I have an idea for a new project actually for when I finish this project.
Basically really old lens on LF camera look, low contrast, soft and dreamy but without using a soft focus filter, kinda like pin hole but without the long exposure, nearer a painting than a photograph, giving an impression perhaps more than accuracy, ethereal images that speak to the soul.
I've spent this whole project stitching for loads of sharpness and resolution, great tonality, crisp prints, etc. I'm interested in going all the way over in the other direction, to say the same things but in a very different way, a way closer to the soul and further from the eye if that makes any sense. I'm afraid that I have less than zero training in art so I don't know how to phrase what I'm trying to say, just that I want to say it.
Oh and I want to do it with a DSLR but LF look tonality because I really can't be bothered with starting up LF again, probably using stitching for the tonality. Either that or if they resurrect Type 55!
I think I can do it with the right lens and technique. Not got to the stage yet where I'm specifically investigating what tools will give me that kind of look. Heck I don't exactly know how to describe what I want to do but I'll know what it is when I see it!
I will only ever take on a project if it involves expressing something that is within my soul. I'm not the type to do a project for a projects sake. I know pretty much what I want to say and express unlike in the beginning of my photographic career. I was taking photographs where my soul was crying out but I had no idea what I was saying, only that my images connected with me. One day I sat and looked at the photo below which was hanging in my bedroom. I sat there for hours just staring at it trying to work out why it spoke so much to me, what had I tried subconsciously to say when I took it? After hours I finally worked it out but when I mentioned it to my best friend he was shocked that I hadn't realised what I was expressing, it was obvious to everyone else and was a running theme throughout all my images.
In any case once I realised what I was subconsciously trying to say in my images, it became far easier to make the image as I knew now consciously exactly what I was looking for. Although those emotions are now much suppressed due to 8.5 years of an incredible marriage, the idea of knowing exactly what you want to express even before you go out to make the images is why I can go out, take only 4 images in 3 hours of wandering in that incredible cauldron of image possibilities and have 4 keepers, 4 images that express what I am trying to say, in this case along the theme of my website 'Timeless Jewish Art' the feeling of history in the streets were the echoes of centuries are there to be heard.
I'm not a photographer. I believe that a photographer will photograph regardless of whether they are trying to say something with their images just for the love of the photograph. I respect that but it's just not me. I am trying to express what is in my soul and go out to find and make an image that will describe my feelings. I use a camera to do that eventhough more traditional artistic methods are far more suited to the job. But, I can't paint or draw so I use a camera as my paintbrush.
Whether what I have to say is worth listening to is for others to decide as in any other form of expression. The important thing though, I think, is that I'm trying to say it.
This is the image that to this day hangs in my bedroom, the image that made me realise that I was trying to reach out through my art to express what was in my soul. Today I'm trying to say something different. No longer about myself, now I'm trying to express my feelings of being in the cities were so much of our history lies, of feeling the steps of history all around me as I tread those same pathways surrounded by the realisation of what was, what is and what will be in this incredible place. Sometimes I use people to give the impression of the present overshadowed within the past though always described as a fleeting presence or moment within the centuries of history (I almost never fully freeze the human movement for that reason and you'll notice that I pretty much only allow one person in an image). The people are not the point, it's the ancient feeling oozing out of those walls and pathways. I want the images to feel ancient, to feel like they are not only part of history but history itself. Because that is what I feel as I walk through them.
You see joy in that girl dancing down the steps. I feel melancholy in the childhood among these ancient streets, the most fleeting of moments when seen on the scale of the history these stones have seen. It's very hard to live and rejoice in the present when walking through these streets, the present feels so very artificial...