TRENT PARKE

Who?!
Australian born Trent Parke is considered one of the most innovative and challenging young photographers of his generation. After covering sports news for a paper in Sydney Australia for a few years, He bought a Lieca, was introduced to Rodinal and the high contrast way of processing and printing images.

Technical sidebar
(Rodinal (aka Adonal) is a concentrated liquid developer with very long storage life; the working developer is used once.

Rodinal increases perceived edge sharpness dramatically: since the developer is used up more quickly in dark than in light areas, development of light areas next to dark areas (the edges of the image) is reduced, increasing contrast at edges.

 His mistake of putting a battery incorrectly into his Nikonos and developing the underexposed film for an inordinately long time led to a two year brush with the the sea that led to the The Seventh Wave and further experiments with chance and experiment and serendipity and contrast and technique.

The Seventh wave

The Seventh Wave

The seventh wave

The seventh wave

The seventh wave

The seventh wave

The seventh wave

The seventh wave

The seventh wave

Minutes to Midnight
In 2003 Parke was awarded the prestigious international W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his series Minutes to Midnight. Parke documented his journey around Australia over a two-year period, examining 'the current and changing state of the Australian nation'

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to midnight

Minutes to Midnight

His mouth to our ears

We dont have him right here to tell us about his technique, but we have the next best thing: He taught a week long seminar once and one of his students kept a blog. Here are those words of wisdom:

Shoot the S**t out of it

Trents favorite phrase. It doesnt just mean take a lot of photos. Change angles, play with the light, go back at different times of day, return to the same subject over and over trying to find a new way to shoot it. More about obsession than repetition. Work hard for your shot. A corollary: Stop thinking and just shoot.

BEGINNERS LUCK
When starting out, just turn your camera into a black box so that you dont need to think about it. Set it to f11, 1/250th, pre-focus, then just concentrate on the light and subject. Subject is key. Light is everything.

BEGINNERS LUCK
Sequence your photos to tell a story. If you can get photos out of your backyard you can get photos anywhere. Anyways think how can I shoot this so it will look different to how everyone else would shoot it.

Working the brewery

The low light levels in most breweries meant I was using wide apertures which give you outof-focus backgrounds and a bit of a romantic look to the photos. I never used flash, in fact I refused to use flash because the light was too harsh.

 Trent thought they were good, but the lighting was too flat.
He spent 10 minutes showing me techniques of using off-camera flash and sent me to back to the brewery looking for interesting textures and shapes.

 In the new style everything is the complete opposite. Small apertures (f/11-f/22) mean almost everything visible is in sharp focus

The Brewery
OLD STYLE NEW STYLE

OLD STYLE

NEW STYLE

OLD STYLE

NEW STYLE

 OLD STYLE

NEW STYLE

 There is nothing really wrong with the first set of pictures, but in the new style, the play with light and shadows is more dramatic, making the pictures that much more interesting.

 Trent does with color as well, but with his new photography Black Rose has returned to black and white and medium and large format .Most of his books are available for browsing at Barnes & Noble and Youtube has one or two clips of him talking about the passion behind his projects.