Impossible Project PX680 - 10 Dec 2012, London

After a brief pause for the Easter weekend, what could be more appropriate than a picture from Christmas! 

Unexpectedly perhaps, this nativity scene was not in church but a corner of the bar at Paradise in Kensal Rise. Although obviously thematic of the seasonal spirit, it still seemed a little out of place amongst the drinking and laughter of The Sunday Times photographers party.

The divot at the top, often a bit distracting, might actually have added something to this picture.

Impossible Project PX680 - 07 Nov 2012, Paris

Pont des Arts, renowned the world over for the thousands of 'Love Locks' attached to the fence and railings by couples making a public declaration to one another. 

Amongst them the enigmatic message, "I was waiting for you". 

Were they the plaintive words of someone broken-hearted, written for the lover who never appeared for a rendez-vous? Or were they an affirmation of romance, finally discovered after a lifetime of searching? 

You decide.

Impossible Project PX680 - 05 Nov 2012, Home

Choosing a subject for a first shot with the new film was more difficult than one might expect. There was the fact that I was ridiculously keen to try it out, balanced with not wanting to waste a limited and precious resource. I settled on this rather traditional still-life mostly because I loved the colours and was curious how they would be rendered.

The subtle orange hue to the skin of the pear was a little lost perhaps but the ageing lime and the dried pomegranate came out exactly as I had hoped they would.

Impossible Project PX680 - 07 Nov 2012, Paris

Rooftops and rays of light. The view towards Ile De La Cite as the sun tries to break through the racing clouds of late autumn.

Perhaps showing a little too much influence of another photographer I admire...

Impossible Project PX680 - 06 Nov 2012, Paris.

With two sets of Japanese tourists posing as though they were holding or carrying the Eiffel Tower, I suddenly found myself struggling to get back far enough and open the polaroid camera in time.

Just as I did, a girl on a scooter magically appeared in the frame... 

"Tonight Matthew, I am going to be.... Henri Cartier-Bresson!!"

PX680 Colour Protection - First impressions

My much loved but under-employed Polaroid SLR680 SE has finally had a bit more use in the last few months with five packs of Impossible Project PX680 Colour protection to enjoy but there were a few surprises in the process. The results are a lot of fun and for the next week or so I'll be posting one Impossible Project picture per day to show them in a little more detail.

The transition from old Polaroid 600 film to PX680 Colour Protection is trickier than I thought for three principle reasons. 

The first surprise was the biggest, but least daunting in the the long-run - PX680 CP is not as "instant" as I had expected. For the first few minutes I thought I had done something wrong or that the camera had ceased to function in the intervening years since its last use. The pictures dutifully ejected as usual but, despite following IP's instructions to place out of direct light, there didn't seem even the faintest ghost of an image when I looked at it a few minutes later. I shot another test frame, turning the exposure compensation up to max in case there was an ISO mis-match. Again, a plain blue image after several minutes. With a heavy heart I put the camera down and resigned myself to the fact that the long hibernation had damaged it in some way. 

A few hours later, hardly daring to look, I opened the little Moleskin concertina file I used for storing instant film while shooting... and there they were; two pictures, one massively over-exposed!

After a while I came to realise that the image seems to develop within half an hour or so, sometimes slightly quicker. However, this doesn't really bother me. Quite the reverse in fact - the discipline of locking the picture away for a while only increases the enjoyment of eventually checking it. A bit like taking a film to the mini-lab and waiting for the prints.

The second observation was that nearly all the pictures had a little divot in the centre of the upper edge. Again, my first thoughts were that the camera had suffered some kind of malfunction but after thinking about the fact that PX680 CP is physically thicker than the old 600 it seemed logical that some kind of pinching was occurring. A quick check on the internet explained that the SLR680 had a different roller mechanism to the older SX70 and that this could cause the compression mark. The cleaning suggested has had no effect in my case but was worth trying. The marks themselves vary in size, and while there seem to be many factors, I have yet to establish any predictable pattern. On some of the pictures, they lend a certain analogue authenticity but after a while it can become distracting.

The final difference is the colour. Impossible Project have done an amazing job in resurrecting the technology after all the machines in the original Polaroid factory were put beyond use, but the PX680 CP has a compressed colour gamut in comparison with the 600 and a particularly distinctive yellowing of the whites and highlights. This means that after a while I found myself avoiding certain colours and lighting conditions, fearing the compressed tonality and slightly "urine yellow" results I was getting.

But there are some positive aspects of this very different colour palette and after a period of adjustment I started to find subject matter that would better suit the slightly dream-like qualities of the new film. This process of experimentation has been massively enjoyable and it has been years since I have taken pictures with such a sense of open-minded discovery. Relinquishing control in this way is so liberating compared with much of my everyday work where I am constantly striving for consistency.

Naturally, it is possible to correct some of these casts once the pictures have been scanned or copied digitally, but that sort of defeats the point. Instant film photography is an adventure, a whimsical exploration, a shot of uncertainty in an increasingly predictable world. 

As long as you can enjoy it on those terms, it's hugely rewarding.

A box full of (im) possibilities.

Several years ago I did a byline picture of one of my colleagues, and after she decided that she rather liked it, we agreed to do a trade. 

My ransom for the rights to use the picture on her web-site and PR company profile was fairly simple, a few packs of Polaroid 600 film. At the time, the film had just been withdrawn but it was still reasonably easy to find on internet auction sites.

Now we all know how life gets in the way of these slightly fiddly tasks and despite an occasional friendly hint, it looked as though I was likely to go un-remunerated. But with a special occasion coming up, I decided to give it one final try, and sent off a little gentle reminder that the swap was still not completed.

The response I got could not have been nicer. A short note apologising for delay accompanied by a UPS tracking number. A few days later, a cardboard cube bound with tape bearing the legend "impossible" was sat on the kitchen table, greeting my return from a long and tiring day.

My much loved Polaroid SLR 680 has lain dormant and somewhat neglected since the demise of 600 packs. And despite the inspiration of reading Greg Funnell's post about early Impossible offerings, I had been reticent about the shading process. 

It basically meant that you had to get the film immediately into shade to stop fogging of the developing image. Most people who had experimented with it described a kind of "mason's handshake" technique involving holding the film box over the exit chute of the camera with your left hand whilst supporting the underside and pressing the shutter with your right.

Now though, the new PX680 looks to be a might less cack-handed to use. You simply have to get the developing shot into shade promptly rather than immediately.

I have not had time to try this yet but it's hard to properly express the childish joy and anticipation with which I am looking forward to popping the seal and firing up the my beloved 680.

Diary Picture - 20 Oct 2011

Halloween ghosts strung up outside a favourite old haunt - Cafe Lalo. 

For all my US friends who might have been caught up in the chaos of Sandy over the last few days... I'm thinking of you and hope you are all ok.

Details! Details! - part two

Following on from my hurried post at lunchtime... the story so far; a friend ask me for some DSLR raw files so he can run a test with them on upcoming software. He can't tell me any more than that and would prefer some shots from a variety of cameras, preferably pictures that are challenging in some respect.

Fast forward to this morning when Drew Gardner posted several examples of pictures, some of which I took, processed with Adobe's Lightroom 4 and also the newly launched Capture One 7. It was an "out of the box" test which aimed to garner an impression of the differences between the two software offerings rather than a serious exploration of the full capabilities of each.

He has since sent me a couple of the processed frames so that I might make my own observations on them. Firstly we have these two shots from an ambush in Afghanistan in 2006. The light was fading fast and I was crashing upwards through the iso of my 5D mkI as we fought for our lives in a total encirclement whilst on patrol with the soldiers of 16 Air Assault (3rd Parachute regiment and Royal Irish).

Here is Lightroom's version, with no changes or adjustments.

And here is the version from Capture One - 7

The first thing to note is that they both look way better than the in-camera JPEG that I used at the time (I always shoot RAW +JPEG although often, on deadline, it's the in-camera JPEG that I have to send to publications due to time constraints). Lightroom has produced a more saturated, slightly yellow/cyan shift which whilst not faithful to the original, does look good. At first, the area to the lower right of the picture, where an Afghan National Army soldier was crouching, appears more clearly. But on closer inspection it has markedly less detail than the C1 interpretation although it does a better job of holding the green colour in the undergrowth.

The default noise reduction in LR4 seems just a bit too aggressive and it seemed to be glossing over details in favour of smoothness. But the foreground figure of the running soldier has lost all detail n his left arm in the LR4 version and consequently much of the urgency of the picture is gone.

On Drew's blog there are several examples that I have not yet got from him. So this one-shot comparison is not altogether conclusive. But his piece makes the very valid point that details do seem to be getting lost in LR4 and the balance between sharpness and smoothness seems to be out of kilter.

Whilst it is almost impossible to do a like for like comparison I would point out a few strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches.

LR4 has very good highlight detail retention, markedly better than the samples from CO7 so if you habitually over expose your pictures and need to recover, that is something worth bearing in mind. Colour faithfulness and overall crispness cuts the other way; with CO7 the clear winner in Drew's test by such a huge margin as to be a little disturbing.

However, there is the NIK question. Many photographers I know have come to rely on the NIK plug-ins for many of the fine colour adjustments, sharpening, noise reduction and localised retouching that would otherwise be done in photoshop. These tools are a godsend and reduce further work in photoshop and overall post processing time. Capture One has never been compatible with these plug-ins (which are available for Aperture, Lightroom, Photoshop) and while they are not cheap, the fact that  CO7 cannot use these tool in pre-acquire is likely to be a factor for many who are looking for a one-stop solution.

Still, I'll say it again, the amazing level of detail and colour accuracy means that all my high-end output will be routed through Capture One 7 for the foreseeable future.

Details! Details!

Digital photography presents as many difficulties as advantages sometimes. Chief amongst them if you have dedicated yourself to a good raw-file work flow is how to process the raw images.

At various times over the last few years I have used many or maybe most of the available options including Bridge, DXO, Capture One (in various incarnations) and more recently, the all-conquering Lightroom.

The advantages of Lightroom are obvious; a powerful feature set allied to nimble processing speed, excellent support for new camera file formats and the knock-out punch of a seemingly unbelievable price-point. Combine that with the Nik software plug-ins for pre-acquire and it made it a mighty tool for photographers to get the best from their files.

However, various versions of Capture One had always delivered the best colour of all of them (I confess never to have seriously used Aperture) and for all serious high-end output projects I have tackled over the past decade or so, it has been my favourite software.

A few days ago and somewhat cryptically, my friend and colleague Drew Gardner asked me if I had any examples of Raw files from a few different cameras that I could give him in readiness for a new C1 launch at an unspecified future date. He explained that he could say no more than that and asked my understanding. His idea was to try  a real world test on a broad range of subjects and light-levels, over different cameras. He wanted to have these ready for release day so that he could get the first results out onto the net.

Naturally I said yes and waited for some kind of announcement from him. But just to make his job as tricky as possible I sent him some low-light shots from a Canon 5D mkI and a 1D mkI, both of which had presented me with problems due to noise at high ISO shooting, as well as a few pictures from a recent sailing event I shot in the summer where the sails, water and spray all provide lots of fiddly details to be rendered.

This morning, as I started setting up for a shoot, he called briefly and said that I should check his latest post on "the Dark Art" and that I would most likely be surprised by the results.

Now, I haven't had enough time to fully digest these and I'll write a detailed post later today but the initial results are not just surprising, they are nigh-on unbelievable.

I suggest you read Drew's comprehensive post (here) and then check back in a few hours time for another take on this issue.

Although, it must be said that both he and I are very taken-aback at the sheer chasm between the two in terms of fidelity and colour accuracy.

It means that the new C1 version 7 will be an absolute must-have for all my high-output assignments. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of it.

Maybe not everything - but definitely not nothing.

Ever since I returned to Britain from the US in 1999 I have submitted pictures to the National Portrait Gallery's annual Photographic Portrait prize in the hope of making it through to the exhibition. 

The yearly ritual of delivering prints (showering in public - Aug 2010) and then, sadly retrieving them after they have not been chosen (collecting the children from detention - Sept 2010) has provided a certain amount of humour for me and is something I have enjoyed describing. 

Currently sponsored by Taylor Wessing, it is one of those prizes that often sharply divides opinion amongst my fellow photographers. Some, like me, see it as the most consistently challenging, interesting and provocative collection of portraits that the UK produces. Others regard it as slightly aloof and perhaps unrepresentative of the everyday majority.

Either way it is well supported with more than two-thousand photographers entering this year and more than five-thousand pictures submitted in total. Even with the seemingly insurmountable odds of getting into the final edit, the momentary sting of disappointment that accompanies the polite rejection message is something that never gets any easier.

Rejection or acceptance does not instantly make anyone a lesser or greater photographer. On the other hand, photography is a language, a form of communication and photographers who profess no interest in having the chance to connect with new and different audiences make me sad and slightly suspicious. 

This year I entered three prints, but one of them, a portrait of PC David Rathband, the policeman shot by Raoul Moat, had special significance for me. Meeting PC Rathband was one of those experiences that had really made me examine my life and how lucky I was. The terrible nightmares he talked of, the physical pain and mental anguish of having his sight taken from him in such a violent manner, the feeling of loneliness and isolation and the dignity with which he tried to bear it. 

His story had a profound effect on  me and it showed in the picture.

So it was especially uplifting to receive the news yesterday that this one photograph, of the three I submitted, had been selected to join the sixty or so pictures that would be included in the exhibition and book this year.

I found myself running a rather unexpected gamut of emotions. What I felt most instantly was relief. Maybe I had been wanting this particular picture to be chosen a little too much. It was replaced with a kind of elated disbelief as I read and re-read the email just to make sure I hadn't imagined it. This I understand is fairly normal behaviour for unexpected good news. 

Then finally, and most strangely, as my friends started to post messages on Facebook and text, expressing their disappointment at not being selected, I felt guilt.

The fulfilment (at the eleventh attempt!) of a modest but sincere ambition to see my picture exhibited amongst that selection of inspiring works made me feel momentarily as though I had been ushered into a nightclub when my friends had been left behind the red rope.

A day later I finally feel as I am probably supposed to in such circumstances, fortunate and happy. But this could never have happened without the people involved in the process and I would like to acknowledge the tremendous contribution they have made.

Firstly and most importantly, PC David Rathband, who was so open and honest in the way he sat for the portrait. His tragic death earlier this year was such terribly sad news.

Secondly, Sophie Batterbury, Picture Editor of the Independent on Sunday who commissioned me to shoot the photo and whose guidance in my work has been so important over the years.

Also thanks to Martin Berry at Tapestry who was endlessly patient and did a beautiful job of printing the pictures.

Obviously I could never have done anything worthwhile without the support of Jane and my friends but I haven't won a bloody Oscar so a sense of proportion might be best!

It's just a picture in an exhibition, a picture I feel strongly about in an exhibition I have always admired.

As they would say in New York, "That's not nothing!"

Diary Picture - 20 March 2011

The Calls - Leeds, saturday night/sunday morning.

Diary Picture - 23 April 2011

Edinburgh - In the house of chaos, waiting for night-fall so we could head off for a shoot. 
Wishing that I had a Fuji of my own.

Diary Picture - 07 July 2012

Storm gathers out of a blue sky, crossing back to Portsmouth on the Isle of Wight ferry.

Diary Picture - 28 July 2012

BT Vision Hyde Park - first saturday of the Olympic games. Stand up and cheer!... or lie down.... either way.