"Fenêtre de ma cuisine..."
(Window of my kitchen...)
Every sunny morning about twenty minutes after sunrise, the light comes through my kitchen window in the most wonderful way. A few times I've made it a point to be cooking breakfast at that time, just so I could be there, watching the light changing as the sun moved behind the bushes and trees outside, throwing patterns on the dirty window glass I never clean because it lights up in such a lovely way in the morning light.
I work in large format and have gotten very used to the original concept of the camera itself being not much more than a little dark box with film on one side and a lens on the other.
It's the lens that actually creates the image. After using early soft focus lenses with deliberately-induced spherical aberration, I've begun making my own lenses, put together by hand from other disassembled lenses, diopters, doublets, achromatic cells, magnifying glasses, old binoculars...
Factory lenses strive for perfection, perfect resolution and contrast and color saturation without flare or coma or any sort of optical aberration. Perfect lenses, like perfect people, no flaws, no surprises, no personality. Stepford lenses...
But with lenses, as with people, it's the flaws that can be beautiful when you accept them and get to know them. I think this is why some people are being drawn to Holgas and Lens-Babies and the like. Beauty in the imperfection.
"Fenêtre de ma cuisine..." was done with a home-made 12" lens that allowed more chromatic abberation than even an old soft-focus lens would give, so I could shut it down in aperture a bit and still have a beautiful mess. Beautiful to me, anyways... Just two elements, a half-meter's focal length in front, a meter's at the rear, spaced a little too close. It just can't get all the different colors focused in the right place, but stop it down a bit and it tries. It doesn't quite succeed, but it fails so wonderfully. And the spread of the color focus speads the depth of field just so slightly, that while there's a fuzz, there's a faint underlying sharpness too. But it's the softness and the play of the light I love.
I have other 12" lenses that would have captured this with so much more detail, but missed the real impression of the moment. When I remember a certain someone's face, I don't remember the detail of her skin pores or her individual eyebrow hairs. I remember the glow of her skin, the the softness of the sparkle in her eyes, the outpouring of joy when she smiled. Not the physical details a camera could capture. The more important things.
I have high school students who, after two or three years in photography think they know it all. After thirty-some years in large format, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface...
