Archive for the ‘Family’ Category
Two good things about recession & Art
My first 10×12″ wet plate collodion taken with Vageswari camera and lens Voigtlander 300mm f/4,5.
I’m working really hard these months. I know that December will be more easy going and that January will be dead month in commercial work, so I work literally triple jobs. Anyhow, I still take an hour here and there and make something for myself! I finally made my first 10×12″ (25x30cm) plate! It’s not that difficult at all! Actually it’s easier because a dust dot looks really really tiny, comparing to the same size dot on a 4×5″ plate. I’m really happy, a step forward! Actually this wetplate was a birthday gift from me to myself. I know… weird…
This are hard times if you want to make a living from art. I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed that nobody buys my art this days. I got frustrated, but then I realized that if nobody will buy my art and I need to fund it from my own pocket, I can make the art that I like and don’t care what others think! Ha, that’s really liberating. I thought I don’t care what others feel about my art, but that can’t be true, if I got frustrated because my art-work wasn’t funding it’s self. Nevertheless when I do commercial work I feel a strong motif, because I know I will fund my art with this commercial work!
Another good thing is also that I can forget big production costs and once again I can afford without a shame to be modest again! I mean few of my shows in London’s Host Gallery (link) and in Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana (link), costed a fortune and since I set the benchmark of presentation on quite a high level I got frustrated because I couldn’t afford to exhibit anymore!
Well now recession is here and I feel liberated! I don’t feel embarrassed anymore that I don’t have 2x3meters lambda prints mounted on dibond aluminum boards! I just blame it on the recession and not on my art-career failure, thank you very much!
I’ve made this print as a gift for my aunt. I’m a bit rusty, but I still can do a good print.
New level of my Wet Plate Collodion portraits
Yesterday my family had a family lunch and a celebration of my father’s birthday, so I used this opportunity to make a new set of family portraits. Recently I reset and readjust my chemicals, so I was anxious to see how my pictures will turned out and here they are!
Technically I used Palubel 5×7″camera with Voigtlander Heliar 300mm f/4,5 lens at aperture 6,7 and illuminated by one flash burst of two flashes of joined power 2250Ws. Flashes were about 90cm away from the subject.
This plates along with others will be exhibited in Kulturni dom, Gorica in Italy. The opening will happen on 29th of September 2012. You’re invited.
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Homage to Paul Graham
Paul Graham at the workshop in Fabrica in year 2000
While we had a workshop together he asked from us to go out and make pictures, that we wouldn’t otherwise, we were asked to make mistakes, rigorous technical and compositional mistakes. We went out and each of us shot a roll of film and I took it as a joke, throwing camera in the air and taking pictures with a timer on and of course nobody took an effort to look trough a viewfinder. And accordingly that’s how our pictures look like, a one big mess! Paul came along and start shuffling pictures and out of this mess of unsharp, blurry, over&under exposed pictures made a series that actually looked really cool! Then he was talking about possible connotations that this kind of aesthetic could be applied to. I was astonished! What a good workshop!
So when I read the book review that I’ve mentioned before I clicked through the book and as always it’s not on a first ball as we say it, but as all Graham’s projects it takes some time to get familiar with his new “invention” in photography. To be honest my belief was that diptychs, triptychs and other typtichs are for photographers who can not make a good picture, then they do some distracting maneuvers with juxtaposing several images together. In 99% it’s like that, if you ask me, or even more if the theme of the series is dealing with identity of a photographer (grow up!).
But, I’m also great fan of Duane Michals and his way of transcending an image with a sequence and Graham’s diptychs are sharing a some sort of rhythm that I like. Furthermore this is actually a street photography, a contemporary modern version street photography, that I adore. Robert Haagart wrote:
“But, inch by inch, I realized that the book’s locale is strictly allegorical. It could have been London, or Barcelona, or San Francisco, or almost any city on Earth. The title of the book is not “NYC,” it’s “The Present.” Mr. Graham is asking us to take him at his word, and look beyond the obvious.”
At the moment I was reading this I was at a vacation at the sea site in Nerezine, Croatia, so I wondered if it could have been NY, London, Barcelona, why not Nerezine as well? I took my camera and the very next day I’ve made a jackpot of an image that I’m publishing bellow. I’m continuing with the mining the concept…
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How to get a maximum swirl lens effect
I was testing how to achieve maximum swirl effect. Open aperture, focus on a subject at a distance, objects at corners must be closer then subject in the center. And this works only with lenses that aren’t compromised by a mirror between lens and film. No single lens mirror reflex cameras in the club! Only view cameras, range-finder cameras and twin lens reflex! Taken with twin-lens Mamiya C330, 80mm, blue-dot series. Of course Petzval lens is the king of swirl effect 
PS: pardon, readers warned me, that some special lenses are doing beautiful swirl also for 35 SLR cameras. Like Russian Helios 40 85mm f/1.5 Lens
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Testiral sem kako bi poudaril swirl efekt, ko se na robovih slika začne rotacijsko pačiti. Recept je: popolnoma odprta zaslonka, subjekt mora biti relativno oddaljen, objekti ob robovih morajo biti bližje, kot subjekt v sredini. Aja, pa to deluje na pravih objektivih, ki niso kompromitirani z zrcalom med lečami in filmom. Se pravi zrcalnorefleksni aparati odpadejo, le mehovke, range-finder in pa dvooke kamere. Na fotografiji posneto z dvooko Mamiyo C330, 80mm, blue-dot serija. A seveda, Petzval objektiv je car swirl efekta.
PS: PArdon, bralci so me opozorili, da imajo tudi posebni objektivi za zrcalno refleksne kamere SWIRL efekt, kot je na primer Helios 40 85mm f/1.5 Lens.
Family summer time in 6×6 format
Few days before with my family we left for summer vacation to a seaside I’ve bought a “new” camera Mamiya C330, so I was excited to try it out. I never liked the square format, as a student and as a young professional, but I guess it’s because square format was a trade mark of Hasselblad, that I couldn’t afford
I looked at my bookshelf, thinking who is a master of square format photography. My first pick was Mary Ellen Mark and her book Indian Circus, then I checked The Hasselblad Masters awards. The Hasselblad awards didn’t inspire me (I can do better), but with Mary Ellen Mark I found some good clues how to deal with the square format.
I was thinking… Square is a stable, boring format and to make the image interesting I must brake this stableness with composition. My first rule was to fill the image with the subject all the way to the borders and even across the border. That was the idea for the picture published above and on the left side. OK, I admit, I didn’t discover America, but playing with concepts and aesthetics is inevitably leading us to new “discoveries” as I call personal micro revelations
Second inspiration was the book On Photography by Susan Sontag. I’ve read it twice, but that was some time ago, so why not follow the Atheism 2.0 commandment to repeat the lessons over and over again. It’s the basis of every religion so it must make sense. While reading Sontag’s words on how photography is surreal, the most appropriate medium for modernistic art, I understood everything. World make sense if viewed through a lens of a camera.
Last but not least, this adventure back to black and white analog photography is bringing good old memories from Prague’s Famu Academy where I earned my BA in photography. I know I’m repeating some lessons from history of photography, but I don’t do it because of the love towards the history, but I’m doing it for the love of photography and to the love to my family. More of my Family Album project you can see on my site www.borutpeterlin.com.This is not the end result it’s just warming up! I’m inspired as Apollo 11 rocket!
PS: Under comment leave a link to a site of a photographer who work in an inventive way with a square medium format camera. I want to grasp as much info as I can.
My love affair with middle format cameras (Mamiya, Bronica, Yashica, Fuji,…)
As followers of my blog might know, I got into large format photography. First only with Wet Plate Collodion technique, but then when I run out of chemicals, I started to shoot also film. I got into it right away! I mean I’ve shoot 26 film folders with about 100 films in each before I started digital, so it’s not like I discovered America, but I must admit, that in this digital revolution I left out many things, that I didn’t know I’m missing them. Like the smell of fixir on your fingertips
But seriously in this digital revolution suddenly all images are the same. The same optics, the same flashes, printers, the same images… And when I started to rediscover the analog cameras again, I felt a child-like joy and things started happening. Like the other day I was walking through storage room of a friend and noticed Zenza Bronica ETRS, format 6×4,5 and I borrowed the camera that nobody was using for a very long time. Then another friend borrowed me a Mamiya C220, a twin-lens camera format 6×6 and I loved it. I was publishing pics by this camera and a Facebook friend offered me a Mamiya C330 camera for 200 EUR. That offer you can not refuse so I’ve bought it. It’s in mint condition! The seller told me a lot about the former owner of this camera and I’m feeling kind of guilty that I’m dragging this camera constantly with me, whereas the former owner was taking it out only on special occasions.
On the end of the day I’m suspecting it’s middle age crisis kicking in. When I was studying photography in 90′s this cameras were really expensive. Like a camera like that was half the price of a car and now, thanks to digital revolution, nobody wants them anymore! Thank you, very much!
Here are few recent pictures. Square ones are with Mamiya C220, lens 80mm, f/2,8 and rectangular ones are with Zenza Bronica ETRS, lens 150mm, f/3,5.
The last image: Daughters are delighted by father’s new camera!
Wet Plate Collodion portraits
Tilen by the pool.
This portrait I’ve done yesterday. I’m still not satisfied with the quality of ambrotypes I’m getting, but this one is quite good. Actually I cheated a little and I add some blacks and some contrast – digitally 
But I didn’t altered the image. It’s sort of “I smoked pot but I didn’t inhale” excuse, I know. Anyhow today I managed to gather my large format portraits and wet plate collodion portraits of my family, so if you’re interested please take a look on my site. LINK. This series A Family Album is a series about love. Towards photography and towards people. It doesn’t pretend it will change the world, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it will. Depends on a viewer. It’s exhibited in Frančiškanski samostan as a part of Fotopub festival. Fotopub starts this Monday, don’t miss lectures and exhibitions, if you’ll not participate at the workshop!
hospitalized…
photo: Boštjan Pucelj
Last Monday I got a high fever and I was shivering like a wet dog. A doctor just told me it’s not a bacterial infection, so I should come back on Friday if I’ll not get better. And it didn’t. It got worse! After a proper blood test they just send me to an emergency. My blood was taken so many times, I felt like a junkie. Salted water that was infused directly into my vane got me back to life and soon I felt much better. After four days of therapy all my blood results are normal and fever is gone. All other tests were negative and I’m waiting for one more result. Basically they still don’t know what knocked me out, so I’m here for at least one more day.
As my mother is saying: A healthy person has many wishes, an ill person has only one. Looking forward of Fotopub festival of documentary photography next week!
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Prejšnji ponedeljek se me je lotila mrzlica in visoka vročina. Na višku vročinskega vala sem se tresel kot šiba na vodi. Doktor me je na hitro pregledal, mi rekel, da ni bakterijsko in me naročil naj pridem nazaj v petek, če ne bo bolje. In ni bilo bolje. Bilo je slabše. Po prvem pravem krvnem testu so me poslali na urgenco in me prešpikali tolikokrat, da sem se počutil kot švicarski sir. Infuzija slane vode me je spravila sebi in po štirih dnevih te infuzije, so vsi moji krvni rezultati normalni in povišana temperatura je izginila. Vse ostale preiskave so negativne. Čakam še na en rezultat. V bistvu še vedno ne vejo kaj me je zbilo, tako sem tu še vsaj en dan.
Kot pravi moja mama, zdrav človek ima veliko želja, bolan pa samo eno. Veselim se Fotopub festivala naslednji teden!
New pictures for my Family Album
I haven’t been blogging much lately, since I am in a very productive period of my life. Unfortunately I can’t afford to be focused and I work on many, many different fields, mostly for commercial clients, but in this days I can’t complain about that, right. Also this blog gained quite some attention, although you don’t comment much so I think twice what am I publishing. But this formula just doesn’t work. Now this is my only second post this month and I decided to go back to my old habit to publish what I make during the day.
My niece Enja had a birthday party so I took few photographs on collodion and on film. I used my ShenHao 4×5″ camera with a fast lens Linhof 135mm f/3,5. How do you like it? Leave a comment, rate, like and Rock&Roll!
PS: More family portraits on my site www.borutpeterlin.com.
Invitation to the exhibition of my Wet Plate Collodion photographs
Dear reader, I invite you to the opening of my exhibition Family Album that will be in Galerija Laterna in Črnomelj, Slovenia on Friday 25.5.2012, at 19:00. I’ll exhibit a series of portraits of my family that I’ve made in last half a year. Some of it are made in Wet Plate Collodion technique, others are taken of sheet film format 4×5″. Large format rules! I’ll also make a live demonstration of Wet Plate Collodion portraiture. Fun it will be! Here are some previews from the show.
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Dragi bralec, predraga bralka, vabim te na otvoritev razstave Družinski album, ki bo ta petek, ob 19. uri v Galeriji Laterna, v Črnomlju. Razstavil bom portrete svoje družine, ki sem jih naredil v zadnjem obdobju, v tehniki mokri kolodij na steklu in na velikoformatnem plan filmu. Na otvoritvi bom izvedel tudi demonstracijo tehnike mokri kolodij. Bo zabavno! Tu je nekaj predogledov z razstave.
