Sean Esopenko

Manufactured Meets Organic – Calgary Downtown from Prince’s Island

September 5, 2010

Normally my Saturday downtown walks start at Center and 7th in downtown Calgary and I head south-west. Yesterday I decided to head to Prince’s Island Park and see what the view is like from the north end of downtown. I saw a lot of trees, water, and recent building developments. This time, under advice from Jim Kitchen, I brought a little view finder with me. I was much more picky with the image I was aiming for using a viewfinder and it helped to prevent me from setting up the camera in a spot that would be a waste of time. In the end I only took two photographs with this one being my choice to show after the day’s work.

I’ve been finding two things handy for very unexpected reasons. The large imaging circle of large format lenses helps great for shifts and tilts but they’re also great for the mechanical vignetting caused by stacking multiple filters. I found myself stacking 3 filters at once for these shots. If I were to do so with a lens designed for 35mm I would see vignetting. The faster ISO 400 film is good for indoors but it’s also good when stacking filters as well. I was able to keep my exposures less than a second because of the faster film speed. The negatives are so massive that I could perform all the adjustments I wanted in lightroom/photoshop and the grain still doesn’t show through.

The large resolution of 4×5 is something I’m beginning to take for granted. It’s not as exciting any more to be able to zoom in on a building and make out the bricks that were used to construct it. I’m starting to take that as something that should be inherent in the work I aim to produce. I want to share what I see when I go for these walks and the ultra resolution of the large format is doing a good job at it.

I can’t wait until I print some of these at a good size, however. Both Ansel Adams and David Hockney spoke about how the eye moves over an image, scanning in the vista in pieces and not one entire impression. I feel I need to print these photographs large enough so that the viewer can do just that and spot all the little nuances of the scenery that a low resolution image cannot provide. I’m preparing work for a little show at Untitled Art Society where I can hopefully address some of these concerns I have. We’ll see if I’m successful in any way when that time comes. The show will run from October 7th-9th with an opening reception on the 9th. See you there!

I’m also going to document my film development process and post more detailed pictures of the exterior & interior of the shack I’ve converted into a darkroom. I think the shack is something quite interesting on it’s own. That will be a post for the future.

Update: I thought I should share a crop from the above photograph. This was cropped at 100% then shrunk down to fit the width of the blog post.

Comments (1) | More: Calgary, Large Format