Interviews with interesting people I bump into from time to time. (The English version of the text will sometimes be at the bottom of the original or vice versa.)

Friday, 12 September 2014

MARK II - the English version...



A TEST SHOT, so to say
With the one thing that failed to flee while I was looking for my first victim.

MARK II, a photo camera and a traveller

1.       Mark, sir, or better yet, Canon 5D Mark II. Thank you for sitting down with us and for your time – something which you obviously have a very competitive attitude towards. You’ve been in the service of Eve of Cleves for quite a while now, counting almost four years since her first real photo-shoot on the 24th of this month. Haw has the time past been for you? For a camera of this age you now seem to be in… post-adolescent, young adult years?

I would point out that my first real photographing wasn’t that of Ms. Drej as is popular belief, but in fact a flood reportage on the same day Mrs. Of Cleves and I first met. We hit the field running, right into the storm. I knew then that in the vehement grip of her tiny hands my life was going to be colourful. You can never tell with Eve – is it going to be the fast paced shots of her hyperactive beagle or night scenes of the street in a downpour, shooting vista or faces against the direct sunlight… There certainly is a lot of buttons-pushing, a lot of lenses exchanging. A camera needs thick skin to keep up.

2.       You are titanium made, are you not?

Parts of me are titanium, yes.


3.       Say, while you were on the shelf, did you ever imagine your career as it has been now? What were your expectations? What were you thinking when you felt, literally, the truck around you moving down the road?

When you're still in the box, in the dark, your head is full. There are lots of conversations with others about crisis areas and the glory that can be reaped there from, despite proportionally shorter lifespan. Others dream about fashion and glamour. The worst fear of every camera is being purchased not by someone without a sense for photography but by someone lazy, dispassionate. Someone who will only use you to photograph their car or their latest trophy wife and then forget about you. Back to shelf, in fact.

4.       Do you suppose your market value and overall quality review distance you from such a fate? Offer a greater chance you WON'T be bought by someone dispassionate?

Afraid not. Smaller, cheaper cameras truly do attract an even less predictable future, but with them the case is often younger people or amateurs whose random day is more fruitful, more eventful. My colleagues rejoice at landing with young families or collectors or avid trekkers.

5.       How do you regard the lenses?

There are two schools of thought - namely a shot can be good regardless of the machine: a photographer, knowing their intention thoroughly, can capture a quality photo with.. I don’t know, a small digital camera with practically no lens to speak of. But it is also true, if we consider photography to be a refined product, a form of expression akin to high art with a finely tuned need towards perfectionism, be it technically or as a statement, any shot could be done BETTER. It is not just about freezing time to a standstill. A camera has a relationship with any lens – good, bad, that is a subject of a debate. Appropriate, poorly chosen for the task.. Perhaps it is not quite right to regard us as a duet but instead as a trio in conjuncture with the photographer. That is the only way to pursue a perfect photo. Anything else is just a beautiful coincidence or a pushing the boundaries of an expression.


6.       What is your opinion on camera phones?

Do not talk to me about camera phones. I don't ask you about tabloids, do I?

7.       Alright. Fair enough. Can you tell us what sort of a photographing individual Eve of Cleves is?

Above all she is a very euphoric one. She gets prepared very excitedly, meticulous to the brink of worrisome, even though she has already mastered a certain level of quality. She is aware each photo session is unique and can be unpredictable. When she is not aiming to out-do herself with each new session, she aims to at least meet the expectations of a client. Once on set, she is almost panicking, barely breathing, not eating, not drinking, not even thinking with the full capacity of her brain. You wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at her, but I can tell. She forgets names, for instance. Her finger is almost constantly on the trigger, snapping hundreds and hundreds of shots. This frightens me sometimes. My battery gets alarmingly hot. We’ve buried one like that already. She drains herself to the point of depression every time, though she can’t help herself. Even after I surrender the work to the computer and get to cool down and rest in the quiet of my bag, I can hear her for hours on end, barely keeping from keeling over, editing the acquired material.

8.       Has her sense of a photo as a form honed since?

She does remain faithful to certain flaws, seemingly rooted in her motor functions. An example of this would be her uncanny insistence on tilting the camera. She has to edit this later on, often rotating the image for less than a degree, but her composition is relentlessly challenged. Her natural understanding of the golden ratio and the dynamic of an individual narrative serve her to her full potential, all the while falling short on single-mindedness. This is also reflected in her inability to settle for the most appropriate lens in a given situation. There are times when she agrees to see only through a 50mm, being the smallest, lightest and offering for the most beautiful bokkeh, but only now, after four years, has she began to realize a 100mm bids a better dialogue with a person being portrayed – less invasive and less sense that they are being slapped on the cheek with every wet smack of the retracting mirror. Same with the flash. She falls in awe of the intuitive capabilities of her gadgets, taking eons to find new functions, wider spectrum of approaches, more experimentation aptitude, a larger variety on the same subject. Using the ‘street lens’, my only zoom lens, she goes into the task with mind-set on wide angle, but she is too shy to get really close and subconsciously starts zooming in – defeating the whole idea of a street photography.

9.       Is, in your opinion, her lack of subject focus a virtue or a shortcoming? Did it ever occur to you to express you view or even insubordination?

It certainly is challenging. It has to be said about her, no subject comes truly unnatural to her – she spends her free time going after the clinically cold architectural photography or the messy smudgy, hysterically colourful ‘party photography’… She is, though, and remains, a portraitist. She looks for the ‘face’, for the ‘expression’ in everything, be it nature, animals, plays on alignment, travel, experiment… I believe we would be amazing in reportage.. To really defy her, failing to perform, has luckily never happened. Nor do I assume it is in my nature to question the background of a photographer’s decision for the task. I would, might, probably give it a hiccup.. at the end of a truly poor taste… If, say, she were to point the camera at a pink poodle with a small silk bow… Then mayhap the shutter would get momentarily stuck. Only momentarily, you understand. I can tell you, though, the first time I had to shoot a nude, I thought it would be the end of me! I expected a shy, timid approach, it was such a complicated, intimate assignment, but the model simply dropped her clothing and started doing some very bendy poses. I almost jumped out of the photographer’s hands! The first few shots were but idiotic blinking, nothing was sharp!

10.   For the closure – what say you of your moonlighting career of a video footage camera?

Hm, now you got me. It’s not something I’ve been drilling too much into, but it does come with the range of my abilities. It is up to my colleagues to either take advantage of that or don’t. I may stress that this trend of taking live footage, which my generation has reignited, professionally, may revolutionise an approach to video, but that poses a double-edge sword: will the coming generation be able to keep up with the hype and interests of the consumers or will it resemble the fashion we’re seeing in the so called ‘vintage’ DSLRs? Because while I am able to offer a very specific, very agreeable tone of video and hope it only improves without moving away from the style, the ‘vintage’ photo cameras shifted wholesomely into an ‘appearance’ as opposed to the delivery of quality of the shot. So will, keeping the video format and building upon it, the photographic side of a photo camera proportionally increase or will it be left behind for the sake of the video quality? I worry a bit about that.


Thank you very much! Many focused shots to come :)

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