Trimmings: Hands

THIS SERIES OF PHOTOS BEGAN WITH THE FACT THAT a regular roll of 35mm film has at least one or two more frames than fit comfortably into a standard negative storage sheet. For years that meant that, as a stingy young photographer, I'd save the extra, trimmed-off frames. After several years I became more relaxed with the penny-pinching, and would try to waste the first frame of every roll by taking a photo of my hand, held in front of my lens, to check that the auto focus was working.

The result was hundreds of photos of my left hand, either blurred or sharp, with perhaps a glimpse of grass or sidewalk or a corner of a hotel room behind it. I threw out most of them as I'd cut up rolls for sleeving, but near the end of the analog era, when I began letting photo lags process my negatives, I'd end up with a 4x6 machine print of my hand at the front of every set of proof prints.

This is a selection of just three of those proof prints, taken around a decade ago, with either my trusty Canon EOS Elan or the Elan 7e that replaced it. They're pictures of my hand, of course, but they're also relics from the last moments of film. It's not worth pointing out that I no longer take pictures of my hand.

It was actually part of a ritual: Squat down in front of the camera bag, unzip it, pull out the camera and mount the lens I thought I'd need; power up the camera, take off the lens cap, then hold my hand out and point the lens at it before squeezing off a quick frame. A precise sequence of actions that commenced every shoot I did for years.

You'll have to believe me that abandoning that ritual has made most of the work I've done since then feel less like a professional task and more ad hoc; more a hobby than a job. Which is probably true enough.

Because I'd usually hold my hand closer to the lens than the nearest focal distance, I'd hear the tiny servo motor in the autofocus lens rack in and out a couple of times, trying to find focus, before I'd press the shutter. It was like I was teasing the camera, frustrating it before letting the little machine I trusted so intimately do its job.

Trimmings: Easter

Cristo Blanco, Cusco, Peru, October 2003

THE STATUE OF CHRIST, ARMS OUTSTRETCHED, THAT STANDS OVER RIO DE JANEIRO is probably more famous than the shorter one that overlooks Cusco, just a short walk from the ruins at Sacsayhuaman. I had no idea it was there when my guide took me there on my third day in Peru.

The White Christ, or Christo Blanco, was a gift to Cusco, built by Palestinian Christian refugees in Peru in 1945 before they returned home after the war.

It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles. And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not. Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.

Trimmings

A VIEW FROM A HOTEL ROOM WINDOW. But where? My only clue is the date on the back of a 4x6" photo lab print: October 14, 2003.

The only place I remember going in 2003 was Peru. So is this the view from my hotel in Lima, snapped offhandedly as I blew off a frame or two on the front of a roll while loading my Canon 7e, just after I'd checked in, and before a very brief night's sleep preceding the flight to Cuzco the next morning?

Probably.

The columns of blurred light makes it look like a different city - a colonnaded and arched one - is growing out of the bubbling lights below. Not that Lima wasn't fantastic enough, at least to my eyes.

Here's another trimming, shot from the same spot. A bit less magical and mysterious: a nighttime view of the Palacio de Justicia across the Avenida España, shot on either the Canon or my Olympus Stylus:

And another bonus trimming: A view from inside the same room in the Sheraton Lima:

 

Trimmings

Teri, Parkdale, 1992

HER NAME WAS TERI, AND SHE WAS THE GIRLFRIEND of Dave, my old boss at Nerve. She was a model and needed portfolio shots so Dave gave me a call. I wanted some fashion in my own portfolio, so it was a good trade.

We started in my studio in Parkdale but - impetuously - I suggested we head outside after a few different setups and try to get something ... grittier. We ended up in a dodgy greasy spoon by the corner of Lansdowne (now long gone) where the patrons gave us funny looks but let me shoot in a booth and in the back, by the kitchen, where they stacked the empties.

My brief forays into fashion photography will be the subject of another post. All I can say now is that I loved the challenge of shooting fashion and even liked some of the results, but couldn't see my way to getting a foothold in that part of the business.

Trimmings

Sacsayhuaman, Peru, 2003

THE BOTTOM OF AN INCA WALL, snapped while I loaded film into my new Canon EOS Elan 7 on the third day of a press junket to Peru. These stones were put in place when Europe was building cathedrals, but the Inca empire was neolithic, so it feels so much older.

This was taken at Sacsayhuaman (or Saksaywaman, depending on what you're reading.) I'd already been to Lima, Cuzco and Macchu Picchu by the time I was taken to see these massive walls. They're wildly impressive - most Inca ruins are - but are only a remnant of what was once here - all but the heaviest stones were carted off to nearby Cuzco to help build the new Spanish colonial centre.

I'll eventually get around to scanning the photos I took on this trip, but they come at the end of my twenty years of pre-digital photography, at the foot of the analog wall which, in my mind at least, is still almost as solid as these Inca stones.

Trimmings

THIS MONTH'S LUCKY DIP into the box of film trimmings is a streetscape, but it's certainly not anywhere in Canada or the United States. If you're from the UK, however, you'll recognize it as a classic middle class Victorian terraced street.

It's Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill, where I stayed over the Christmas of 1997 with an old friend and his pregnant girlfriend (now wife.) It was my first time in the UK - my first time overseas, in fact - and I spent the first few days on the ground suffering from something I'd never encountered before: Jet lag.

I remember staying up late at night staring out over the rooftops, sleepless and fascinated by urban features like the gasometers I could glimpse in the distance, confounded at how they would be different heights whenever I looked at them. London was terribly expensive - more than I anticipated, and even though my friend paid for my meals, the £200 I managed to scrape together for the trip evaporated from my wallet just buying a pint or a newspaper or a magazine.

It's also a frame from the last film I would ever shoot with my Pentax SV, taken along in the interest of being as portable as possible. It was fun to use a camera with a single prime lens and no meter - a challenge to my skills at a point in my life when I would have described myself as a photographer and nothing else.

Trimmings

LET'S TAKE ANOTHER DIP INTO THE MARBLE BOX and see what we come up with. For anyone confused about this feature of the blog, read this.

They aren't mugging enough to the camera to be actors, so they have to be a band. But who? That's probably the front man in the middle, and his hair rings a bell. I was going to say it's a Vancouver band called the Grapes of Wrath, but a cursory Googling tells me that this was the three-piece edition that performed as Ginger when a founding member left and the band's name was stuck in legal limbo.

A glance through the big ledger book tells me that I shot Ginger in August of 1994, when they released a record called Far Out. As I write this, there are three used copies of Far Out available on amazon.ca for less than a buck.

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the marble box

PERHAPS ITS MY SCOTTISH BLOOD, but I hate wasting anything useful, so I save rubber bands and plastic bags. Back when I shot film, I used to save film trimmings - the stray frames from the beginning or the end of rolls that you'd sacrifice to make a better fit when you were cutting up a roll to fit into negative sleeves. I'm aware that anyone who's only ever shot digital won't have a clue what I mean.

Back when I started as a photographer, I discovered that if you fed your 35mm rollfilm onto the take-up spool of your camera carefully, you could get 37 frames out of a 36 frame roll. I didn't know what to do with that odd frame when I'd finished cutting up rolls to sleeve, so I had a habit of saving them into a little marble box on my desk, a hand-me-down from my brother-in-law. (I think he used to keep his stash in it.)

I used 36 frame negative sheets for the first few years that I shot until I discovered that 35 frame sheets fit into binders better and made for neater contact sheets on 8x10 paper. Which meant that I had to sacrifice a frame to fit a 36 shot roll into a 35 frame sheet. Needless to say my Scottish tightness chafed against this waste, and so the trimmed frame would end up in the marble box.

Talking to my friend Jonathan Castellino the other day about those stray shots that your camera takes when you put it in a bag without turning it off, I remembered these film trimmings as the closest equivalent in the analog world, and remembered the marble box on my desk.

The trimmed frames were still in it.

And so, as a tribute to the random nature of film photography and those happy accidents that sometimes happen, every month I'll pull a frame out of the box and scan it. Some might be abstract blurs or shots of my camera bag or offhandedly composed pictures I took, knowing I was wasting a frame. I might even remember where I took them. Here's number one:

The Catalan signs hanging from the balconies are a dead giveaway - this is the Placa del Pi in Barcelona, and the view from our hotel room at the Hotel el Jardi in the early summer of 1998. This might be the first frame of the first roll I shot there, on the first trip I took with the woman who would be my wife three years later.

There was some kind of protest going on by the residents on the square against some local authority, but without sufficient Catalan I couldn't tell you what it was about then or now. It's a lovely square, with a medieval basilica on one end and a Basque tapas bar I'd frequent while my girlfriend was off teaching classes at the university. I would love to be there now.