Heidelberg Materials Project

Most of my life I’ve shot with a digital camera and a wider angle lens. If I was shooting with a 50 mm or even an 80 mm lens I was aiming for a short depth of field and blurry Boca with the focus clearly on the subject. Lately, however I’ve been playing with the longer lens. On my 35 mm film camera, It’s my 135 mm or my 200 mm. With my Mamiya 645 it’s the 150 mm or the 210.  I like to shoot at least F8 if I can. At F8 or F11 I can compress a lot of layers together without everything falling out of focus and I get a real sharpness and 3-D quality which I’m really learning to appreciate. 

What am I doing here?  I’m hunting for opportunities. I’m exploring the space to find a vantage point that allows me to look through an environment at something in the distance. The goal is to fill the frame in an abstract way, taking advantage of as many lines, colors, tones and textures as possible. If possible include a bird or an airplane. Most of the time I’m using hyperfocal focusing. If I’m shooting at f/8, I set the infinity mark on the lens to line up with the f/8 mark on the depth-of-field scale. That gives me the maximum amount of depth in the field without wasting any depth beyond infinity. I’m essentially using the entire depth of field available to me, from the nearest acceptable point all the way to infinity. I’m usually hoping to create something that looks like a still from a movie or a Def Leppard album cover. 

The first time I came here to shoot I had my 35 mm film camera, my 135 mm lens, a yellow filter and a roll of expired Lucky 400. I developed with rodinol all at 50 to 1 dilution. The grain, the contrast, the feeling of paranoia. Apocalyptic vibes after the fall. I like.

The next time I came back with my Mamiya 645 and HP5 that I rated at 800 iso and shot f8 or f11 at 1/500th or 1/250th of a second with a yellow filter.  Again I developed with Rodinol 50:1 pushing the film to 800 ISO. I repeated a bit of my work with the 35 mm camera but still managed to find something new.  Less grain…but the scene feels bigger. 

After that I had some time to marinate on the idea. I started to day dream about different plots or narratives.  The images seem to be begging for an explanation. Who is this person? What are they up to? What’s happening here? What are they spying on? Where are all the people? What’s going on with all the airplanes?

Although I love the grainy black-and-white aesthetic, every time that I went back to shoot, I couldn’t help but notice how amazing the colors were. I imagined a sort of nostalgic version of the pictures I was taking. Maybe just before the collapse. The last minutes before the disaster. I was hoping for something sentimental, 70s, sun kissed, warm and gritty. I chose Kodak Gold 120 200 ISO and developed with the Flick Film C-41 color kit. This time the depth of field was a little shorter due to the long lens and the slower film, but the sun drenched colors and the possibility of including an airplane or 2 in the shot was exactly what I was hoping for.