50 lux issue 4 february 2014

Kimberley Munro____________________________Conceptual Photography

Emma McEvoy____________________________It’s not what you look at that matters

Rebecca Ann Hobbs____________________________In conversation

Student Showcase___________________________Kieren Andrews

Darkroom___________________________Printing naegatives, part one

Pentax Spotmatic__________________________Buying a film camera

50 Lux

Issue #4| | February 2014

Issue #4 | February 20142

Experience the originals...

FREE entryFREE toursFREE education kit

Bill Henson has curated his first exhibition of Australian photography.

With an emphasis on unlikely juxtapositions and strange connections, Henson has selected over 80 works that also tell an unusual story of Australian photography.

THE HOME OF AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY

More information including a timelapse video of the installation process here:

mga.org.au/education

“...photography, more than any other medium, suffers from a mistake or misunderstanding people have when they’ve seen a reproduction in a magazine or online: they think they’re seeing the original.”

Bill Henson, 2014interview with artguide.com.au

Supporters

MONTALTO Vineyard & Olive Grove

MGA is the premier cultural facility of the City of Monash

BOWNESS FAMILYFOUNDATION

photograph: Jessica Hromas

http://www.mga.org.au/education

50 Lux | 50lux.org 3

Welcome

Experience the originals...

FREE entryFREE toursFREE education kit

Bill Henson has curated his first exhibition of Australian photography.

With an emphasis on unlikely juxtapositions and strange connections, Henson has selected over 80 works that also tell an unusual story of Australian photography.

THE HOME OF AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY

More information including a timelapse video of the installation process here:

mga.org.au/education

“...photography, more than any other medium, suffers from a mistake or misunderstanding people have when they’ve seen a reproduction in a magazine or online: they think they’re seeing the original.”

Bill Henson, 2014interview with artguide.com.au

Supporters

MONTALTO Vineyard & Olive Grove

MGA is the premier cultural facility of the City of Monash

BOWNESS FAMILYFOUNDATION

photograph: Jessica Hromas

Hi everyone.

Welcome to our fourth issue. It has something of an art theme. Whilst not all of our photographers took the Arts stream, they are all producing what can be classed art images.

We start 2014 with Kimberley Munro. I first saw Kimberley’s work on DeviantArt around 2008. She has photographed a number of the same people both before and after me, and we live in the same region of Melbourne. It was inevitable that we would one day meet. Kimberley’s work encompasses the extremes of the macabre to bubble-gum colours. Her work is highly regarded and has won her a swag of awards and gallery exhibitions.

We follow that with Emma McEvoy. Emma is also from Melbourne region and has also been highly awarded. The folio of work seen here are her graduate images from PSC. All the elements in the images are photographic and have as little manipulation as possible.

Our third artist is originally from far North Queensland. She studied photography at the Victorian College of the Arts and now lectures in the arts at MIT in Auckland, New Zealand. Rebecca Ann Hobbs’ work is quite different to Kimberley and Emma’s. Rebecca uses a Hasselblad film camera to create her initial images. There is a dark wicked humour to her work, and it sometimes takes a few moments to realise the underlying joke. Rebecca is currently mainly working with video and we include references to some of the video.

Following on from issue #3 we review another film camera, this time the Pentax Spotmatic. This was the fore runner to the classic K1000. And while some examples could be as old as 50 years, they are still a viable proposition for occasional film users. We also continue our series on darkroom practice, and look at the technical aspects of camera lenses.

Finally we’ve tweaked the layout slightly, this will hopefully make the magazine more readable on platforms like Issuu.

Issue #5 is also well under way. Look for it in the second week of March 2014.

Andrew RenautEditor

[email protected]

Issue #4 | Februrary 2014

50 Lux MagazinePO Box 319 Croydon Victoria Australia 3136

Published by:Andrew [email protected]

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Web site and layout:Andrew Renaut

Graphic Elements:Meg Armstrong

Animation:Victoria Gridley

Marketing:Meg Sceri

Notice To Readers and Advertisers:The publishers of 50 Lux Magazine take every care in the production of each issue of this publication but we are not liable for any ed-itorial error, omission, mistake or typograph-ical error. In the case of advertising material supplied, we as the publishers, make no rep-resentation and provide no warranty as to the accuracy of descriptions or offers within said advertising. As publishers we accept no liability for any loss, which any person may incur while re-lying on the accuracy or description of any statement, image or photograph herein. The views expressed by all contributors are not necessarily those of the publisher.

50 Lux Magazine reserves the right to decline any advertising for any reason.

Copyright 50 Lux Magazine 2014: ALL of the content published in this magazine is subject to copyright held either by the publisher in the whole or in part by the contributing pho-tographers, their agents, or estates.

Any infringement may incur legal action. No part of this magazine may be used in part or in full in any way without the express written permission of the publisher.

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Contents

Welcome 3

Student Showcase 6

Kimberley Munro 8

Emma McEvoy 32

Rebecca Ann Hobbs 54

SLR Camera Basics 76

Introduction to printing 80

Review - Pentax Spotmatic 88

Tech Talk - the lens 92

Parting Shots 100


Kimberley MunroKimberley’s images cross the boundaries between photography and art. He we showcase a range of her images from her years at the Photography Studies College, Melbourne.

Emma McEvoyEmma is also a PSC graduate. Again Emma’s folio has crosses that line between photography and art. Here she shares her final folio.

Rebecca Ann HobbsRebecca Ann Hobbs is a photographic artist and lecturer in New Zealand. Born in far North Queensland, here we showcase a range of her images from the past decade or so.

CoverThe cover of this issue features an image by Kimberley Munro.

All images copyright.

Featuring


Student ShowcaseKieren Andrews

Although these landmarks will be familiar to those readers who live in Melbourne, these images by former Aquinas College student Kieren Andrews are both more interesting and technically superior to the usual tourist snap.

Although Kieren will be studying computer networking and web design at Swinburne, he will continue his photography studies at Box Hill.

Right: Eureka Tower. Far right Shot Tower. Both images copyright Kieren Andrews 2013.


The GraduateKimberley Munro

Kimberley Munro is a person who is passionate about here photographic work. Although she took the Commercial stream at Photography Studies College, much of her work is highly conceptual and imaginative. One side of her work has a dark, somewhat macabre feeling, whilst the other side is a bright and colourful as icing on a birday cake.

Although she only finished he degree just over year ago, Kimberley has a large swag of awards and gallery shows to her name. These include: the Australian Commercial and Media Photographers’ 2013 Student Photographer of the Year: Advertising Category Winner, the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers 2013 Emerging photographer of the year, and a number of gold medals at the AIPP awards.

Her work has been exhibited around Australia and appeared at galleries such as Ian Potter Center, Federation Square, CCP, Gallery Obscura, National Gallery of Art, Monash Gallery of Art, AGRA and John Curtain Gallery to name a few.

Her range of work is diverse ranging from monochromatic portraits, through to bright colourful beauty pieces.

I spoke to Kimberly on a hot and humid Melbourne day in the hills on the Melbourne fringe.

Images Copyright: Kimberley MunroOpposite page: Untitled

http://www.berlemu.comwww.kimberleymunro.com.au

http://www.berlemu.com

www.kimberleymunro.com.au


Welcome to 50lux Kimberley, thanks for allowing us to share your work with our readers.

Shall we begin by talking about your early influences?I really only got deeply into photography when I was accepted into PSC, I was never inspired by photographers as such, more inspiration came from illustrators and artists. People like HR Giger, Mark Ryden, Paco Perigrin. I’m a big fan of Tim Burtin because he is so quirky. Natalie Sheil who does great work with Photoshop, and digital rendering. She merges the 3D rendering into Photoshop which is something I’d really love to learn.

When do you get your first camera?I’d had some camera’s when I was young, but the first camera I was really inspired with was a Polaroid iZone. It took tiny pictures about 2 x 3 centimetres in size, and I really just took happy snaps with it of my friends when I was about 12 years old.

Did you study photography at school?I did some photography in Studio Arts in Year 12, but it didn’t sink in that I could be doing what I’m doing now with photography. I did all the arts subjects they offered. The photography I was doing was simply pictures of leaves and putting them through the darkroom. I was concentrating on the elements, line, textures etc. By the last term I was much more into it, and started to explore the little digital camera I’d got for Christmas. I started to get more creative. I painted a girl white and put her a white cube that my dad made. I started to realise that photography could be more than the just the happy snaps I’d been taking. It was 2009 when I really got into photography, and that was my first year at PSC.

What was the experience of applying for PSC like?I simply applied through VTAC, however I went to one of their open days. I went to all the illustration, graphic design, and photography open days at R.M.I.T., Monash, Swinburne, etc. Then I walked in to PSC and there were all the pictures on the walls. It felt so homey. It just felt right being there.



What was your experience with PSC through the years you were there?My first year was really learning how the camera worked. It was the first year that I had really wanted to do photography, and it seemed that everyone else had been doing photography all their lives. I went in there with no experience and no back-story. So I started doing shoots two or three time a week with friends and people I’d met through the Internet. It was just learning the technical side of things and getting a decent shot. I also really discovered Photoshop as tool. Not relying on it, but using it to improve what I had done in the camera.

In second year I began to tinker with the actual images. I started making props, collaborating with different people. I started doing much bigger shoots with more people involved, hair stylists, make-up artists; designing and building backgrounds. I also started to push myself a lot more in Photoshop, so I understood what I was actually doing, rather than just manipulating the controls.

By third year I was doing a lot of refining of my work. Trying to make it look as professional as possible. Making it as clean and seamless as possible. I was also trying to break the barriers. Everyone was shooting fashion, food, landscapes, or products. I was doing the commercial major, and really enjoying the Photoshop side of things. However, I wanted to do highly imaginative things. I wanted to tell stories and to a have a narrative in my images. We had to present a folio of 24 images, so I decided to create 3 different series of images that presented something that wasn’t real.

I took a six month break and went traveling after third year and returned to do fourth year and finish my degree. My lecturer really encouraged me to do a lot more conceptual work. That’s the area where I really found my feet and I’ve really grown to love the medium.

Do you have any tips for people applying in 2014?Everything is so accessible these days that to make a career out of photography you are literary competing with everybody. It’s got be something you absolutely love. The courses are so expensive that you need to make sure it’s not just a hobby. If you are thinking of photography as a career, you need to be prepared to make money from it and get something back in the end. By the end of the course I’d spent tens of thousands of dollars on fees, then there was all the


equipment you need to buy, the costs associated with the shoots such as paying MUAs and buying props, and then there are the final prints, frames etc.

You can learn photography without doing the expensive courses, but if you want to be a commercial photographer it can be worth making the investment in a course where you are getting the best help from professionals, and learn the skills needed to deal with the industry. It has to be more than a hobby. Anybody can go down the street and buy a great camera, do some online courses and become a good photographer for a lot less money. What you are paying for is the feedback, the mentoring, and the networking that you simply don’t get doing it at home.

Is there the expectation, perhaps like lawyers and doctors, that because of their high skill levels professional photographers are able to charge a premium for their services? So many of the people I went through the courses with are not making money from photography, they are doing journalism and other courses in the hope that they will be able to make a living. There is limited work out there and few people want to pay for it. There is sometimes an expectation that photographers will work for free, it’s really hard work to make any money from it. Each job is a new job, and you can no longer expect to have a job every day.

But back to the question… If you think it more than a hobby and you are passionate, speak to the people running the courses and apply. For all its negative aspects around money, it’s a fantastic experience. When you are talking to the selectors, you need to be able to sell yourself as much as sell your portfolio. There is definitely more emphasis on who you are over the quality of your year 12 folio. The idea is that you are going there to learn. You need to show that you are passionate, you are interested, and that you are capable of achieving the work that they give you. They are interested in your potential.

Tell us about the paid work you have been doing since graduating.I did about 5 months of retouching work, but that has dried up. I’ve done a number of weddings, and a few fashion shoots, but they’re really not my thing.


I’ve also done quite a few Time For Print sort of jobs with fashion students.

The fashion shoots were a nice experience. The designers are so excited about what they have done. It’s great working with all the other people who are so passionate about what they are creating. So those sorts of jobs are fun because of the mutual respect people have for each other.

Since graduating I’ve been earning money from retouching. I was lucky that I learnt enough Photoshop skills to be able to get work in that area as it is fairly specialised. I’ve worked with a number of clients, mostly in the Web area for product catalogue’s. Clothing, shoes, handbags etc. for companies such as Mimco, Jeans West, Witchery etc. It’s not the most creative work, and it’s quite repetitive, but the people I work with are great and the money is good.

The most enjoyable retouching work has been for Airship Solutions. They have the blimps you see flying around at events. The also do aerial photography of cities and out in the countryside. I stitch the images together to create the panoramas. I also work on putting the images together to create full 360o Virtual Reality views that you can move around in on the Web. We also do building sites where they add a 3D render for the proposed building to show how it will look when built.

I’ve done a number of hair and beauty jobs since leaving PSC. They are such fun, I get to be a little bit creative, and I love the people I’m working with. The final images have been used in competitions, and are something I can add to my portfolio.

When you are doing your paid fashion and beauty assignments do you have any influence over the people you work with such as MUAs and Stylists?It depends on who has organised the assignment. If the client has brought me on simply as the photographer, I don’t have much control over the MUA’s, stylists, models, etc., but I do take control of the lighting, angles, positioning, and poses. On the other hand, if I’m organising the assignment I’ll take a lot more control of the people I work with. I now have a hair and make-up artist that I like to work with, and I’ll help them out when they need a photographer. It the same with models. I‘ve developed a great relationship with some of them, and I’ve used them


six or seven times.

For my personal work I find people by building a relationship with them on Facebook. I talk with people for quite a while before choosing to work with them, and by then I’ve built up some sort of rapport with them. Agency models aren’t always the best choice for art projects, people who have character, and even drama experience are the normal sort of people I work with, for the type of work I create. It takes a bit more effort to ‘train’ non-professional models to get exactly what I want though sometimes.

Did you feel prepared for the “real world” by your tutors at PSC?I think I did. They seem to allow a lot more creativity in students than some other colleges. When I look at some of the fashion work that other colleges do there seems to a lot of sameness to the images. There isn’t much in the way of creativity in lighting or the style. It’s really that creativity and differentness that makes you stand out and gives you the edge. Advertisers are looking for something different that will make their products standout from the crowd. If your work is the same as everyone else’s why are they going to choose you? So I think that PSC was great for the encouragement I was given to explore unusual ideas.

A lot of people expect that when you go to Uni they will teach you absolutely everything. I bought lots of disks; I did a lot of Internet tutorials that showed a lot of retouching techniques. I did a lot external workshops. If you want to get more out of a course you need to put a lot extra effort in. You can’t just expect to go off to Uni and leave at the end and do what ever, there is so much more to put in.

Then there is the financial side of things, I worked so many extra night shifts just so I could properly print and present my folio. In the end it was all about how I could make myself a better photographer.

How did you organise your time? I worked nightshifts in a pub three or four nights a week, plus the four full days a week at PSC. There’d be some times where I would go to PSC through the day, work a 8 or 9 hour shift, and then go back to PSC for the another day. I’d try and make up the sleep somewhere along the line. Having said that, I still had plenty of time to do my shoots each week. I


aimed to do two or three a week, but I always did at least one. All the sacrifices I made sleep wise were so that I could get the absolute most out of the course. There is a huge amount of time spent on preparation – booking models, MUA’s, hair and stylists, booking the studios etc. So it takes a lot of time management, organisation is the key.

Do you see yourself working mainly in Australia, or are their opportunities for your type of work overseas?Almost everyone I’ve spoken to has said that there are few opportunities in Australia for the type of work that I do. I’ll probably need to go to the United States or Europe where there is a far wider range of work on offer. However, right now I don’t feel that I have the work experience to tackle going over there and setting up on my own.

Are you a ‘boys with toys’ type of photographer with lots of gear or do you keep things simple? Tell us about the equipment you use? I started off buying lots of gear, sometimes without really knowing what it did or why I bought it. I bought about 6 different lenses, a 35mm, a 50mm… I had a couple of telephoto zooms, a 70-300mm… A wide-angle zoom that I used a lot for backgrounds… Another exciting thing was a macro lens that created really lovely out of focus backgrounds and bokeh. When I started to get more comfortable with lighting I bought some Nikon flash units. I was really crafty with them and attached them to cheap foam-core boards and got some really beautiful light from them. I started with a Nikon D80, but that died. I then bought a second-hand Nikon D300S, but the flash units didn’t want to sinc with the body.

Now I have a Canon 5D mkIII, the detail is incredible, but I still use the Nikon for close-up beauty shots. It’s got a lot more focus points and they are easier to select to get perfect focus. I use the Canon for other things like full-length and background shots. I’ve also bought a portable lighting kit from Dragon Image in Melbourne. I have some soft-boxes and umbrellas, and it charges up really quickly.

I want to get hold of some ring flashes. I’m really interested in seeing how light works in different situations especially when doing portraiture. I want to collect more of the things that we learnt about at PSC. Things like barn-doors, snoots, and honeycomb grids. Exploring different colours using cellophane and gels. I always get so excited learning new


techniques and playing with new equipment…

What is your approach to lighting?I’ve been learning to keep the number of lights down to one or two instead of three or four. Having a single source makes it much easier for the composites I do in Photoshop as it’s much simpler to match the lighting. It looks much more natural if the overall light appears to come from a single source. Sometimes I’ll use more lights if I need to say light up a background in the studio though.

I really like to keep things as simple as possible. I always ask myself how few lights do I need to get an image. If you start thinking you need seven lights, than ask yourself what are each of those lights really doing. I’m a bit limited at the moment because my work is very much studio based, I’m mostly working out of my living room. My next step is to develop relationships with studios and move on from there. I don’t do that many location shoots, but my approach to lighting is very similar to that in the studio. I still use the soft boxes and umbrellas. That’s why the Dragon kit is so good as it runs off batteries.

Describe your preproduction process on a typical paid assignment, sketches, location scouting etc. It usually starts off with an idea for a single image. Then I do a lot of sketches and mock-ups using similar images from the Internet and magazines. I generally do things in a series. So it will start off with the original idea, lots of sketches and refinements, and the idea might get changed around a bit, but still have the original idea at the core. I’ll then take it to a whole new level.

For example, in one image I started with a hand, then I made the hand into a tree, then I added the birds, and then the house. The background was formed out of the hands. When I opened the hand image in Bridge it had flipped the image, which gave me the idea to add more hands to the fingers. I came across the image of my pet Cockatoo and added that. So it went on and I created a whole series of images with that hand theme. I’ve always liked to use hands in my images, that series came out of playing with the hand idea, then drew in themes of the environment. How man can be a destroyer and a saviour of the


environment. Another in the series has two faces of a man, it symbolised how we can be so two faced about the environment.

With the cake lady I immediately knew exactly how I wanted the finished image to look. Bright, pink, a fantasy. I wanted her to be freaking out that someone had taken a big slice out of her perfect body.

In third year they were trying to get me to create a brief and stick to it. I find that with my imaginative work that I’m always building on my ideas. It might change as I choose the models, change as I build the sets. So it can end up looking quite different to the original concept. It’s always an evolution.

What is your approach to post production?I try to keep my workflow as simple as possible. I use Adobe Bridge to sort my images and work out the best ones for the purpose. I then work almost exclusively in Photoshop. I tried Adobe Lightroom and Capture One, but I’m more comfortable using Photoshop because you can’t really do the compositing in Lightroom or Capture One, but I can see that I’m going to have to get more comfortable with them in the near future.

One of the most important things to learn is the Pen Tool. It takes a lot of practice to get it right. Recently I created a flower arrangement for a future project. Cutting it out and getting it just right took me over three hours, so you have to be patient. You get used to working with it working four days a week retouching though. Learning to mask properly is also really important for retouching too. The latest version of Photoshop has some really improved tools for masking around hair and doing fine lines like stray hair, but I still need to do some manual fixing.

Have you done any video work?There’s definitely a push to get students to do more video work. In third year we did an assignment that simply animated a series of still images. In the Bachelor year we had to do a three-minute piece with moving images, and audio sounds and music. I did a Bogan gnome with stop motion talking – lots of foul mouthed swearing! It‘s the Neville the Gnome traveling around the world telling stories. That was actually a lot of fun.

I think it’s important to learn video. The cameras all do it well now, and it’s expected in photojournalism. Lots of Web sites use stop motion to show products


Following speads: Untitled and Untitled

from different angles too.

Who are your current favourite photographers and artists?There’s no-one who I follow closely or I’m obsessed with as such. However, I love illustrations, paintings, and images that juxtapose ideas and concepts within themselves. I scour the Internet for magazines. Hi-Fructose Magazine and juxtapose Art contain a lot of pop-surreal. Images from popular culture are turned into the surreal. It’s a very modern take on people like Salvador Dali.

I really like the idea of taking a person and putting them in a situation that really defies reality. To create a new world and a new character into something that doesn’t exist, but creates a new story.

I look to people like Greg Simkins who does surreal animals that twist and morph into different things. It becomes a different creature that interacts with something else. He’s done one great image where there are about fifteen animals - even the chairs are animals. They are emerging from a castle that is one big piece of bodily weirdness! Everything is as one, but it’s a fantasy journey.

I’ve recently got into Doctor Who. I love a great storyline, and when you combine that with some of the surreal characters, and the incredible special effects, it’s just magic. I love images that have more than just the obvious, there needs to be a story, a narrative behind it. I love the Japanese anime. The weirdness of the stories, the amazing characters they develop.

Another of my favourites is Swiss artist HR Giger. I love the image of Christ being held by the devil, his arms as a crossbow. Another is Michael Hussar. Yet another is Mark Ryden. He has all these characters that are almost childlike. There are animals that are somehow creepy, but cute at the some time.

Natalie Shau has inspired me since I was about 17 in high school. She’s from Vilnius in Lithuania. She starts with photography and then does the compositing. I like her because she is creating new worlds from real things. Even her fashion photography includes many


of these elements.

Another person who influenced me early on was Sandy Skolund. She made some enormous art works. Revenge of the Goldfish and Radioactive Cats are not photography but they are so imaginative, slightly surreal comments on life. Her early photography is really interesting too, the way it comments on the bleakness of American life despite America’s wealth.

Anything that sparks my creativity, anything that creates a character that just doesn’t pre-exist. There’s more to life than just being realistic!

I think it’s just my inner child. I still love watching children’s cartoons. I’m not into serious dramas. Why be serious when you can create a whole new world that no one else knows about, but you can share with other people.

Do you ever do any work with film and darkroom?I’m so immersed in ‘digital’ now. Everything I do becomes a Photoshop creation. I did enjoy working with film, maybe one day I’ll get back into it and integrate it somehow with what I’m doing. Working with digital is what I’m comfortable with, it works with the type of compositing work that I do.

Do you consider yourself a photographer or an artist?An artist. I use photography a lot in my work, but it is tool and a starting point for my work. I feel more an artist because I want there to a story and meaning behind what I do. There are some fashion photographers who can do this were there is a series of images and a message at the end. I like the idea of coming up with an idea and changing it to create a meaning that inspires other people. I will always be a photographer, but I want to create art that is more suited to being seen in a gallery rather than in a glossy magazine. I’m very much a visual communicator. I use photography to get my ideas and thoughts across.

We often hear that professional photography is a career that is dying because cameras are so good that anybody can take a professional looking photograph. Do you think that this is really the case?Sadly it is. Having said that, I think that anyone who is trained and understands the medium is always going to produce a better image than someone who hasn’t trained. A trained person is going to be able to

see what wrong with an image, see its potential, and then work it up to be something much more.

I’ve seen commercial work that hasn’t been taken to it’s full potential. If you are doing work to sell to people and there are unintentional marks and scratches, and it’s not colour correct to the product, you are not fully selling that product.

The technology is so accessible. There are so many companies doing their own photography, but it is not quality and it’s not really selling the product – often it’s making the product look worse than it really is. In the end it’s all about money, but they are probably loosing money by not hiring someone who knows what they are doing. A professional photographer will be able to visualise the outcome, see the lighting possibilities, and then produce a polished final image. Your average person will simply pick-up the camera and shoot what is there as it were.

Describe your dream photo assignment.When I left PSC my thoughts were all about getting jobs, getting paid, working up other peoples ideas. Now my thoughts have turned to creating series of images that tell stories. Nothing would make me happier than creating a series of characters that inhabit a fantasy world. They would be in a set of images that are published as a book. People could pick-up the book and say this is so different, so unique, that it isn’t like real life at all. I want to inspire people. It would the ultimate dream for it to be good enough to make a movie out of.

The films that Salvador Dali made from his works are so inspiring, so different. The cutting of the eye and egg pouring out is so shocking, but so thought provoking.

Creating series and having a big budget for props, costumes, sets, and people so I can realise the stories and idea I have is perhaps my biggest dream.

I’d like to learn more about creating CGI and 3D objects and perhaps somehow integrate that into my art. I like how in some commercials there is the use of CGI to change and morph things to create an idea or concept in the viewers mind. There’s also a Bundaberg rum ad where it appears that only the bottle is real, everything else has been done in 3D computer modeling. All the shadowing and lighting look totally real photographically; it’s creating that


illusion. Every element complements the other other and works together. I’d love to learn how to do that; it would be a great addition to the way I work and my style of working.

Where do you see yourself in 5, 10, 25, 50 years?Hopefully people will start to see my photographic talents and use me. I’ll be recognised enough that people will want to buy prints; they’ll want to understand my stories. They’ll understand that these things take money and time to create. I’d love to be traveling more, collaborating with people any where in the world. Being recognised by galleries. I wouldn’t mind doing some teaching, running workshops. I see that there is so much potential in digital media.

Ultimately I see myself as both a commercial and an art photographer. I see myself as someone who can fulfill someone else’s brief. I’d love to be regularly hired by creative directors on a neutral basis where we both work together on creating something huge. Working with people who share that vision. On the art side creating huge visions, something along the line of what Canadian photographer Jeff Wall does with his massive transparencies. I just don’t want to simply recreate what an art director tells me, but to be much more collaborative. I’d love to create some massive billboards that defy what’s been done before, go beyond just people standing there next to words.

Finally, what advice would you give to young readers who are thinking of studying photography and taking it up as a career?You need to remember that you only ever get out what to put in. I feel I always did everything possible to expand my knowledge, increase my experience, to build my work to the point where I’m really happy about where it’s going. I want to continue growing more. I feel I can be more than just another photographer.

There were people who thought you could just do something without putting in any effort and be an expert in a weeks time. Never think that. You have to put in and practice. You have to keep at it. If you don’t have the energy and passion to keep at it, you have to question why you are doing photography. There’s two hundred, three hundred people graduating each year across Australia, so there is always going to be someone just ahead or

just behind you. The thing I’ve learnt most is that you have to put yourself out there, put in a huge amount of effort. If you don’t get a job out the course at the end, you have to understand that there are so many other people in your position. If you are not prepared to make sacrifices in this industry, be an accountant!

A big thank your for your time…

Contact Kimberley

[email protected]


The GraduateEmma McEvoyLike Kimberley Munro, Emma McEvoy is a graduate of the Photography Studies College in Melbourne. She completed her Advanced diploma of photography and she has recently graduated from her Fine Art Major. 2013 was a great year for Emma, she won the prestigious AIPP Australian student photographer of the year award, the ACMP student photographer of the year award and also took out the portrait category.

I spoke to Emma about her experiences in her photography course and where it might lead her in the future.

Who were you early influences?I was thinking about this recently. Rather than particular artists, it was more my mum and my grandma. They are both very creative, very into making things. That’s all we did when we were younger. They had stalls at the markets where they sold dolls, and art and crafts. I remember being around all the creative people at the markets. Then when I was about eight years old I started selling at the markets myself making jewellery and really bad paintings. So I guess being around all those crafty people at the markets was my first creative influence. So I feel those people were more of an influence than just looking at the work of artists. I think that is still the same today, I feel liked I’m really inspired by people around me rather than looking at other artists so much.

When did you get you first camera?In Year 7 I got my first compact camera. I used to take lots of happy snaps. Then in Year 11 I got my first serious SLR camera when I was doing VCE Studio Arts Photography. The camera was a Canon 400D. It was supposed to have been shared between mum and me, but it was really mine! Then when I started at PSC I upgraded to the 5D – I love it!

When I was at school we didn’t do photography in Years 9 or 10, photography started at Year 11 in VCE. We had a darkroom and the photography was all

darkroom based. I loved it. It was really the best way of learning. I loved hanging out in the darkroom at lunchtime and when ever else I could get in there. My friends would come into the darkroom at lunchtime to see what I was up to. It was such fun. The school provided all the cameras etc. we needed. Unfortunately while I think the darkroom is still there, they have bought digital cameras and its all gone digital. It’s a real shame, because I learnt so much and it was such another world. It’s sad, I really miss it.

Unfortunately by the time I was at PSC, the darkrooms had well and truly been removed. Instead we used to go to the Gold Street studios at Trentham in central Victoria. Ellie Young was a fantastic teacher. The studio runs lots of other workshops too on traditional photographic practices.

Describe the process of entering PSC.It seems like a lifetime ago, even more so because I was part-time so I did the course over four years. I don’t know if it has changed, but applying for part-time study was different to full-time as I didn’t have to go through VTAC. It was pretty much simply going for an interview. I don’t think I even had to show a folio. It was about my previous experience and my preparedness for the course. I had already done a visual merchandising course at RMIT. When I was finishing school I was actually thinking of going to


Freedom in letting go. Copyright: Emma McEvoy


(I’m) perfect. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

PSC, but ended up doing the Visual Merchandising. It was good experience though. We did graphics, prop design, prop making, styling, and photography was included in the course too. A whole range of subjects. I wanted to see where my heart lay, and what I got from it was that I really wanted to do photography.

The people at PSC were great and talked me through the application process. I think for arts students now the interview process has more or less gone. It’s all based on your ATAR score. I think that’s a bit ridiculous because you must need to see the quality of the person’s work rather than just their ATAR. Thankfully PSC still interview students in the application process.

What was interesting about PSC was the camaraderie. Starting off though, that weekend at Chewton was great. It’s such a great way of meeting people and getting to know them. You go away on field trips and have dinners with the lecturers to, so you really get to know them. It’s a bit different for the full timers in first year because they are there all the time, where as I was perhaps coming and going a bit more than them. There’s a really wide age range too - from teenagers to a guy in his late seventies. There are a lot of different people from lots of different walks of life, which is really awesome.

What advice would you give people applying in 2014?Despite the ATAR business, you still need to think of the old cliché about being yourself. Produce the kind of work that you what to produce and love to make. Don’t simply do something in the hope that you what to please someone else. I think a lot of people get stuck in the mind frame that RMIT is very commercially orientated and PSC is only conceptual. A lot of people I came across had that narrow view of the different colleges here in Melbourne. When you get to final year at PSC, you can specialise in photojournalism, commercial, or art photography. They embrace it all, so do what you want to do, show what you want to show.


Homesick. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

What was your experience entering the world of paid assignments?It’s really difficult as a student to not get caught up in Time For Print. People come to you all the time and say we can’t afford to pay you, but if you do it TFP it will be great for your folio. So I did things with the promise of experience, recognition, and exposure, and ended up with absolutely no recognition or exposure.

So in final year I put my foot down and decided that my work was good enough to be paid for. That people should be paying me for what I do. There are some people who pay and recognise you when you are a student, but I found that there were a lot of people who really just weren’t willing to pay. They didn’t seem to think that photography was a skill.

I’ve definitely done a lot of unpaid jobs, but as I got more savvy I’m glad to say I do more paid than unpaid work now. My first fully paid job was a wedding and I was absolutely terrified. I was worried that if I didn’t get it right I would ruin the bride and grooms whole day. Afterwards it felt amazing, and getting paid was awesome. It was a great incentive to keep going. I think I was only 19 when I did it, so it was a great weight on my shoulders controlling a wedding. I’m not certain that I would want to do weddings my whole life though.

There is a learning curve in dealing with people. Having the confidence to produce what they want me to produce. It’s about building that confidence and not worrying about the business aspect when you are starting out.

How have you developed from the business aspect?I’m not sure that I learnt much of the business side of things until this year! I’m still really getting my head around the financial aspects. I’m a creative person. The financial and business side totally contradicts my creative side. That was where my mentor Samantha Everton has been so great. She works for 6 months of the year without thinking of the business aspects; she concentrates 100% on the creative side of her work. The other 6 months is all about where am I going to exhibit this body of work, all the marketing, all the advertising, all the business side of things, nothing creative.


The art of ruin. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

I think that is how I need to structure myself. Maybe not the extreme of six months on six months off that she does, but separating the creative and the business aspects. I find that when I put the business into the creative, I simply can’t be creative anymore. Again it’s something that I’ve come to the conclusion of in the past year. The art photography world is just so different to the commercial photography world.

Do you have any gallery representation yet?When I was ready to hang my graduate exhibition I though it would take to long to hang it myself and get it perfect, so I got a professional exhibition hanger. He does work for the National Gallery of Victoria. He’s a really cool guy, but was really quiet when he was hanging my work. When he finished he stepped back and asked if I was actually represented, I said no but it was one of my goals now that I had finished the course. It was a real honour and compliment to have someone who works with art everyday to suggest that my work could be worthy of gallery representation so early in my career. I’m in the process of contacting galleries at the moment to discuss my forthcoming trip to Iceland.

What sort of control do you have over the people you collaborate with?A lot! I’m a bit of control freak! Perhaps not so much for commissioned work, a lot of that is pre-planned with the client and other people before I become involved. However with my fine art work it’s all up to me. I don’t necessarily use make-up artists. I like my models to look as natural as possible. They can usually do their own make-up anyway if I need that little bit to balance the lighting. I learnt a lot of good styling techniques through the visual marketing course, and that has been really useful.

A lot of people think that my work is created in Photoshop. In reality I build most of the sets myself, I make most of the props etc., and I source clothing and costumes from vintage and op shops. I do all of the running around for that myself, I don’t trust anyone else! When I’ve got a vision, I’m on a mission.

If it is my own personal work I do it all myself, if it’s work for clients I’ll have as much say as I can.


The paradox of safety. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

Did you feel ready for the real world when you left PSC?If you had asked me that a year ago I would have said no. But now that I’m about to graduate I feel I am quite prepared. It’s because when you are in your final year you are dedicated to the path you want to follow. I’m really talking about the photography industry generally and where you are placed in your final year. That is whether you are following the art, commercial, or photojournalism stream – whatever your niche is. So the final year of the course is much more structured to your chosen area. Because I wanted to become a fine art photographer, everything I learnt was aimed towards that goal. Learning how to edition, how to find representation at a gallery, how to exhibit, how to frame your work, how to hang your work… All the things I’d been freaking out about. We also had a lot of industry people come in and speak to us, and we went on a number of field trips and visits. The mentor program was invaluable. As I said Samantha Everton was great. After four years you feel comfortable enough with them that you can ask them all sorts of weird and wonderful questions. They become more your equals and you loose that feeling of intimidation.

For me it’s all happened in the past three months, with Kim winning the emerging photographer of the year, and my winning the student photographer of the year. It’s all suddenly coming together for me. I’ve got things in place and more exhibitions coming up, and residencies planned. So I definitely feel prepared.

Back to the business side of things, do you feel prepared on those aspects of your training?We had one set of classes on the business aspect of photography. One big tip is to download the ACMP ‘Better Business Bible’. It’s awesome. It covers everything you need to known and more. Things like licensing your images and quoting for jobs. We also had to do a three year business plan, so it was interesting to see just how much money I’m going to loose in the first few years! Obviously, starting out, I still have plenty to learn. And having ongoing access to a mentor is a great help too.


Brave in her vulnerability. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

We also had a really good arts lawyer come in and speak to us. She spoke about image licensing, copyright, the photographers’ rights as opposed to the client rights. All things that you really need to know, but simply don’t think about. That’s why I think arts courses need to be teaching you about these things from the very beginning rather than just as you about to graduate. You need to know that when you place your image on someone else’s web site that they can claim the rights to your image in perpetuity. That the same can happen when you place your images in competitions, they can claim ownership of your images and use the image however they want to, including selling them to someone else. It’s quite a scary thing, and who reads the fine print? You have to be so careful with things like model releases, and working with children is a legal nightmare. You have to know all these things; it’s such a minefield.

Is time management one of your strengths?I’m really good at getting things done on time if there is a deadline. However, if I’m working on my own projects I’m quite a perfectionist. I sometimes don’t know when to stop! I’m always seeing a better way of doing things, making adjustments. I need to learn when enough is enough, and move on to something else. I feel like I waste a lot of time, but in reality I’m very productive. I always get things done on time, this year especially. I wasn’t really that stressed, unlike the first three years of the course. I think that is because I’ve become more confident in my abilities and myself.

Do you see yourself staying in Australia to work? Are there enough opportunities for art photographers here?Yes. There is a surprising amount of opportunities for art photography here in Australia. America and Europe seem to be so much more competitive, but they have a greater general respect for art. I think it is slowly getting better in Australia though, and many galleries are seeing photography in the same light as say painting and sculpture.

I’m planning on going back to Iceland in 2014. I’ve applied for two artist’s residencies one in Reykjavik, the other in a regional town. I’m aiming to go in April,


The winds will cary you. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

May, June when the light is in transition from the total darkness of winter to the total daylight of mid-summer. I plan to travel more in the coming years, but I want to make a name for myself in Australia, and I think you can now do that.

Discuss the equipment you mainly work with.I’m not an equipment freak. It’s such a boy thing. I use my 24-70 most of the time – it hardly ever comes off, and a 50mm 1.4. I’ve just bought a 70-200mm which I love. Because of my style and the type of work I do, I don’t need equipment to cover every single focal range.

I bought myself a small lighting kit, but I rarely use it. I’m such a natural light sort of photographer. I’ve tried to use it a few times, but I don’t really like it. It’s just my camera, my reflector, me and my model. I like to keep it really intimate. If it was a big set, lots of assistants, MUAs, stylists etc. it would just ruin the moment. When I have had a big crew, I feel I just haven’t quite got the same feeling in the photographs. So I like to keep it simple.

I’ve been setting up a proper studio in Moorabin with a double cyclorama. That will be available for hire soon. I’m finding I need to separate home and work, and I have my office there. Otherwise I tend to spend 24 hours a day on the computer editing.

How do you approach lighting?As I said I love working with natural light. I do a lot of landscape work, that’s partly why I want to go back to Iceland. However, having said that now that I have my own studio space, and the fact that I make so many of my own props and costumes, I really want to explore studio lighting a lot more.

I have much more space than the college studios, so I want to build more elaborate sets. I really admire people like David La Chapel and Tim Walker. I like the notion that people think something has been Photoshopped, but it’s not.

When I’m on location, I literary only use reflectors. I pick the time of day very carefully. It’s almost always the “golden hour” around sunset. It’s a bit limiting,


Beneth the weight of it all. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

but when I work at other times I just don’t get the mood I’m after.

Describe your pre-production process.My visual diaries are always huge, and I have a huge number of them. I can’t work without them. I guess that comes from my earlier crafting days. There’s a lot of scrap-booking. I sketch all my idea a lot too. I get a lot of inspiration from writing, so there’s lots of quotes, words, and poems everywhere.

For a project I’ll sit down and jot down ideas, sketch out ideas, sketch out the props and locations I have in mind. I pretty much have it all planed out in my head, so it’s a matter of getting out onto paper. I then head off to the various prop and vintage stores – my favourite place to spend the weekend! My mum says I’ll never make money because I spend it all on props, costumes and vintage clothes!

Then it’s really just me and the model. I rarely use a represented model. It’s usually a friend or a friend of a friend. I also use actors because I don’t like things to be too rigid and posed. Then we just go out and make the images.

I’ve always got it down to the colours I want to use, where the props need to be positioned. Everything is closely planned, so at the location I just have to put it in place. The actual shoot is the quickest part. All the time is spent pre-production and postproduction, sourcing everything. It makes a lot sense rather than getting somewhere and not knowing what you are going to do.

Postproduction…?As I said earlier, most people think my images are created in Photoshop, but they’re not. Everything is created in-camera. I sometimes use Photoshop to alter colours if I haven’t been able to create that colour in-camera. I’ll darken the overall image to create the mood, maybe add some textures, and do the required sharpening. That’s about it. Everything is created in RAW, then imported through ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) and then tweaked, before working on a TIFF file in Photoshop.


Be a light in the dark. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

A lot of people say that my images look quite painterly. I think that comes from using multiple layers and adding the subtle textures. I don’t use a tablet, nobody believes I just use the track-pad on the MacbookPro. A tablet is on my list, I’ve used my brothers, I just need to get used to using it.

I use Prism in North Melbourne for my exhibition printing. They are fantastic and will sit down with you and listen to what you want then get the prints just right.

Have your influences changed over time?Early on, surprisingly because I’m not a fashion photographer, it was fashion photographers. I think that was because many of them do quite conceptual work. Again David LaChapelle and Tim Walker, all the Italian Vogue style photographers. While I still like those people and their work, I’ve definitely moved away from them towards fine art photographers. Perhaps surprisingly many of them are from here in Melbourne: Jane Burton, Samantha Everton, Bill Henson… I’m looking at them and their careers because they are where I want to be. There are just so many great art photographers in Australia. I actually try not to spend to much time looking at them because it just becomes overwhelming. It can block my creativity, I get over saturated. I try to look more at people’s lives, and the work of writers to get my inspiration more so than other image-makers.

I also like Ellen Rogers. She’s an English photographer whose work has appeared in Lula – Girl of My Dreams magazine, and she did the cover to the Imogen Heap album. She only works with film and hand colours all her images. I so miss the darkroom and working with film. I can hopefully setup a darkroom in the studio. There’s the perfect room for it. Then I can go back to playing with it again.


Porcelain. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

Do you ever do any work with video?It a class now in third year at PSC. I think they are introducing more of it partly because the cameras have the capability, but also because photojournalists need to be able to shoot both still and video now. I did a stop motion project. I really got into that and like to do some more in the future. I’ve also done a film clip for a local musician. I did video that went with my exhibition a couple of years ago. So I’ve dabbled in a few times. I want to incorporate some video work into my Iceland project too. I’ll probably do all the preproduction and filming, but get someone else to edit it as it so time consuming.

Do you think that professional photography will ever die?No! There’s a quote: ‘Your camera takes such great pictures. Thanks I taught it everything I know.’ It’s a bit like saying a paintbrush makes great paintings. The camera is a tool. It’s all about your vision, your idea, the stories you want to tell, and your ability to translate that into a great image. The camera can’t do any of that. So no. There’s agroup of people who think that they can do that, and the camera and Photoshop will do everything for them, well they can try… There’s a big difference between a professional photographer and someone picking up a camera on “Auto” and taking a snap. Anyone one with an eye for photography should be able to see that.

Where do you see your self in the future?In five years time I’ll definitely have some form of gallery representation. I’ll have grow my work, be travelling a lot more, maybe living in Iceland!

I’d love to be able to just be working creatively and have someone come on board to do the technical aspects.

I’ve been asked to run workshops, but I don’t quite feel ready for that. I love the idea of teaching and inspiring people though, and it’s something I’ll definitely be doing. I promised myself that when I finished VCA art I would return and teach students that just because you are doing art, it doesn’t mean you are going to fail in life. Even though my subjects were scaled down, I still did better than those people who did subject that were scaled up. I loved what I was doing, they didn’t.


‘Artists are some of the most driven, courageous people on the face of the earth. They deal with more day-to-day rejection in one year than most people do in a lifetime. Every day, artists face the financial challenge of living a freelance lifestyle, the disrespect of people who think they should get real jobs, and their own fear that they’ll never work again. Every day, they have to ignore the possibility that the vision they have dedicated their lives to is a pipe dream. With every role, they stretch themselves, emotionally and physically, risking criticism and judgment. With every passing year, many of them watch as the other people their age achieve the predictable milestones of normal life – the car, the family, the house, the nest egg. Why? Because artists are willing to give their entire lives to a moment – to that line, that laugh, that gesture, or that interpretation that will stir the audience’s soul. Artists are beings who have tasted life’s nectar in that crystal moment when they poured out their creative spirit and touched another’s heart. In that instant, they were as close to magic, the universe, and perfection as anyone could ever be. And in their own hearts, they know that to dedicate oneself to that moment is worth a thousand lifetimes.’ - David Ackert

Her sinking spirit. Copyright: Emma McEvoy

So do what you are passionate about and you will do well in life. I really love the idea of becoming an art teacher, and it’s also a great way to support myself with a regular income. It’s really hard to make a good income from art photography alone.

What would your dream assignment be?That would be to photograph the band Sigor Ros in Iceland. And I’m going to make that happen in 2014!

Click or tap to contact Emma

http://emmamcevoy.com/contact/


In Conversation With...Rebecca Ann HobbsRebecca Ann Hobbs is a visual artist who began working in photography. However her work has now has expanded to include conceptual video.

Over the past 15 years she has won a number of photographic awards. Her work has been exhibited widely across Australia including at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. Her works are in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Her work has been described as having a literal quality. The pieces are often highly stylised jokes or comments on the society we live in. There is often a double-take when first viewing the images. Yes Overeasy is upside down - the title comes from the way American’s cook their eggs, but is the image also suggesting we live on the bottom of the world, or our world is topsy-turvy?

There are many references in Hobbs’ work that point to the photographic decisive moment, to the cinematic language - Mise en Scene - that we see all the time but don’t necessary acknowledge in our viewing. The diegesis of her worlds is slightly warped .

Rebecca is currently based in New Zealand where she lectures at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland.

Artist Web Page: rebeccaannhobbs.com

Australian Video Art Archive:

http://www.videoartchive.org.au/rhobbs/index.html

Circuit Artist Film and Video Aotearoa:

http://www.circuit.org.nz/artist/rebecca-ann-hobbs

http://rebeccaannhobbs.com

http://www.videoartchive.org.au/rhobbs/index.html

http://www.circuit.org.nz/artist/rebecca-ann-hobbs


Images copyright: Rebecca Ann HobbsTop. A Pseudofemale Fish 2001: from the series Suck Roar. Inkjet digital print. 50 x 50 cm

Bottom. Waiting, 2007: from Up With the Fall, Down on the Diagonal. Lightjet print 50 x 50cm


When did you first discover photography?I grew up in the area called Black River in far north Queensland, in Bindal and Wulgurukaba country. There were no galleries, museums or even any libraries. I didn’t really begin to understand art or photography until my twenties. It wasn’t actually until my mid twenties that I really went into a gallery for the first time. However, I picked up my first camera when I was in my mid teens and had my own camera by the time I was about nineteen. I was looking at photography though, and had access to magazines like National Geographic.

The first camera I consciously set out to save up for and buy was a Nikon FM10. I was thinking I needed a good reliable camera for University. Before that I’d been using plastic type camera, nothing too serious.

I remember as a teenager thinking that photography could be a good way to go because “painting” and “art” was on some sort of pedestal and really far away. Art felt as though it was unattainable, whereas photography was achievable and something you could earn a living from. The realities are perhaps a little different, but photography didn’t seem as remote as the other arts.

Photography is quite accessible, and historically quite a lot of women do it too. You don’t need a studio. All you need is the camera. I liked that about the medium. It seemed more affordable too, much more so than big canvases and oil painting or making sculptures. Of course it is even more affordable now with digital technology.

I didn’t have access to a darkroom until I went to University in my mid twenties. All my early photography before then was colour film taken to the chemist where it was sent off for developing and printing.

Where did you go to University?I studied at the Victorian College of the Arts where I did an undergraduate course. I also did an honours year at the VCA. Then I went to the California Institute of the Arts, on a Samtag scholarship, CalArts is a expansive private university located in Los Angeles. Over there I did a Masters degree. My idea of what photography is changed quite dramatically through that process. And my idea of what photography can be is still changing now. These days I do more moving image works, but I see that the two mediums have a very close relationship with one another. Both are


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Complex Social Groups: Suck Roar. 2001. 50x50cm Lightjet Print


lens-based mediums and both can be manipulated digitally through a computer. I like the way you can use narrative and work in a series with both mediums.

What were your majors at University?When I was at VCA doing my undergrad I had a very romantic idea of what photography and art were. Back then the VCA was divided up into various separate departments. I was in the photography department. So in the first year or so I was very preoccupied with learning the tools. How the camera worked, the relationship between the aperture and the shutter speed. We worked in the darkrooms, there were both black and white, and colour darkrooms. So for the first year I just worked in black and white. Working with the camera, just figuring out its limitations. In second and third year I moved on into the colour darkrooms. In the fourth year I started to explore video and the moving image. I’ve continued to work with photography, up until the past two years or so. Photography has become a little too serious and heavy for me at the moment, but I’ll go back to it at some point.

How did they structure the course?In first year there was quite an emphasis on critical thinking on the arts, but I was pig-headed and was determined to learn the medium. I started off with 35mm equipment – the Nikon FM10, but by third year I was using medium format equipment – a twin lens Rolliflex. I did my first series on that camera – the Suck Raw series with the animals. I found I really enjoyed using the Rolliflex much more than a 35mm camera because I didn’t like peaking through the viewfinder with one eye. I like that you use both eyes to see and because the camera is away from you face it is much easier to engage with the subject. There isn’t that big camera between you and the subject. Then when I was doing my Masters I got myself a Hasselblad. I still have that kit and I can’t bring myself to sell it even though I’m not using it at the moment. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to afford a good digital back for it. I’ve made a conscious decision to only print my work at 50cm x 50cm, I wanted my photographs to be about photography and not about painting as such. So I don’t need a huge resolution file for my images, but it would be nice to have a digital medium format back so I have the resolution to work with if I ever need it.

It’s interesting that there are still people who cling to mediums. A bit like how people who collect vinyl records because they prefer the sound quality to


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Flight Using the Mouth: Suck Roar. 2001. 50x50cm Lightjet Print


digital. Film has a unique grain structure, and there are people who are engaging with that medium because they are after a certain effect. As for me, I haven’t had any misgivings transiting from film to digital files. I don’t have a particular nostalgia for mediums. So for me it’s not about using film as such, it’s about waiting for a digital back to become affordable. Where I work they have a bunch of recent Canon 5D’s, so there isn’t a problem accessing good equipment. And they are really good for video and stills.Equipment changes move at such fast pace that it’s been hard to keep up. I like to work with wide-angle lenses for both my video and my still work, so I’m more interested in the lens than the camera body. The lens is what gives you the quality of the image. The different glass is what gives you the quality of the final light. So for me it’s always been more about the lenses than the bodies.

I worked in camera shop. It’s interesting that some people learn the lingo and they shroud it all in a kind of mystery. I’ve never really subscribed to that. I always think of the camera as a black light-tight box with a hole. That’s how I explain it to my students. At the end of the day a camera is just a light-tight box. I think of the video camera in the same way. Although I continue to love photography and I still get an adrenalin rush when I’m making images.

I like working with digital. I’m not really a tactile person, I’m not so much interested in working with paint and clay. I like that about photography and video, that sense of distance and the interface. I originally didn’t like working in the darkroom. That sense of dampness and the smell of the chemicals; but now I find that environment quite relaxing. Perhaps it’s because I’m on the computer most of the time so it has flipped around again. There’s a great sense of isolation in a darkroom, but it’s a bit like going to a casino where they don’t want you to know how long you’ve been hidden away. So it’s always good to have a radio on or music playing. I like working on a computer, and I’m on one pretty much 12 hours a day, but I love the darkroom now!

Describe your workflow.I always shoot RAW. I use Photoshop and go from RAW to PSD to TIFF to JPEG if needed. I use Premier for my video work. Photoshop and Premier are pretty much all I use. I use Lightroom sometimes. I find if you are on a shoot and take a couple of hundred digital images it is a great file management system


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Smash: Girl Physics. 2003. 50x50cm Lightjet Print


because of the way it handles RAW images. However, because I haven’t made the transition from film when creating images on the Hasselblad I find I don’t really need to manage electronic images in the same way yet. You get 12 images per roll of film, and then I usually shoot say 12 rolls. So that’s 144 images. I use transparency film rather than negatives, so I can then look at them on a lightbox. Therefore the selection process is done via film. I then get the selected image scanned on a high quality drum scanner.

I mostly use Photoshop for spotting (removing dust spots from the scanned transparency) and minor colour correction. My aim is to keep as much integrity as possible in the final image. I try to keep the maximum quality of the image when it is printed at 50 x 50 centimetres.

In my teaching it is slightly different because we have to teach the students Bridge, Lightroom, etc. In my own practice though it is different because I do not have to manage lots of digital files.

I think film is a great way to learn photography. It’s partly to do with the cost. It make you think more about what you are doing because you are paying for each image. People tend to be a rather blasé with digital and just fire away until they think they have a good image. Film is a more tangible way of learning of how light works. Working in colour darkroom was good too as you had to physically learn how to correctly colour balance. It became a really intuitive and immediate experience. Where as colour balancing on a computer is slightly removed, abstract and seeing the print is not immediate. I find that students struggle with colour balancing on the computer, while that wasn’t an issue in the darkroom. The darkroom used physical filters, so that was how you learnt about colour and light as it were. We no longer have a colour darkroom at the University just black and white. It was a great way for me to learn, as I’m a very kinetic person. I learn from doing things. I’m less of a learner through reading and listening.

Where I’m teaching at MIT, the students are choosing their own tools and their own way of working in the medium. Especially by third year it’s more directed by the students who are choosing their own way of doing things, the lecturers are more facilitators. We are there to help the students achieve what they set out to do. While we still teach the technical things in first year, it’s not a “photography course” like VCA


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Tethered Horse: Western. 2004. 50x50cm Lightjet Print


was. The students can choose whatever medium they like to work in and move across mediums as they see it fit best for their idea. That’s why we still have the darkroom for them to work with film or even pinhole cameras if they want to.

Do you think photography has changed since you began? How do you react to the notion that photography as a career is dying?

People are always pontificating that painting is dying, or sculpture is dying, or that music is dying. For me I don’t think these arts die. That’s a sensationalist way of putting it. I think they are in a continual state of flux; they are just constantly changing all the time. It’s funny that tertiary institutions are currently trying to model themselves by talking more about contemporary practice as a whole, and less about a specific medium and the technical aspects of that medium. It’s much more about engaging with contemporary research practice, or contemporary dialogue than learning how to press a button on the camera or expose a scene correctly, or use particular brush strokes with paint. It’s been quite a shift in the decade since I was at VCA. I wanted to learn that technical aspect, that’s why I was there. We still get a lot of students wanting to learn that aspect of the craft. Having said that, my lecturers at VCA were also trying to open up my mind by thinking about the content, by thinking about the context. At the time I was quite resistant to that. I see it in my students too. They’ve come to learn to use the tools and yet we are pushing them to think about ideas, content and context. It’s really what I went through at University. It’s interesting.

So my experience in public sector Universities is that they are not teaching the technical aspects so much anymore. The technical aspect is to be learnt somewhat independently. You learn those skills through online tutorials. The lecturers are there as facilitators to guide you through the course content, the theory and the literature.Would you say that now the students are really learning the aesthetics of the medium, and that the tools are secondary to the learning of a medium?

I think so. In tertiary education where I am, though it is not aesthetics. In fact I’d steer away from that word. It’s more about how to engage in a practice; what sort of research needs to happen? How does that research make your work unfold? What critical dialogue will you engage with? Where does your


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Photoshoot: Western. 2005. 100x100cm Lightjet Print


work sit? Does it sit in a gallery or on a web page? Does it sit in a printed magazine or a book? So the conversation we have with the students is less about shutter speed and aperture. It’s less about the apparatus of the camera and more about the machinery of the arts industry.

So the marking criteria is not about how well the student has exposed the image, or how they have used depth of focus, or how well the framing has been done as such. It is about what types of experimentation have you done? What type of research is going on? How are they contextualising the work? How are they engaging in critical analysis? These sorts of questions. Having said that there are workshops in first year where they learn specific technical skills.

I went through in the late 1990s early 2000s after Post Modernism, Post-Structuralism and the Conceptual art movement. I think these movements had quite a profound effect on tertiary education and I think that shift away from the technical aptitude of a student to getting them to think about content and context was starting to happen when I was studying. It’s a shift that has continued over the past decade.

With many of the students and graduates I’ve spoken to, they have been critical of the lack of technical training they have been given. Do you think it has swung to far away from the technical aspects? Perhaps there is an assumption that digital cameras are so good at giving you a decent exposure and the computer skills are easier to learn than traditional film based photograph. If you don’t know how to use a tool in Photoshop there is always a number of tutorials on the Web…

Yes, it’s a fine balance. I went to a great lecture once. They drew a graph. On one axis they had technical ability on the other axis they had ideas. If you simply had ideas and no technical ability, there wasn’t the way of creating the vision. On the other hand, if you have technical ability and no ideas you would also fail. That’s something you have to figure out as a practitioner. You have to know when to develop your technical skills and when you need to develop some conceptual rigour. There is a continual feeding of one into the other. That’s the responsibility of a good practitioner to know when to feed those separate strains. It also has a lot to do with the people you surround yourself with. They can help you move through that. At the end of the day that’s up to the Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Overeasy: Up With the Fall, Down on the Diagonal. 2007. 50x50cm Lightjet Print


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Overeasy: Up With the Fall, Down on the Diagonal. 2007. 50x50cm Lightjet Print


practitioner to decide how they want to do that.

So as I said before, for me it’s no longer about the camera, it’s almost all about the research. I explain it to students this way. You have three tools, form, content and context. Form is the physical way of creating the image. Content is the idea, the thing you are trying to communicate. Context is the location in which you place the work. For me it becomes a balance between the three. When I first came to making images, I was quite romantic and thought it was all about form and all about the making of those visuals. Now, I think it is all about all three of them, but content is something of a priority. The starting point is the idea then it’s about the practice. Figuring out how I’m going to research the idea, how the idea is going to evolve. Once I have that I can research my position in relation to that idea; locating the context. The tools and the making come last. It’s quite a shift from when I started.

If you want to start at the making end of the process, then work on your ideas, and finally work out your context from there, then that can be OK too. However, you need to create a strategy, what I call a set of rules. It might be that you have to get the image within the 144 frames of 12 rolls of films. Photography and video are rule-based mediums. You have specific technical rules to get your exposure correct, and it rule based in terms of shutter and the focal length of the lens. I really like that about the rules, it gives you boundaries to work within, but you can always push up against those boundaries.

So the rules you set become containers to work within?Yes, for a particular outcome I set rules and boundaries. They can be quite arbitrary. The rules could be something that I makeup. However, when I set that rule I really stick to it. Again I can use the example that my prints are 50cm x 50cm. In the world of photography that is quite small now. Think of Andreas Gursky, his prints can be many metres by many metres. Think of Jeff Wall’s very large light box transparencies. Those works start to step outside photography for me, they become cinematic or like paintings. So for me setting that 50cm square rule made the images photographs and human scale. They are photographs in the sense that you could conceivably pick them up and handle them. Ultimately those rules of photography and video are fantastic and one you know and understand them


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. bbbounce: Up With the Fall, Down on the Diagonal. 2007. 50x50cm Lightjet Print


you can then push up against the rules.

I couldn’t make images of other people for quite a long time. I felt it was an intrusion into other people’s lives. The camera was some sort of weapon; so much of my early work is self-portraiture. Photographing other people was an intrusion. It was important to me that I represented people in a way that was ethical and not problematic. It’s interesting that young people have to deal with their own images all the time. They are constantly taking images and posting them on the Internet. They work out their own ethics of what is right and wrong. I didn’t have that technology, so I grew up with perhaps a different set of ethic to them. There are so many sexualised images that they create without thinking. Images are such powerful things and many of the images they are creating are problematic and could have deep consequences for them in the future.

When I was young I used to cut out and put images from National Geographic on my walls. I used to lie in bed and critique them, I didn’t know that was what I was doing then, but that is what it was. I used to look at an image and say what wrong with this image? What’s right with it? How would I do it differently? What has happened just before or just after the image was made? What is happing just outside the frame? Then I realised that National Geographic is problematic. It was a first world touring of third world countries. It was more or less stealing images, misappropriating images of people. I feel problems are somewhat different now. Young people putting their self-images on the Internet and not realising what the images mean or could be used for. Using photography for bullying, filming each other having fights and putting that on YouTube. What seems OK now, but in two or three years time it’s no longer OK, and then not having the ability to remove something from the Internet. That cultural tourism still exists. People take their expensive cameras to poor countries and return to have exhibitions that we view with a certain pity and then walk away without a second thought.

What do you think of the language that we have attached to photography in the last couple of decades? We go on a ‘shoot’, we ‘take a shot’. It’s very aggressive. It’s interesting that people somehow see that the camera as a weapon. Photography is such a powerful medium. So the language we are attaching is problematic. Photography is such a visual language;


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Wait: To Do. 2009. 100x100cm Lightjet Print


it’s powerful. Even written language can be just as powerful as if it were an actual gun. I think it is important that people think about that when they are making images; when they are engaged in that industry. The process of ‘making an image’ is different to ‘taking an image’; it’s a different way of engaging with the subject. It’s a different way of engaging with the world. Do you want to go around ‘taking’, ‘shooting’, and ‘exploiting’, not think about what it is you are representing, or do you want to make images in a way that are basically and fundamentally considered and ethical? Do you want your images to be more beneficial to your existence in the world, how do you engage with that world around you?

For me the work I make is my way of engaging with the world, my way of participating. Within that act, you have to find the way of participating. Are you going to perpetuate Colonialism? Are you going to make images in a way that disempowers someone else? Or are you going to do something that empowers you and empowers somebody else at the same time?

How does that fit into the work you do?My work is usually about gender, class, or race. I think about those things a lot when I’m contextualising my work, and when I’m making my work. For me it’s something that I think about a lot. When I’m teaching, I try to impart to my students that it is important to think about how you are engaging. Are you giving or are you taking? It’s as simple as that. It might be as basic as say courteous thinking, telling the subject you are working with and the audience who is viewing what you are thinking. Thinking about how the images are going to be seen, perceived or represented. It can be quite a powerful thing.

Unfortunately it is always the same people who are being misrepresented. Women get misrepresented in a sexist way; the poor get misrepresented in a way that disempowers them. You see it everywhere, on TV, in advertising on buses; it’s on the billboards. So as the makers of those images we need to think about whether we want to continue that thinking or move to something different.

You’ve lived in both Australia and New Zealand, how do you perceive the opportunities for a career in photography in both places?I think in terms of lifestyle and cost of living it is quite similar. Australia is of course bigger, so Australia has perhaps a little more opportunity. The cost of living is little more expensive in New Zealand. In

terms of income you would probably be able to earn more in Australia, but you could do equally well in career terms. You could get a job in New Zealand as a journalist just as you could get a similar job in Australia. Similarly, if you wanted to become an art practitioner the opportunities in both countries are comparable. So you could conceivably become a photographic artist in New Zealand just as you could in Australia. The art scene functions in a similar way. In fact I’ve found that the art scene functions in a similar way everywhere I’ve been, it’s a very competitive industry. It’s an industry that is moving all the time. It’s also a hard industry because it is quite a small pond for a lot of people to swim in.

In Australia there are over half a million people involved in the arts in some way. More people attend arts events than sporting events. They are obviously not all involved in photography. Doesn’t that give artists a wide range of opportunities?Yes that is a large number of people. I can only go by my own thinking. I went to University to become an artist. I thought I was going to set the world on fire and be this amazing artist and I think a lot of people think like that. Perhaps that’s part of being young and partly some of the mythology of art. What happens though is that people whom study an arts field end up in the arts industry or a creative field, but they don’t necessarily become a rock-star artist. So you might end-up becoming a teacher or lecturer or a designer or an editor and so on. So when we speak to our students it becomes a matter of finding out where they might fit in the industry, what jobs are actually available? I never thought I would become a lecturer, I thought I would be a rock-star. Now I’m a lecture I find I really enjoy it, I’m learning all the time from doing it. It’s a challenging job.

So for the students, it’s about them learning where to locate themselves with the creative industry. It might be something that they never thought of, something they never even imagined doing as a career. We have a student who has made interactive sculptures that you wear to activate. We think he might be heading towards working in the theatre as a prop designer and maker. It’s something that he never imaged doing when he started at University.Where do you find inspiration?

I’m not a big consumer of photography magazines. However, I look to galleries to find practitioners. Galleries such as Gertrude Street and Utopian Slumps in Melbourne. Michael Lett and Hopkinson Mossman


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Mangere Bridge: 246 Meters: South. 2010. 00:02:46 Digital Video Loop

Click or tap above image to open the video in YouTube. This may not work on certain devices. The YouTube URL is http://youtu.be/KFmj2Oxg3jY

You can download the artist statement for this work here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KFmj2Oxg3jY

http://youtu.be/KFmj2Oxg3jY

http://rebeccaannhobbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/246-Meter-Bridge-statement.doc


in Auckland. If I find someone I’m interested in I will research them in more depth on the Internet. When researching I don’t just look at photographers, I don’t just look for tools or mediums. I base it on how they are talking and what they are talking about. I’m looking at how the practitioners engage and contextualise. It’s actually been a long time since a photographer has blown me away in that way when a new artist really excites me. I’ve been looking at recently, Fischle and Weiss, Francis Alys, Nick Cave – not the Australian singer. This Nick Cave makes sound suits and wears them to make various sounds and music. I rarely look at photographers now. It’s video artists, sculptors and conceptual artists. It’s an interesting shift from when was doing my undergraduate study when I was looking at the classic photographers. People like Emmett Gowin, Alexander Rodchenko, Robert Mapplethorpe. I think it is really important to know of those people because they are photography’s “masters”. But now it’s sculptors, dancers, choreographers like Martino Gamper, Big Freedia and Laresa Kosloff now.

It’s quite interesting that when people come to art, they see the artist as some sort of mythical creature who is talented and has genius. In our society that the sort of impression we attach to art if you are not part of the community that is engaging with art all the time. So for people outside that community art becomes that mythical creature. The longer you engage with art and become part of the arts community, the more it becomes de-mystified and normal. As an artist you can engage more with the practice of art. It can be somewhat traumatic for University students as the de-mystification process occurs. That the arts are a practice, and it is hard work. Your practice becomes an everyday engagement with your art. It’s something that takes a lot of hard work.

Where you might head over the next few years?I am planning to go back to school to undertake a DocFA at Auckland University in New Zealand. I have a large body of work that I would like to make and I need assistance for this to happen. I find that the theory is hard work and I need the time and support to work through it. Long term I don’t know for sure, the only really solid plan is that I want to continue to maintain an art practice. Making videos and still images that address issues as they arise and continue to engage with world via making. I also want to develop as a lecturer and work on being a better facilitator so that I can help demystify art for other

people. Also I guess I have to figure out a way to be in both New Zealand and Australia at the same time!

Thank you for spending the time with me for this interview.

http://youtu.be/OCmxulh5ijI


Copyright: Rebecca Ann Hobbs. Otara at Night: South. 2011. 00:02:09 Digital Video Loop

Click or tap above image to open the video in YouTube. This may not work on certain devices. The YouTube URL is http://youtu.be/OCmxulh5ijI

You can download the artist statement for this work here.



http://rebeccaannhobbs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Otara-at-Night.doc


Tech TalkMemory Cards

File types, memory cards, and long term storage.

About five years ago I wrote an article that looked at memory cards and the various file types. In some ways little has changed from 2008, where as in other areas there has been a lot of change. Here we look at what you need to know about the different memory card formats and ways of storing your images.

In the middle of 2013 Adobe announced that it was discontinuing their Encore DVD authoring software. This means that there is no longer an affordable way of creating proper menu’s for DVD’s let alone BluRay discs. What has this to do with photography you may well ask? Well it got me thinking about my photography workflow. Nothing ever stays stable for very long in the world of electronics. You maybe old enough to remember when Super 8 film was the method of recording home movies, then video tape came along in Beta, VHS, Super VHS, Video 8, Hi8, Digital 8 and Mini DV formats. For the last decade DVD has been to final resting place for our edited video. Adobe says they dropped Encore because everybody is storing their video on the Internet. Domestic video is supposedly stored on YouTube and Commercial video is stored on AppleTV, Netflix etc. The reality is a lot more complicated – the company Adobe licensed parts of Encore from seems to have pulled the plug for their own commercial reasons. The bottom line is unless you are prepared to pay substantial amounts for 3rd party software, or put up with the absolute basics of software like iMovie, DVD authoring is fast disappearing.

This obsolesce is mirrored in the photography world. 20 years ago almost all the images you made where seen as prints. Kodak had the PhotoCD format that allowed you to view images on your TV via a specially modified CD player, and there were images in the Web. However computer monitors and television screens are not what they are now. Nor was a 2 Megapixel

camera going to give you a large rich image.

Five years ago, there were four common memory card formats CF (Compact Flash), SD (Secure Digital), Sony’s Memory Stick, and the Olympus/FujiFilm xD type. Most larger camera companies such as Canon and Nikon started with the CF format that held 4 Megabytes of data (about 3 floppy discs). Sony’s Mavica cameras had 3 ½ inch floppy discs with just over 1 Megabyte of storage, with later models also having a MemoryStick format slot. Similar capacities were available for the xD format. Five years ago 4 Gigabytes was considered large, today 512 Gigabytes is possible with the CF format.

Today the two main formats are CF and SD. Although the MemoryStick format is still around, it’s generally restricted to Sony equipment. There are advantages and disadvantages to both the CF and SD formats.

The CF format is larger in size and more robust. It is not dependant on the equipment it is used in as it has its own internal controller chip. Therefore, a 256 Gigabyte CF can in theory work in any camera that has a CF card slot. Further, because the controller chip is in the card, the cards can transfer data at a much fast rate. The disadvantage is that the cards are physically larger (although that means they are less likely to be lost) and they are more expensive to produce.

The SD cards are smaller and less robust. They don’t have internal controller chips and are dependent on the camera. Further, because there are a number of generations SD, SDHC (High Capacity), and SDXC (Extended Capacity) cards there are compatibility issues. Original SD cards may work in current equipment, but SDXC cards will only work in the some of very latest cameras. They are also generally much slower than CF cards. The fastest SD card is around one third the speed of the fastest CF card. The


SD (top) and CF cards come in various speeds and capacities. Early cards were slow and had capacities as small as 4MB todays CF cards can go as large as 512 GB and 160 MB/s

advantage of SD cards is that they are inexpensive to produce and can be bought just about anywhere.

As cameras have become smaller and less expensive manufacturers have generally been moving to the SD card format. Nonetheless, at the high end cameras are fitted with either double CF slots or a combination of CF and SD slots. This allows one file type (say RAW) to be recorded on one card while another format (say JPEG) is recorded on the other. Files to be written to both cards at the same time to prevent data loss in the event that one card fails, or the overflow when one card fills is sent to a second card – this is particularly useful at sporting and theatrical events. Because of their smaller size, midrange cameras are increasingly being fitted with dual SD card slots.

Cameras with large sensors collect a lot of data; slow data transfer from the camera to the card reduces the overall speed of the camera.

Buying a card for your camera.

Apart from the obvious type and compatibility questions, what do you need to consider when buying a card? Foremost is reliability a 16 Gigabyte card in the local shop might seem like a bargain, but if it fails part way through an assignment it is poor value for money. Seek a good brand such as Lexar or SanDisk who make professional grade cards and generally have good production control. Of the dozens of cards and USB flash drive I have from SanDisk only one has given trouble and none have failed. The same goes for people who use Lexar products.


The second consideration is speed. Speeds are generally quoted as the rate at which data can be read from the card, writing to the card is often a slower process. CF cards are usually marked with their MB/s (Megabyte per-second) transfer rates and may go as fast as 160 MB/s. Lexar cards may have something like a ‘300x’ type marking that is confusing and a little meaningless. It is based on the transfer rate of 6.6 MB/s. Thus a 400x card is rated at 60MB/s

SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards are sometimes marked with their transfer rate in Megabytes per-second. SD and SDXC cards will have a ‘class’. Class 4 cards transfer data at 15 MB/s; class 6 and 10 30 MB/s. The theoretical maximum speed of the SDXC format is 105 MB/s. Some older SD cards may not be marked with either and maybe as slow as 2MB/s – these are generally the cheap cards found in the supermarket and bargain shops. If you are doing any video work the class 10 SDHC cards are the minimum standard.

The final main consideration is the capacity of the card. It is probably going to be difficult to find a brand name card smaller than 4 Gigabytes these days and 256 GB, CF cards are not hard to find if you have the considerable cash required. So what is the best balance? Five years ago people worried that 4GB was too large and if it was a damaged or corrupted too many images would be lost now 4GB cards are out of production. Today 16Gb and 32Gb cards are commonplace and people are asking the same questions about loss and corruption. Brand name cards are very reliable, and are unlikely to fail in the short to medium term. Nonetheless, they do have a service life and should be changed every few years.

The best advice is to transfer the images from the card as soon as possible. Then make multiple copies on different drives, and to back up to a medium such as archival quality DVD and place the disc is a cool secure place off site.

Once the data has been transferred, format the card in the camera before each assignment. Deleting images does not actually remove the data. It removes the reference to the data from the look-up table (File Allocation Table or FAT). Formatting clears all data and creates a new FAT. If your card ever becomes corrupted it is usually possible to recover the data as the problem often occurs in the FAT rather than the actual image data.

Keep your cards dry, clean the contacts on SD cards with a tissue from time to time (don’t touch

the contacts as oils from your skin can affect the contacts), and store the cards in their cases or in a protective pouch.

While we might not ever print the majority of our images, they remain valuable. Selecting and maintaining your memory cards is an important first step in the creation of your final images. Spending a little extra on quality memory cards is worth it for peace of mind, and faster cards will help speed up the process. You may not need 160 MB/s transfer rates unless you are doing Ultra High Definition 4k video, but getting a better quality card will mean waiting less time for the camera to write to the card.

Next: File types: whats the difference between RAW, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF files?

Although most modern computers have built in SD card readers. If you are working with other types of cards a good reader such as this USB 3 model from SanDisk is worth paying extra for. Not only is it substantially faster than cheap readers from the supermarket, it is less likely to corrupt your image files.


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In the third of our series on darkroom photography we look at making your first prints.

Printing isn’t difficult in itself, but requires a darkroom - see breakout below. You will also need a good clean water supply, and perhaps an extra larger tray tray to stablise chemical temperatures if the weather is particularly hot or cold.

In the DarkroomPrinting - part one

The above image was printed on Agfa Brovira heavy weight paper in about 1979. Although there has been some increase in contrast when scanning the sharpness and richness of the image is clearly visible.Nikon FM. 85mm lens. Agfa 100 ISO film. Rodinal developer. Epson V700 @ 600DPI 24Bit colour TIF.


Weights and measures are now all but standardised to the metric (SI) system. Here in Australia we converted most units in the early 1970s. However, the United States is the last country apart from Liberia and Myanmar (Burma) to not convert, and has a mishmash of metric and imperial marking on it’s products. This mishmash is also reflected in the photography world. Lenses are referred to in focal lengths of ‘mm’. Photographic paper is measured in inches (although Ilford gives the cm size as well). Roll film is referred to in mm (35mm film has a 24mm x 36mm frame), but sheet (or cut) film is measured in inches. This has come about for historical reasons, 35mm film was invented for European movie cameras, while Kodak was a major driver of the industry early on and is based in the United States. 120/220 film is metric (70mm again from the movie industry), but American books usually refer to a frame of 2 1/4 square inches. This is the same as 6 x 6 cm.

Measuring chemicals is slightly less troublesome these days as all are sold with metric measurements, and many are mixed in ratios of 1 to 4 or 1 to 9 (one part chemical to x parts water). One thing to watch is that European made measuring beakers are marked as CC (cubic centilitres). This is easily converted to ml. 10ml equals 1cc. If you are using old references work out whether the ounces and gallons are UK or US. They are very different. This also goes for Internet references where there is still a lot of US imperial measurement floating around.

Most temperatures are given in Centigrade (Celsius). The standard temperature for development was 18⁰C (65⁰F) until the 1950s. Today, times are usually given for 20⁰C (68⁰F), 21⁰C (70⁰C), or 24⁰C (75⁰C). Read the instructions carefully for the recommended temperatures and times. Higher temperatures reduce development times. If the temperature is to high for a given developer/film combination you may get uneven development. Temperatures below 16⁰C may fail to develop the film fully no matter how long the time. In Melbourne the water temperature from the tap can go as low as 10⁰C in early Spring, and as high as 30⁰C in mid Summer. So warm water and ice baths are sometimes needed to maintain an even temperature.

Always handle poisonous and corrosive chemicals with care. Always follow the manufacturers instructions. Make certain that chemicals are stored in a safe place that cannot be accessed by young children. Keep the chemicals in the original containers and store mixed chemicals in clearly marked non-food containers.

Working with photogrpahic chemicals is safe if you take senisible precausions. These include mixing chemicals in a very well ventilated space, using plastic examination gloves that can be obtained from the chemist- never use latex/rubber gloves such as the disposible gloves from the supermarket as some chemicals can burn through rapidly. Safety glasses and a lab coat or plastic apron are also highly recomended during mixing raw chemicals.

ALWAYS wash your hands thoroughly after handling chemicals.

All the information, statements, and advice in this article are believed to be true and accurate. However, the author and copyright holder, accepts no legal liability for omissions or misconstruing any information given here-in.

If you are a student ASK your parents, guardians, or teacher BEFORE you start.


Hopefully since our last issue you have had the chance to expose some film and process it to a satisfactory level. To print you will need some form of darkroom and the associated equipment to create a print from your negatives, but you could also try photogram’s by placing small objects directly onto the paper if you don’t have access to an enlarger. (You can follow the articles in previous issues of this magazine or follow the instructions on the 50lux.org Website for details on building a darkroom and processing film.)

Here we will look at the basics of creating a print.

Paper and chemicals.

Until digital photography really took hold in the mid 2000s there was a very wide range of papers. My favourite was Brovira fibre based paper (not to be confused with the awful resin-coated Brovira Speed) from the now defunct Agfa. This was the paper we used at college and it gave beautiful deep rich blacks and clean whites. Unfortunately that paper has long been discontinued. Although Ilford’s Multigrade had been around for many decades, it was at he time not considered good enough for display prints and for non display prints we used single grade Ilford resin-coated papers. However, Multigrade was beginning to be used in the newspaper industry, and we soon got the hang of it.

In the past 3 or 4 years the quality of black and white prints from the upper printer models from Canon and Epson has improved markedly and there is far less demand for black and white materials. While ink will never have the same qualities as silver, a good pigment print can now come close to matching silver gelatine. Unfortunately, many of the most specialised materials have been discontinued. Nonetheless, as with film, there is still a reasonable range of paper available and chemicals seem to be disappearing at a slower rate than paper and film.

Here in Australia the largest supplier of black and white materials is Ilford, but you can still obtain some Kodak materials – especially chemicals, and Adox, Foma, Kentmere, and Tetenal plus a few other small specialist products are still imported. Although it is possible to import film and paper yourself from overseas, chemicals are not easily imported and many companiy will not export their products to individuals due to legal restrictions.

As they are freely available, it is likely that you will be

using Ilford materials. Ilford make a range of papers that come in RC and Fibre types. RC stands for Resin Coated, and the paper is coated with polythene (plastic) resin. The advantage of this paper is that it is very easy to handle and needs short periods of washing because the chemicals don’t soak into the actual paper base. The paper comes in a wide range of finishes. Over the years, it must be said, some finishes have been pretty horrible. When teaching and running workshops we use the Pearl finish (Ilford code MG4RC44M) as that gives a nice result and is more forgiving of scratches and dust on the negative than the gloss. At home I tend to use the Warm tone fibre papers. These are also known as Baryta papers as the paper is toned with baryta. Ilford’s code is for the warm tone is MGFBWT1K and MG4FB5K for the normal base tone. There is also a cool base tone, bit I find that the prints look a little ‘cold’. Fibre bases come in different thickness, and are usually described as single or double weight.

Fibre bases are harder to work with as they absorb the chemicals and go soggy, making large prints easy to tear. They also require substantial amounts of time and water to wash – at least 45 minutes in running water. They can take hours to dry too. However, I find that the results are worth it, and once flattened will produce a more pleasing result that any RC paper.

Each type of paper is ‘graded’ to allow for contrast control. The ususal contrast range is from 0 to 5. Variable contrat paper have coloured dyes that react to deferent coloured filtered light. (See breakout box.) Depending on the filtration method used the range of grades is 00 to 5 with half grade steps. Filters may be introduced to the light path of the enlarger by the use of a drawer in the enlarger head, dial in filters, or by mixing the magenta and yellow filters on a colour enlarger head (ensure the cyan is set to zero at all times). Ilford still sell below the lens filters, but hese are likely to slightly soften the image and are prone to dust particles settling on them. For the cost of these filters it is proably better to buy a different enlarger with an above the lens filter drawer. Filters have a life and fade with time. The Ilford drawer filters are prone to scratching and water damage so need to be handled with care.

Single grade papers are still available. These have a more restricted range (I haven’t been able to find any half grades) and are available in fewer finishes and sizes. However, if you don’t have a suitable colour


Place you negative in the carrier. Ensure the negative is flat. Emulsion side faces down, shiny side up.

Select the filter. Low numbered filters give a lower contrast. High numbered filters increase contrast. Increased time are required for filters 4, 4½, and 5.

Place your filter in the tray or select the correct filter by adjusting the Magenta and Yellow dials on a colour head.

How does it work?

Variable contrast papers respond to different levels of blue -green light. They are coated with a mixture of three different emulsions that contain light sensitive dye’s. One emulsion is sensitive to blue light only. The next is sensitive to blue light, with some sensitivity to green light. The third is sensitive to both blue and green light. The magenta and yellow colours filters allow only blue-green light through to the paper. By varying the balance between the magenta and yellow filters, you vary the amount of blue-green light reaching the emulsion, and therefore vary to overall contrast of the print. This is also the reason why you can work under a red safe light. The paper is only sensitive to blue-green light, not red light. Turning on a normal light or allowing daylight to reach the paper will expose the paper, as normal light has all the colours of the spectrum, including blue-green light.


Finally a warning about ventilation. The current recipie for Ilford filxer seems to contain a high contentration of amonia. This has a strong pungent smell, ensure the space you are using has a good airflow with fresh-air flowinging into the space.

Your first prints.

When teaching in schools and doing workshops I get the students to create their own hand-drawn negatives using tracing paper and black marker pens. The aim is to learn how to set up the enlarger and get a pure black and white print with deep black and clean white. You could also do the same exercise with photograms. Place small objects such as leaves, buttons, jewellery etc. directly into the paper, expose and process. If you don’t have an enlarger you can do photograms by turning on a desk lamp with the filter covering the lamp. Don’t use a fluorescent or LED type lamps as they put out green / blue light that doesn’t work with variable contrast papers.

Step one. Setting up the enlarger.

Place your negative in the carrier – make sure it is flat. The non-emulsion (shiny side) is up.

Turn on the preview on the timer and adjust the height of the enlarger to suit the paper size. Don’t be afraid to crop the image – that is, make the print bigger than the negative area.

Focus the image. You may need to adjust the height and refocus depending how you want to crop your image and the size of th paper you are using.

If you have a colour enlarger, adjust the filter grade by dialling in the Magenta and Yellow values. Ensure the Cyan is on zero (0). You will need to refer to the charts on the Ilford Web site. There are three sets of values depending on the enlarger brand you are using. (See breakout box.) A good starting point is Grade 2 or 2 ½.

Multigrade paper needs the filtration. Prints made without the filter will have a flat grey appearance.

Step two. Exposing the paper.

From this point on everything must be done under safe light conditions. Never open the box of paper with the room light on or in daylight. Ensure you close the bag and box after taking one sheet of paper out. Paper is expensive.

enlarger or a black and white enlarger that has a drawer for the gelatine filters or a way of attaching the below lens filters, then single grade paper may be your only option. Variable contrast papers have come a long way since Ilford introduced them in 1939-40. Old books can be very critical of the material, and people who criticise VC paper on the Internet today are really talking humbug. It is as good as single grade paper, is more flexible to use, and there is no need to buy boxes of very expensive paper that may never be used.

However, the choice of chemicals is restricted, and at elast to begin with, it is usually best to stick with the matching chemicals for the paper. Therefore, we use the Ilford Multigrade developer with the Multigrade paper, and achieve great results. As when processing film I have never found the need to use stop bath except when making very large prints in troughs. Keep the water clean by running a hose into the tray if possible, or change the water after 5 prints.

Any fixer can be used. The same fixer can be used for both film and paper. The mixing instructions will usually show the dilution for paper as opposed to film if there is a difference. At home I’ll often mix enough fixer for my printing session and use it for the film processing before hand. Mixed fixer can be stored for weeks in a bottle that is filled to exclude all air.

One thing that is important for success is to ensure that you use fresh developer for each session. Multigrade developer seems to have a short shelf life, and goes off rapidly when mixed (a few hours). Poor prints are usually the result of developer that has gone off. Another error occurs when prints haven’t been fully washed in clean water. These may go purple after a few days. If this happens or the print starts to fade or go grey, try refixing and washing thoroughly in clean running water.

As when processing film, temperature is also critical for the developer. If it is to hot you will not be able control the print – it will develop rapidly. If the developer is below 16C it may fail to develop at all. The standard temperature is 20, 21 or 22, (This is around 68-72 Fahrenheit in old books and anything from the United States – See breakout box.) and can be maintained by placing the tray into a larger tray with water at the required temperature – ice cubes work well in the summer. The temperature of the wash and fixer is less critical, but is best if close to the developer within a couple of degrees.


Place a sheet of paper on the easel frame (or mark the position with masking tape. Use a piece of paper that has the same dimensions. Sacrifice a new sheet if need be. Adjust the height of the enlarger to the preferred size and crop. This could be a crank as on the Durst, Meopta etc. or a spring loaded system with locking knob as on the LPL..

Adjust the focus of the image. This may need to be done a few times as you adjust the height, unless you are lucky enough to be using a Leica self focusing unit. It is best to focus the image with the aperture wide open, then stop down - i.e. close the lens to f5.6 or f8 from f2.8.

Set the aperture. Start by setting your aperture to f5.6 then go from there if needed. Many lenses have ‘backlit’ f stop numbers when the lamp is on.


Every enlarger gives different results. Even enlargers of the same brand and model number can give slightly different results depending on the age of the lamp. If you are using 8 x 10 inch paper (yes it is still mainly referred to in inches) set your timer to 10 seconds. Set the lens aperture to f 5.6.

Move the red safety filter into place and place a piece of paper emulsion side up. You may need to uncurl paper that is new to get it sitting flat. The emulsion will usually be shinier that the plain paper side.

It is a good idea to use an easel/mask. These allow you to position the paper consistently. They are quite inexpensive second-hand, but look out for excessive rust and bent mask arms. Another option is to use small pieces of masking tape to create a corner.

Turn off the preview (lamp), remove the red safety filter, and expose the paper. (10 seconds as your stsrting point.)

Step three. Processing.

Processing the paper is the same as processing film. Develop, wash. Fix, wash.

Place the exposed paper into tray of developer. Slide it in under the surface face down. Don’t simply drop it onto the surface as it will float and the paper will not be evenly developed. After a few seconds, use tongs to turn the print over. If possible gently rock the tray every now and again. At 21 C , the Ilford Multigrade paper should be fully developed after 1 minute. Don’t be tempted to remove the print under the 1 minute mark. It will not be fully developed and will look grey and uneven when dried.

Using tongs, move the print to the stop bath or first rinse. Keep the print immersed for about 15 – 30 seconds. This neutralises the developer stoping the process, but also prevents the fixer from becoming contaminated and neutralised.

Using differnt tongs, move the print to the fixer. Depending on the fixer used, its dilution, and its age this can take between 3-5 minutes. Up to a point (30 minutes or so) longer periods of fixing are not going to damage the print – especially RC paper, so I tend to do my next print while the fixing takes place.

Hint: have a jug of clean water on hand and rinse the tongs from time to time. If you are using the wooden/rubber tipped type of tongs slean and dry

them thoroughly. The rubber tips leave marks and the wood can go mouldy if not cleaned and dried.

Step four. Washing and drying.

Washing a RC print in a tray, sink or the bath doesn’t take very long. I tend to err on the safe side and wash for about 15 minutes in running water. The washing of Fibre prints is far more critical because the paper will have absorbed the developer and fixer. My archival prints are washed for about an hour in running water. Print washers come up second hand from time to time and are worth the investment if you do a lot of prints, they save time/water and do a more thorough job.

Hang the prints to dry in a ventilated place. Keep in mind that they will drip, so be aware of puddles of water on slippery floors. I use a plastic coated wire clothes airing rack for RC prints, and squeegee Fibre prints emulsion side to a mirror. That may seem strange, but it reduces curling, and results in a glossy sheen to the dried print. You know when the print is dry too, as it will simply fall from the mirror!

Once your prints have dried assess them in daylight. They will “drydown” and look a little darker. They may have lost some the sparkle of the wet print too. Everybody has their own idea of a nice print, and there is no right or wrong within certain bounds.

If you find you are getting consistently flat (grey) prints you may need to increase the contrast filter – remember filter grades 4, 4 ½ and 5 need up to double the exposure time. If prints are overly contrasty try a lower filter grade. You will also need to adjust your overall times depending on the height of the enlarger.

Once you have obtained some good prints with your hand drawn negatives or photograms, try printing some of your negatives.

Do some test strips.

Test strips allow you to assess the exposure of the paper for a given negative without wasting expensive paper. These are done by revealing strips across a piece of paper in five-second steps. Cover 80% of the paper with a piece of card, expose for 5 seconds, reveal another 20% and expose again for 5 seconds. Keep on doing this until all of the paper is exposed. The first strip will have received 25 seconds of exposure, the last strip 5 seconds. This will help you


make a judgement on the correct exposure for the negative.

Remember that the aperture on the lens is the same as on a camera. Each full f stop will halve or double the amount of light reaching the paper. f 4 will give twice the amount of light as f 5.6 and f 8 will give half the amount of light as f 5.6. Although you should always focus with the lens wide-open, avoid exposing the lens wide-open as it probably will not give a sharp print and may result in vignetting (darkening of the corners).

Your exposure time will vary on how far up the column the enlarger head is. A good starting time is about 10 seconds for un-cropped image from 35mm film onto 8 x 10 paper.

Well that’s about it to start with.

In summary.

• Mix your chemicals to 20C

• Place your negative in the enlarger – shiny side up.

• Turn off any white lights. Safe light only from this point.

• Set the height of the enlarger for your composition.

• Focus the enlarger at the widest lens opening – stop the lens down to f 5.6.

• Add your contrast filter. 2 or 2 ½ is a good starting point.

• Do a test strip.

• Process the strip and assess in daylight. Remember it will dry slightly darker.

• Do a full print based on the best segment of the strip.

• Assess the print for contrast under daylight. Reprint at a different filter setting if needed.

Printing is an art that can take many years to master. When you are starting out it is likely that your negatives are not going to be great, so it is going to be harder to get a good print. Practice and consistency is the key, both when exposing your film and in the darkroom.

In the next article we will look at some of the more advanced techniques associated with improving your prints.

Note the first two steps are done under safe light conditions.

Once you have exposed your paper for the desired time, it is a simply a matter of developing - washing - fixing - washing your paper. When buying trays - these are 8 x 10 inch trays - it is a good idea to buy multiple colours. Use one chemical for each and stick to that to reduce the possibility of chemical contanimation. The final wash can be done in a bath or sink.

The commonally available bamboo tongs with rubbber tips tend to leave marks on prints. Although these Patterson tongs are from my early days they turn up at camera markets from time to time.


Once upon a time, after the second world war, the words ‘Made in Japan’ and ‘high quality products’ were not used in the same sentence. Struggling to rebuild after a humiliating defeat, the Japanese copied superior products coming out of Germany and the United States. However, by the late 1950s the Japanese had become innovators and the Asahi Optical company was making high quality products and building a reputation amongst the military personnel on leave from the Korean War. Self returning mirrors, film winder leavers instead of knobs, and a back that opened by pulling up the rewind knob instead a sharp latch, were just some of the advances on Asahi camera bodies. When the prototype Spot-Matic was shown in 1960, it was the first camera body to include a built -in light meter. It was pipped at the shops by a Topcon that sold in small numbers, but the Pentax Spotmatic as it was to be known, changed photography and set a standard in camera design that wasn’t to change until the plastic bodies with built in motors of the 1980s. Although celebrating it’s 50th anniversary in 2014, the later Spotmatic’s are still highly usable cameras. Find some uncoated lenses and you can have great fun emulating the flared effects of late 1960s photography.

Buying a Film CameraPentax Spotmatic

This Spotmatic was bought for $5 about 8 years ago. It works perfectly, and has the slightly more desirable f1.8 lens. However, there is corrosion below the accessory shoe (don’t place an electronic flash on the shoe or it will short out and may damage the flash unit). The base plate is in poor condition with multiple crossed out engravings.


The Spotmatic was the forerunner to the Pentax K1000 that we will review in a future issue. Conceived by the Asahi Pentax company to replace the ‘S’ and the ‘K’ models of the 1950s, the Spotmatic was first shown at the 1960 Photokina photographic exhibition held each two years in Cologne Germany. The Spot-Matic appears to have caused something of a sensation at the time as it was one of the first SLR camera’s to have a through-the-lens metering system.

The model shown at Photokina did have a spot meter, that is the meter only took readings from a very small area in the centre of the frame. However, this system was deemed to difficult to use by the general photographers that the camera was intended for. Production models had a much wider metering area, and late models had a centre-weighted system similar to that used today. The centre weighted system, takes a reading from a wide area of the frame, but has a stronger bias towards the centre of the frame. The decision to not use the spot metering system seen in the prototypes was apparently taken close to the production date, and the tooling had been made with the Spotmatic name on the camera body, so the Spotmatic name remained.

The camera was first sold in 1964, with production continuing until 1976. They were particularly well built for the time, and much more robust than the camera’s that they competed with such as the Japanese ‘Miranda’ and East German ‘Praktica’. Stiffer competition came from companies such as Bronica, Mamyia, Minolta (now Sony) and Yashica, all of whom Pentax has out survived. Canon, who was yet to enter the professional market, and Nikon were one level above. Nonetheless, it can be argued the Japanese were not yet on a par with the West German companies of Leica, Rolleiflex, Voigtlander, and Zeiss.

Models.There were a significant number of variations over the 13 years of full production. The first models were simply named Spotmatic, and had a top shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second and are quite rare. These have some variations to the majority of later models including slight cosmetic and metering differences. Their serial numbers are below 2016000.

Much more common are the second series bodies. These include the SP, the SPII, SP500, SP1000, and SP MD models. The SP500 and SP1000 models were

budget models and lack the self-timer. There was also a SL variation that lacks both the self timer and the built in meter. The last of the line was the ES 2 model with a semi-automatic electronic shutter. All but the original versions are identified by the markings on the top plate, rewind knob side together with the serial number.

All these models except the SP500 and SL have a marked top shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second. The slowest timed shutter speed is 1 second, with a bulb setting that keeps the shutter open as long as the button is held down - use an older type cable release with a locking screw for long exposures. The SP500 apparently has the 1/1000 setting, but may not be accurate. As time went on the ISO (labeled ASA) range increased from a top of 400 ASA to 1600 ASA. Some of the very late models can have a 3200 ASA setting. Today metering with the earlier mid to late 1960s versions is somewhat problematic with film that is faster than 400 ISO.

The pick of the crop is the SPII. It has has metering at fully open aperture, a 3200 ASA film rating, and a hot-shoe. Other changes made along the way included improved film loading mechanisms.

All variations have a switch on the left side of the lens mount that is pushed up to turn on the meter - it stops the lens down giving a depth of focus preview at the same time. A needle moves up and down in the right of the frame as the shutter and or aperture are changed. If the light level is out of the metering range, the needle will ‘flick” to show that the battery is OK. This can be a little bit tricky, and it can fool people into thinking that the meter is broken. Most of these cameras use Cds cells to measure the light, and the cells do not last forever, so it is good to check that the meter is actually working. Further, as with any camera that uses Cds cells, the cells loose their accuracy over time. It could take a couple of rolls of film to get accurate exposures, compare the readings with a modern digital camera set to manual if possible and adjust the ASA setting to compensate. The very last of the bodies have silicon cells that are very reliable.

As noted, the ES was the last of the line and was Pentax’s first try at electronic exposure control. All the ES’s I have seen are black bodied, but it was listed as either black or chrome (optional) - the opposite of the standard Spotmatic’s. The ES is notable as it


was the first camera in the world with an electronic shutter. There was a production model sold in Japan for a short period that had problems with the circuit boards. These are marked Electro-Spotmatic, but it is unlikely that you would come across one as a casual purchase. When the camera was released world-wide the boards had been changed and the electronics modified. Therefore, the remaining two models sold from 1973 to 1976 are apparently quite reliable - although I haven’t had direct experience with them. The disadvantage of these cameras is that they don’t have manual metering below 1/60th of a second, you set the ISO and aperture, and the camera does the rest setting the shutter speed automatically. However, there is an exposure compensation dial. Nevertheless, maintaining a fast shutter-speed for action photography can be problematic in aperture priority mode. There isn’t a self-timer on the original ES as the electronics takes up the space and the ES is slightly taller than it’s fully manual siblings. The ESII is a better bet as the self timer is present and this model uses 4 1.5 volt batteries that are still readily available.

Motor Drives.As early as 1965 the Spotmatic could be purchased with a motor drive. This was more akin to what would later be known as a power-winder. It is a combined motor and battery pack that is fitted to the base of the camera via the tripod mount. It doesn’t in itself have an electric shutter release, but came with a grip and release. These units were very expensive for the time. In 1968 the standard Spotmatic was listed at AU$210 with a 55mm f 1.8 lens. The motordrive body (without lens) was AU $250, the motor itself was AU $290, and the battery and grip were a further AU $65. That’s close to 3 times the standard body with a lens. Suffice to say they are quite rare, and therefore command very high prices when they actually turn up at markets and on e-Bay.

Other variations.The majority of Spotmatic camera’s sold in Australia were sold through C.R. Kennedy who still handle the distribution of the Asahi Pentax brand. In the United States, Honeywell distributed the Asahi Pentax products. The U.S. versions are marked Honeywell Pentax and have a “H” on the penta-prism housing. These versions often have minor changes, especially in the electronic ES versions. However, whilst these bodies would be uncommon in Australia, they do turn up from time to time at markets. These would not have been sold locally, and would either have been

brought home by a traveler or imported recently via e-Bay. Buying a Honeywell branded version shouldn’t be anymore of a problem than buying a local body as the internals are likely to be the same. Unlike the later K1000, all Spotmatics seem to have been made in Japan.

Lenses.This is another area where Pentax comes up trumps. The majority of the SMC Takumar (Super Multi Coated) lenses are excellent for their period and began being introduced in the early 1970s. The 24 lenses available in 1968 included 22 fixed focal length ‘primes’, a 70-150mm zoom and a 50mm ‘macro’. Some of the new designs at the time had anti-reflective coating and an automatic aperture for open metering.

Most bodies were fitted and sold with the 55mm f 2 or later a 55mm f 1.8 lens, and these are the most commonly seen lenses now. The 50mm f 1.4 turns up from time to time, but is apparently not sharp until ‘stopped down’ to f 2. However, the wide aperture gives a much brighter viewfinder, aiding focusing.

Nevertheless, as good as the Pentax lenses are, there is one drawback. The Spotmatic uses a M42 mount. This is a 42mm screw thread mount that is not compatible with the later K-Mount bayonet used on the K1000, KM, MX, ME, all the digital bodies, etc. There was still a substantial number of different manufacturers using the M42 mount at the time. (Canon was introducing the FT bayonet mount in the late 1960s, while Nikon introduced the F mount in 1959.) While the M42 mount was a universal mount, by the 1970s various attempts at automation means that some pins and screws can foul the attachment of various camera/lens combinations. So take care with non-Pentax lenses.

The good news is there was a M42 to K mount adapter, and is possible to use the M42 lenses on later cameras. It’s even possible to use the M42 lenses on digital camera’s in full manual mode. However, as the K mount has a larger diameter to the screw mount it is not possible to use K mount lenses on the Spotmatic.

What to look for.There were hundreds of thousands of these camera’s built - over a million between 1966 and 1969 alone. In the past I’ve bought very good examples for as little as AU $5 at markets with nice lenses. Sadly, the days of great cameras at throwaway prices is


coming to an end and it is probably best to expect to pay around $50 -100 for one in reasonable working condition. I’ve recently seen very clean examples for $200. These are tough camera’s that can take quite a beating. They are basically an older version of the K1000 that is popular in schools. I have seen an as new (with box etc.) K1000 in a major camera shop for $500, so prices are definitely on the up. Find a Spotmatic in good condition and it will last your lifetime, and possibly your grandchildren as well.

As with any camera, minor dents and scratches are to be expected. The baseplate’s seem to be particularly prone to damage from tripods, and it is rare to see an undamaged baseplate. These camera’s were designed well before the hot-shoe, but a flash mount was available. This can leave marks around the eyepiece and the rear of the pentaprism if one was ever fitted. If you have one of the flash holders, don’t use a modern flash unit with multiple contacts, or the flash unit will short out and fry - the shoe is all metal. You will need a sync cable and it must be plugged into the ‘X’ socket, not the one marked ‘FP’.

The battery cover seems to have been made of fairly soft metal, and most I see have mashed coin slots. Open the cover and check that there has been no battery leakage. Despite what you might read, it is not necessary to find a mercury battery. I have read that the following batteries will work - AG9, AG3, Energizer/Camelion/Varta/whatever 389, Energizer E387S. My cameras have S939S batteries, and I believe a LR41 with a rubber spacer washer will also do the trick. Remember to make sure the meter switch is pushed down after use, or the battery will go flat fairly quickly.

As noted earlier, these camera’s use older type light sensors in the meter. It’s not unusual to find cameras of this era with failed light meters. They cannot be fixed, but all is not lost. The Spotmatic should be quite usable if you meter with another camera or get a hand held meter. Again it is a good idea to compare the meter with a modern digital camera to test for accuracy. Or simply follow the Sunny 16 rules with 100 ISO film.

As with all cameras it is critical is to check that the shutter is working. Check all speeds, try to listen to other cameras that you know to be working accurately to get a feel as to what each shutter speed sounds like. Open the back and carefully inspect the shutter curtains they should be clean (no finger

marks or mould) and move smoothly when the film winder is moved. Remove the lens - it screws off anti-clockwise. There should be no pin holes in the shutter curtain. It is worth having the foam replaced around the back. This rots on all film cameras at some stage and is simple to replace.‘Remember, the Spotmatic (not the ES) is a fully manual camera with cogs and springs. Springs may loose tension over time, but can be replaced. So if you are using the camera seriously it would be a good idea to have it checked and serviced.

Check the lens for scratches, blemishes caused by finger prints and other long term grease damage - a UV filter is a good sign, and that the aperture blades are not sticky - it’s not impossible to have blades re-greased, but could cost more than the camera is worth. The same goes for fungus in the lens caused by high humidity, so be especially careful if the seller is from Sydney or Queensland.

Summary.What you don’t get with earlier examples of the Spotmatic is a hot shoe, and a wide metering range. The M42 screw mount precludes the use of modern lenses, the viewfinder isn’t as bright as a modern camera, and there is no automation (ES excluded).

Nonetheless, the pick of the bunch - the SPII with the faster 3200 ASA film setting, fully open aperture metering, and a hot-shoe - is a very workable camera. These were built from 1973 to 1976.

What you get with the Spotmatic is a very solid no frills camera. Look for the SP variations first, then the SP1000, and SP500. Remember that the SL variation does not have a light meter, but is mechanically the same as the other bodies. If you find one in good condition it is a great reliable basic camera, if quite heavy. There is a huge selection of M42 lenses from the weird to the wonderful. If you are not fussed about the lens mount, and have it serviced from time to time, you will have a great camera that will last you a life time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_16_rule


Using your cameraThe lens

In this series of articles we look at how your camera works. This article looks at the technical nature of how a lens works and how we perceive images taken with lenses of different focal lengths. In the previous article we discussed the concepts of the aperature. He we look at the relationship between focal length and depth-of-focus. It gets quite technical so you may want to read the article a few times in conjection with the illustrations on pages 96-99.

Although it’s possible to record an image without a lens using a pinhole camera, it’s not really a practical way to make photographs. A camera needs a way to focus the light that is coming towards it and accurately project that light onto the film or camera sensor. The camera you use may have interchangeable lenses or a lens that is integrated into the camera – a fixed lens. Some fixed lens cameras may also have accessory lenses that can fit onto the fixed lens.

If you are a student, or someone new to serious photography, and have a modern SLR film or digital camera you will probably have a zoom lens fitted to your camera. If you are using an older camera such as the Pentax K1000, it probably has a single focal length lens or ‘prime’ lens.

What is the focal length?Focal length refers to the distance between the nodal point (the point where the image is at its widest inside the lens) and the focal plane (the point of focus on the film or sensor*). The closer the nodal point is to the focal plane the wider the angle of view that is recorded. On 35mm film and ‘full frame’ sensors the focal plane is 24mm x 36mm, therefore we can calculate how a given distance from the focal plane (focal length) will equate to a certain angle of view. The shorter the focal length the wider the view, the longer the focal length the narrower the view becomes. For example a focal length of 28mm will

give an angle of view of 75o while a focal length of 500mm will give an angle of view of 5o. This is why a telephoto or long lens will usually be physically longer that a wide angle lens. The lens elements need to be further away from film of sensor. Our eyes have a focal length of about 45mm and an angle of view of about 40o.

In addition to the angle of view the focal length controls the amount of magnification. A longer focal length lens will have a greater magnification and see a narrower field of view compared to a lens with a shorter focal length and wider field of view.

To get an idea of these concepts hold your forefinger and thumb together to make a circle. Close one eye and hold your fingers close to the open eye. When that circle is close to your eye you will see most of the scene. As you move you fingers away you will see less of the scene through the circle. You are effectively ‘zooming’ the ‘image’.

Of course the circle formed by your fingers does not have any lenses. This means that the objects in the ‘image’ remain the same size. So in fact you are really not really zooming, just cropping the image. Nonetheless, the exercise is still useful for understanding angle of view.

When you add a lens element you effectively start to


magnify or reduce the size of the image on the focal plane. The shape of the piece of glass or clear plastic will effect the magnification or reduction by the way in which it focuses the light that passes through it. You may have studied some ‘optics’ in science. You can see the effect of the shape of the glass lens when you look through a magnifying glass. If you don’t have one, try carefully looking through a classmates glasses. If you wear them yourself, then you will already know the effect they have.

Perspective.The relationship between the lens and our perception of what we actually see is a complicated one. People often say that perspective is compressed when we use a telephoto or long focal length lens. (In 35mm film or full frame sensor terms that is usually a lens with a focal length of 70mm or more.) Objects appear closer than they really are because we have magnified the object to fit our chosen crop of the scene. Highly magnified scenes of distant objects are optically grouped together, and therefore appear to be closer together than they really are. Good examples of this can be seen in sports photography where the photographer has to record the event from quite a distance away and has used a long lens such as a 600mm.

The opposite is true with a wide-angle lens. We often think that it expands perspective. In fact we often photograph things close-up with a wide-angle lens because we cannot get any further away from the object. This leads to distortion. The wide angle of view makes closer object appear to be closer than they really are, and distant objects further away than they really are.

The camera in your phone or tablet probably has a lens that gives a wider angle of view than your eyes. Place the camera lens as close as you can to an object with the object in focus and in the light – this will probably be very close as these camera lenses have the ability to focus very close to the lens due to increased depth of focus. Notice that there is probably some distortion of the perspective. The iPhone/iPad uses a 4mm lens, but the sensor is so small that is the equivalent of 35mm on a full frame SLR camera.

In actual fact, our perception of the image is also governed by the distance we view the image and the size of the image. A small print of a scene might

The above diagram shows the angle of view of some of the more common focal lengths of prime lenses that can be used with a 35mm film or full frame digital camera. You can adjust zoom lenses to match most of the middle range lengths. On the following pages are examples of the angles between the 24mm and 200mm focal lengths. The images were created on a Canon 5D MkII that has a sensor the same size as 35mm film.


seem more compressed than a large print of the same scene. Our eyes see the small print differently because our brains expect things to be a certain size. If we go to the large extreme, a scene taken with a very long telephoto lens can seem quite natural when printed at a very large size. The most extreme example of this is the Imax theatre system. Although a scene is only taken with a single lens, the image can appear to be three-dimensional as the screen projection covers a greater angle than our eyes see.

A further experiment that you can do is photograph a full moon as it rises above the horizon. To our eyes the moon may appear very large, however this is an optical illusion. Try photographing the scene and the moon will appear quite small - it’s natural size in the image. Our brains expect to see some thing - a large moon - when the mechanical apparatus of our camera has no brain to create and manipulate expectations - so records the scene exactly as it is.

Focal length and depth-of-focus.There is a relationship between a given focal length of a lens and the depth of focus it produces at a given aperture. Depth of focus, in older books referred to as depth of field, is the area of a image that is in focus between the front of the camera and infinity.

A wide aperture (small f-number) will produce a shallower depth-of-focus (distance between the front of the lens and the most distant point the lens is in focus) than smaller aperture (large f-number). This relationship changes as the focal length of the lens changes.

On a 35mm full frame camera, a 200mm lens set to f2.8 may only produce a few centimetre of the scene in focus depending on the distance that the focused object is from the front of the lens. While a wide-angle lens such a 24mm lens set to f16 may have everything from a few centimetres from the front element of the lens through to infinity in focus.

The images on the following pages demonstrate both the changes in perspective between a wide and a telephoto lens, and the changes in depth of focus as the aperture and focal changes. The camera used was a Canon 5D MkII that has a sensor the same size as 35mm full frame film. Carly stayed in the same position and the camera was moved to frame Carly at the same apparent size. You will see that while Carly stays roughly the same size, object around her

change shape and size. The background in the images created at 200mm seems substantially closer than when a 24mm focal length is used.

Similarly, depth of focus decreases the larger the aperture becomes. Thus the image created at 200mm f2.8 has less depth of focus than the image created at 24mm f16. If the light levels hadn’t been constantly changing due to light cloud, there would have been a direct relationship between the shutter and aperture.

Furthermore the size of the film or sensor is a determining factor. The smaller the size of the sensor the greater the depth of focus will become because the nodal point of the lens will be closer to the focal plane. A given lens will effectively cover a wider area of the scene on a smaller sensor area, but a lens designed to cover only the area of a small sensor will vignette - cut off - the corners of a larger sensor. This is referred to a the multiplication factor. Thus a 50mm lens on a full frame camera becomes a 75mm lens on a APS-C or DX camera.

Summary.Understanding the physics of optics and lenses is very complicated. So don’t fret if it doesn’t make sense. The thing to remember is that:• a telephoto lens will reveal narrower angle of view and compress perspective• a wide angle lens will reveal a wider angle of view and expand perspective• a small aperture - large f number - will give greater depth of focus• a large aperture - small f number - will give shallower depth of focus• a smaller sensor frame size will give greater depth of focus • a larger sensor frame size will give shallower depth of focus

*The focal plane is the point where light is focused onto a surface. This is usually the film or sensor surface, otherwise all your images will be out of focus. (Professional cameras such as those from Canon and Nikon will show this on the top plate of the camera with a circle cut through with a line.) To achieve this at least one of the glass elements of the lens move in towards or away from the focal plane. When the nodal point and the focal plane achieve focus the measured distance becomes the focal length of our lens. Some cameras have a fixed focus, and will generally rely on a small sensor area and a wide angle with small aperture to achieve focus over a reasonable distance..


Call for ContentHave you enjoyed reading this and previous issues of 50 Lux magazine? Then read on....We are seeking feature articles, study-guides, essays, and practical classroom / workshop materials from practicing and former professional photographers, Arts and Media teachers, and feature writers. You must have a background in professional imaging, photography, and video production. Your writing must be of a professional standard suitable for students, teachers, and other photographic educators.

We are also seeking high quality photographs and photographic media from students, and emerging professionals. This usually takes the form of 1-3 images from secondary students and a folio of 10 plus images from tertiary students and graduates. If we are interested in your work we may arrange a feature interview.

We regularly feature current working commercial and artistic photographers, and photojournalists. We can accommodate suitable work from video and hybrid artists.

Photography covers a wide range of topics and 50 Lux has so far covered, buying film and digital SLR cameras, setting up a darkroom, processing film, and printing negatives. We also cover photography related events, gallery exhibitions, and have preservation and display features ready for publication.

With the introduction of the National Arts Curriculum from years F to 10, we are particularly interested in Lesson Plan’s and Unit’s of work aimed at younger primary and middle years photography students.

We are also interested in submissions for feature articles for tertiary students that include the setting up and running of a photographic business, self-marketing and promotion, and developing an on-line presence.

If you have suggestions for other photography related topics please contact us with a sample or links to your writing.

Interested? The first thing to do is read our style guide and terms and conditions. Remember we are a not for profit organisation. Images must be 300DPI TIFF, PNG, or PSD (flattened) and be at least 5-10 megabytes. Very large JPEGs maybe considered, but tend to pixelate on newer high resoultion screens. Please do not watermark your images. Written submissions must be 1500, 2000, or 2500 words in length and be submitted in .DOCX, .DOC, .TXT, or Pages format. The submission deadline for issue 5 is Friday 28 February 2014.

Contact us: [email protected]


24mm f 5.6 1/1000th second24mm f 2.8 1/4000th second

35mm f 2.8 1/400th second 35mm f 8 1/500th second

50mm f 8 1/400th second50mm f 2.8 1/5000th second

Camera - Canon 5D MkII. Sensor size is equal to 35mm film.Lens - Canon 24-70 f 2.8 L series.


24mm f 8 1/400th second 24mm f 16 1/80th second

35mm f 22 1/60th second35mm f 16 1/125th second


Observant people will notice that the relationship beween the shutter speed and aperture may not be as expected. This is because the sun was

sometimetimes hidden by cloud. ISO was kept at 100 throughout.




200mm f 5.6 1/400th second200mm f 3.5 1/1250th second

Camera - Canon 5D MkII. Sensor size is equal to 35mm film.Lens - Canon 70-200mm 2.8 Image Stabilsed L series.





Observant people will notice that the relationship beween the shutter speed and aperture may not be as expected. This is because the sun was

sometimetimes hidden by cloud. ISO was kept at 100 throughout.


Parting ShotsWhen I last wrote this column many of my former students were preparing for their final exams. They were studying hard to achieve the ATAR they needed to enter their preferred university course. I’m pleased to say that most of the students I have spoken to have done well enough to get their preferred choices in the first round of offers. Others are making slightly harder decisions or waiting for their second round offers. It’s often not easy to make decisions such as these, but if the first choice isn’t imediately available, and you are passionate about what you beleive in, there are many ways of achieving your goals.

Part of the drive for this magazine came from reading a Masters of Education Thesis about a decade ago that explored photography education in Victoria. The author lamented that there wasn’t a way of communicating with photography teachers on an overall basis, there wern’t standards, or a common curriculum. Nor was there a teacher body like the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) for the promotion of photography education in Australia.

Photographic education in Australian schools is mainly taught in Art or Studio Arts, with some states such as Victoria also offering it as a part of Media. At tertiary level, courses often allow students to have the option to branch into Photojournalism, Commercial, or Art streams of photography. These are all quite different professional fields, but all have the underlying need to have substantial skills with the tools, and to be able to successfully create narratives.

My interview with Rebecca Ann Hobbs suggested that there was a shift away from the technical aspects of photography at tertiary level to one based on the contextualisation and realisation of the medium. Yet many of the students and graduates I speak to lament some of that technical training.

Whilst it is unlikely that photography will ever become a stand alone subject in the last two years of secondary schools in the near future, there is clearly a need to create a body that is devoted to photographic education.

My photography classes were large, with as many as 75 students across three classes each semester. A source at the VCAA estimated that there might be as many as 5,000 students doing photography either in Media or Studio Arts (Photography) in years 11 and 12 in Victoria. Extrapolate that across the 7 states and territories and the figure is probably around 20, 000 senior secondary students each year.

An article in the Time-Life library of Photography Annual of 1974 wrote about the death of the printed magazine, and where the 50,000 tertiary students studying photography in the United States would find jobs - around 5,000 each year were expected to graduate with some form of photography degree each year, with the remaining 45,000 doing at least two semesters of photographic study. It’s a little strange that the same sentiments preducting the death of the meduium and the mediums that support photography haven’t changed in 40 years.

The article also celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Society for Photographic Education and the success it was having in co-ordinating photographic education in America.

In 2014 (some 50 years after the foundation of the American equivalent) we aim to start such an organisation covering Australia and New Zealand. We think it is timely to do so with the introduction of a National Curriculum for the Arts in Australia from Foundation to Year 10. In our next issue we hope to have details on how you can make a contribution as a photographic educator.

Our aim is that by the time the next Ballarat International Foto Biennale comes around in 2015 we’ll be able to celebrate a new era in photography education in Australia and New Zealand.

Andrew RenautManaging Editor


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50 lux issue 4 february 2014

Documents

kimberleys work

unusual story of australian

folio of work

rebecca ann hobbs work

misunderstanding people

kimberley munro

premier cultural facility

timelapse video