Portraits round 1

January 29, 2012November 14, 2018 Camerajunky4 Comments

Portraiture

Portraiture is a very exciting branch of photography probably because of its subject. It is indeed a very ancient and natural thing to depict our fellowman. Therefore an enormous amount of portraits has been created over history and especially nowadays.

Most likely this is the reason why portraiture is not easy to do well, fortunately, all of us genetically attracted to faces. People are hard-coded to recognize human faces virtually everywhere and in anything even if there are only a few random craters and some shadows on the surface of a dead planet.

I also do love good portraits, and I am generally taking a lot as well. Unfortunately, I am not as good as I wish to be.

It is rather hard to catch the moment of emotion in the right composition among proper lights to get a really special portrait. In addition, as it is an interactive process you have to be connected to the other human-being on a level which is challenging and exciting at the same time.

This is overall very rewarding for me and I am going to keep shooting portraits for sure, hopefully on a higher and higher level.

I was planning to post some of my portraits here for a long time ago, but on the other hand, I decided to push myself to publish new works as much as possible.

Finally, the time has come and I have developed a few rolls of film a few days ago. So now I have some new photos which I will mix up with a few not so new ones.

The recent shoots caused a quite a bit of excitement because as always everything was experimental. I have tested a new focusing screen in my Pentacon Six as well as 2 new types of film (Fuji Across 100, Lomo Lady Gray 400) and this was the first time I used Kodak D76 developer.

It turned out all good, however, there were lessons to learn again.

Some new shoots

Nico (Girona, Spain), Pentacon Six, Biometar 80mm, Fuji Across 100, Kodak D76, Cannoscan 9900F

SavE (Girona, Spain) Pentacon Six, Biometar 80mm, Fuji Across 100, Kodak D76, Cannoscan 9900F

Paolo (Prato, Italy) Pentacon Six, Biometar 80, Fuji Across 100, Kodak D76, Cannoscan 9900F

Hunor and Tibor (Szentendre, Hungary), Pentacon Six, Biometar 80mm, Lomo Lady Gray 400, Kodak D76, Cannoscan 9900F

Some not so new shoots

These two pictures were among those I shoot on my first few rolls and developed myself around 2007-2008. The guy was my roommate during the university and these were taken in our kitchen next to a big window.

By the way, he is also a photographer and shooting film too from time to time. He is the founder of a really nice blog called 100ASA.

Holló (Miskolc, Hungary), Zenit E, Helios 44, Forte 100, Forte developer, Cannoscan 9900F

Gabi (Gyöngyössolymos, Hungary), Cosina CSM, Cosinon 55mm, Forte 100, Cannoscan 9900F

Final words

Naturally there are many more portraits in my collection which deserve a frame in this blog and certainly many will show up. I only need to find the occasion and the context to merge them with recent works and publish. But hey this is only the round 1. I hope some of these cached your eye.

Stupa (gold and blue)

December 20, 2011November 14, 2018 Camerajunky1 Comment

These photos were taken last year around January. The place is close to the village Tar, Hungary. This stupa is called “Béke” (peace) stupa and built in-memorial of Kőrösi Csoma Sándor, also known as Alexander Csoma de Kőrös.

According to Wikipedia he was a Hungarian philologist and orientalist, author of the first Tibetan-English dictionary and grammar book. He was born in Kőrös, Grand Principality of Transylvania (today Chiuruş, Romania).

Anyway, I am probably not the right person to describe this sight historically neither theologically, but it was a wonderful experience and we could really smell a special religious atmosphere.
There were a Fantastic sunshine and clear deep blue sky although the air was a bit chilly plus, of course, the stupa which indeed looks extraordinary. I hope the photos will explain better what do I mean.

If I made you interested in this stupa, have a look at this link.

Gear

I used my Pentacon Six TL and most likely the standard 80mm f/2.8 Biometar and some Kodak Ektachrome 100 slide film. This was my first and so far only trial on this film. I would love to get some more of it though. I have used my Ricoh GR Digital digital compact as light-meter.

Photos

Iron factory

November 25, 2011November 14, 2018 Camerajunky2 Comments

Coupe of months ago I had got a chance to join to a photo tour into an abandoned iron factory. I had no idea what to expect, I only visited one building before to play paintball.

So I grabbed my “grown on steroids” SLR camera (the medium format Pentacon Six TL and), a few lenses (180mm Sonar, 80mm Biometar and 50mm Flectagon) and 2 rolls of slightly expired Fuji Reala ISO 100. Yes, my bag was pretty heavy, but who cares, the quality worth this price for me. Despite my expectations the weather turned good and I could shoot the slow speed film and the sight was even more amazing than I could imagine. I also toke some digital shoots as well. But since those come from my GR Digital compact camera (and nowadays light meter) they are so different, I decided to not to mix with the 6×6 images. They will be published in the next post probably.