law that makes Minnesota the 12th state in the nation to allow gay marriage. BIG day for the state. I’m so proud.
All images shot on black and white film on a Hasselblad and Crown Graphic.
This is a photograph of a city, Minneapolis, in the daytime. on Flickr.
Crown Graphic | 135mm f/4.7 Optar (wide open/titled) | Arista/Foma 100 (@80) | R60 filter | Grad ND filter | Rodinal (1:50)
Recently, I’ve been taking Highway 55 to downtown which takes you through a not-so-nice part of town that has some great vantage points of the skyline. I think it’s interesting to see the city with the industrial part of town in the foreground. Don’t get me wrong, the Stone Arch Bridge and all is a nice area, but you’ll run into about 500 other photographers there, aiming their cameras at the same place you are. This view (above) had always intrigued me as I drove by, so last weekend I decided to venture through the maze of road construction from my apartment in Longfellow to this spot, on a dead end of a road that runs parallel to Olson Memorial Highway (the other name for 55). I was standing in a field of spring-long grass and it was windy as hell. My camera tipped over once with the lens extended and everything, but thank goodness for cameras built like tanks. All I had to do was pick it up and re-level it and it was good to go. I suppose I’ll tire of this “tilting” business sooner or later; I mean, I can do it whenever I want on Instagram. But there’s something like the real thing (notice the swirl of the old, wide open, tilted lens in the bottom corners) that makes it special. The ability to isolate an important element (the skyline) in a scene while also noting its context (Industrial North Minneapolis) is the key to this technique. The 135mm lens is the equivalent of about a 40mm lens on a 35mm camera. It’s a pretty wide normal lens, so taking landscape shots like this can be difficult if you don’t have a way of isolating your subject, be it through a vignette, good light, or tilt (or all of the above).
All analog all day.
The Shot, no.1
I thought I’d start a series of “behind the scenes” stories about particular images that I’ve made in the past few years; some good, some bad, some neither—-just a story that needs telling. It’s fitting that I’m starting with a true behind the scenes image! I made this “on assignment” for a great new collaboration called MPLSzine whose theme for that issue was Beauty. Myself and a wonderful writer Lindsey teamed up to cover a local beauty pageant, a preliminary contest for Miss Minnesota and Miss America (not to be confused, so I’m told, with the trashier, The Donald-sponsored Miss U.S.A.).
I shot on film, in part because I love it so damn much, and in part because I felt that old school (Tri-X) black and white film pushed to ISO 1600 (a big deal for film, not so much anymore for digital) would lend itself well to the timeless subject of beauty pageants. I also shot on film because it’s all to easy with digital to point, shoot, and chimp—-look at the LCD for confirmation that you got the shot. I find that this often means that you stop looking for “the shot” as soon as you have a serviceable image on your memory card. Besides, there were pro photographers there to take the boring flash-lit “SMILE” images. My job wasn’t to be the event photographer, it was to tell a story to go with the story.
This is where the fun began for me. My “day job” of being an engineer in recovery and a law and public policy student (I should be studying for a Constitutional Law final now!) means that I don’t get a lot of time to tell stories or dig deeper (unless there’s potential liability afoot…). Via MPLSzine, I got the chance to become a photojournalist and an observer of what goes on behind the scenes in a local beauty pageant. It was kind of what I imagine travelling with a minor league baseball team to be like; conceivably, one of the players could be playing in front of 50,000 at Yankee Stadium in the future, just as one of the contestants I shared sandwiches with in a community center with a children’s basketball tournament going on concurrently could someday grace the big stage at the Miss America pageant. Were there flashes of that future self in the contestants that I could somehow capture? Or, were the contestants doing pageants for some other reason than fame and fortune? I found that all of the contestants were very smart, driven, and focused on their platform, and most surprisingly, they were all bound by the camaraderie of individuals who cannot afford to be primadonnas when they have to help push a piano off stage left (to continue the baseball analogy, consider a stud prospect carrying his bags onto a bus somewhere in small town Middle America).
Moving on to the image, I had a nice place off to the side of the stage during the pageant. I caught myself taking a few too many pictures of the contestants’ smiling faces or pageant poses—-shots that anyone could have taken because they were literally in the spotlight. I tried to push myself to look where others weren’t and turned to see this image, of the silhouetted contestants (they were winners from other regional pageants, which explains the tiaras). It looks mysterious, almost otherworldly; disembodied heads and torsos wearing tiaras. You can instantly place the scene as a pageant, but without seeing faces or obvious movement, you don’t know why they are there or what they are doing. On another level too, the symbolism of the tiaras on every person in the shot speaks to the camaraderie already mentioned. I don’t know, this shot is just one that stuck in my brain as soon as I saw it on the roll of freshly-developed film. It’s familiar, yet mysterious.
Date: February, 2012
Place: Miss City of Lakes Pageant, St. Paul, MN
Camera: Nikon FE
Film: Kodak Tri-X 400 (shot at 1600)
Lens: Nikkor 105mm f/2.5 (possibly with a 1.5x teleconverter on it)
Sequin Blindness
A peek behind the scenes at a teen beauty pageant.
Written by Lindsey Frey
Photos by Joe DammelProbably my favorite piece from the Beauty issue of MPLSzine: a behind-the-scenes look at a regional beauty pageant by writer Lindsey Frey, with stunning photos by Joe Dammel. Go look!
Thanks Colleen! It was a great experience!
“Mini”-apolis on Flickr.
Picture taking > Studying for finals;
Puffy clouds > Overcast skies;
Tilt > No tilt;
Film > Digital.
80MP camera with a 1/400 flash sync speed? And all for less than the cheapest digital camera? Yup.
I didn’t have high hopes for my 60 year old camera’s flash capabilities. For one, it has an obscure flash connection called bi-post on the shutter. To connect, you need a bi-post cord! How novel. Luckily, I found one at the local camera shops bargain bin. It even says Graflex! My next step was to cobble together my various flash adapter accessories, which you see above. Had to do a little rewriting to accommodate the household plugs (don’t plug these guys into the wall!), but once I got it all plugged in, to my astonishment, it worked! I can even go wireless with my cheap radio triggers. Who knew, vintage American gear mating with cheap new Chinese gear—Weegee would be turning in his grave. What this gives me is a fast sync speed (though I might be limited by the trigger’s max speed around 1/200) and a lot of film area to work with. Dan Winters, consider yourself on notice ;)
I got the final piece of my large format filter-puzzle today! You see, one of the ways I get around old, finicky shutters is to not use them at all. I do this with my holga and now with my Crown Graphic. All i have to do is use the bulb setting and screw a dark filter on the front. The exposure goes from A fraction of a second to something I can reliably count off, like 25 secomds. What’s more, I love the long exposure look and the minimization of distracting elements in the frame, like people walking on the street. It’s easier to count off 20 seconds than it is to compensate for a shutter at 1/8 that might be off my a stop or two depending on the day. Though it does add more complications like reciprocity failure…oh well, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it (oh wait, everyone has a camera!). Anyway, I got a slide-on Series VI adapter which has a 44mm filter ring on it since my lens doesn’t have a threaded filter ring. With the use of a 44 to 52mm step up ring, I’m all set to use my 35mm Nikon filters and my 10-stop B+W neutral density filter I got last summer! Now I can add filters (and a hood) to my Crown Graphic and the added bonus is that they are relatively portable (see the first photo). Now, all I have to do is get out and shoot!
Minnehaha Falls No. 2 on Flickr.
According to a quick search, there are over 14,000 pictures of Minnehaha Falls on Flickr and an untold number elsewhere on the internet, in school photography class portfolios, jammed into dusty shoeboxes, and in memories. The question, asked in times of darkness for photographers, is why bother? Why add to the visual noise? I admit to sometimes wondering this and really, any answer has to come from inside. For me, it’s a chance to see something new, to accept the challenge of countless other photographers who have stood where I have. I made this photograph upon walking out from below the falls, near where the “no trespassing” sign has become worn from the shoes of people climbing over the fence in harmless lawlessness. I know that at least 5 other people took their cameras out from the vantage point of this image while I was standing there. So this wasn’t a unique image to begin with, at least regarding the date it was shot. But I’m fine with that. I’ll continue looking for images in the places both well-traveled and less-so. My photography isn’t about travelling to the ends of the earth, searching for the still-undiscovered scenes. It’s about finding some new meaning in familiar places.
