Simon Keitch Photography Blog

Here are a few candid portraits of Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel from an interview with him backstage at the Plymouth Pavilions stop of the Black Procession European tour. I shot a mixture of film and digital during the interview with Rocklouder but these are all film scans; the digital images look great but the square format and grainy black and white film stock (Ilford Delta 3200) suits the candid documentary style perfectly I think, and I’ve found myself choosing this super-high ISO film stock and going with the available ambient light a lot more recently.

I first met documentary film maker Mark Kidel last Summer when he was in Plymouth to film one of my photo shoots with performance artist Francesca Steele – Mark is producing a documentary about Francesca’s bodybuilding performance piece ‘Routine’ – and we’ve met up a few times since with me turning the camera on him more recently. Mark has forged an amazing career producing and directing films on a broad range of subjects including artists as diverse as Ravi Shankar, Mario Lanza, and Tricky, was a founding producer of the groundbreaking BBC arts documentary series ARENA and even collaborated with Peter Gabriel on the concept for a world music festival that eventually grew to become the world famous WOMAD festivals. For more information about Mark Kidel’s work head over to http://www.calliopemedia.co.uk/

Grant Jenness - Kodak Portra NC 160

I think that anyone who started out in the darkroom as opposed to Photoshop can’t help but romanticise about film to some degree; digital technology is so good now but it still lacks that tangibility of analogue. As well as having a very different look and feel to the images themselves the whole process is very different and as much as I love and have embraced digital photography, pushing a Compact Flash card into a slot just isn’t the same as loading a roll of film. I’ve been flirting with using film again for about a year or so after exclusively shooting digital for several years, but it wasn’t until late last year that I decided to start seriously using film again. I’d kept a casual eye out for a used Hasselblad for a long time – probably a couple of years – and with so many photographers jumping ship to digital there’s no shortage of used film cameras for sale at a fraction of the price you’d expect to pay for a pro level digital body alone, and I eventually picked up a 1994 – the year I left school! – 501C.

I’ve always used 35mm systems so medium format has been an interesting learning experience in itself along with the unique idiosyncrasies of the Hasselblad design. Square format, a waist level viewfinder – as well as the flipped view of the viewfinder screen which made me feel drunk at first - and manual focus all combine to provide a completely different way of working to my DSLR, but after the steep initial learning curve I’m enjoying the process as well as mixing cameras and formats; I get bored so easily that I’ve occasionally wondered if I have some degree of ADD, and I’m finding that chopping and changing between such different cameras and formats keeps me focused and creatively inspired. I’m hoping that some clients may ask for film for certain assignments but in the meantime I’m shooting film both for certain personal projects and alongside digital for assignment work where possible and appropriate and at the very least in those instances it’ll give the Art Director another option which is always important, and especially so I think with digital now being so ubiquitous. I actually read an interview with a gallery owner recently where they stated that although they believed that film doesn’t necessarily produce a ‘better’ (that is a subjective word of course…) print it does have a greater perceived value as it’s a disappearing medium. Food for thought.

Rob Clark - Kodak Portra NC 160

I’ve been meaning to experiment a little more with the Holga 120N since I picked one up nearly a year ago; if you’re unfamiliar with Holga they’re a Chinese company that produce 120 film format ‘toy’ cameras that feature not only a plastic body but also a plastic lens; the cheap construction produces photographs that have a distinctive quality (or lack of it), plus you never know what you’re going to get back from the lab. I specifically ordered the Holga 120N as it features a hotshoe for mounting a flash, with the intention of hooking it up to some lights; there’s something pretty hilarious about plugging a Pocket Wizard radio transceiver into the hotshoe of a camera that costs less than £20 including shipping from China, and then syncing it with a 750 watt flash head and power pack… The frame on the left is (obviously…) from the Holga, shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 and straight out of the film scanner (no additional post production), while the right hand frame is from the Nikon D3. The subject is Devon based artist Clem So who’s a huge talent and was a great pleasure to work with; we got a lot of great images from the shoot so I’ll blog some more about my sitting with him in due course.

Update: finally got a decent scan of the Holga/Tri-X negative (the above was a lo-res scan straight from the lab); what a difference… You can really see the Holga weirdness on this; looks like something from a drunken dream.

I was in Plymouth last night to photograph the Late Night Lido Endeavour, an artist’s film event staged by the Plymouth Arts Centre over the last three evenings at the Tinside Lido amphitheatre on Plymouth Hoe and curated by the artist Tim Knowles whose Wanderlust solo exhibition is showing at the Plymouth Arts Centre currently. Mr Knowles himself is featured above just before Sunday’s screening, and post swim (and it was a cold evening… Paula Orrell from the Plymouth Arts Centre also had a swim but was wearing a wetsuit if that tells you anything). The recent heatwave seems a long time ago now but the clouds cleared and made for a dry evening at least and although not too many braved the water there was a good turnout and it was nice to see the Lido put to good use since its refurbishment. The theme of the event was films that ‘explore ideas of endeavour, where the artists place themselves in challenging, potentially dangerous and unpredictable situations’ which for some reason makes me recall a number of past assignments…