photoblogs magazine: Help us to get to know you a bit by describing your life outside of photography.

Marcus Kazmierczak: Until a few months ago, I was your typical single early-thirties dotcom era geek living in the Bay Area. After working as a technology swiss-army-knife for seven years at an on-line brokerage, the excitement and joy had worn off; so it was time for a change. I quit my job on the hope of finding more meaning, joy or purpose in life.
Currently, I've done some traveling and I haven't found anything yet, but enjoying the search. What's next, I'm not sure. I might take a few more trips, it is easier to see with new eyes when you aren't surrounded by the familiar. You aren't trapped in the same daily scenario but see different ways of life and living.
I'm tempted to really mix things up and just up and move to a different country for a little while. I'm trying to gather the courage for that step.

pm: What photographers do you admire and why?

mk: One of my favorite photographers is Hiroshi Sugimoto. I saw his architecture exhibit a few years ago and it really resonated with me. In the exhibit, he didn't take crisp perfect pictures of buildings but tried to capture their essence, most of the photos being blurry blocks.   It was one of the first exhibits for me that wasn't more of the same-old, but showed photography in more creative and unique ways. Now maybe five years later, it is surprising to me how similar a lot of recent work I am doing is to Sugimoto's without consciously thinking of it.
He is just one of the many great photographers that I admire, there is so much great work out there and being produced today, I admire them all for being brave and unabashedly sharing their work.

pm: Do you attempt to emulate them in any way?

mk: I don't directly try to emulate the photographers I admire, but there is always something in their photography that I like. So in the images that I create, I will end up emulating them in unintentional ways; didn't Schroedinger's cat teach us that it is impossible not to be influenced by what we see around us.
For example, comparing Sugimoto's photos and some of the blurry stuff I am working on now. I do not intentionally make photos blurred because I want to be like Sugimoto. However, I make blurred photos which I like for the same reasons I like his work.

pm: Do you have a preferred photographic genre and if so what do you find compelling about that type of photo?

mk: I really enjoy night photography, both the experience of taking photos at night as well as looking at night work. Night photography brings out an incredible mystery; long exposures add time as a tangible element in the images. Time can transform simple waves into an eerie fog, stars into streaks of light and it eliminates minor motions.
I am also recently interested in a lot of plastic camera work. I love it, in the world of hyper-consumerism and multi-thousand dollar digital cameras people are using what would be considered junk by gear snobs to create amazing images. Many plastic camera photographs capture a mood/essence of a scene better than a perfectly exposed crisp image.

pm: You make your own lenses, which you cover in detail on your site. Could you concisely describe the process of creating a lens and how you use it?

mk: The homemade lenses are a lot of fun. It adds a whole new weird dimension and often surprising results. Some times good, some times bad. I first saw a homemade lens on Justin Ouellette's site where he described his process to build his; he was inspired by John Perkinson, who said he got the idea from Mark Tucker.   One of the great things about the web, you can be inspired by people you'd never meet without it, it makes all these new connections.
The lenses themselves are rather easy to make, no glass grinding or special tools required. First you find a cheap old lens, ebay is a decent place, I'm lucky to have a good used store nearby. Most of my most successful lenses have been from enlargers, you can see my site for details on the exact lenses used so far, more on the way.
The biggest problem I have had is getting the focusing distance to be acceptable. Normally I have a problem focusing out to infinity if I use too wide of an angle lens. I need to read up more on optics and lenses before I can explain it properly. I find around an 80mm lens works fine.
I have a set of Nikon mounts that I took off some used extension tubes. I then take a piece of thick black plastic, from a b&w paper bag, and roll it into a tube. I may switch from plastic to a black cloth for better flexibility. I tape one end of the tube to the mount and put the lens in the other end, secured by rubber bands. Voila.   It sounds easier than it is to cobble it all together, but with enough tape and rubber bands you should be able to get it workable.
So in the field: I take the homemade lens, which normally looks hideous and deformed; I always get lots of stares at my camera. I've even had some one take a picture of me while using it, I forgot to get her name so I could see if it was posted on a blog somewhere. The lens will be somewhat floppy and easy to twist-turn-up-down-in-out, point it at your subject and manipulate until you see the focus and effect that you want. To achieve the greatest blur effects, don't have the lens parallel with the film plane. Experiment and Practice.

posted by Jeff|