Be Prepared

A-Harrrrr me hearties what was that a creakin' out beyond the reef that waylaid your Goode Shippe FogBlog? Yes it was none other than the bad pirate Blackie Master Homework and his evil crew. Seems like Blackie (as we call 'im round these parts) is a panickin' because he feels his crew is ill-prepared for battle, Well he might worry!  Those decks haven't been caulked in months and the riggin' is worn out; the canons are a showin' a nice patina of rust and the ship's cat is still floatin' in the grog. And as every pirate knowes cats need to sink to give the grog some power! In other words he was ill-prepared for battle. His guiles were obvious, for we smelled him on the morning breeze and it was but a walk-over for the Goode Shippe FB,  though it did take us a few days to shake him off out beyond the Sargasso.

Was there any point to that? Well no and yes! If you are a teacher, make sure your class is prepared for exams and knows what the hell is going on; if you are a student, make sure you are prepared for exams and have asked the teacher what the hell is going on!
Sheephouse's Third Law states: There are three ways to prepare for anything (especially anything photographic) and these are:

1./ Be Prepared

2./ Be Prepared

and (wait for it)

3./ Be Prepared

Photographically this means knowing your camera and your chosen media inside and out.
Does your shutter lag just a millisecond every time you press the shutter?
Do you compensate for it?
Can you focus your lens without looking through the camera?
Do you know how your lens renders in focus and out of focus areas?
No?
Can you watch someone passing by you, lift your camera to your eye, press the shutter and remove it from your eye in a split second, knowing that you have got something really rather good?
Again, No?
Then you are not prepared.
Henri Cartier-Bresson called being prepared for that one key bit of photographic timing  'The Decisive Moment', and though that is an obvious call, I like the term - it is all about preparation! If you look up some of the Gary Winnograd videos on youTube, you'll see a master of that style at work. He knows his camera, he quickly checks it, lifts it to his eye, makes the photo, holds the camera loosely in one hand and smiles at the person walking by who is wondering why a stranger has just take their photo. It is genius at work.
Unfortunately for me, for most of my photographic life, I have been a master of 'The Indecisive Moment' - the following story is a good example.
Many years ago I was making a very very early trip out for a hillwalk. I was driving through hilly country and was passing by two iron age hillforts just as the sun was starting to lighten the horizon. The vista was incredible. If you can imagine the hillforts to my right and right in front and to the left of me a huge sweep of fields and hedgerows leading down to a plain. You could see for miles right to the North Sea. Happenstance had made it so that right in front of me was a field full of cows. They were all lying down and were all perfectly still and watching the sun rise! The light was very slight and the cows were barely just visible, but it was like they had been carefully arranged just for me. It was like nothing I had ever seen. If I had been prepared I would have had the camera in a handy place, and more importantly I would have known the best way to have taken the photograph. As it was, by the time I had figured what I should do to make the most of it, the cows reverie was disturbed and they had started getting up and mooving around. Man was I disappointed. I still carry the image in my head it was so great.
So, as the saying goes, 'Chance Favours The Prepared Mind'. be prepared, spend a lot of time with your camera, know it's workings and the the feel of everything, and if you are lucky you might just have your own Decisive Moment.

Although hardly a Decisive Moment, the above pleases me. I like cows, and I especially enjoy the fact that the one on the right is staring me down whilst the other two flee. The place is God's Own Country - Scotland.
The film was TMY2 400 at EI 320 developed in Barry Thornton's 2-bath. Camera was a Nikon F2 and the lens was that 35mm f2 Nikkor again. I am especially happy with the tonality.
Sad to think the cows are all probably just memories of a nice meal now.

Lucky Findings

Morning, as they say around these parts, and it is. Not as cold as it has been thank goodness.
This post is going to extol the sheer enjoyment of walking around with the right camera.
You're probably muttering to yourselves, what? and you could well be right. I wander a lot with a 35mm camera and it is fine, but there's certain things that deserve the breadth of greys that you will only get with 120-size film.
The strange thing about this is, that just using medium format isn't always a guarantee of tone. My main camera for a number of years was a 1960's Rolleiflex T - quite possibly (well any Rollei really) one of the greatest cameras ever invented; negative size was the ubiquitous 6x6 cm,  however I have at times struggled to get a spaciousness of grey tones.
A number of years ago I had a Pentax 67 for a very short time - it was great but totally unreliable, as well as having the loudest shutter on the planet (akin to a bird scarer actually). I returned it to the vendor, and missed it like mad. Last year I had the opportunity to buy a Koni-Omega Rapid 100 - yes it has problems like the film advance which is the most strange thing ever, and its rangefinder is a tad dim, but the lens, gosh it's a beauty. Mine is the 90mm Super Omegon a direct descendent of the original Hexanon in a different shutter. It's a Tessar design, but actually one of the very sharpest lenses I own.  Very versatile, AND attached to the correct 'walkabout' camera (see where I am going here) just the thing for wandering around with just in case the unexpected turns up . . .which in this case it did. It wouldn't have looked half as nice in 35mm.

This TriCool machine was pure happenstance, found in some old mill buildings along the road from me. What it was for I have no idea . . however it was obviously three times cooler than any other machine on the planet.
The scan doesn't do the negative justice. Film was TMY2 400 at EI 400, developed in the rather marvellous HC110 Dilution G. This was a compensating dilution as extolled by Mr. Ansel Adams, and I really like it. HC 110 is very active, but using this dilution semi-stand gives an enormous palette of greys. The camera was handheld, and yes, the white specks everywhere are what you think they are - God bless the pigeon.
There y'go, you've maybe learned something and it wasn't too painless was it.