film

Old Stuff Revisited

Here’s a harsh truth: I’ve taken fewer photos each passing year since 2015.

It’s not for lack of trying or interest. No, it’s mostly because the rest of life got busier – three kids, a demanding job, a new house, chores, spending time with family, etc. 

(Another consequence of moving home and work is that I don’t have an interesting commute anymore. It’s mostly city and highway driving instead of the beautiful back country roads that used to fuel my hobby.)

That means, besides family vacations and a rare sunbeam coming into the home office, I have fewer and fewer photos to take, edit, and post for public consumption. And I miss doing that! I miss the process of capturing pictures and making them my own.

Lately, my solution has been to go back and rediscover some of my past work. I can look at it with fresh eyes, and tinker a bit. I have a good selection of photos that I’ve taken but never touched or shared in the years since.

Take my film portraits from the Musicians In Jackson project. I was initially so dissatisfied with how they turned out that I shelved them in favor of the digital versions. Now, looking back at them, they were actually pretty fun, and using a bit of Lightroom magic, I can make them look how I prefer.

There’s a ton of abandoned pictures and others that are stuck in a Lightroom folder somewhere. All I have to do is look for them, play with the sliders, and boom – something to share.

Now, that also means I’ll eventually run out. And I can’t fix the not-enough-time-for-picture-making problem – not easily. But this scratches the creative itch well enough to keep me busy for a while.

, , , ,

The Spark You Need

The Spark You Need

Wrapping up my latest project, I thought about what kickstarted the whole thing.

It was the film. Lomography advertised a new, limited-run film stock that you had to buy in bulk – 10 boxes an order. That got my brain, and my math, going: 10 boxes of 36 exposure film equals about a year’s worth of shots, if you took one shot per day.

Boom. A project.

Sometimes we don’t need grand ideas for personal projects. Sometimes it’s the gear that sparks an idea.

Grab a cheap-o camera and see what kind of project you can make out of it. Take a simple piece of equipment – a vintage lens, or twin-lens reflex camera – and see where it leads you.

All you need is a spark.

, , , ,

Lost and Found

Go Through the Changes

My Canonet is missing.

It could be stolen, or it could be lost. But it’s gone. The camera, and a roll of film with 20-ish exposures from my 365 project.

What a bummer.

That means most of September is missing. Maybe a bit of late August. Lots of sunrises and foggy mornings – those magical times when photography is so fun this time of year. The light changing, the leaves falling, the hot days and cool evenings.

It could be that I left my little rangefinder in my front seat, and then left the car unlocked overnight, a prime opportunity for a wayward thief. Or it could be that me, the absent-minded photographer, left the camera sitting somewhere out of sight, waiting to be discovered again.

The point is that I can’t leave the 365 half finished. No, I’ll load a roll of Lomo into my Olympus and keep going, and try not to pine for those lost photos from earlier this month.

Lost, or found, I have to keep going.

, , ,

Begging For Compact Cameras

Cortice

Bellamy Hunt at Japan Camera Hunter argues for a new compact film camera:

One of the large makers needs to step up to the plate and make a compact film camera. And I am not saying this on a whim or with a wistful idea of halcyon days. I get more requests for compact cameras than I could ever fulfill, even if I had the cameras. People are prepared to spend nearly $1000 for an old Contax or Ricoh, knowing full well that it could simply stop working at any point and there would be nothing they could do about it.

Hunt’s point – that the current stock of compact cameras is dwindling, and getting more expensive – tells me that there’s a market for a new film camera out there, if someone would just take a chance on making one. And with more and more companies investing in film again, photographers need new tools to take advantage of those film stocks.

Compact cameras are my favorite kind of camera, and I’m not alone. The company that stepped up and started making new film cameras again would gain more than money – they’d earn a whole bunch of goodwill.

(via On Taking Pictures)

, , ,

For My Next Project

 

Bronica ETRSi

Details are starting to come together for my next community project.

For this next one, I want to experiment with some studio space, and making the portraits on black and white film. To do that, I picked up a Bronica ETRSi from Jon Wilkening – a fantastic kit, full of potential. And it includes a learning curve, which is the part I’m most looking forward to.

(One of the benefits of picking up photography as a hobby is that you get to tinker, and learn new equipment, while you’re making photographs. That puts it in the same realm as classic computers or engine repair as much as art.)

I hope to set up a quick photo studio to practice with the Bronica, including making photos with friends and family, just for fun.

Restrictions are simply creative challenges. Using medium format film for a portrait project is a restriction that, I hope, leads to interesting results and good photographs. It forces me to learn something new, while lending a timeless feel to the whole endeavor. Should be fun.

, , , , , ,

One Afternoon, One Roll of Film

Time to break out the Canonet.

After thinking about my favorite type of camera – small, single lens, 35-45mm range – I loaded a roll of Agfa Vista 400 and hit the streets for a just-starting-to-feel-like-spring afternoon in Ann Arbor.

From loading to dropping film off at the camera store took less than an hour. I had 24-ish chances to capture something walking around an unfamiliar neighborhood. And I had 40mm to express what I saw, with a rangefinder focusing mechanism to express it.

I also had a serious limitation: the bright, sunny afternoon was killer when the Canonet’s highest shutter speed was 1/500. That, combined with a 400 ISO film speed, meant having to pull the ISO down a bit, or else the camera refused to take a photo. Chalk it up to one big learning experience.

The point is, I took the Canonet for a spin, and blew through a 24 exposure roll of film. That old saying about potato chips, that you can’t eat just one? Same rule applied to that roll of Agfa Vista. It was easy to just keep visually snacking.

, , , , , , , , ,

1 2 3 4