#reciprocity failure

[siananneboylan-blog]

{For more help on getting started with film, check out the Beginner’s Guide to Film Photography} You all probably have a good grip on exposure by now, and how it is an interplay of aperture and shutter speed used to control the amount of light that hits the film.

[matthewbroadhead-blog]

Reciprocity Failure tip for Black and White photography

Any exposure time under 1 second, double the time and then double it again. 1 + 1 = 2 + 2 = 4 seconds in total if your light meter states 1 second for exposure at night. 

[girlsoffyf]

"Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"

Griffith Park Observatory Los Angeles, CA Spring ‘13

[one125]

Stan Banos's "Forbidden Portraits"

There's something of a running joke that I only like portraits where you can't see the subject's face. Well, this post certainly won't buck that trend.

Last month, Stan Banos at Reciprocity Failure posted effaced or redacted versions of three portraits that are part of a series which he was forced to abandon. I won't go into the details -- you should definitely click through and read his whole post. But I find myself drawn to the portraits themselves in the redacted form in which he posted them:

And so I'm left with seven orphaned portraits- The Magnificent Seven; three of which I present here in their ghostly apparitions. Although I took care to get signed releases from each subject, I have no idea what the legal implications to showing the actual images are, particularly since it can now be probably claimed that I took them without authority. As proud as I am of these images, they have been as effectively gutted of their context, as they have of their details in this presentation.

There's not no information visible in them, although there is very little. The shape of the subject's body, broad strokes of their wardrobe -- and of course the posture, which is the only trait that is preserved more or less fully intact.

These are essential aspects of a person's image, and they give the portraits, even in redacted form, a degree of personality. It might be a greater degree than is found in the most frequently seen photographs of people -- advertising photographs and news photographs. These often reduce the complexity and idiosyncrasies of their subjects to archetypes -- the building blocks of simple, powerful, salable stories.

In (what is left of) these portraits, the specific person is invisible, and only the shadow of a type is suggested. No story, just a question. Which is the perfect illustration of the post to which they are attached, of course. (You did read it, right?) And it's probably why I find them so appealing.

In a sense, it's a more extreme case of what attracts me to old albumen prints -- I like that photographs with incomplete information seem to leave more to the viewer's imagination, interpretation, and judgment.

Of course, this probably isn't a principle that can be followed to its logical conclusion, or else my favorite photographs would be totally blank.