[matthew]

There's a place in Toronto that spends its weekends as a publicly-accessible nature preserve and the workweek as the city's landfill site for construction debris. It's a long spit of land that juts out into the lake, and the part that I like looks like this:





I've been taking landscape photos there for years (the one above is from a few weeks ago, shot with the Zeiss ZM 35/2 and Ektar 100 film) and landscape photography isn't really something that I find much of myself in. In March I went there with my Hasselblad, to prepare for my first trip to New York, and used B&W film. However, this was just a few days after the massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, and those photos have been waiting for more images to round them out before I would be happy to show them. To that end I went out with my big Fuji for a visit in July, and came back with photos that look like this:









All photos are taken with the 210mm lens on Kodak "New Portra 400" film. I do love that camera.

The Fuji's claim to fame, aside from weighing more than most newborn people, is the ability to control perspective and its plane of focus. I also experimented with its close-focus ability, but forgot to allow for the bellows factor when I was calculating the exposure. But as I was packing up to go home I already knew what my next trip would be for, even though I had to wait a month before the conditions were right.

For my most recent trip there – the one that also provided the opening photo – I carried only small-format equipment, including my D700 and 85mm PC-E lens for their first use on a personal project since the start of 2010. (fittingly, as it turns out.) I carried a bit of other gear as well, and this is what I came away with:











Those photos, as much as I like them, are all out-takes that don't make the cut to be included in the eighteen images that make up the core of the series. The full collection, including a less verbose introduction, is here: matthew robertson photographs: Lakefill

I'm not going to stop taking my landscape photos, but I feel like these photos finally bring more of myself to the images. I may be the only one who feels this, but I find them arresting each time I look at them.

Technical: the camera was positioned horizontally for the entire shoot. Vertical compositions were captured across two or three images and then merged as a 'panorama' in photoshop. Originally photographed between one and two stops overexposed to blow out the white backdrop, these have only needed a minimum of clean-up before having their tones restored in Lightroom. It turns out that the Nikon D700 is a pretty decent camera.

As I knew that the images would be presented on white, I only photographed enough width to capture the objects' shadows. Much of the white has been added in postproduction, which puts most of the camera pixels on the subject where they belong. The background is several sheets of white bristol board, resting on a convenient block of concrete for the base and propped up against my bike for the rear. The light is simply natural, with no additional strobes or modifiers.

I took over 200 photos in order to assemble 45 finished images, of which 38 are unique subjects. I've selected eighteen with the intention of being able to present them as a book, and I have to admit that I like the idea of putting the WD40 photo on the front cover. For the back I'd have a landscape, possibly the one that starts this post. But I still have a couple of months of good weather, so perhaps the project isn't done yet.

Full project: matthew robertson photographs: Lakefill