Like you, we here at Neutralday.com find ourselves buying new camera gear from time to time. I’ve been on a bit of tear of late, so I thought I’d share some recent additions. One of the things I’d been wanting to get for awhile now is nice tripod, specifically of the carbon fiber variety. Readers will know, these don’t come cheap, even the cheap ones aren’t cheap. One thing was clear at the beginning, I wouldn’t be getting a Gitzo, so after much research, I settled on:

The Manfrotto 055CXPRO3 Tripod: It’s a 3 section carbon fiber tripod with a center column. The tripod itself weighs about 3.5 lbs and is 68.9 inches high, so with a ballhead attached it’s easily eye-height for me (I’m 6′ 1″). The legs lock with flip levers and the center column comes up and over to parallel, and all of it works quite smoothly. I’m happy to say this thing is rock solid for my uses, this guy is strong and stable. Flaws? No hook for hanging weight is about it, other than maybe cost. I got the Manfrotto 055CXPRO3 at B&H Photo, where it set me back about $400. That’s a big ouch, but I am loving this thing!

• Manfrotto by Bogen Imaging 055CXPRO3 3-Section Carbon Fiber Tripod Legs at B&H Photo

Markins M10 Ballhead: Another well researched addition. The Markin M10 is small compact ballhead that features a neat little trick that allows the user to dial in a “sweet spot” where one can freely move the camera, but still let go of it and have it stay firmly in place. The M10 is beautifully crafted and works like butter. Spec’d to 90 lb capacity, the M10 will be fine for most camera/lens combinations, but for real long glass, it’s best to get the bigger M20. Another not cheap addition at $339, and worse, not easy to find. They don’t carry Markins at B&H Photo, so for this you’ll have to go to Markins directly.

• Markins M10 Ballhead at MarkinsAmerica.com

Canon BG-E6 Battery Grip: I know I’ll be buying a portrait type lens soon, and it can be a pain to do portrait work without a vertical grip, so I finally broke down and got the BG-E6 for the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. It doesn’t add any performance to the 5D Mark II, but it does allow you to install 2 batteries for twice the power. Of course it also allows for pretty comfortable vertical shooting with some carry over controls from the horizontal position. On the negative side, it adds quite a bit of weight, but so far it’s worth the compromise. The grip cost me $249 at B&H Photo

• Canon BG-E6 Battery Grip at B&H Photo

B+W Filters: Widely regarded as the maker of some of the best filters, I thought I’d give B+W a try, and so opted to buy their #110 Neutral Density (ND) 3.0 Glass Filter as well as their Circular Polarizer Multi-Resistant Coated (MRC) Glass Filter. Both are high quality looking and feeling items, and I really can’t complain about the performance. The ND filter is good for 10 stops, it’s so dark you can’t see through it, which is great for long exposures (where you’ll need a tripod, see above.). Once again, these items aren’t cheap, $91 for the ND filter and $156 for the polarizer.

• B+W #110 Neutral Density (ND) 3.0 Glass Filter at B&H Photo
• B+W Circular Polarizer Multi-Resistant Coated (MRC) Glass Filter at B&H Photo

That’s it for this edition of “Recent Additions” but before we leave you, a couple of readers with their own “Recent Additions”.

Photographer Rupert Marlow acquires a Panasonic GF1: Reader Rupert Marlow is the lucky new owner of the excellent Panasonic Lumix GF1. He discusses the GF1 and posts plenty of image samples at his blog:

• http://rupertmarlowphotography.posterous.com/

Writer/Artist Eolake Stobblehouse acquires a Nikai FMD: Reader Eolake Stobblehouse, who has a new camera of some sort every time I turn around, discusses his latest acquistion  at his blog:

• http://eolake.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-new-nikai-camera.html

Camille Seaman has a new body of work titled “The Big Cloud”, some of it currently being shown at Soulcatcher Studio’s website. Seaman has already garnered some renown for her series of photographs of icebergs (”The Last Iceberg”), and that seems likely to grow based on the evocative images of supercells that Seaman chased for 10 days in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota. Via Soulcatcher Studio:

The storms we were chasing were Supercells, capable of producing grapefruit sized hail, and spectacular tornadoes; they were 50 miles wide and reached as high as 65,000 ft. into the atmosphere. These clouds were so large that they had the capability of blocking all daylight, making it very dark and ominous standing under them.”

-Camille Seaman

© Camille Seaman "The Collapse III (3), South Dakota, USA, June 2008"

© Camille Seaman "The Collapse II (2), South Dakota, USA, June 2008"

© Camille Seaman "Chasing the Storm, Kansas, USA, May 2008"

I loved Seaman’s icebergs, not simply for the subject matter, but also how she personified them, in addition to her overall treatment, toning etc. All of that carries over to the “The Big Cloud” images, which for me evoke much more than a simple awe for the power of nature. Striking work from a great photographer.

Check out Camille Seaman’s website at www.camilleseaman.com.

All work is copyright © Camille Seaman.

Up right now and through November 29 is Sam Taylor-Wood’s exhibition of photographs at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London. Titled “YES | NO”,  the exhibit includes three series of photos and one film, in which Taylor-Wood explores “absence and mortality”. Via White Cube:

…the pictures depict a beautiful and expressive landscape, and yet one that is also bleak, almost exhausted, as if the landscape itself expressed the novel’s brutal take on the themes of desire, thwarted love and suffering. One picture depicts two leafless trees, one large and dominant, the other appearing to turn away meekly, in a relationship that seems to embody that between Catherine and Heathcliff. In another, a brisk wind pushes some yellow-grey grass along a ridge beneath a moody sky. Although the photographs are suffused with the chill of winter, the harsh beauty of the landscape gives the photographs a hint of vibrancy and resilience.

© Sam Taylor-Wood Ghosts X 2008

© Sam Taylor-Wood Ghosts VI 2008

Mason's Yard, Ground Floor Gallery Photo: Todd-White Art Photography (click to enlarge)

I was lucky enough to see some of these works at Mass MOCA a little while back. Lovely landscapes with such a somber tone to them.

Find out more and see some of Taylor-Wood’s work at White Cube.

Closing this week is an exhibition of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s latest series of work, “Lightning Fields”, at San Franciso’s Fraenkel Gallery. This latest work depicts electricity, quite literally. For the images, Sugimoto used a Van De Graaff 400,000 volt generator to apply a charge directly to the camera film. The resulting images can take on any number of forms and blur the lines on what viewers might consider abstract or representational.

Exhibition view

More information at the Fraenkel Gallery.

One portfolio I’ve been turning to quite frequently over last month is photographer Josef Hoflehner’s. Hoflehner is a landscape photographer, of both the urban and more natural varieties, whose exquisitely done black and white prints capture slices of time with near sublime results.

© Josef Hoflehner Burj Dubai - Dubai, Emirates, 2009

A frequent traveler, Hoflehner has photographed the landscapes of too many places to fully mention here, but the list includes the likes of Yemen, India, Iceland, Vietnam, Cairo, Venice, New York City, and most recently the rapidly changing cityscape of Dubai. I had hoped to pick out some favorites, but ended up failing, there’s unfortunately just too many gems in Hoflehner’s many series of works. Hoflehner has a keen eye for picking out just the right composition, and does so without falling back on any formula. From symmetry to asymmetrical, balanced to unbalanced, Hoflehner finds a way to make everything work, and does so with great aesthetic effect. That’s not to say Hoflehner just takes a pretty photo though. Unquestionably Hoflehner’s skilled technique at working in black and white, and frequent use of long shutter times do make for beautiful photos, but Hoflehner’s photographs don’t leave the seriousness out in the field, instead they easily balance depth and beauty with profound results.

© Josef Hoflehner Black Beauty - Dubai, Emirates, 2009

Josef Hoflehner (b. 1955) is an Austrian photographer know world round for his black and white photography work. Hoflehner was the winner of the Nature Photographer of the Year 2007. Hoflehner is represented around the world in over 13 galleries including the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York City. Many more examples of Hoflehner’s work, as well as finely produced monographs of his work, are available at his website, www.josefhoflehner.com.

All images in this post: © Josef Hoflehner.
Title image features: Water Buffalo II – Guangxi, China, 2007 © Josef Hoflehner.

"The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage"

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now showing the work of photographer/artist Frederick Sommer, in a show titled, “Frederick Sommer Photographs”. From the show description:

Over his long life Frederick Sommer (American, 1905–1999) crafted a body of art inflected by surrealist ideas and distinguished by his meticulous love for the art of photographic printing, his broad knowledge of art history, and a keen sense of how the parts of a picture come together to produce meaning. This exhibition surveys five decades of his photography, including disorienting compositions such as Arizona Landscape (1943), a

Max Ernst, 1946 © Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation

horizonless image that only gradually resolves its components into a desolate desert scene, and equally bewildering subjects such as Max Ernst (1946), in which Sommer experimented with layered negatives, superimposing an image of a rock onto a portrait of the pioneering Dada and surrealist artist to create the illusion of a human morphing into rock.

Some of Sommer’s techniques may seem old hat by now, double exposures, etc. but Sommer was one of the first to explore photography as an artistic medium, and is generally considered one of the “masters of photography”. Using large format cameras and unconventional methods, Sommer made influential works that are still interesting today.

Availability

• “The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage” is available at Amazon

Additional Resources

• The Frederick Sommer Foundation
• Learn more about Sommer at the Getty’s website

The Tate Modern has removed a work by Richard Prince from their exhibit “Pop Life”, after the obscene publications unit of the Metropolitan police paid a visit to the museum. The piece titled “Spiritual America” is an appropriated photo of a then 10 year old Brooke Shields, in the nude and heavily layered in makeup. From the Guardian:

The decision by officers to visit Tate Modern is understood to have been made after police chiefs saw coverage of the exhibition in today’s newspapers, rather than as a result of complaints.

Officers met gallery bosses and are also understood to have consulted the Crown Prosecution Service as to whether the image broke obscenity laws.

A Scotland Yard source said the actions of its officers were “common sense” and were taken to pre-empt any breach of the law. The source said the image of Shields was of potential concern because it was of a 10-year-old, and could be viewed as sexually provocative.

The work has been shown recently in New York, without attracting major controversy, where it gave the title to the 2007 retrospective of Prince’s work at the Guggenheim Museum.

-Guardian.co.uk

The photographer who actually took the photo, Gary Gross is said to be “disappointed” in the decision. From the Telegraph:

Prince’s work is a photograph of a photograph. The original was taken by Garry Gross, a US photographer, in 1975. It was commissioned by Shields’ mother, who was intent on turning her little girl into a child star and signed away the rights. The picture was later featured in a Playboy Press publication, and Gross planned to turn it into a poster.

On Wednesday night Mr Gross told the Daily Telegraph: “The photo has been infamous from the day I took it and I intended it to be,” he said, adding that he once sent a copy to Switzerland only for it to be seized in France.

Gross, 71, said he did not consider the photo pornographic although he conceded that “she was supposed to look like a sexy woman”. It was supposed to have been displayed alongside another photo he took of Shields without make-up, he said.

“It certainly doesn’t breach child pornography laws here because a judge said so,” he added, referring to a US judge’s ruling in 1983 that the photographs he took were “not sexually suggestive, provocative or pornographic”.

“In order for it to be considered pornographic here, she would have to be doing something sensual or sexual,” he said. “But she’s not. She’s just sitting in the bathtub.”

-Telegraph.co.uk

On person unphased by this I suspect is Richard Prince, who typically seems to have “screw you” type attitude towards, well, everything.

Harald Mante has a new book out titled “Photography Unplugged” from publisher Rocky Nook. The book is intended as both a catalog of Mante’s work and as an example of working in an unedited, untouched way, more “natural” way. From the book’s description:

© Harald Mante

Harald Mante is regarded as one of the outstanding contemporary photographers in Germany. He started out as a travel photographer whose work was published in numerous magazines and books and later taught photography in the tradition of the Bauhaus school of design, applying image and color composition concepts to photography.

This book is meant to present the wealth of Mante’s photographic work and at the same time to advocate a pure, straight approach to photography, untouched by digital image editing tools — uncropped and unmodified captures of scenes as seen through the viewfinder.

Photography Unplugged is meant to sound a voice which is singing to a slightly different tune than the digital photography choir.

Harald Mante’s photographs, all captured on Kodachrome’s legendary slide films, will inspire beginners and expert photographers alike, and will reveal the beauty and magic of masterfully composed photography.

Of course I put “natural” in quotes, because I don’t necessarily agree with this approach. Not to say it isn’t a valid one, it certainly is, but it seems to me that there’s nothing “natural” about the photographic process, and simply stopping the series of artistic decisions or lack of at the point of capture seems somewhat contrived to me. If you’re going to do “something”, then why not do “something” else too?

Of course the book isn’t just a philosophy pounded into your head, it’s also chock full of Mante’s work, which true to form are indeed frequently well composed.

Curious what some of the readership might think?

Resources

• Mante’s website
• Some of Mante’s portfolio

Availibility

• Harald Mante’s “Photography Unplugged”