Drawings, Photographs, Papers, and Notes From Nowhere
I’ve come pretty far in post processing the latest round of images from my Mountain Project. Here are two more. The final edit will be slightly above 70 images. I’ll make an updated movie from this project soon, a new gallery, and a book later this year.
I have also started to sell off my current camera gear. I wanted a change regarding the cameras that I use for some time – insofar pressure was huge this summer to complete this project in a consistent way, before I can move on.
I’m about to board a plane and get back to Manhattan, so this is my last entry to Jens’ blog from the lovely Mediterranean coast of Amalfi. I’ve been renting a little house here – that is, the island I mentioned last time, Procida. I’ve been rather immersed into one of my architecture projects for a while now. The culinary result of working hard *and* being in this house is: lots of tramezzini. For of course, even the most minimal kitchen equipment of a relatively inexpensive holiday rental down here is luxurious if viewed from the perspective of my starving life in Manhattan. You walk in, and the first thing you notice, with a heartwarming sensation that tells you you shall never go back to Manhattan, is a tramezzini grill.
I asked a couple of my Manhattan friends, gourmets of the New York type (by which I mean: extremely well versed in the names and looks of all kinds of foreign food, if not always in how I think it should taste). They didn’t even know the word ‘tramezzini’! So what are tramezzini? It’s two pieces of tramezzini-toast, a variety of toast that doesn’t have the regular ‘rim’ that toast in the US has. In between you can put all kinds of things, such as arugula with parmigiano, or tomato, basil, and mozzarella, or whatever you like, and then it’s put into a tramezzini grill. Super simple. But with the bread and the cheese and the grill being perfect, the nicest computer lunch ever.
I spent about a month of my first stay in New York trying (a) to find a bar that serves tramezzini (forget it!), (b) an importer of tramezzini grills (forget it!). The disappointment that went along with these searches was mixed with disbelief – tramezzini seem like *the* Manhattan food to me, everybody would love them!
So I am asking all of you out there: Why are there no tramezzini in Manhattan?
First of all: I have given up film in 2002 and won’t go back. However, in a strange way, I like the fact that some people who had abandoned film for years now use medium format film again – it is an entirely different way of working compared to digital, and I think it often shows in a good way. Also, it seems that prices for used medium format cameras have gone so low now that it even makes economic sense to just get one on the side and shoot certain projects with film again. Anecdotal evidence from some of the larger photo stores in New York seems to suggest that there indeed is a spike in sales of that kind of used gear.
Here is my big regret about digital: I spend about 99 percent of my post processing time to make my digital files look as if they were shot with film. In the late 1990ies I did a lot of cross processing and I had a lab in Berlin that printed the negatives exactly the way I wanted (which of course involved going back and forth between my studio and my lab up to three times on a busy day – but mostly I kind of liked that). The above image is a good example that digital is not all about convenience. Ten years ago, I’d have made this kind of image with a film like Agfa Scala (I don’t even know whether that is still available), pushed to 800 ISO, printed on monochrome photo paper with a laser printer, and be done with it. Pushed Agfa Scala gave wonderful blacks, nice looking whites, and not much in between – just what I wanted.
I made the above photo with a Canon 5D this past July. Contrary to popular belief, digital cameras show a lot more detail in the shadows than film does. That is why digital files often look so dull. Technically this was actually a rather low contrast scene, making the problem worse. Hence I had to increase contrast by a huge margin to achieve a file that shows what I saw when I made the photo. Digital files only take that much manipulation before they fall apart, and in this case the file had pretty bad banding once I was done with the contrast adjustments. Well, there are Photoshop filters for that, but honestly it makes me feel like a complete idiot to spend half a day with adjusting contrast and removing digital artifacts when I could have achieved the same result in 1/500th of a second ten years ago.
Again, I don’t see myself going back to film. At least not until I’ll settle down in Switzerland or the Italian Alps. Traveling with unprocessed film after 2001 seems inconceivable to me, and in many ways digital suits my way of working (I don’t like “doctored” images and use my digital cameras and their displays to get the perfect frame on the scene to an extent that film did not allow). But I do miss the diversity of cameras that existed before digital flattened the camera world – and the spare time away from the computer…