freelance paradigm

Yesterday I was photographing the concert of our local brass band. Unfortunatelly I couldn't play, because I was missing the practice in autumn, but listening to my band for the first time in many years simply as a visitor was a delightful experience anyway.

The light for photographing was not exactly dim, but chaotic, so I decided it is time to experiment. I took a BW film (Ilford PAN 400) to avoid any shifts in color temperature and pushed it to 3200 ISO!!! It is was the first time I did a push of such magnitude and I didn't know what kind of results to expect.

Well - It is better than I expected!!! A lot better! The pictures are not as grainy as one could predict and they gained a lot of contrast. A lot of whites and a lot of blacks, but not many greys inbetween. The images have some sort of mystic atmosphere, they look very similar to the image of the Sin City movie, which is soooo stylish! Here is an example (It is made by hands in the darkroom, no photoshop whatsoever - just raw scan of a physical image).

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Spending the night in the darkroom (developing photos) is usually an experience of solitude and contemplation. Time passes very quickly and while you wait for the image to appear, there is a lot of time to think. It is funny, how analogue photography seems more real to me than the digital. I believe it is because more senses are involved in the process of it. With BW films, you literally do the photos with your own hands, and you can touch it, smell it, see it... In the digital world, everything is so abstract and distant. I am not trying to romanticize it too much, but there is something too it. It is like playing an electirc piano; it sounds and feels like the real thing, untill you try the real thing! When you can actually feel, see, touch and smell the strings or mechanisms that produce the sound the whole experience gets far more overwhelming.

It is the physical world we have been living in for the last 99.9999...% of the evolution and all our mental devices are more or less developed to serve the function of the physical perception. Abstract thinking is really cool because it helps you to think about the future and things beyond, but the power of the experience is still based upon sensorial perception.

There are some more pics below... Enjoy!

PS: And merry Christmas all!