Back to the city

Spent another weekend in Toronto (and St Catherines). Still scanning... this is mostly a mixed bag. Comments and criticism welcome and encouraged.
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I really like the 2nd one but I think that's because I'm into "people" right now.

Nice stuff.

Ken, I commented on your flickr stream.

Thanks for sharing Ken. These are great!

I've got 5 favorites here. Numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 are all amazing shots.
I'd really like to see them printed.

I find the first two a bit distracting. Between the poplars and the bridge in number one, my eye doesn't really settle.
The second one is a nice shot, more controlled but it doesn't hit me with the same impact as any of the last 5 shots.

Is there any story behind any of these. I'm a sucker for the story.

Thanks again for sharing Ken.

Oh, ya. The woman kneeling beside the baby.... hands beautifully lit...
Masterpiece.

crowellphotographs wrote:Oh, ya. The woman kneeling beside the baby.... hands beautifully lit...
Masterpiece.

If by "woman" you mean my 19-year old neice kneeling with her SECOND baby (got started early)... then yah. I was thinking of cropping this one, maybe 4:3 instead of 3:2 and getting rid of the doll on the bottom left. What do you think?

The first two shots are me messing around with my friends in St Catherines. The guy is Chris... besides my daughter the most photos I have in my shoeboxes going back 15 years are of him. I miss having a model around who I can call up and shoot at a moments notice.

3 and 4 are a burnt out church in downtown toronto that I have been shooting over the years. After the fire the walls were still standing but it looks like now they are getting ready to put the condos up. All that is left is the shell of the basement. Here is a shot from INSIDE the church in 2005. The roof was gone and some genius grafitti artists took down the boards over the outside of the windows and painted their own "stained glass" and put the boards back. It looked really awesome.



5 is just a shot in the newly renovated Museum subway station. They covered the pillars with various statues. The station still looks ugly but the statues were well lit so I shot it. Most of the Toronto shots I did were from behind a stroller so I didn't get a lot of what I wanted. 6 is an exhibit at the ROM called "Housepaint." It's the first exhibit on street art and graffiti in a major Canadian museum. Those are huge canvases stretched around a "house" frame. They will be auctioned off at the end of the exhibit with proceeds going to habitat for humanity.

I like #1 the best. It's difficult to figure out what Ken (or anybody else) is thinking when they press the shutter. I feel that the geometry in and of the composition, in itself, is the subject. It is interesting for the mathematician. Whether Ken intended this, I don't know. I can read more into it... I can easily come up with some metaphor for a relationship between the man, nature and machine, say. However, that's not what I find interesting. I like the V in the branches, the inverted V of the bridge - together, almost forming a zig-zag across the photo. I like the two trunks in the foreground that run nearly parallel to each other. I like how the centre tree is positioned. Dividing the composition down that tree divides the left side of the frame into a nearly perfect square. Then there is the position of Ken's friend. If you draw a line from his head to the top of the frame, it divides the right side of the frame into nearly a perfect square.

On occasions, some of Ken's compositions remind me of a bit of Lee Friedlander's work. At first glance, it looks like its chaos, randomness or that there is nothing there but in truth, there is a hidden structure. Also similar to Keith Richard's guitar playing.

Nando wrote:
On occasions, some of Ken's compositions remind me of a bit of Lee Friedlander's work. At first glance, it looks like its chaos, randomness or that there is nothing there but in truth, there is a hidden structure. Also similar to Keith Richard's guitar playing.

Haha, although I'm sure you're not saying I compose like Richard's plays, I will thank you for the complement. It would be nice if I could harness it a bit, but often I don't even know. I think I need a good editor. I have more coming soon, I will post them once they are ready. Some are still in the cans and some are developed and scanned but need to be rooted through.

Also I don't think I did it on purpose when I shot it, but when I scanned the baby shot I instantly thought of this Larry Towell shot. Although I don't claim to be anywhere near his level I must have been channeling him in some way, if not outright copying.

Probably more coincidence than copying but its funny how the mind works when shooting sometimes. An old roomate of mine cut an album once. He came up with a riff for one of the songs that was almost the same as an one from an Iron Maiden song that he listen to in his youth. He never caught it until he listened to the recording.

And Keef is a great guitarist!

I have now rotated the photo in Flickr
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I'm going to do my own self-revue now. Feel free to tune me out as I think aloud.

My first problem is that I used too many different films. When I went to Toronto last February I took 10 rolls of TRI-X with me and developed them all in Rodinal. No matter what I can look at all those shots from that trip and they are similar. On this more recent trip I used no less than 5 different films (PANF 50, TRI-X, NeoPan 400, NeoPan 1600, HP5) and used two different developers (HC-110 and Rodinal). For my next trip in May (wherever that may be) I will use one film, one developer again... which will likely be TRI-X in Rodinal.

I like the shoe box picture... with only that ONE pair of white boots... and I really like the one of the grafitti in the second set... I think the balance of dark and light is better than the ones on top (for me anyways). The baby picture is very nice as well, with the different angle...

Kenneth Armstrong wrote:My first problem is that I used too many different films.

There is something to be said for using only one film and one developer. I used to just use Tri-X and D76 but now I'm using all sorts of things. As I said in our secret meeting, I think that I made a mistake in buying a wide variety of different films and chemicals. Fomapan 100, for example, is very nice. My only complaint is that it curls too much. On the other hand, I really do not like Fomapan 400. I can't seem to get any good results from it. I think that I'll never go back to just using Tri-X and D76 again but I'm definitely going to cut back. I'm thinking APX100 in Rodinal for low-grain, Tri-X in Xtol a general everyday film, and Tri-X in Rodinal (stand development) for high-speed at 1600ISO. Just two films and two developers. When I need the convenience of a C41 film, I'll go with Kodak BW400CN.