Niko J. Kallianiotis

Photographers

Fine images of urban decay.

WaPo just featured this photographer in a piece titled ‘Portraits of the fading American dream’ where he documents urban areas of Pennsylvania which have fallen into decay. That’s the great thing about the American Way. As industries and regions fade, Americans move to a better place, leaving behind those too old, too shortsighted or too unambitious to improve their lot in life. Natural selection, if you like. Americans have little sense of history or spirit of place.


Click the image for the article.

You can see more of Kallianotis’s work at his Instagram feed.

The cardinal returns

Nikon lenses, Photographs

This time I was ready.

The bird is very shy, and wary of the rapacious quail and doves which dominate the feeder. If doves are the ornithological world’s idea of timidity then I fancy I would rather keep the company of vultures. An early attempt appears here.

The cardinal is impossible to miss. One’s peripheral vision immediately catches the flash of bright red, like an electric shock to the system.

This time I was better prepared, the 500mm Reflex Nikkor attached to the Panny GX7 set at ISO800 which delivered 1/320 second. This at the lens’s fixed f/8 aperture. While hand-held, that’s poor technique as a 1,000mm FFE optic really needs a solid support. I got lucky, aided by the critical focus option in the Panny which permits enlargement of a selected area for proper focus. Of the twenty snaps the first (go figure!) was the only one usable. I would guess that depth of field at 30 feet distant is no more than a couple of inches. The image is from the full frame. I passed the file through PS to remove the out-of-focus ‘donuts’ typical with catadioptric lenses, and often quite distracting. More on that technique appears in the link in this paragraph.

In lieu of the use of Mirror Lock Up which I advocate with a conventional DSLR to cut vibration, I use the GX7’s silent and vibration-free electronic shutter. A Panasonic MFT body is superior in every way to a conventional mirrored DSLR with this lens if you need 1,000mm FFE. You get a vibrationless electronic shutter, a very light rig which can be easily carried slung over the shoulder all day, Panny’s superior magnified focus aid and, best of all, a bright finder image as the electronics automatically adjust for the small f/8 aperture. And to get 1,000mm FFE with the full frame DSLR you have to cut out a large part of the image in processing, rendering your DSLR’s sensor effective pixel count the same as the lower spec of the MFT’s sensor.

Here are the ‘after’ and ‘before’ images:

The Reflex is a special lens, small, light with delightfully smooth focus action, but easy to use it is not. Add a small, nervous subject and you have your work cut out for you.

To learn more of the design history of Nikkor’s reflex optics under Teruyoshi Tsunashima click here.


GX7 with the adapted 500mm Reflex Nikkor. Arca-style QR plate fitted.

Shulman and Bosch

Movies, Photographers

History repeats.

While I have not had TV service for some two decades now, I do subscribe to Amazon Prime and they make available a lot of content, including their ‘made for TV’ series as Amazon moves to become a major movie studio.

One which caught my eye recently is the Harry Bosch series of detective thrillers, set in Los Angeles. The cinematography here appeals immediately, capturing that sun bleached look of the poorer parts of a city I love. Bosch, a somewhat dour and jaded Hollywood homicide cop, lives in a magnificent stilt house in the Hollywood Hills. You know, one of those due to become an insurance claim receivable when the Big One hits, for these Hills homes are perched on uprights which will be the first to go when tectonic plates commence shifting.

The story line, for no straight cop could afford this place on his salary, is that Bosch participated in the making of a cop movie – there’s a poster on his wall testifying to this – which rewarded him richly, affording him the magnificent home (1870 Blue Heights Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90069) along with some really cool vintage tube hi-fi hardware. The latter, sadly, is wasted on his preference for jazz, which is so much noise in my book, but each to his own. Here’s Harry in his pad:

This image, used in several episodes, immediately harkens back to the greatest modern architectural photograph of a Neutra inspired home, that of the Stahl house, taken by Julius Shulman:

The Stahl House.

If you like your detectives hard bitten, cynical and rule bending, with more than a dash of Philip Marlowe (and some of the complexity) thrown into the mix along with fine acting and cinematography, Harry Bosch is your man. The intense and splendidly named Titus Welliver is Bosch.

Funny Face

Movies

Three minutes of absolute magic.

I pontificated on Essential Blu-Ray movies a while back and that short list remains valid today. These movies are essential not to the cinephile or auteur. Rather, they are key for any photographer.

None meets the definition of ‘essential’ better than Stanley Donen’s 1957 Funny Face with Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn and the powerhouse that was Kay Thompson. But the movie director had two special tools in his arsenal. One was the aristocratic couturier Hubert de Givenchy, recently deceased. No man more defined ‘elegant’ when it came to modern couture and in Audrey Hepburn – an actress of surpassingly bland acting talent – he found the perfect mannequin. The two would remain linked in the minds of the fashionistas for decades. The other was the ‘go to’ fashion photographer of the ’50s and ’60s, America’s own Richard Avedon, yet another Columbia dropout. When editor Diana Vreeland left Harper’s Bazaar for Vogue she took Avedon with her and the rest is history. A great collaboration defined fashion photography for two decades.

Avedon served as the expert photography adviser on ‘Funny Face’, as this wonderful image with Fred Astaire shows:

Just over half way through the movie the photography crew finally has the somewhat gauche Hepburn more or less beaten into modelling shape and what follows is three minutes of absolute magic. In those three minutes Astaire is shown crafting seven showstopper images as he directs Hepburn in various posing routines in magnificent Parisian locations.

Here he is getting ready for the first with the same giant plate camera in the Avedon image above:


In the Tuileries Gardens, outside The Louvre. The most perfect urban space on earth.

He uses a Rolleiflex as often as the plate camera, even adopting the tricky upside down orientation shown here:

Then the fun begins.



With the balloons at the petit Arc de Triomphe.


At Gare du Nord with the Flèche d’Or, the Paris to Calais train. Givenchy at his very best.


At the florist’s.


The Louvre.


Fishing in the Seine.


Not any doves. Parisian doves.


The Coup de Grace. Givenchy outdoes himself at the Paris Opéra.


7 images. 3 minutes. Absolute magic.