Photographic Influences

[Don Hoey]

Yesterday I took a series of low light autofocus tests for Jim. That led to me doing the self portrait. Subject wise something I had never done before, and in my mind it was no doubt influenced by Jim's work which I greatly admire.

This got me thinking about how we are all influenced either by what we read, what we see, other photographers work, processes, or acquisition of that particular piece of kit that opens up a whole new world.

So I thought I would start a thread to see how wide that range of influences has been on other members.

As for myself, and picking just one aspect.
Without a doubt I seem to have a bit of an obsession for the maximum achievable detail in an image for the budget I have.

This was not the case in the early days, so where did it come from ?
I think in my case, it started with a visit to an exhibition of Ansel Adams work. His images were not wall fillers, in fact on a fair few the mount was a lot bigger than the print. Ansel used a 10 x 8 camera, and the degree of detail that is recorded on a negative that size is just amazing. Very shortly afterwards I had the opportunity to do some special projects photography for work, and that style finally led to me taking on all of the publicity work.

Doing works stuff just reinforced the whole 'maximum achievable detail in an image' thing. Probably made worse as I got to play with the works Sinar 5x4. Well they were paying for film and processing, and that was not at all cheap. 35mm never looked the same from receipt of the first Sinar transparencies, Nikons went into deep sleep mode. So for years I just used 6x6 purely for the larger than 35mm negative size. Mind you to keep in that groove I was using Technical Pan film for its ability to record fine detail, so I had to learn to work with 12 ASA (ISO). The choice of 6x6 rather than a larger format was driven by budget, and portability issues, and anyway I could not afford a bigger enlarger to go permanently to 6x8 or 5x4 anyway. Now using digital budget is as much a consideration. So its a case of maxing what I have.

When I was looking for the Yashicamat instruction book for Jim, I found a few old works 5 x 4 negatives. For most here its probably something quite alien, so I thought I would do a shot of one on the lightbox to give an idea of the detail that the medium could achieve. Well you could in fact get better detail from other films, but this is a Polaroid 100ASA negative. Framing here is so I could print it on the smaller format enlarger I had and could afford. Whole frame quality would therefore have been much better.

Don