Feb. Portraits

[Nana Sousa Dias]

Nana, that guitar player is really wonderful...

Thank you, Jiri, this is Rui Veloso, the most famous singer/guitar player in Portugal. I played in his band for seven years and recorded a few albums with him, thias was 26 years ago. At that time I was not a photographer. He invited me to do a studio session with him, for the new promotion photographs for this year. I shot mostly digital and medium format but, I shot a few 8x10 and 4x5, too.
This was a nice session, he enjoyed the photos and invited me to play in his blues band again, at the end of 2009, when we will start a new tournée.

[Nana Sousa Dias]

Nana it's a shame the toe of the shoe is cropped, but otherwise I like this

I agree with you, Ash! This hapened because I couldn't see the whole image on the GG! I don't have a fresnel for my 8x10 cameras! I hate shoot in studio with them!!!!

Must buy 2 fresnel lens for them but they are expensive!

[Ray Bidegain]

David's 5x7 photo and Ray's profile of Catriona are really fine examples of why large format portraits work so well.

Thanks Frank, the model looks like Catriona but is a different woman.

Ray

[Nana Sousa Dias]

I agree Nana, the other I shot an assignment on 4x5, a clown that does therapy with very ill children in hospitals, after a dozen sheets I gave up and grab a medium format camera, there was not one solid frame on 4x5.


That said,
I love your 8x10 image of the guitar player posted below in the thread. It must make a wonderful large print!

Thank you, Allen, unfortunatelly, my enlarger (Durst 139G with 301 CLS colorhead) doesn't go beyond 5x7!
I use to do just contact prints with my 8x10 negatives.

[Jiri Vasina]

Thank you, Jiri, this is Rui Veloso, the most famous singer/guitar player in Portugal. I played in his band for seven years and recorded a few albums with him, thias was 26 years ago. At that time I was not a photographer. He invited me to do a studio session with him, for the new promotion photographs for this year. I shot mostly digital and medium format but, I shot a few 8x10 and 4x5, too.
This was a nice session, he enjoyed the photos and invited me to play in his blues band again, at the end of 2009, when we will start a new tournée.

Nana, i wish you musically similar (or greater) success as you achieved photographically

I have very nice memories of Portugal's music - the evenings in the streets of Coimbra listening to Fado.... (not mentioning the other good memories of my month long stay in Portugal during my studies) I'd return for that specific atmosphere any day...

[Jim Galli]

So Jim, in the name of exploring what this thread has been speaking about, can you say what it is about this 5x7 image that you like, what is it about the photograph that moves you.

I am not trying to stir up the pot, just explore a little deeper, and I will understand if you do not want to go into this.

Ray Bidegain

Simply put, it is pretty music to my ears.

Not enough, OK, I like that the swirls send me back to the subject which is elegantly stated. We need not go into phallic symbols etc. but I'm sure they are present. The ladies gaze engages me. She is a siren. I resist.

[Nana Sousa Dias]

Nana, i wish you musically similar (or greater) success as you achieved photographically

I have very nice memories of Portugal's music - the evenings in the streets of Coimbra listening to Fado.... (not mentioning the other good memories of my month long stay in Portugal during my studies) I'd return for that specific atmosphere any day...

Well, I'm a professional musician composer and record producer for 27 years, now. For now I just play my instruments (tenor, alto, soprano saxophones and flute) I gave up producing, I just want to play and compose. I just started photographing seriously 8 years ago, so I have a long way in photography...at least, I hope so!

When you return to Portugal, you tell me, we can drink some beers and, who knows, we can go for a shooting. I leave near Lisbon (50km) and 3km from the sea.

[Dave Aharonian]

Thanks so much Jim and Nana! I find for certain subjects and composition, a Petzval can work very well. At other times its a bit overdone. At the end of the day, I don't give a rat's ass how a photo is made. If it is beautifully done and evokes a positive response for the viewer that's all that matters to me.

[r.e.]

I am kind of taken aback that my comments have resulted in a discussion, now a new thread started by Mr. Galli, about whether it is possible to make great portraits using sheet film.

I didn't mean to raise that question, to which it seems to me the obvious answer - indeed patently obvious answer - is "yes".

Precisely because there are so many great examples of portraits made with sheet film, and because I assume that people on this site are aware of, and have studied, those examples, I raised some interrelated questions about the quality, on a pretty basic level, of most of the portraits that tend to be posted here, the focus on lenses (as distinct from the more important issues of technique and merit) and the lack of criticism of any kind.

I gather that my link to the work of someone who is using a digital camera to produce a combined still/video work may have had something to do with the discussion about portraiture and sheet film. The fact is, I made the reference as a kind of jolt between the rather large gulf between much of what is going on here and what is actually happening in photography.

I also offered the link because the technology, as well as this particular photographer's use of it, is pretty interesting, not to mention fun, a value that seems to me to be lacking in almost all of the portrait work that I see here.

I was struck by Allen of Montreal's suggestion that this still/video production was irrelevant because it isn't a portrait. I learned from that that he and I, and perhaps others who participate here and I, are not on the same wavelength about what portraiture is. You know, if you look at Avedon's self-portrait - which you can see on the Avedon Foundation site - it is a string of three images in the form of a filmstrip. If Allen's point is that one can't have a portrait of the New York subway system - or for that matter of the Metro in his Montreal - I don't know what to say, except that the word portrait seems to pretty clearly work, regardless of whether one consults the Oxford, as I do, or Webster's, as our American friends do, or the Robert, as Francophones in Montreal do.

I will say that I'm disappointed that nobody, other than Allen, had anything to say, good, bad or indifferent, about a concrete, pretty sophisticated example of the merger of still and video in a still camera. Sorry, but for me, it was a revelation in a way that yet another photograph that could have been taken by a rather average photographer in 1910, is not.

And yes, there was a time on this site when that piece in the New Yorker about postmodernism would have been discussed, but apparently not now, not even when someone points it out. That said, it's worth reading, and there's a pretty good chance (although I haven't checked) that it's on-line. It's the current book review, about a biography of a guy named Donald Barthelme.

Cheers

[Steve M Hostetter]

R.E. I seen the Avadon link ,, is that last photo of his father umm is he dead?