Single Coated

On the very same warm and beautiful afternoon of my previous post. There's something very special in that first day when you finally can feel for real that the winter is over.

Add to it that it was friday and I had just left from work, and you can imagine my joy while shooting all this I found on a 10 min walk by the sea... It was the day of students...

...a picture is being made.

A warm and nice afternoon after an unusually long and cold winter, in Barcelona's Port Vell. M2 with Summaron 35/2.8 on Classic Pan 200.

And I really hope this spring will bring many more afternoons like that one, mainly after the unusually cold, nasty and long winter we've experienced. I know I'm saying this twice, so imagine how cold and unusually long it has been...

But spring is here, so, let's celebrate ! :)

Categorized: _blackandwhite | _urban | _itsaboutyou

Last friday morning, at seven thirty or so the phone rang. I had a quick thought and I was right, my grandmother had died that same night. She was (really) 102 and a half years old.

I can't really say it was something that caught me by surprise, as since half a year ago or so her physical and mental condition had been slowly but progressively getting worse to a point that honestly I strongly prefer she had never reached.

So the truth is her funeral was basically an optimistic and relatively happy family get-together to honor the person she was, the extremely long life she had, and why not say it, her peaceful and quiet ending after several months of nonsense suffering.

And it is when somebody is no longer, when photography shows you one of its most powerful faces.


Categorized: _blackandwhite | _people

A bike and a passerby, and not really that I can say a lot more, except that I liked the scene.


Categorized: _blackandwhite | _urban | _itsaboutyou

For whatever reason, that's the title I gave to the shot above these lines. That's just a wall of the building besides the one I work on. All the zone was previously one of the bigger (if not the main one) military quarters in Barcelona, dating from the XIX century.

That specific wall was on the vehicle entrance to the main courtyard and it still has the traces of some guard house on it. The most part of the quarter is now a public university (they replaced weapons with books, as somebody said once) but on the unchanged zones you can still catch a glimpse of its previous life.


I must admit I greatly enjoy finding traces of the long gone past wherever I go. That thing you see above is a huge grinding wheel used to turn the chalk mineral from the quarry in the background into easily transportable and useable powder.

That quarry is quite well hidden inside a small valley in the countryside zone of Spain I've been visiting year after year since I was a child (since it was our holiday's place), but it wasn't until last year that I recalled on an interesting point marked as a quarry in the zone map I had bought some weeks before.

It resulted to be a chalk quarry, operating for as long as people there could remember, and quite active up to the 70's. It provided with chalk mineral to all the surrounding villages, from where they came first with mules and carts and later, as I was told, with small lorries which were a nightmare to drive all the way along the very narrow mountain path.

Nowadays, both the quarry and the 'processing' facilities (read a rock oven and the grinding barrack) are long forgotten and left there until mother nature claims them to vanish completely in their surroundings.


Yet there's still enough trace of its very humble history as to satisfy a curious soul, you can still hear the echoes from the past.

Categorized: _blackandwhite | _color | _urban | _echoesfromthepast

I'm not usually very prone to PS work, but thought that this image could be a good candidate for some very different approach and tried a filter whose name looked promising, dilluted color plus tritone (over already existing tritone).

Categorized: _blackandwhite | _urban | _itsaboutyou

Some of my first M2 experiences, with my beloved 50/2 Summitar (sometimes scale focused for faster shooting which explains some of the fuzzy results, sigh) and my also first experience with Efke KB50.

I souped it in Diafine, as always, and exposed it according to the sunny-16 rule for a 100 ISO film. I quite like this film but it's really prone to scratches so be very careful (or avoid completely) with the squeege !

As always, hope you'll like them :)

These girls, journalism students probably, were doing a live interview to this bronze cowboy, one of the multiple 'living statue' performers along their zone of La Rambla. I started shooting them from a far distance but seeing that they didn't seem to mind I ended approaching them and took a couple more shots.


I was just framing the 'Psico' sign with the lamp post and the guy having his lunch in the background and suddenly I caught the cyclist coming with the corner of my eye and decided to try to include him.

This girl struck me in the Born Market zone, having her lunch alone, so smartly dressed contrasting with the usual 'cosmopolitan' fashion you can see around here, and placed in a place where light played such a nice effect. I focused the Summitar by guessing not to disturb her, but as you can see I failed by quite some meter(s). Anyway, I like how the fuzzyness here gives her a certain sense of anonimous quality.


Some meters from that girl (and previously) I had noticed how light (again) played a nice effect with the gas tank of this mighty Montesa Impala 2 bike.

This scene just appeared to me attractive due to the extreme almost lith-like contrast... just like the next one.


Funnily enough, after taking this shot a woman walking behind them stopped and looked inquiringly to that 'caged' window, probably wondering what the hell I was finding so special about it...


And finally... just ping pong.

Categorized: _blackandwhite | _urban | _itsaboutyou

It was already time for an update... It's curious, I spend a lot of time day after day, week after week seeing almost the same scenes, and even often seeing the same faces.


The other day a way fun idea crossed my mind. If we would put 50 chimpanzees on a subway car, I can't imagine the size of the party they would instantly make. however, as close to them as we are, we can put up to 200 people together there and each one of us will kindly and respectfully ignore all the others.


All is written in the DNA ;)

Well, hope you enjoy the pictures. As with all the project, taken with the Bessa-T and the 35/2.5 Skopar scale focused, with Jessops Pan 400S in Diafine.


Categorized: _blackandwhite | _urban | _underground

I don't consider myself a lucky person, but I don't think I'm unlucky either.

Luck plays quite an important role in our lifes (I suspect that a lot more than we imagine), and if as some people say photography is about life, we should expect the A->B->C axiom to apply and thus having luck being important in photography as well... no ? Well I think I'm lost...

Anyway, I mean, sometimes it's not enough to be there, and to be awake and to have your mind and body tuned with the action going on so that you can be aware of when to relase the shutter and where to stand when doing so. Sometimes you just can't fully see or you can't get to where you want and you can only raise your arm and pray for the best.

And sometimes it works. The above photo is the second one from two I took while this acrobat performance was taking place during the Forum Barcelona 2004, a huge multi... ehh, well, when this was taking place: www.forumbcn.com

Both shots were at a speed of 1/15 or so, with the lens scale focused around f/8 (I think). The first one came out too tilted and blurry due to camera shake, but when I scanned this one I knew I had exhausted my luck for quite some weeks :)

Some other times (a couple weeks ago to be exact), I was walking down the street from the uni, and getting ready my Bessa T for some shots. I proceeded to slightly press the shutter in order to activate the meter and get a light reading and.. CA-CHLANK ! Here goes the 'silent' Bessa shutter, taking a shot of who knows what. Well, it turned out to be this thing below. I still wonder what are the odds of having that results in full frame...



And then, the 98% rest of the time, what I use to get when I rely on luck is similar to this:




Categorized: _blackandwhite | _urban | _itsaboutyou

If you've read this blog for a while maybe you remember my entry about the (happy) day I finally got my Leica M2 in the mail, and how I mentioned I received another great surprise as well in the shape of a wet print from my RFF Print Swap IV partner, David Widom.

That really nice shot, apart from hanging on a wall now started a chain reaction of some kind, and I started to think seriously (or more seriously than before in any way) in getting started with that wet printing thing myself.

Honestly, I've been using a regular consumer lab for all my work and although I haven't printed a lot lately, I sent them some B&W scans after being worked in PS for them to print in their Fuji Frontier systems. The resulting print looks a lot like the regular ones you get from color negatives, only that in B&W, of course.

But (and here's the important thing), when you compare them against a REAL B&W print in REAL B&W paper... well, as we say here, no hay color. The quality of touch and looks, the texture, and the luminosity and range of greys I see on that Ilford MG IV print are amazing. I realize how much of this is merit of David and how possible it is that my attempts don't even come close to that, yet I can't stand from wanting to try it myself, I'm a curious guy :)

After commenting this with some friends, one of my very own guard angels, G'man (aka as Greyhoundman / Dave) showed me again his generosity and mailed me the main body of his first homemade enlarger, which you can see mounted here:

http://greyhoundman.blogspot.com/2005/12/building-enlarger.html

I'm in the process of building the central column and extended lightbox, and today I finished the more simple task of the negative carriers, for 6x9, 6x6 and of course 24x36. They are made from the matt black plastic cover of a used notebook (the ones you write on, not the ones with keyboards ;). The 'glass' is made out of a CD case.

As developer I just got some Dektol plus some stop bath. I'll try to go with household recycled materials as much as I can, but of course I also had to buy the paper, Ilford Ilfospeed RC semimatt grade 3. From the very little I understand so far, RC stands for Resin Coated paper, which seems to be far easier to use for newbies as an alternative to the more tricky Fiber Based one.

I feel like an alchemist, I only hope I won't blow up the house in the process...

To be continued...

Categorized: _theprocess

He seems to be almost everywhere (see my Summitar post). I've seen him at work, showing me the way to escap eer... leave after a hard day...



Inviting me to take a shower ¿?



Telling me not to swim... on ice !?



Sometimes I'd say I've even seen him on the corner of my eye when walking around...


Geez, it's starting to scare the hell out of me... :P

Categorized: _blackandwhite | _urban | _itsaboutyou | _letslaugh