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The blog is on hiatus for a bit as I am moving

Hi:

All twenty-two of my faithful followers, never fear, I'm still around but work and suchlike is drawing my attention away. Stay tuned and I'll be back in a bit.

Work demands may necessitate packing and putting stuff into storage. On the positive side, that'll mean many interesting new photographic opportunities may open up. In the mean time you keep shooting!

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Here are your 2014 photographic resolutions

Get more content. Imagine you are a runner wanting to complete a marathon. Would getting into long drawn out arguments on the internet with people who refuse to look up things that are easily found in their equipment instruction manuals count toward your training miles? No. Shut up and go shoot. Even if it is the lamp post outside. Less time talking about photography in the echo chamber of this or that photography discussion forum and more time shooting. Here's a helpful test: if you average more time reading photography discussion threads than time shooting, close your browser.  Content. Content. Content.

Learn why things work. When people say they don't like X in photography, my question is 'what were you expecting?' Meaning everything is a constellation of trade offs and compromises. That your expectations were not met is not necessarily a problem or the problem. For example, learn what an MTF chart tells you and what it does not. Learn what a camera profile does and does not. Learn what light sources do and do not. People who understand why things are built the way they are have an advantage over people who do not. Learn how to do things you don't know how to do such as off camera flash, using soft boxes, shoots, or using the exposure/flash compensation, mixed light sources, why raw processors work the way they do, how Photoshop actually sees images in terms of channels, how to confuse autofocus, why diffraction kicks in, why purples and greenies appear, set a slow sync rear curtain, et cetera. Once you've grasped it, learn how to do it repeatedly and under less than ideal circumstances and faster.

Don't buy anything.  More gear is not a substitute for adding pictures to your image gallery. The gear you have now is probably more than you need. The economy won't grind to a halt if you don't have the latest thing. Besides, everything eventually becomes 'old guy crap' that needs to be trucked off by your relatives. Make it easier on them.

Don't take street photography literally. Taking photos of people on the street is ONE part of documentary photography and likely should be its smallest part. Do you want to images of bakers with their hairless arms pulling bread from the oven, men working grinders, potters shaping clay, teachers at the chalkboard, chemists staring at beakers, steelworkers on a girder, cowboys roping animals, aproned butchers at the block, medical technicians adjusting artificial limbs, politicians breaking wind  - then take those photos.  Stop cranking out shots from the hip as you cross an intersection or walk past a construction site or truck in the off chance that you'll get something interesting to post to a photography discussion forum saying 'Look! I got a street photo!' Moreover, unless you're staring at the top of a Rolliflex, shooting from the waist while pretending you're not taking photos means you've given up control over your framing AND you'll be taking photos up peoples' noses. The reason why you're shooting walk pasts is because you're starved for content.  Go to where people are doing stuff. Go to where the photographers are not. 

Get close. No closer than that. The worst thing that will happen is that someone will call the cops.

The previous item does not apply to lions, alligators, crocodiles  cheetahs, pumas, tigers, sharks, giant squid, volcanos, geysers, burning oil rigs, incoming artillery et cetera. 

Get in front of your subjects. Backs and turn aways are the lowest form of street photography.  Anyone telling you that this is his aesthetic probably has nothing else in his portfolio.

Stop posting immediately to this or that social media.  Let your photos sit for a bit before looking at them so you have some editorial distance.

The opinions of people who are better skilled than you matter. Likes on Facebook or this or that social media count for nothing. 

Leave your lens caps at home. 

To shoot documentary, you need very little gear.  If you're going to a specific shoot, yes you'll probably bring a bag of gear and your light kit but for being out there in the world, the old 50mm, 35 or whatever is fine. The idea that you need a heap of zooms and reflectors and strobes and this or that on hand at all times is insecurity.  One of my favourite films is Ronin. It's about a bunch of ex-military people hired to steal a suitcase. The youngster of the group keeps asking the older fellow what his favourite weapon is. The older man, played by DeNiro, has no answer. You open the toolbox, see what you have and figure out a way to get the job done. 

Keep your camera in your hand. It doesn't do you any good in a camera bag.

If you see the shot it's likely too late. Stay awake.

Try to take the sorts of photos you wouldn't normally take. Again, this is about content or doing some weird post processing in Lightroom in the hopes that an interesting image emerges.  Yes, go to workshops but what you'll get out of workshops mostly is access to new content. 

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Saturday Cinema The Passenger, 1975 – Jack Nicholson plays a reporter who uses the coincidence that the looks like an arms dealer to get away from his life’s frustrations. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

A documentary film maker is in Africa in the 70s when he find an opportunity to get away from his life. Unable to meet with the right people to assemble a good film about the war in Chad, his wife is having an affair in London, and having to abandon his Landrover in a sand dune, he returns to his hotel to find a man with whom he’d struck up a friendship dead of a cardiac arrest.

 The men had resembled one another physically. The reporter takes on the dead man’s identity. In theory, he’ll see if pretending the arms dealer will lead to more material for his film.  In actuality, he’s bored with is own life. 

However, the reporter’s colleagues and wife are now looking for him. Unfortunately, pretending to be an arms dealer when you don’t have any weapons to deliver is a risky business. The film’s last major scene has as seven minute tracking shot that very subtly ends the film with a key action taking place off screen.  

Maria Schenider, famous Last Tango in Paris stars as an architecture student helping Nicholson in his ill-thought adventure as his old life, and his new one close in on him. The quarrelsome Steve Berkhoff also stars.

Director Michelangelo Antonioni specialized in using very long single takes in contrast with apparently disconnected events and very spare scripts about men and women who felt trapped in their lives to sew together his stories. His most famous film is Blow Up, about a photographer who, when processing a negative, realizes he may have witnessed a murder.  This film making style is not to everyone’s taste as even Igmar Baergman thought Blow Up was good, but otherwise couldn’t figure out what the big deal was about Antonioni. However, lots of people like this slow-moving film.

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Off until New Year

I'll post a Saturday Cinema mind you.

In the mean time, stop reading photography blogs and going to workshops. Get out there and shoot.

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Saturday Cinema – The Stuntman, 1979 – A man on the run sees a stuntman’s death during an impromptu shoot. The director covers it up, but what will be the new stuntman’s fate?

Peter O'Toole died this week.

O'Toole was in any number of classics and stinkers. But his presence was enough to add star power to any scene he was in. Why? His height. His sing-song voice and punctuated, clipped diction. His good looks. His ability turn all that off or crank up to excess and play a parody version of himself. I never met the man and am not sure that I'd like him as drinkers are a difficult bunch but his acting was riveting.

If you don't know the Stuntman, stop reading this and locate a copy.

If anyone could also tell me why Richard Rush never directed after this, I'd also be very grateful.

Steve Railsback is a man on the run who stumbles onto a film scene being shot on a bridge. The result is an accident where the stunt driver dies. The director decides to cover up the accident and continue shooting his World War 1 love story using the escaped felon as a replacement stuntman.

I'll come out and say it, I never liked Lawrence of Arabia. It's well-shot, edited and would great to watch with the sound off if I didn't like Jarre's score so much. It's just that Lawrence of Arabia is so full of people doing not-obvious things for cloudy reasons. Perhaps because of this, O'Toole was perfect casting because his charisma would wallpaper over the what is in my opinion, script weaknesses. In Stuntman, O'Toole's demonic motivations are open to question by the man on the run. Does the director need the new stunt man to survive the film shoot? This too is unclear but we're given a definitive answer by the end.

Anyway, this film is part thriller, funny, romance and has the best jump cut in the world after 2001's bone throw/space ship.  This film made a heck of an impression on my adolescent mind and I remember being blown away by it. Every few minutes, the film seemed to change into a completely different kind of story.

This film took a long time to come out on DVD and it included a documentary called the Sinister Saga of the Making of the Stuntman where the director details studio interference when shooting and then trying to distribute the film. However, Rush fails to name names so the documentary is kind of a frustrating watch. Rush must have pissed off people with money because he never was near a camera again. 

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Saturday Cinema, The Wilby Conspiracy - 1975

This little-known thriller has visiting English engineer Michael Caine blunder into South Africa’s racist police state. Sidney Poitier also stars.

What else could we do the week Nelson Mandela died? Cry Freedom was a bit too obvious.

I remember seeing this now unknown-thriller on a black and white television late at night when I was young and being utterly confused that by the racist apparatus of that state. How naïve I was, eh? It made it easy to sympathize with Caine’s character, an engineer who’s taken a job in South Africa to make a few quid and get out.

Poitier plays a political prisoner who’s lawyer is sweet on Michael Chain. Poitier’s just been released thanks to her efforts but he’s swept up again in a mass arrest over identity paper checks. However, the police wanted several things, not just to see if he had his ID card in his wallet.

His job be damned, Caine tries to make a bolt for the border as he’s had enough with this crazy country. Unfortunately, the police have other ideas for him. 

Miss India 1965, and Star Trek star Persis Khambatta also stars. Nicol Williamson, whom you may have seen as the Merlin in Excalibur, plays the South African major. The film is based upon a book of the same title by Peter Driscoll, a minor writer of thrillers who lived for a time in South Africa. According to Wiki, he set several of his adventure stories in Africa.

Caine apparently said that this film this film was his first production that strayed into ‘sending a message.’ More trivia about this film here.

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Saturday Cinema,  A Boy and His Dog, 1975

An unlikely pair communicate through telepathy as they wander Earth’s atomic wastelands looking for food and sex in this Harlan Ellison story.

The A-Bomb was invented in ’45. The next fifteen years was a period of incredible changes in engineering and aviation (see the recent BBC series Cold War, Hot Jets) that took everyone from bombers to inter continental ballistic missiles to nuclear subs and the space race while the threat of completely ending civilization paralyzed the imagination.

Finally we learned to laugh about the end of the world.

Science Fiction author and prick Harlan Ellison began writing a series of short satirical stories about an eighteen year-old, desperate for sex in a post nuclear war world. The short stories were re-worked into a novella that actor LQ Jones saw potential for. How? The role of the telepathic dog was a great role for a voice actor, I guess.

Jones, a TV actor, assembled a film crew and began shooting this improbable and unfilm-able story.  The result was that this low-budget guerrilla production film shared a Hugo Award for the gazillion-dollar studio-funded satire Rollerball in 76. The film was also nominated for a Nebula.

Look for a very young Don Johnson as the orgasm-obsessed teen.

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Saturday Cinema Shoot to Kill, 1988

Sidney Poitier and Tom Berringer as a cop seeking the aid of a mountain man as he peruses a killer over the US Northwest. 

The man on the run has joined a hunting party of businessmen. The identity of the killer is left for the audience to puzzle out as the FBI man and tracker sprint to catch up with the expedition.

The cop movies of the 1980s had the operational principle that the filmmakers need to find an excuse to avoid calling for back up. Well, scrambling over through the wilderness away from radio and cell phones provides that escape hatch.

There’s a bit of an in-joke in some of the dialogue: In a diagreement with Tom Berenger, Sidney Poitier says he has been up against the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan and the KGB. He has: in Let's Do It Again (1975), In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Little Nikita (1988).

Director Roger Spottiswood went on to direct Brosnan’s best 007 outing, To-Morrow Never Dies and Schwarzenegger’s The Sixth Day. He also created the film based on General Romeo Dallaire’s experiences of the Rawandan Massacre, Shake Hands with the Devil.

My favourite film by Spottiswood is the little-known Under Fire. It’s about three journalists stumbling through the Salvadorian revolution of the 1980s. Listen for the stellar music by longtime film composer Jerry Goldsmith and jazz guitarist Pat Metheney.

Lastly, Michael Chapman photographed this film. You may have seen some of his other work including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

It may be just me, but I have always thought of Poitier as a really refined man. I know it’s not actually true but in my mind, in nearly every picture he’s wearing suits. To see him in rough mountaineering clothes seems kinda odd!

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Saturday Cinema – The Outlaw Josey Wales, 1976. Clint Eastwood is trying to start over after the American Civil War. To put it mildly, things don't go smoothly. Chief Dan George also stars.

The Outlaw Josey Wales is about a wanted man after the US Civil War, but made only two years after the end of Viet-Nam war, this backdrop of this western has America reconciling itself with itself. This proved a successful metaphor with a bankable star in Clint Eastwood.

This film also features the worst hat Eastwood ever wore. Fortunately after the introduction, it gets replaced.

Director of photography Bruce Surtees also shot 14 films with Eastwood including High Plains Drifter and even Eastwood's very first film Play Misty For Me. He also photographed next year’s the Shootist, John Wayne’s final picture. Surtees picked the nickname The Prince of Darkness for his tendency for lots ofdeep blacks. 

The editor was Ferris Webster, who’d worked with Director John Strugess previously (The Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven, The Hallelujah Trail) before becoming Eastwood's regular editor starting with 1973's Hugh Plains Drifter. He also edited for one of my favourite directors, John Frankenheimer.

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Saturday Cinema, Time Table, 1957

An insurance company investigator is teamed with his friend at a railroad to investigate a flawlessly planned cash car robbery. But friends have secrets.

In the days before computers, debit cards and the internet, cash robbers were always a risk and a problem. In this case, a payroll delivery being made by train is robbed. A notable feature of the crime was its clockwork timing.

The money was insured but before the insurance company pays up, they want the crime investigated: did the railroad company take reasonable precautions? You know, the usual thing that insurance companies do to find a reason to avoid paying out.

Charlie Armstrong is tasked with the investigation, just as he and his wife are to leave on vacation. A railroad cop the couple knows is hopes to help them get to their booked vacation. 

Of course, the insurance company doesn’t want to pay up. As the investigation progresses, the conflicting needs of their respective employers makes things difficult. And, of course, even friends have secrets.

Directed and starring Mark Stevens, a second-tier leading man of the 1940s and 1950s who never quite made it to the front ranks of the movie stars. He became a staple of television, working until age 77.

Felicia Farr, Jack Lemmon’s eventual wife,  also stars. The story was written in part by Aben Kandel, who wrote  the cinematic masterpieces ‘I was a Teenage Werewolf’ and ‘I was a Teenage Frankenstein.’

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The camera market today: cool stuff but cooling sales

Thom Hogan is a long time photographic industry watcher. His most recent article is about the great and wonderful cameras we have on the market today...

… and the dismal sales faced by manufacturers. It's worth a read.

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Saturday Cinema - Frenzy, 1972

The stories of two men are followed: one is a serial rapist, the other is an innocent man to whom circumstantial evidence points in Hitchcock's second-to-last film.

It’s all here: an innocent man accused, a manhunt, sex, violence and blondes.

In other words – Hitchcock.

If you��re too young to really know much about Hitchcock, I envy you. You’re in for a treat as you discover his films. He started as a dialogue sign painter for silent films. He worked his way up to be the biggest film director of the 1950s and 1960s. 

In his old age, he returned to the UK  for a film that he shot in largely in Covent Garden. The open air market where his father had a green grocery stand was going to be transformed into the tourist mecca we see today.

Fortunately for us, the Covent Garden of Hitchcock’s boyhood was preserved on film so we get to see it here. It’s also lovely that he shot it late in his career. The level of polish in his filmmaking great.

The film is about two men who are connected to women via a dating agency. (This is what we had before on-line dating. It was the same idea, you wrote an essay and had your photo taken with the agency taking a cut to introduce you to men or women you choose from their files.*)

Unfortunately, the one of these men is a murderer. The police draw the wrong conclusions. This forces innocent man to bust his way out of custody and, with the bobbies in pursuit, race to Covent Garden to find some evidence that he’s innocent.

Michael Cain was apparently offered the role of the rapist and murderer, but declined. According to Wiki, he thought the character was disgusting and didn’t want to be associated with such a role. I guess he much preferred nice fellows like the gangster in Get Carter!

The role instead went to Barry Foster. Foster is probably best known for a series of detective stories set in Copenhagen about a cynical copper named Van der Valk.

Hitchcock would direct one more film after this.

If there’s a split of opinion on this film, it’s on two issues:

The villain’s really unlikeable. He’s tough to watch on screen because he’s got few redeeming qualities.

Secondly, that the mystery of who is innocent and who is guilty is revealed comparatively early. 

I can see both sides of these issues. I  think the choices made were legitimate but can understand how people might feel and think otherwise.

* And these dating agencies were about as bloody useless as the on-line ones.

Bonus: One of my favourite early Hitchcock films is the 39 Steps. It’s now public domain and is available for download from the Internet Archive. 

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Horror Express, 1973

Longtime friends Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing play opposite each other again, now as competing explorers and scientists in 1906. Lee's discovery of what he thinks to be a missing link between homo sapiens and other earlier species, is being transported to Europe.  People aboard are being killed. Autopsies reveal that … we'll, I shan't ruin it for you. It's a nice twist on the murdering monster tale and each has an explanation. The priest thinks it's Satan, the Kossack commander, Telly Savalis, thinks it's Bolsheviks. 

If I had to describe it, it's like a Space: 1999 episode.

According to Wikipedia, 'Horror Express was filmed in Madrid between 1971 and 1972, produced on a low budget of $300,000 with the luxury of having three familiar genre actors in the lead. The film was co-produced by American screenwriter/producer Bernard Gordon, who had collaborated with Martin on the 1972 film Pancho Villa (which featured Savalas in the title role). Though it was believed that as Bernard Gordon had acquired the train model used in Nicholas and Alexandra and he commissioned a script for its use, Gordon denied it, saying the model had been constructed for Pancho Villa.[3] Filmmakers used the mock-up from Pancho Villa as the interior for all train cars during production since no further room was available on stage. All scenes within each train car were shot consecutively, the set then modified and shot for the next car.'

Lee's many year friendship with Cushing also helped save the casting. This was Cushing's first picture after the death of his wife. He attempted to resign when filming was already underway. Apparently, Lee helped sweet talk his old pal back to working. 

Finally, it also has that weird audio so prevalent in some early 70s pictures. Apparently some European films weren't shot with audio. The actors did speak but the understanding was that the real audio would be recorded in studio later. 

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Saturday Cinema - The Changeling, 1980.

George C. Scott stars in a atmospheric haunted house yarn. Praised as an end of an era horror film just before the slasher era took over.

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Saturday Cinema - Dr Phibes Rises Again, 1972.

Vincent Price returns to bump more people off in unnecessarily complicated ways during his quest to bring his wife back to life.

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Saturday Cinema - The Abominable Dr Phibes, 1971

Vincent Price and the always great Peter Jeffrey star in this B-film about an unnecessarily complex set of murders by a crazed widower. Pure 70s fromage but kinda great.