On All Cylinders — mnchrm vol. lxvii
Hello, friends! Happy Labor Day! I was lucky enough to get it off this year, which is something of a rarity. Honestly, the coming shortened week is as good as the three-day weekend in my book. Maybe better!
If you’ve forgotten where this letter came from, I’m Ian Battaglia, a writer, photographer, and self-described philomath; and this is my newsletter. You can always update your subscription preferences at the bottom of this email, and if you’ve really enjoyed this dispatch, please consider forwarding it or sharing it with a friend.
I feel as if lately I’ve fallen in love with photography again. It’s long been one of my passions, something I list off when asked “what I do”. But even so, there are times where my focus shifts, or I lose motivation for one reason or another.
For me, a large part of my photography is what I would consider candid or “street” photography, here around my home in Chicago. It’s something I’m intuitive at now, and have spent many a day biking or walking downtown, or out to a new neighborhood, and just walking around for a few hours, driven entirely by intuition, making loops and snapping frames as I see them. Sometimes I find something interesting, or some play of light I like, and I’ll wait for the moment. Others I’ll just wander, never even stopping to fully compose a frame, let alone get a second shot.
But as coronavirus continues in the states, I became much more sedentary. No longer commuting across the city for work, nor wandering for pleasure. And that movement, the wandering, and the people I come across fuel my photography in this vein, the genre that feels nearest to me. No walking, no people, no candid work.
I’ve been working on doing a longer form, more intentional photo project lately as I’ve mentioned more than once, spurned on by Alec Soth’s Magnum Course as recommended by Craig Mod, as I have also mentioned before. The course came at sort of a perfect time for me. Late last year into the start of this one, I was really firing on all cylinders photographically. Just going out and making pictures almost every day, feeling good about the process, and yet yearning for more.
These destination-less photo walks are sort of jazzy, improvised. Only occasionally do I go out with an image to make in mind, and instead just go out with the desire to create. Sometimes I want to play with a specific lens or technique, but that word is apt, it’s “play” as much as anything. Often, the photos I make are grouped best by location or weather conditions as much as intent or project. Take a look inside my editing process, and you’ll see as much!
So I look at photographers who have a body of work like Soth, distinctive cycles and phases and the cohesively grouped photos to match, with a tinge of jealousy. So I put my focus there, on sharpening and designing a project before I went to make the images. Then coronavirus hit, and added another barrier to my old way of working.
Taking advantage of a Summer Sale, I sent in a lens to be cleaned professionally by Fujifilm, something I’ve never done before. I guess they must have been unable to fix it, or perhaps this is how they do it, but after paying the reasonable costs for the repair, I received a brand new version of the lens in the mail, from Fujifilm. I hate that new gear can be such a motivational force, but alas, it can be. So I slapped my new Fujifilm 35mm f/1.4 on the camera, and went for a walk. A long walk. This was no “coronavirus lunch break three block loop”, no sir. I wanted to walk like I used to, for a few hours South until I felt compelled to return North.
Can we talk about this lens? Despite being one of the most well-known Fujifilm lenses, I actually feel like the 35mm f/1.4 is underrated. I posed on Twitter whether a single lens can be a system seller in the way a shiny new game can move the latest Playstation, and I think it can. And if there’s one to do it for Fujifilm, it’s this 35mm f/1.4. I think many people had the same experience I did, locking the 35mm to an X-T1 or early X series camera, taking a few shots, and just knowing this was it.
There’s some lenses that just seem to punch above their weight, that seem to be more than the sum of their parts, and have something arcane working between the elements, and maybe no other lens I’ve owned has magic the same way the 35mm f/1.4 has magic. Luckily for Fujifilm, I think they’ve got a few lenses in this category, though the 35mm is really in a league of it’s own.
In a preview of the forthcoming 50mm f/1 (the fastest autofocus lens in production, at the time of writing), longtime Fujifilm shooter and brand ambassador Jonas Rask wrote about this magic, attributing part of it to the single aspherical element in the back, leaving perhaps slightly more imperfections, slightly more character than other modern lenses might. I don’t know lens engineering that well, so I’ll leave the tech talk to him.
Anyways, it’s a great lens. But on Fuji cameras it has the equivalent field of view of about a 50mm, and I tend to want to shoot wider than that, so I had often left it at home. But man, there is something about this lens. So I took a long walk. And I took some photos. And in a way, it feels like it’s all coming back to me. I remember I don’t have to work in only one way, and never do. I stretch out in many directions, an amoeba with ADD. Maybe there are ways this process gets in the way, but it also works for me. I yearn for complete focus, and maybe that will come, in time, but I don’t have to abandoned what’s been fruitful for so long, despite being forced to adapt a bit.
Here’s some photos from the walk, scaled ideally to newsletter size—
My baseball team, the Cubs, hasn’t quite been firing on all cylinders lately. But one of the broadcasters, Jim Deshaies, a man of great wisdom in my book, said something (perhaps quoted?) that stuck with me: “I’m not sure if I’m in a rut or a groove!”
Ain’t that just the way. Sometimes, the only difference is perspective.
Thanks for sticking with me. I’ve got more photo content coming up on Patreon, including the second part of my complete photo editing series, this time free of all technical issues! Additionally, I’ll be posting the conclusion to my discussion of photographic formats soon (Part One here), along with the anime writing you know and love. Thanks for your continued support.
Stay strong, fight on.
From Chicago with love.
Your faithful commander,
— I