OCOLOY Week 4

Tuesday 10th of February 2015

For this week I’ve gone with the suggestion to stick with just one processing preset in Capture One – Robert Boyer’s Tri-X +2, which is a grainy, contrasty and ‘vintage’ look that I really like.

Admittedly, it’s a bit… dishonest, perhpas? I mean, the output from the X-E1 is nowhere near as coarse-grained – the picture below shows a 100% crop comparing the normal Tri-X preset (with grain amount and granularity reduced to 10% or so) to the Tri-X +2 preset at its default:

artificial grain comparison this is from ‘slow country lane’, below

It’s a bit of a conundrum really: I like the grainy vintage look, but I also feel a little uncomfortable having my photos try to be something they’re not. It’s the same reason I’m sort of on the fence about homage watches; I like the look of the original, but it’s impractical (in the case of shooting actual Tri-X) or impossible (in the case of owning an actual Rolex MilSub), hence on the one hand the appeal of the homage/emulation. On the other hand, I like the idea of something being true to itself (see also: the trend away from skeuomorphic design), of exploring and exploiting and enjoying something’s innate qualities.

And of course all of this is dodging around the fact that the X-E1 natively shoots colour, but I think that’s a somewhat different argument, in that B&W is possibly its own photographic discipline, distinct from colour – it’s entirely about tone and shape and texture, without the opportunity to fall back on colour as a ‘crutch’.

So who knows, perhaps I’ll tire of the grainy aesthetic and move towards a more ‘natural’ look, we shall see. Oh and today Fuji just released a new lens roadmap with a very interesting 35mm f/2 on it – the 35/1.4 I’m using now is fine, but the leaked(?) picture of the 35/2 shows it’s significantly smaller, which certainly appeals to me, so I might be facing another dilemma near the end of the year: whether to keep on with the f/1.4, or sell it and get the f/2 instead. Again, we shall see.

Anyway, enough rambling, here’s this week’s pictures:

dark sky and street lights