My Simple Photography Workflow: One Camera, One Phone, One Keyboard

My current obsession is how to simplify my kit down to as little as possible. After years of wanting “the perfect setup” and lusting after $10,000 cameras to take the same photos i could get with an iPhone (i know, it hurts, but we know its true) I lost pretty much all interest in photography due to life in general and the explosion of over processed stock-like photography.

I got a box and put everything in it and put it away. And dreamt of being a master painter instead (who’s that going Simon? Anything in the National Gallery yet?). But the thing is I do like photography and I like to believe I could quit the corporate life and magically become a Vietnam War era photographer. So I picked up a Fujifilm X100 and decided if I could get my interest back then I would eventually go get one of those $10,000 cameras. But the honest truth is I haven’t got anywhere close to the limits of what the X100 can do, and the workflow is insanely simple.

So I’ve been playing around with the simplest travel package (traveling the world on a 49 cc Vespa - whole other realistic plan) with the smallest footprint that makes sense. Plus with “cheap” gear that is easily replaceable.

So current package is:

Camera: Fujifilm X100 with black and white film-like recipe set to output both jpeg and raw files. Plus a tabletop $15 tripod. Plus screw in filters, couple of batteries and a pocket full of cards

Post-production: iPhone 15 with a foldable keyboard. JPEG photos transferred via USB-C for on-the-go publishing

Headphones: Meza Audio in-ear monitor

So I’m sitting in JJ Bean typing this out on the keyboard which folds down to the size of my phone. Photos are transferred to Photos, and then the whole thing is uploaded via Squarespace iOS app to my site. Bish bash bosh. 40 minutes from going out, taking a couple of photos, writing some random stream of consciousness, and publishing the whole thing to fill up some small corner of the internet where nobody ever goes.

Magic.

Less with more

Or is it the other way around?

Testing out writing to the journal here with the app and on my phone.

Currently dreaming of long distance travel on a Vespa 50cc. There’s something compelling about the slow pace, low volume, simplicity of the idea that appeals. Lots of great videos out there on trips, including this one where the guy travels around Morocco on his Vespa (ok issue #1 can’t paste a link!)

I’m always looking to simplify my gear and get it down to as small a package as possible. I’m shooting the Fujifilm X100 vi pretty much exclusively and figuring out how to make do with a 35mm lens. One of the very cool aspects is the ability to apply a “look” to the jpegs and output directly to my phone either with a cable or wifi.

The images here are from the beach this morning. Assuming I can upload them in this app!

Update! Figured out how to link. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MbRJjN_F_TU&pp=ygUNVmVzcGEgbW9yb2Njbw%3D%3D

Bit west coast really...

Got to spend a little time in Manning Park and then at Alice Lake in North Vancouver. It’s hard to beat the ghostly beauty of the west coast.

Photography at La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires

When thou shalt have allotted me my fire I will not fare here from the dark again. As living men we'll no more sit apart from our companions, making plans. The day of wrath appointed for me at my birth engulfed and took me down.

Homer

Slow time moving quickly

Spending a little time with my Fujifilm, an ND1000, cable release, and tripod. Plus a little pop and drag action.

Making not producing

I’ve been reading "The meaning in the making" by Sean Tucker. In discussing Logos, he asks “do we want to elicit a favourable response from others by playing to the crowd, or do we want to speak the Truth as we see it with the things we make"

I've been thinking about that and how it relates to my relationship with Instagram. The process of creating and the posting to instagram and hoping for likes is crushing any sense of Truth in my practice. The pursuit of Likes is an end unto itself and each time I post there, I find I hate photography just a little more.

But then how do you get feedback? How can you grow as an artist?

I think its the relationship between the art and the viewer that has been damaged by instagram. The conversation reduced to impressions and likes. A race to the bottom, No meaning just content.

I want to get back to making, communicating the Truth as I experience it. To creating rather than producing.

So I'm going to focus more on publishing here, on my blog. I've no idea if you'll see it, I've no idea if you'll like it. Maybe when we talk you'll tell me. Or perhaps give me the gift l most want; constructive feedback.

To start with, a photo of my beautiful wife Maura. who gives me more love and support than I could ask for, And probably more than I deserve.

5 Frames with... my 28mm

At the end of last years European adventure when we had to head home and pretend to be responsible adults, I snuck in one last moment of childlike abandon and got a 28mm Summicron lens (second-hand, I’m not THAT crazy) for the Leica. As it turns out, my M4-2 doesn’t have a 28mm lens line on the viewfinder so I’ve really struggled to use it. And I’ve not taken it with me and basically pondered selling it for a more expensive 50mm lens (can you say Summilux ASPH?).

I thought I’d better give it one last try and see if I could get anything I liked with it. Jury is still out, but I liked it more than I did in the winter...

Left without saying goodbye - 1/30 @ f4.0 TriX400

Prepping your five a day - 1/60 @ f8 TriX400

Still love the daily grind - 1/30 f4 TriX400

Trying hard? Or hardly trying? - f11 1/1000 TriX400

What’s in a name?

Back in the naughties (which weren’t as naughty as I would have liked) it was all about personal branding. As a wide eyed wannabe photographer I followed the time honoured tradition of obsessing over hideously expensive cameras, lighting gear, lenses, and thinking up a good name for my soon to be awesome business. And of course avoiding shooting and actually developing my craft.

I spent a lot of time developing out a brand, thinking up a name (seriously, how perfect is f/otographique?) and building out a website to display my soon to be awesome photos. And continued to avoid shooting.

When I did shoot I didn’t really have any idea what to say. I got technically better but the images were frankly boring. And honestly I got a bit disillusioned. I still wanted to be a photographer but I couldn’t see a pathway. Photography has so many possibilities and it’s easy to get lost into trying to do everything instead of getting good at doing one thing.

A couple of years ago I had an idea. Shoot film. Slow down and think about what I am doing. Look for a meaning to each photo rather than fire off a few hundred and hope. The transition to film have been a life saver for me. It’s forced me to work harder, think more, and expose my feelings more in my photos. It’s helped me to find a voice in my work and to focus on my style.

It’s easier to hide behind a brand, behind a mask. If people don’t like what you do, it doesn’t matter, it’s only business. But it’s hard to put yourself out as yourself. The images I shoot that mean something to me, represent me. So if people don’t like them, it feels personal. But I’ve come to realize that you have to take the risk. You have to be yourself and say something. Otherwise you might as well just download stock photos from the internet and pretend.

So. I’m putting the old branding in the back of the drawer and focusing on being me. Just me and my photos. And hopefully something interesting to say.

From now on, I’m Simon Chester.

This is one of my favourite images I’ve taken. It represents everything I want to achieve (at the moment anyway!)

Four from the street

Back on the street, this time with a roll of Kodak T-Max and my 50mm Zeiss Planar. I have been playing around with my 28mm but if I want to actually shoot, it’s always the 50mm. I also have a new light meter (stole my wife’s old iPhone) so the exposures are better.

I shot this roll at iso 800 and then developed for 12 min in Rodinal 1:50 as per the Massive Development Chart.

The incalculable joy of riding a bicycle.

The women in my life watch, always watch.

“Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space, you can bend time also” Margaret Atwood

Playing with colour

I am a black and white shooter. There. I’ve said it. I love black and white. I love the timeless, structural nature of it. I love the gradation away into darkness. Colour has always felt cheaper. Too close to the humdrum of daily existence. No drama. Plus, I have always been bored with my own colour photos and struggled to find an anchor to the image.

Recently I watched one of the Art of Photography videos on the Photo Assignments. If you haven’t watched Ted Forbes video’s I highly recommend them. Watch one, make notes, go shoot.

This video opened my eyes a bit to the possibilities of color - https://youtu.be/bAWZ9PtZ4uw

In black and white photography, I focus on separation of the subject (or subjects) from the rest of the world to bring focus and drama to the photo. Using framing, depth of field, and a few other techniques I try to draw the viewer’s eye to the purpose of the photo. Maybe colour can be one more technique? By using tension in the colour palette of the photo (along with framing, depth of field, etc) the subject can be further separated from the rest of the photo.

For this series I focused on red. I mostly live in Vancouver where there is a lot of green, so red seems to “pop” more for me.

Red Series #2

Red Series #3

Red Series #4

Red Series #5

Red Series #6

Red Series #7

Semana Santa

Holy week in Spain is a very big deal. Semana Santa (Holy Week) starts on Palm Sunday and each day different brotherhoods emerge from their churches to perform penance. They walk through the streets wearing capirotes (the conical heads) and silks to cover their faces, traditionally hiding the identities of the penitents.

Here in Andalucia the parades are a very big deal and the streets are packed. The brotherhoods walk from their church to the cathedral and back. They carry giant Pasos (floats) which take 20 to 24 strong men to lift and walk with thorough the cobbled streets.

What the hell is an artist?

My background is science. Microbiology to be specific. Now I spend my professional life listening to complex problems and trying to help people navigate their way through to an acceptable computer solution to those problems. Although the problems can be messy and ill defined, success (and failure) usually is a little easier to tie down. You know when a job is done well, when a customer is happy. You complete a project and tie it up with a nice little bow and move on.

But what about photography? How do you know when you are doing well? How do you measure success? What is success?

When I approach a technical problem I usually start from the end. I imagine what the end state will look like and then work back to where we currently are. It’s like doing a maze on a paper. If you start from the end all the options fall away and you are left with a clear path back to the start. My wife calls this cheating. I don’t know if I agree with that.

So let’s start there. What is success with photography? Riches? World renown? A little positive feedback?

Actually I haven’t got a clue. Maybe a little bit of all? Maybe none of the above. And if I don’t know I can’t use my normal process. I’m an analyst at sea, no starting point.

In this case it is easy to try and think of your whole life as an end point and forget there is the slight matter of living life. Even if I could say my end goal is to be a famous photographer, I’d have to get there. And to do that my photos would have to not only be good, but they’d have to have value. No paintings of dogs playing cards please!

So then what about another problem solving technique? Find different but similar problem space and look for solutions there? This is a bit of a hackneyed example, but let’s talk about Mozart and Beethoven for a moment. Both produced transcendent works of art. Both look impressive in brass statues. Both have inspired countless humans since their times. But they were remarkably different as artists.

By all accounts Mozart was a truly unique individual. The music flowed effortlessly, intuitively. A stone cold child prodigy. Enough to make mere mortals weep. It makes me sad to say, I’m no Mozart.

But what of Beethoven? Someone who wrestled huge gorillas of self doubt and torment. Someone who had to make endless mistakes to move forward an inch. Now there is someone to take inspiration from.

Maybe an artist is really a process. Not an end state but (trying not to sound like a pretentious fool here) the progression and development of a set of skills. Maybe it is not grandiose delusions of fame but small incremental steps. Slow improvement and investigation into technique and history. Maybe art is not the product but the steps the work that go into creating it.

Finding a voice

Everything is interesting on the way to lessons

To start with, photography is easy. Get a camera take some photos, get a bit better. Life is good and gratification flows. Then it starts to get more complicated. You start to want to improve. You compare your photos against images that define a generation and obviously they come up short. So your ego takes a knock, but you soldier on, and you start to research more. Hours are lost to the internet.

And then it seems so many of us get caught by reviews of cameras. Of flashes, lenses, light meters. In the search to become better photographers we take a wrong turn and obsess about gear, like that is the route to good photos. It’s easy to see why on reflection. Technology is a physical thing. You can compare one piece to another. You can say this sensor has a higher resolution than this sensor. This shutter is faster than that shutter. On the internet review and technology sites abound.

And so you get lost in the world of technology but your photos don’t really improve much. They just become technically better versions of the same boring photos that you could take before. Higher resolution. More space in your hard drive. More time invested in a death spiral of technology, but no worth in the photos you produce. And no gratification.

I think everyone who becomes interested in being a photographer runs this risk. I know I have wasted years on obsessing about which is the perfect camera and system. And wasted a very large amount of money too but still failed to be satisfied about my own progression as a photographer.

The problem is it’s easy to look at technology but hard to look at artistry.

Artistry begins with imagining what you want to say, what you want to achieve. With an understanding of your materials. With research into other works, both in your field and outside of your field. It develops through repetition and refinement. But it begins with finding a voice. And that voice isn’t on the internet, and it certainly isn’t on a review site.

A little Spanish street photography

After moving my family half way round the world for a few months and navigating endless paperwork, I am finally a little more settled. I’m waiting for development chemicals to be delivered for black and white film photography, so in the mean time I’m shooting digital.

One of my justifications for my foray into film photography was to make myself a better photographer by having to go back to basics and focus on producing good clean images to work with. I noticed the change in the way I approach street photography with my digital camera. No more spray and pray, I take more time looking for the photo and imaging (also call pre-visualising) the photo before I pull the trigger.

Shooting in Granada is wonderful. So many people, so much to see. I’m like a kid in a candy store. With M&Ms in my pocket!

Shooting a protest with film

January 21st 2017. Women’s March in the US with solidarity marches across the world. By all accounts one of the largest marches in US history. And despite what some might claim, in person engagement is worth far more than people watching things at home or on their phones.

Here in Vancouver the march was claimed to be approximately 15,000 strong. Certainly the biggest congregation of people I’ve ever seen in Vancouver. I was told by one group of women the marches in the 1970s were bigger, but I didn’t get to go to those.

I made the debatably risky decision to shoot only film. I left my Nikon D750 at home and headed out with only a Leica M4 and a slightly ancient and decrepit Seagull TLR medium format camera. And a bag of film.

From my last experiences at protests and big events things are not as hectic as you would think so there is time to pick and choose. And shooting film adds to that sense of taking time, looking for something different. The biggest difference for me is shooting digital feels like you grab as many images as you can without thinking and then you obsess for hours over a computer screen looking for something interesting or different. With film, you look for something interesting and different in the world and then take that photo.

Everyone was very interested in the old Seagull. It got me some interesting interactions with people who engaged with me as opposed to me engaging with them. And I learned a new technique with interacting with people in a march; I often asked permission to take photos. It created a very different dynamic than my normal approach of trying to stay out of the scene. In part I tried this as I have been (very very incorrectly!) accused of being a cop in the past at protests, and in part I tried this as there were many younger children present and it never feels appropriate to shoot small children without permission.

Shooting film definitely provides challenges as well and you can have disasters that are mostly unrecoverable! For example; I shot three rolls of 35mm film and decided to head home. As I left I saw a photo I wanted to take but I need to reload. I opened the back of the camera to change the film and stared down in horror at the complete roll of film on the uptake spool! A whole freaking roll of what I thought would be my best photos suddenly exposed to the light!

And the Seagull? Someone told me it was really cool I was shooting with that camera. I told them I’d reserve judgement until I saw the photos. I’ve seen the photos. They are almost all a disaster. The camera distance scale didn’t agree with my focusing. When I looked at the distance when the image was in focus it was way off. So I decided to trust the distance meter and not the focusing screen. Huge mistake. Every photo after that was out of focus. And some that would have been brilliant too.

And there is no multiple exposure protection on the Seagull. When you shoot, nothing prevents you from shooting a second (or third, fourth etc) image on the same frame. But it can have some unexpected benefits.

In the end it occurs to me; this is what photography has been for most of the time it has existed. This is how most of the greatest photos of all time have been taken. You can get great photos shooting film? Obviously.

A new beginning

Ah Wordpress. I love you, you stab me in the back. To be fair, I could invest the time in figuring out what the @$%^$ is going on and extract all my content and build a new server and... But then I do IT for a living and I would never advise me to to that. I would say "do you really want to invest your time in learning and maintaining something when you could be focusing on what you actually do, taking photos and writing meandering posts"

So this is me, following my own advice. I'm trying out two website builder sites (wix and squarespace) and I'm going to build out two new sites and then have them fight to the death in a Star Trek planet surface like battle.

In time I may figure out how to recover all the content from my wordpress site. Or maybe not.