I have at last been able to get out for an hour or so to make a start on this assignment. At this stage what I am concerned about is testing out view-points and camera angles, rather than making “finished” images, and looking critically at the sites that I have in mind. This is perhaps just as well as the light was horrible: the sky was heavily overcast, the clouds leaden, and indeed it started to rain quite heavily not long after I came home. Nevertheless, it was a useful exercise and although I have yet to go through the pictures I took in detail I already have some ideas about what positions are going to work when I get to the shoot proper. It also became abundantly clear to me that one of my chosen sites, the village war memorial, does not really fit or work with the other sites and so I might well omit this. On the other hand, although they do not feature in the product of this first foray, there are a couple more sites, that did not feature in my initial thinking, that might well fit in quite well. I will have to do another test shoot of them before deciding.
From a technical point of view, I quickly learned that the local petrol station and convenience store is going to be quite hard to capture. This is not just because of its size but also the effect the large forecourt canopy has on the light. This is certainly going to need some careful metering before I expose any film in the large format camera.
As a bit of an aside in this regard, I felt I was getting some slightly odd meter reading on the digital Leica I used for this first shoot. Despite the fact the light was so poor, I was surprised by some of the aperture settings that the camera recommended. Set at ISO 400 and 125s I was surprised that it kept wanting small apertures; I had expected it would need smaller f stops but it consistently pushed me towards the upper range on this camera’s lens, f/16. Unfortunately, I did not take a light meter with me to double-check but I did a quick test when I got home that suggested the readings were consistent. (This is not the first time that I have had what I feel to be aberrant readings on this camera but everything actually seems to work fine.) What this does serve to emphasise though is that I am going to have to be careful with meter readings for the film camera.
Another point is that the siting of the large format camera is going to be problematic in a couple of places because of the main road that runs through the village. Coincidentally, more with an eye on portrait photography, I have just bought a 210mm lens for the 4×5 camera which should help with capturing some of the views I want from slightly further way, that is across the road, than I would be able to achieve with my usual 150mm lens.
So far as attracting attention is concerned, in fact only one person approached me during this shoot: someone working at the local car dealer di ask what I was doing but then apologised for getting in my shots! I did take the precaution of putting my NUJ Student and OCA cards in a holder on a lanyard to make things look “official” and that perhaps helped. What sort of reaction I get when I set up a field camera on a heavy tripod, with a focusing cloth over my head, remains to be seen!
As yet unsorted and unedited, here are the contacts sheets from this first shoot (from which it is immediately clear that I need to rethink and look again at the angles for some of these sites):
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 