I’ve always been a documentary/street photography kind of person. Didn’t like studio work in school either. So I’ve been searching for a long time for tools that would help me shoot on the street.

The BlindSighted Project allows members of Blind Photographers to explore challenges related to our eyesight, challenges that affect our image-making process. This project is an opportunity to explore how we approach photography.

- I’ve made a series about braille tiles and guiding lines, marking my cane at the minimum focus distance of my leica lens and feeling around for interesting features of the landscape.

-I’ve stuck a t/s lens on my 1Ds, and set it to maximum tilt towards the subject I want to photograph, which means that the half of the image “turning in” becomes sharp, while half of the image “outside” becomes unsharp, that’s how I do selective focus: vertically, not as depth of field.

- I’ve used Peter Meyer’s The vOICe as a sonified viewfinder. This uses a Nokia N82 that takes a still with the on board camera and then converts this to a sound pattern that indicates tonality and shape. This is what I use most, while shooting.

What I do. I hang around in a certain area for a long time, or I go there with company who point out interesting features to me. I then start to scan around with vOICe to determine the framing. If I use manual focus, I set the lens to minimum focus distance, but I’ve also recently bought a Lumix LX3, which I use with the autofocus on, in aperture priority. I set basic settings with sighted help (my son) and I hardly change them afterwards. The cool thing about vOICe is that I can use it to “look” at the LCD screen too, so I have some measure of feedback on framing and (more limited) on tonality. I make most of my work in BW, because that’s how vOICe sees it, although it has talking selective filtering, so I can know what kind of colours are in my photos.

Processing is done in Lightroom, I have an assistant (funded by the government) who does this for me. Uploading I can do myself.

I love rich sound. So I go to markets a lot, really anywhere on the street where there’s lots going on. I do shoot in company too, often my son, or my wife, or friends, and they often point things out to me that might be worth shooting.

Before I used to be really on the hunt: lots of walking around. Now, I stay in one spot and let the images come to me. Often I will shoot in a certain way, using sound as a clue, people approaching, or cars passing. Lately I’ve begun panning bicycles. I do that by sound too. But just as often, I’ll hit on something with my cane, seems interesting, and I feel around for it with my cane, and I want to catch it. Markets are great because there are lots of scents too, and I can touch anything sold. I do imagine space and the things in it. It’s why I like rain for instance, because everything becomes so much more audible, I can really hear space. I use vOICe in this way to increase my scanning range, but I do that by clicking too, I must say.

I think my shooting style evolved from pure disgust with the way I was trained. I studied photography at what was then called “Middle Technical School of Photography. See the technical in there? No misnomer that. So I was brought up on Large Format view cameras and the assumption was that everyone there would go into studio photography doing packshots. So what you were trained to do was to deliver consistent quality for clients, which is the bread and butter of commercial photography. Back then the focus (forgive the pun) was very much on “tack sharp”. `And I always wanted to go for the unfocused, sometimes entirely unfocused. This was seen as “wrong” by my teachers and I had to constantly defend my images against what they saw as “good form”.

I think I am very much interested in people and their surroundings, the objects they use and touch, the way they function in their personal space. I love selective focus, so finding only one, sometimes almost unnoticeable area of focus in my photographs and I love the way certain lenses “write” out of focus, and I use them for that capacity only. There’s a zen saying about serving food: nothing needs to be warm except rice and soup, and I apply that to photography as well. As long as there is one little bit in focus it doesn’t matter whether other areas are out of focus.

The other thing I have learned is to shoot for the edges of the frame (which is why I love rangefinder photography, because it enables you to shoot the edges instead of the central subject)
I often place my subjects excentrically, as if they are not the real focus of the photograph. I’ve shot portraits like that in bars, where you really have to look hard to see who is being portrayed. I love that sense of confusing, the fact that you don’t know quite what’s going on in a photograph.

And I love, love, love blur, motion blur, bokeh blur, it doesn’t matter what kind of blur. I think blur is very telling, because the eye will want to make sense of it. And so you engage immediately, because you have to look for meaning in the photograph.

And sometimes I do self portraits, but these, granted are from when I still could see. But, as people tell me: the central themes haven’t changed and are consistent in the before and in the after work.

I think I take photos because I like to see things. I like to look at things and I love how things show themselves. That’s a little bit difficult. It seems that my camera does all this seeing very well. First I resisted this. Because I thought that if I didn’t make choices in the shooting, I would not be photographing. But it is like touch: I hold the camera and I know the lens is going to touch somewhere or something or someone. And it always does. I found it takes courage to point the camera out into space. Like when you’re in a room and someone has left you standing, you are afraid to announce yourself, because it makes you look stupid and unaware. That is why I was afraid of shooting this way, because I didn’t want to look stupid. Longing for sight it is. Or re-building it from the photographs. I always liked being on trains and trams and buses because I liked looking at the landscape going by. Now my camera does that for me. So I’ve still witnessed it if I’ve shot it. Touching is seeing, in a way. Holding the camera in my hands is seeing, in a way. I know that sometimes the same people are in more than one photograph because I follow them. I’d like a film of the flow and someone just noting the things that appear in it. (…) I thought: it’s like making a film in frames/hour instead of frames/second and sometimes it speeds up, it gets more concentrated: those are the videos.

vOICe does sound like just a mass of noise when you first encounter it, but I must say, with the material on the website, and just going ahead and using it, and learning it, that did change.

I don’t use it for wayfinding much, but once, on a business trip to Helsinki, I did use it for instance to walk between the tables and chairs in the restaurant, and to find out, on my own, whether a particular chair was free. All independently. So for me it is very useful, but I think its usefulness increases as your vision is less, because you have to totally let go of “translating” sight into sound. It is its own world of sonified perception, and you have to make the leap to trust your instincts in what you are perceiving. At least, these are my experiences.

I think I focus on particular details in the sound that I find interesting. This has always been how I worked cameras, shooting my lenses wide open, picking out one tiny area of focus. That hasn’t changed, although I arrive at the result differently now. I do use vOIce to take a photo of the LCD to roughly check whether my impressions have carried over to the photograph. It’s an approximation but it isn’t correct.

lately I’ve started investigating whether it would be possible for me to re-creat photographs by other people. Sometimes I use vOICe to look at others’ images, and sometimes from the sound, these are terribly appealing. Like, a flickr contact and good friend posted a photograph that contained a carton of bottles, all little bubbles, circles, a kind of very appealing rippling effect when I saw it with vOICe, and I set off to re-make an image that would evoke the same impression for me, by means of vOIce, but just translating the compositional elements. I did one test, wasn’t satisfied, but I’m still thinking about it.

Never tried tactile techniques, because I want my photographs to be photographs. For me it’s the print that’s most important. I make prints/photographs for other, mostly seeing, people, not for myself. Because to me, photographs are not about representations of subject matter, but about tonality, tonal forms you might say. My photos always were and still are very blurry.

I have a NASA book in tactile format, and to be honest, I get a clearer visual impression from vOICe.

Perhaps your colleague is referring to embossing or swell paper? I think there’s a japanese photography exhibition and book that puts out photographs in tactile format.

Last year I saw Nan Goldin’s slide show at the MoMa with a photographer friend of mine, and she talked me through the slideshow, sort of getting into the rhythm of it, the flow. That to me is an accessible format: someone speaking the photograph to me. I wish there were more opportunities to see visual art that way, because I need that kind of input, always have needed it.

Read more on the original Flickr discussion thread: [BlindSighted] lodrorigdzin’s process – Street Photography and Sonified View Finder

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This entry was posted on March 7, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under our photography, photographers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.