Thomas Birke

This post describes my process of creating an 8x10 image in urban surrounding in detail. It is not a quick read, but mainly a resource I can quote to answer the questions about my working process.

I will shoot a video for every single step in the future and put up a direct link here, so that you can see me work eye to eye.

So here we go:

1. find an area of interest - when I travel, I constantly make notes of interesting places, images and movies I have seen. I try to find out where the images and movies where shot, check on google earth and flickr - I am also randomly scrolling cities, looking for interesting building constellations, interesting shapes, highways, hills, water and bridges - I also check a lot of blogs and flickr streams for inspiration of places to go - the opportunities are endless!
2. Go out and scout the area - I usually do this at daytime, because I don’t like daylight for my pictures. So that time presents the perfect opportunity to scout - I ride to the location, usually on subway, sometimes by bus. I equip myself with a small digital point and shoot camera - I use a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2, which is a charm to work with. There is a follow up model - the LX3, which even is better. But it just doesn’t matter, as long as you can make custom adjustments to the aperture and exposure time, you’re fine. I then start wandering around, looking for interesting viewpoints and views, i checkout fire escapes, stairs, hills, plattforms, whatever could be of interest. I frame a lot with my small camera and try to imagine different shots with different focal lengths, make some wide angle images for documentation and then I go on. I prefer to scout by foot - I tried scouting by bike and by car, but I never found good places. You always have to find a parking lot or lock your bike if you want to examine something closer - and you stop from doing it after the 3rd time, because it takes so long in a city, especially finding parking lots!
3. Choose your subject for the night - Back home or in the hotel again I check the memory shots I made with my small cam and decide on the location to shoot. To make some informed decisions, I also check google earth again, to see the cardinal points and estimate, where the sun will come down or go up, because this is an important factor for the images I will be able to make. Then I check a weather website to see when the sun will go down or up, how strong the wind is, if there is rain expected etc. I usually refrain from going when there is more than 20 km/h of wind and heavy rain. If everything seems right, you’re good to go, just check for the nearest underground or bus station and the travel time and then start packing.
4. Packing the gear for the trip - You have a plan and are now able to pack your gear accordingly. Which focal lengths will you need? What film will be the best? Do you need one or two tripods? (I would recommend two tripods with more than 600mm of focal length) Which bellows would you need? On and on. This step for me is full of excitement, because it feels like preparing for a battle - remember - failing to prepare is preparing to fail! If you are not sure you have everything - write a list and take it with you. If you forgot anything in the field, add it to the list and check it everytime before you leave. I always forgot my loupe for example, which is a heavy burden for focusing. Check your list after ten successful trips and examine if you really needed everything - cross out things you didn’t ever need - makes your heavy gear a little more lightweight.
5. Getting to the location - Never underestimate the complexity of urban transport. Especially during rush hour your trip could take longer than expected. Loaded with heavy gear you are not as fast as with nothing more than a small digicam. I try to time my trips in a manner that I am at the location exactly at sunrise or sunset, because the interesting light usually happens 30 to 90 minutes after that event. This gives me some buffer and allows to conveniently assemble my camera!
6. Assemble your camera - try to imagine the perfect framing and decide what to set up, you should have thought about this already back home when you packed your gear. Since I have a monorail cam, i take the following steps to assemble: Tripod -> head -> rail clamp -> rail -> front standart -> rear standart -> bellows -> lens -> hood mask -> dark cloth - this generally takes about 5 minutes, including leveling the parts based on what the bubble levels tell me.
7. Adjust your Settings - Now it is time to crawl underneath your dark cloth and check the groundglass. Yeah, it’s mirrored and upside down and one of the best moments during the whole process. I use a loupe to focus, a 4x loupe by Rodenstock, and I feel this is totally sufficient. If you go higher in magnification, like with a 10x loupe, you see too much of the grain of the sanded groundglass und too few of the image. Check for straight lines, check if you don’t cut off anything and if the framing is as you thought it would be, close the lens shutter. Now it is time to decide on the exposure value. I mostly go with F22, since this is the best trade-off between abberation and the diffraction limit of most optics I use. To determine the correct exposure time I use experience a lot lately, since conditions are pretty standard all the time after the sun got down. Just to be sure I use my Minolta Autometer IV with a 5° Spot Attachment or my small digicam to make test exposures and reference the result to my f22 aperture. It mostly is between 4 and 16 minutes. Now to the worst part.
8. click and wait - not much valuable to say about this step. I hate it, since I am not a Zen person. Especially if it is cold or windy, because you always fear that your camera could shake and that’s the single most common source of ruined images for me. I tried to shield the wind with an umbrella, but I noticed very quickly, that you never have a constant wind direction in cities. During 4 minutes, the wind will come from every direction if you are among high rises. And I also blurred images with my umbrella, when a hefty blow came and I lost control and touched the camera with the end of the umbrella - how stupid is that! So all you can do basically is pray for slow wind for the whole time. To spend your time it is most advisable to check for other scenes and viewpoints during the exposure - behind the camera ;) .
9. change location - If I am done, I prefer to make a second exposure with another exposure time, 1 or 2 stops higher to enhance the chance of a good result, sharpness wise as exposure wise. To really exploit a location, you can take different angles on your subject or take images of different subjects in your view - play with the location of your camera and your available focal lengths. As a rule of thumb I always carry my assembled camera, if the next spot is not further away than 200m - if further away, I disassemble the camera, pack and get on to the next spot and assemble again. This can be motivating, but as you see the groundglass everything will be OK again.
10. get back home - you are done with the shooting process - hooray. I always enjoy the ride home, check for new locations on my way and just feel the city around me. You can flow since you don’t have a time constraint and relax a little. First thing at home is to change the film, mark the box and queue it for processing at the lab. I use a Harrison Film Changing Tent - perfect for hotel rooms that never have a perfectly dark room. I would advise you to take the largest, I have the 8x10 version and it is too small for 8x10 to change conveniently!
11. develop the film - I can not imagine developing 8x10 colour film by myself. There is too much precision, space and chemicals required for my taste. E6 is such a standard process, I never had problems with any lab developing it - neither in the US, Japan or Germany. The only difference is in the placement of the hook marks - which have been the most careful in Japan and the most rude and disturbing in the US. You always have to remove the hook marks with a cutter prior to wet mounting for scanning, so the amount and size matters. The price is between 4 and 8€, depending on the purchasing power of the Euro in the country you are in. I always prefer to develop film at the location I am at, to minimize the Risk of X-Ray Exposure while flying.
12. scan the film - I have an Epson V700 for prescanning - I just throw the slide onto the glass, do a quick 600dpi scan and get on to the next. That allows me to check for the sharpness and the overall potential of an image - which is hard to grasp on the light table for me. The ones I deem publishable are then queued for drum scanning. I think the only reasonable way to do drumscans is doing it yourself. I have seen a prepress house in New York, charging almost a 1000$ US for the scanquality I want out of an 8x10 slide! I Paid 3000€ for my scanner (a Heidelberg Primescan D 8200) and pay less then 1€ for consumables per scan. So my scanner amortized after just 6 scans, go figure! Since drumscanning is such a delicate and complex process, I think I will write an extra post about that in the future. I usually scan a 1,6GB File, which is the maximum my scanner can process at the moment - resulting in a 16Bit file with a dimension of 18.000 by 15.000 - or 300 very useful Megapixels. That file is then ready for the final touch.
13. postprocessing - Working on a 1,6GB tiff file is a boring thing - if you add adjustment layers you will soon get to 10GB and your RAM will melt faster than that Ice cone in the sun. I have 16GB installed and only one history step in Photoshop, and still it is paging all the time, taking up to 10 minutes for basic actions like colour mode changes. So what I do is resize the image to a manageable size, like 25MPix, and then record my actions, so I can process the large file with these actions later automatically overnight. This works. What I have not found a workaround for is the tedious task of removing dust and scratches. My record is 40 hours on one single image. This feels so unnecessary…but when it is done, I am happy and have the perfect image ready for printing. What do I do in Photoshop? I do not alter the image content. I only work on the colours. So I balance the light and contrast between areas, change the curves a lot, the saturation and the colour balance, so that I receive a result that resembles my imagination. When I am done, I leave the image open for a day, recheck it on my monitor if it is realistic and repeat this until I find the colour perfect for 3 consecutive times. Then I am done, I have an Image I can do whatever I want to do with.
14. Printing - I prefer printing on a large format laser printer - the OCE Lightjet 500XL offers the widest width at 72 Inches - and there is nothing better than an 8x10 image to print at 72x90 Inches. The result is simply breathtaking. The quality is unmatched by any Inkjet Printer print I have ever seen! Fortunately there are several printshops in Germany that use a Lightjet - I work with GIGANT in Berlin, perfect Service and Quality!

Phew, what a long Post! If you have any further Questions, feel free to post them, I will be glad to embed the answer into the description.