Mamiya 55mm f/4.5 / Velvia 100F
Have you ever thought about repetition? Sure you have. So have I. Some music achieves its effect from clever little twists and turns. It changes unpredictably in a way that delights the mind. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". "Good Vibrations". "Happiness is a Warm Gun". "Paranoid Android". Almost everything by the Dillinger Escape Plan. I would include some examples from the last decade but I'm way out of date.
In general however most pop music is simpler than that. The typical pop song consists of a group of musical blocks that repeat for three minutes or so. Typically there's a verse-chorus group, with middle eights and pre-choruses for variation. Rather than having a series of individual musical ideas that play one after the other without repeating pop songs are instead composed of a simple pattern of musical blocks, each of which has a couple of ideas inside it.
Oh yeah, Mr Moon
There's also a kind of music that doesn't change. It has a single idea that repeats. On an extreme level there's OM chanting, which consists of a single note. On a more complex level there's Stellardrone's "Red Giant", which I listened to on repeat while writing this post:
I could have picked an Indian raga, or Philip Glass, or Orbital's "Halcyon+On", or any number of other examples. "Red Giant" isn't perfect. The drums straddle the uneasy dividing line between epic music and carpet warehouse commercial. But the song is a good example of repetition. It's essentially a fifteen-second chord sequence, with angel trumpets and devil trombones, repeated thirteen times, and it should be boring but instead it's a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal, or silvery wine flowing in a spaceship.
Some people spend their lives wearing headphones, either because the outside world is boring, or perhaps because they want to block out the horror. I find that repetitive music has a hypnotic effect. My brain craves the pattern. Small musical variations that would otherwise pass unnoticed achieve a monumental effect, because they stand out more.
Why does music affect us? Did it give us an evolutionary advantage over tigers? Would our distant ancestors have been able to hunt for food more effectively if they had heard Katy Perry's "Swish Swish"?
Or was music simply a form of drug that overwhelmed our fear of death, so that we could pluck up the courage to drive tigers away from freshly-killed caribou? Is our love of music just a quirk of our complicated brains, a side-effect of consciousness? One of those chaotic by-products that causes some men to become sexually aroused by rubber boots; that causes some people to feel a sense of satisfaction from a GIF of a drill making a neat little hole in a piece of metal?
This is how they refuel boats in Venice. It's a petrol station - for boats. Or, as Ferrari owners will attest, it's a "benzina" station. In Italy they have a type of petrol called benzina.
This, my dearest and only friends, is called padding. Imagine if I got straight to the point. I would probably be higher up Google's search rankings. In the last post I had a look at the Mamiya 55mm f/4.5, a wide-angle lens for the Mamiya C twin-lens-reflex system. Here's what it looks like:
It's really sharp at f/11, not bad at f/4.5, needs sunshine or a tripod. The last post was illustrated with examples shot using Fuji 160. In this post let's look at some Fuji Velvia 100F.
Burano. Yet again. They built it, I came. These two shots illustrate one of the problems of wideangle coverage with square format - you can fill the frame with buildings or have parallel verticals, but not both.
I've written about Velvia before. It's a slide film launched by Fuji in 1990. It was an immediate hit. Strong contrast, super-saturation, almost grain-free, more vivid than Kodachrome or Ektachrome. It was digital before digital. Landscape photographers in particular lapped it up.
But there was a downside. It was so popular that I now associate it with cigarette and car adverts. Adverts and Athena poster collections. Boring images of Miami's skyline. Boring but technically perfect images of North American mountains at sunset. Boring, slick, proficient. It was never used by news photographers so as a consequence none of the famous images you remember from the 1990s were shot with it. Instead posters, adverts.
Velvia wasn't universally beloved. The colour balance was no good for skin tones, particularly caucasian. Furthermore there was nothing subtle or arty about it. Over the last decade or so there has been a rise in Instagram filters that try and replicate the "film look", usually by pushing the blacks and washing out the saturation. That's nothing like Velvia. No-one of consequence is nostalgic for it.
In some respects the retro film movement of the 2000s was a reaction against the perceived slickness of Velvia; it was the kind of film used by professionals to make competent but boring images, the kind of film used by lawyers and dentists during their holidays to imitate the professional look, the exact kind of film that Photo.net's forum dwellers would have gravitated towards in the 1990s, and in that respect I can't think of it without also thinking of a man who has a custom-made shelf filled with Laserdiscs.
Velvia's colour balance was such that a polarising filter was almost unnecessary in the daytime. The film's version of sky-blue was rich and deep and slightly purply. In the shot above I used a polarising filter just for the heck of it. The result has something of the colours of Kodachrome, a mixture of cold blues, vivid reds and yellows, slightly washed-out everything else, dark shadows. Bear in mind that the Velvia I used expired about ten years ago.
During my trip to Venice I noticed that a lot of the locals were like this cat. Just lounging around in the sun not doing any work. What if they're right and we're wrong? What then?
What then. Oh yes. Exposure. The rule of thumb is that you're supposed to meter for the shadows with negative film. You don't have to care about the highlights because negative film is very tolerant of overexposure. Let the highlights fall as they may. With slide film however it's the other way around - it does blow out highlights - with the problem that shadows become pitch black, so if the situation exceeds the film's dynamic range you have to choose a compromise. In the shot of the cat above I metered wrong; the shadows are too dark. I brought them up with Photoshop but if the image had been just slightly darker it would have been lost. I would have to go back to Venice and shoot it again, which would be tragic.
There were different types of Velvia. Mark one was just called Fuji Velvia. It was ISO 50. Hardcore. And awkward, because long-duration exposures suffered from colour shifts. Velvia 100F was launched in 2003. It was less saturated, faster and fixed the colour shifts but there were grumbles that it wasn't really Velvia.
The original Velvia was replaced in 2005 by Velvia 100, which was apparently similar to the original look; a new ISO 50 version of Velvia called Velvia 50 was launched in 2007, which also apparently replicates the look of the original.
This is one of those shots that triggers my OCD. If only the pigeon had been facing the other way, facing into the image. The composition would be slightly better. As it stands I have a choice of cropping out the pigeon, erasing it with Photoshop (easy) or flipping it with Photoshop (too much work for too little gain), or leaving it present as a kind of visual speck of grit that forever irritates me.
Over the years I've shot all of the different kinds of Velvia. I can't pass judgement on any of them because the rolls I shot were expired and I'm not a scientist. Furthermore I run all of my film through Photoshop, leaving behind only a shadow of the original look.
My recollection from scanning Velvia is that the black border of the film is always slightly red and the film feels thick. The emulsion feels thicker than other emulsion - probably psychosomatic, simply because the film borders are solid black instead of translucent amber as per negative film - and I always have a mental image of the scanner trying hard to push light through it.
As of this writing Fuji still sells Velvia 50 and Velvia 100, along with the general-purpose / portrait-balanced Provia 100F, the latter two also available in larger formats. As far as I can tell they're the last slide films still on sale, so at least in terms of slide films the winner was Fuji.
What about Venice? Modern cities are often built on a grid pattern. Venice on the other hand is wonky and misaligned. The horizontals are all over the place; the verticals lean and sag. The paving slabs undulate in an organic manner. It's one of the few major cities that wasn't flattened by war or remodelled by town planners or crushed to death by its suburbs, with the result that it feels non-standard in the modern world.
Venice is incompatible, with visible gaps and areas of imperfection. Its parts are not interchangeable. And yet people flock there whereas the likes of Milton Keynes - with its beautiful miniature roundabouts - and the futuristic concrete perfection of Birmingham are shunned by tourists. I just don't understand it.
