Vivian Maier - revisited

I have decided to look back at Vivian Maier, This time I wanted to focus on her colour rolls of film. As I wanted to experiment with using both colour 120 film with the TLR camera and also do a digital comparison. So I will deconstruct some more images which are apart of her selection of colour film. 

To see how different she used it to the back and white.

1956

This picture was taken in 1956, using kodak colour film or something similar. It has been cropped to a square, which would indicate it was cropped during printing / scanning for artistic reasons or it was taken on medium format. Which is a higher quality of film than 35mm , but it for small images there is very little image quality difference. It is a candid picture of a woman with her hands behind her back. It was probably taken on her Roliflex TLR, which was her most used 120 film camera. Using the TLR it would have been easy to get secretive shots such as this. It was all the time when colour just being used but still for special events/ holidays as it was far more expensive than black and white so Maier would have been experimenting with colour.The contrast with the red dress and the blue water in the back ground that is out of focus draws you into the dress. She would have done this deliberately to see what colour film could do and what affect she would get with it.  It would have been taken in Chicago as at the time she was working for a family there. A lot of Maiers images makes you question her thoughts behind the pictures she takes. Leaving you curious about what she was like.

1976

This was taken on a 35mm range finder or SLR, Most likely her Leica IIIc. You can tell this by the cropping of the picture as it is a rectangle and you can see from the shadows that she is holding the camera up to her eye. The picture has been taken in colour film and is of a lake with a discontinuous lens held up to the horizon which splits up everything within this lens. It was taken in 1976 which was after her Chicago job, so this could be placed anywhere as in the 70s she went traveling all over the world. This was also when colour film was coming down in price , previously It was used but it cost 3 times the amount of black and white which is why Maier would have started to use it more commonly as it was cheaper and developing was far easier to come across as black and white developing had become less widely advertised. I like how you can see her hand holding the lens up and the light refracts though it. It is a landscape picture but it has some added attract elements because of the lens

For the colour she was still able to use all the cameras she used before, and she also at this point bought some more cameras such as the Leica IIIc which is a rangefinder which is more like a point a and shoot with an indicator to the you the focus. Instead of the TLR which I have discovered to be far harder to use than I initially thought.