Chris Jordan, use of filters??

[Tom Christiansen]

Hi,

I was browsing Chris Jordan's site (http://www.chrisjordanphoto.com). I was trul y amazed by the color saturation in his pictures (especially "Seattle Alley Stud ies" and "The Ancient Forrest"). I was thinking that maybe this Chris Jordan is the same Chris Jordan as the one who is quite active in this group. Maybe he wou ld be kind enough to reveal some of his secrets regarding these great photograph s...

Here goes my question: What kind of film was used to make these super-saturated pictures? Did you use a color intensifier of some kind? Is this an effect of usi ng a larger format (I can't seem to get anything similar with 35mm nor 645)??.

Thanks,

~Tom

[Julio Fernandez]

Tom: Chris Jordan may be the best to answer, now let me guess: In the "ancient Forest" there is no mystery here, only Velvia. Second guess, these may be digitally processed. The only series with high saturation, to my way of seeing is the Seattle Alley studies. Too subtle to be Kodak, not sure what else. Thanks for raising the issue. Some quite nice photographs.

[Julio Fernandez]

Tom: Correction: had missed seeing the other series. The Urban Tree series and others are indeed supersaturated. My guess here is digital editing.

[Tom Christiansen]

Julio: I did indeed think of Velvia and E100VS (that I have yet to try). I just don't ever remember seeing such vivid colors -- even on Velvia.

But I'm looking forward to Chris' response.

Tom

[chris jordan]

hey guys, i just returned to internet access from having a down server for a week-- how nice to come back to a thread about my work!

the posts so far were right: my forest work is all on 4x5 velvia, exposed on dark overcast days during the winter, usually in the rain, and frequently at dusk when the ultraviolet component of the light is highest. most of the forest exposures are long, in the 10-20 minute range, which also puts reciprocity failure in my favor in the forest because velvia shifts towards the green end of the scale in long exposures.

my alley work is done under similar conditions-- heavy overcast and rain, frequently at dusk, all long exposures. i wait until i see that glow in the colors that you see right at dusk-- when everything looks like it's under a black light. for years i thought that was an optical effect of our pupils opening up (and thus didn't "really" exist) but it turns out that it actually is photographable. now i think it has to do with ultraviolet light.

my nighttime work is all done with neon lighting as the light source, which produces all the wild colors. so far those images have all been un-printable because the color gamut on my film cannot be reproduced by any color printing method. hopefully that's changing with the new generation of epson printers.

the scans on my website are all as close as i could get to the look of the originals, with the exception of the blue dumpster that's the first image in the "alley" series-- that one is a bad scan that resulted in blown out blues that are way overdone. i'm just about to replace all of the scans on my site with new ones-- rezzed-down versions of my Tango scans instead of the el-cheapo flatbed homemade scans that are on there now. so, the new set of images will be even more true to my originals.

so, check back soon, and thanks for your interest,

warm regards to all,

~cj (Seattle)

www.chrisjordanphoto.com

[chris jordan]

Tom, by the way, if you're interested, feel free to contact me privately and we can chat about whatever details you want to discuss. All my contact info is on the "contact" page of my site.

~chris jordan

[Sal Santamaura]

Chris,

"...at dusk when the ultraviolet component of the light is highest."

I suspect UV is greatest at local solar noon, not dusk. Would you explain, please?

Thanks!

[Tom Christiansen]

Chris: Thanks for your explanation. I find it comforting to hear that no filters or photoshopping was used to create the vivid colors in these images. Now I just need to get "out there" and shoot some film. There are some great pictures to be taken of the walls in Post Alley and those places.

Sal: Regarding UV content. You're probably right that the overall UV intensity is highest at noon (or 1PM daylight savings time) -- but so is the intensity of visible light. At dusk colors shift towards the blue/violet, thus, indicating that the relative intensity of the UV part of the spectrum is higher than the intensity of the visible range of colors. So it's a matter of RELATIVE intensity rather than absolute intensity. Does this make sense?

[chris jordan]

re. UV light: Tom, that's exactly right, as far as i understand the issue. at noon the UV intensity is highest, but exposures are shortest too because of the brightness of the visible light. at dusk the UV light is lower overally, but is proportionally higher when compared to visible light, and thus during the long exposures (which are based on visible light), more UV gets to the film, punching up some color hues a bit.

~cj

[Sal Santamaura]

That seems intuitively reasonable, but it's often easy to be seduced into incorrect conclusions by taking such an approach. Any atmospheric scientists out there (with a *lot* more knowledge than me!) who can tell us if Chris' film is simply responding to the abundance of blue at dusk, or is there really an actinic quantity of UV present?