UFOs: Where Did All the Bees Go?

I saw this man looking over the Inner Harbor of Baltimore from the top of Federal Hill. He was purposefully anachronistic in his clothing; I was too with my mechanical camera and film. So, a quick click as part of my daily photographic diary.

When I printed the picture, I noticed a “black spot” in the upper left quadrant.  A bird, I thought, but it did not have wings.  A plane, but it had no distinguishable features. Intrigued, I looked under my loupe.

It was a strange capture!  I could clearly see the antennae, head, legs and abdomen of a bee. Yet something was wrong with the relative size of that bee within the picture: it was just too big to be a bee! I estimated that it was at least 40 feet away from my lens, yet it looks the size of a small bird. 

Further, the focus seems almost appropriate, placing this creature in the same plane as the anachronistic man. I enlarged the “bee”—yes, it sure looks like a bee!

Is it a bee? Or, as the high-top hat of this man, it is a visitor from another time.  Another space?

I do not know. But the unintended captures through an old lens and 100 ASA film makes me often realize that it is not enough to rely on our eyes to see what surrounds us.  

September 21, 2014

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2014

Street Photography from a Dog's Perspective

September started with festive weeks in Baltimore. Tall ships came to the harbor from different oceans and the streets filled a million visitors for music, foods of the world, and fireworks at night. It is the Centennial Celebration week of the Star s Spangled Banner, remembering the victory of the Battle of Baltimore, when the British failed in their attack on Fort McHenry in 1814, and Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”.  With all these people everywhere, I was certain that I will have a grand time with my camera.

But I did not. Somehow I was unable to find interesting people in a million-strong crowd! They all seemed to just walk, incessantly take pictures with their digital gizmos, and do nothing unusual! After walking in the crowd for a couple of hours, I decided that it was not my day for pictures.

On the way back, I saw a dog and his friend sitting on a 4 meter tall wall at the board of the ocean waters. Perhaps they had also given up walking in that ocean of people. Instinctively I took a picture. Then I realized that the dog was at a higher elevation than I was looking down at me. And a thought crossed my mind: 

 How does the world look to this dog when he is on the ground walking among a million people? That makes for two million legs!  What does he see? Clearly not the faces of people. How does he interpret all these feet and legs he walks through?

Aha! I had a theme now—I planned to go out the next day and take pictures of peoples’ legs. It would be a dog’s perspective. And I wondered:  if I can train my dog to use a camera, what will be in his frames?

That idea made me smile, almost laugh. What a couple we would make if my dog and I hang a 1948 Rolleiflex from our necks and go out to take pictures!

… The next day was rainy but warm. I covered my camera under a small umbrella and went out to discover a dog’s perspective in street photography.

For starters, I needed a small crowd. I looked around for a while to realize how boring it is to look at peoples’ legs and feet. Sure, aesthetically some legs are more attractive than others, but in the street, everyone seemed to stand in a most boring way. So I decided to start with such a picture. 

What would a dog think about such a crowd? Maybe a smaller group will be more interesting? I was totally shocked to realize that if I point my lens to legs in a group, they all seem so banal, so pedestrian! Clearly, I did not have the appreciation of a dog’s perspective and I needed to first see the faces of these people.

Ok, what about a depth of field challenge? If a single person is the focus point, does that give the dog a different perspective? Do dogs have a selective focusing capability like my 1970 Nikkor 105 mm lens? Or do they see everything equally focused? 

And then, I caught that second all of us hope to capture when holding a camera: the man in this couple lifted a leg! Ha, I was laughing when I clicked hoping that later on when I develop the film, I will be rewarded with the intended shot. And I was. “Now”, I said to myself “a dog will fully understand what this man is about to do!” 

Finally, I needed a dog picture to bring things to a normal perspective and routine. But not just a picture of a dog, rather a dog next to legs. And I found it. 

… Silly project? Perhaps. But I have to admit that I had more laughs with this excursion into a million people-strong crowds than I had in previous projects. And, I learned that at the level of a dog’s eyes, human legs are boring!

September 13, 2014

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2014

From Beirut 40 Years Later

Recently, I have been going through my mother’s boxes.  It took me a few years to be ready for this inquiry.

I already wrote about the Ottoman era pocket watch made by Armenian watchmakers I found in one of her boxes (http://vahezen.blogspot.com/2014/07/ottoman-times-armenian-timemakers.html). Today I will share a photo, with a history.

… To my surprise, in a shoebox (Hachim Shoes, a well known Lebanese shoe maker) I found rolled 35mm negatives, 127 film strips, and even large format cut-negatives from the 1940s. Large format? Who in the family used such expensive cameras in those days of war, immigration and struggle in Lebanon? I took the box to my darkroom equipped with 1950s enlargers, loops, trays and memorabilia from my previous darkrooms. I spent days looking at these negatives under the loop and wondering who all these people were.

Then I rolled open the 35mm negatives. These were my photos taken in the 1960s and 1970s with my 1954 Russian Kiev camera. Even then I was curious about mechanical things, so I had opened the camera to see what was inside and realized that it was in fact a true German Contax rebadged as Kiev. I have since owned and used hundreds of classic cameras but I believe that Kiev was a watchmaker’s work—it was pure joy to wind and click, and the Sonnar lens had the creamiest bokeh wide-open.

Most of the negatives were creased, cracked, scratched and affected by time and friction. After all they have travelled to four countries in the past 70 years like their immigrant owners. And in the 1970’s they have seen war. 

So, I decided to print a few pictures from the 35mm negatives, all taken during the 1970s Lebanese Civil War. The one that shocked me when I watched it slowly come to life in the developer tray, under the red darkroom light, was that of a young man, with what seems a hookah tube in his hand.  The tortured negative had not affected his eyes—after a minute in the developer solution they were looking at me with an intensity that froze me and made me forget to take the paper out of the solution to the “Stop Bath” tray making the print darker and the eyes surprisingly brighter.

… I hung the print to dry after washing it under running water and continued to look at it under the red light. These were the eyes of a young man wondering what the future reserves when stuck inside an apartment during a civil war. It was a vivid moment from 40 years ago, kept in a shoebox to come back to life in my darkroom.

What sent a chill down my spine was the fact that this was an auto-portrait, taken with my 1954 Kiev camera probably placed on our coffee table, in Beirut, sometime between 1974 and 1975…

September 7, 2014

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2014