"For Christmas I am going to Maramures…".
I am envied: "This is so gooood…."
I am scolded: "…but it is Christmas, don’t you stay home."
I am pitied: "You will have problems with you liver because of the palinca (a Romanian drink) and of the sausages…."
I am given advice: "The people from Maramures won’t let you until you have a drink with them."
I am finally leaving. No more orders, time limits, BTs, deliveries, invoices….
I set the base in Ieud. From my point of view it is the most photogenic village. Surrounded by villages, ideal as station spot, Ieud is outside the national road. The narrow street, old wooden churches – one in the top of the hill, the other on the main narrow street – sledges with hay, traditional costume, and extraordinary hospitable people are just a few reasons which determined me to stop here.
Ieud is the biggest parish from Maramures, a good keeper of traditions, which attracts many photographers. In Christmas day, at the morning service you couldn’t find space because of the Nikons, Canons, teles, and many others; what a press conference.
Early in the morning a big moon automatically takes me out of bed. With the snow crunching under my feet I left on the hill to look for my spot for the sunrise. On a blue light, wonderful, I find the station spot, I mount the tripod. My fingers almost stuck to the cold metal. It is obvious: the temperature is less than 20 degrees Celsius. How is going to answer D 100. In the user’s instructions it is only specified: the working temperature 0-40 degrees C. Mainly to such a temperature the noise on the CCD is lower. I have the first pleasant surprise when I notice that the monitor with liquid crystals is as “agile” as at much more summer temperatures. I take the first control frames with the settings on auto. Fisss… The white balance must be set on daylight or else all the beauty of the morning light is lost. The histogram tells me that I have to correct more the exposure. Now everything seems OK to me. I take without the concern of wasting the film everything that seems interesting to me. It is a marvel this digital. Time is passing without realizing. I change a couple of times the station spot, I walk here and there and after three hours and some exultant shouts, I declare myself satisfied. I made 1 Gb of photographs that is 100 pieces. I put everything in raw size which on Nikon is called NEF.
The NEF once it is unloaded in the computer may suffer major changes which can correct to a great extent the photographing errors. Only one is irreclaimable: the super exposure. The NEF has another big advantage: it “eats” less memory than a tiff and once it is unloaded in the computer it may be transformed into tiff keeping all the stored information. There are many users of digitals which take pictures in jpeg format at maximum quality and who sustain that there are no differences between the quality of the image which was obtained in this way and a tiff. It may be like this, I didn’t make comparisons of this kind. It seems to me that the advantage of the ulterior correction over the NEF file is much bigger than the space economy on CF card.
The morning service from the Catholic Church. I enter the church from the very beginning and get on the balcony of the choir. Excellent position, the extraordinary light is filtered by the small windows, there’s a lot of people, steam when breathing, background light, switched on incandescent lamps. The exposure test: ISO 400 – is not enough, ISO 800 – perfect. Nice, the countrymen make way for me so I can get to the balustrade of the balcony. Thick, dense rays of light point out the grandeur of the service. I am almost embarrassed to release, but I can’t help it. Towards the end of the service I go outside to catch the crowd gathered around the church. The image which I am following is already famous for me. I did it in a summer, a couple of years ago and it brought me many satisfactions. I wanted to resume it in a hibernal variant.
Clear sky plenty of light: ISO 200 that is the possible minim on D 100, so maximum quality. The white balance on auto. Short time for working with the tele in the hand and an open diaphragm for pointing out the portraits. Exposure correction because of the dark background and of the close-up view with snow. The same old ladies which I easily recognize, the same ritual outside the church. The plan from home matches. Another 1 Gb of images unloaded in the computer.
Finally, in the afternoon I go to the Orthodox Church for “Viflaim” – a rustic extraordinary play, which narrates the birth of the Lord, performed out-door in front of the church, on a wooden stage.
Dense crowd, the sun which is pretty low gives long shades. It necessarily needs a flashgun; with exposure correction lest it should damage the natural light. The sensibility ISO 400 is exactly what I need, the white balance on auto, as for the rest no kinds of corrections over the stored image on CF. It is preferable that most of the corrections from the camera’s menus to be put on 0 or inactive or cancelled. In this way you may interfere in the file however you want after the unloading of the image in the computer. Maybe a too large sharpen damages the image or a correction of contrast destroys the desired environment. And then if you take RAW (NEF) you may afterwards interfere without altering the original. In the last analysis the primary format may be considered the original of the image. In the exif extension the copyright of the author may be inserted so that once the image is made it bears the signature as much time as the raw file is not transformed into tif or jpeg. Reading the data of photographing is made in the program dedicated to each digital camera.
At the end of the day I had already 3 Gb of image that is 300 photographs. I would say that I am still working with the brake put, the instinct of taking pictures on film has not left me, but the experience from Ieud convinced me that “the digital” will be the favoured device from now on. I admit that I have taken even 4 dia in the same time, for those images that take your breathe away and make so much good in a dia projection, a show to which I haven’t found yet a substitute to measure. But I am optimistic. Those times will come.
- published: January 2003, www.fotomagazin.ro
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