frodehegland.com | fleetingmoment.org | twelveminutes.tv | fifty1point2.com projects
Starbucks Ashtray, London May 2011 Changi Aiport Singapore March 2010
artist's statement
‘Only a poor worker blames his tools’ is a great perspective to live by and is true in many ways, but it neglects the transformative effect that new tools can have on work. When new tools and new media come into being it’s up to the worker to figure out how to get the best out of them. I have been working with moving images for many years, mostly with small pocket cameras which I use to take moving stills. These are pictures mostly without movement of the camera where what happens in the scene just happens. Nothing choreographed, no manufactured story. No post-processing beyond color correction. Just life. The world is beautiful and life exists within time not frozen. I simply want to capture this and share it. The tools along the way have changed what it has been possible for me to produce. Early on I used a small black Panasonic Lumix camera (really simply ground breaking at the time) and got interesting snippets of life, but it was clear when viewing that the image was a small post card view with a heavy electronic filter over the world. The camera imposed a heavy texture on what I tried to make a window onto the world. This is great to color a scene in a movie where there are many things going on and many layers of interest. When simply showing a frame of life this texture comes to create a barrier between the subject and the viewer. Even though not even consciously seen, noisy dots dancing around would have an impact on how the scene was perceived. I then spent some time filming medium high definition with a large video camera a SONY, which produced some beautiful images in half size high definition (720p) but which was always cumbersome to carry and therefore was often simply not available when moments happened. Not completely noise free either but a clear improvement over the previous work. I now use the Canon 5D Mark II which is a professional grade SLR producing 1080p full high definition video. Even with two lenses, a 28 mm f1.8 wide angle used mostly for video and the legendary 50mm f1.2 which I use priarily for stills (have a look at www.fifty1point2.com) ,the kit fits comfortably in the camera bag I have over my shoulder almost every day (my laptop, a Macbook Air - which is just a mircale of design - through which I run my software development company fits next to the camera and the original iPad fits comfortably in the lining of the bag). It’s nice that both aspects of my life fits so neatly in the bag I carry every day - the design work complements the photographic work and vice versa. A limitation of the 5D is that it only records video for 12 minutes at a time. This is not really a limitation though I think, it’s more a creative frame, a temporal mirror of the early borders around silver prints. It provides a time for the work to exist. Work from this site will be available as 12 minute 720p videos on Vimeo.com and are listed below. I hope you like the way I framed your world.
Frode Hegland
frode@hegland.com | twitter.com/liquidizer
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