Ugo/focalcamera

FOCAL CAMERA

14 September 2018

EXPLORE:

• SPACE AND TIME IN PHOTOGRAPHY
• THE LIMITATIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHY
• CONTINUOUS RECORDING

Probably everything will be blur. Working on the materiality of image making. Exploring the concept of space, time. Stepping out of classic and normative size limitation / sensor / film sizes.

Reciprocity of time and space

Photography can be seen as a tool to fix things, "fix time". Fixity hep us to conceptualise, categorise, understand, question. Tendency to fragment reality in images, that can be reorganise around a narrative axe (archive structure, discourse..). Roughly, if photography is suitable to fix subjects how the medium will behave when asks to record continuous element. Time is not the only element here : Space is also important. How do i bring the fragmented perception / society together? How can we represent the fluidity of emotions or life?. How to give a new unity? Fluidity / Liquidity is associated with two thematics: Elements and The transience nature of contemporary life.

STATIC Synonyms for static adj motionless, changeless

fixed immobile immovable passive stagnant stationary constant format stabile stable still at a standstill deadlocked gridlocked inactive inert latent rigid stalled standing still sticky stopped stuck unchanging unfluctuating unmoving unvarying

Liquid Modernity in sociology (Zygmunt Baumnan) Fluidity in Impressionism (Monet) How to record / represent / fix the fluidity of movement.

Continuous photograph, no shutter, the whole film is exposed / rewinded in front of the light source. What does that gesture of rewinding really means? Rewinding, passing, moving the film are all actions that can refer directly to Time. What will be the effect of a continuous recording on our perception of time. Is continuous recording different from Analog to Digital? The photograph will be of the film's size. 120 = 61mm X 760mm. A 1.2m height print will be more than 14 meter long. Can we look / read the long photograph like a timeline? Like historical graph with events = Cave painting storytelling How can we achieve that with digital technologies ? continuous recording in time and space like on a film, not only on the sensor size. Scanning continuously. CCTV systems, Cloud Archiving, 24h Flux. Digital allows us "infinity" recording (Victoria, Russian Arch) in time. Calculating the speed of the subject to fit the speed of the film. Matching speed should result in more figurative image. The photograph will be taken manually allowing variations of speed. Speed variation will impact the image. We will try to take photographs of things in movement, like landscapes passing from the train window, and try to match the film speed with the landscapes. Exploring the movements of element like water or air can be interesting.

08 October 2018

08.10.2018 35mm Experiments

I experimented last week on my old 35mm camera. The camera have a manual rewinding system and a Bulb shutter option. First I advance the whole film without exposing it. Second, I press the shutter on Bulb (Manual timing) to let the light passing through the lens and start rewinding the film, meaning the film is being exposed by passing behind the lens. Speed of the film is a selective process: a shutter system. In the next camera the shutter will disappear. The scrolling speed of the film has an impact on the image. Each speed variation is make visible by the edges of the camera frame (24*36 in this case). The direction in witch the film is scrolling in the minolta srt101 highlights the vertical edges . So changing the speed make the frame visible, we also know that the horizontal framing is due to the film size. A perfectly continuous speed should allow a continuous picture in a constant exposure environment. The speed is the exposure time. Objects can be recorded with a certain sharpness. Subject need o move in opposite direction or same direction than the film it is recorded on.

Rosmalen - Dordrecht by NS train 1/6 of the photograph

29 October 2018

I built the medium format camera without shutter, only adding a small crank to the original design provided by Mathijs van Oosterhoudt. The crank allows me to pull the film with more control, allowing both continuity and variation in speed. The aperture is roughly f4. The lens is build from 3 separate elements glued together. After noticing a tendency to overexposure, I reduced the aperture to a thin strip made of transparent red plastic. I didn't use any metering for the exposure, I guessed it, playing with the speed of the re-widing, the now-reduced aperture (f8-f10) and the film sensibility 100-160iso. Below, you can find fragments I extracted from 120mm negative color films. Negatives were scanned.

Hilleresberg, Rotterdam 2018 (Sitting at the back of a bike)

Hilleresberg, Rotterdam 2018 (Walking around a wood structure)

Blaak Market, Rotterdam 2018 (A travelling through the crowd)

The rest of the research will be now held here :