Godfrey
somewhat colored
With three years of COVID pandemic and then The Catastrophe of October 14, 2023, while I've been out pressing the shutter button regularly, I felt my photography had drifted into being "aimless picture taking". That won't do, so I decided to refocus my brain. First I pulled a Minox out of the closet, checked it, and loaded it up. Hmm, lots of aimlessness but some good stuff. I pulled another one out and loaded it. After processing, ah: better. About a dozen actual photos out of 36 shots. Okay, that's going somewhere.
Looking for faster turnaround and a bit more constraint, I pulled out the Polaroid SLR670x by MiNT, loaded a pack of 600 B&W and constrained myself further by requiring manual metering/setting for every exposure. There are only 8 shots on a pack, so I figured I could make 8 exposures on a walk if I worked at it. Good results! I blew exposures on three of them, but the rest are all usable photographs. Yay! I repeated this yesterday, this time loading the SLR670a with 600 Color ... Short walk because it was too damn hot to walk my usual hour to hour and a half yesterday, so I only made four exposures. But three of them are good, and one died of overexposure. I'll finish that pack on my walk this morning, and move on to a roll of 35mm next.
This just points out to me once more that good photography is not a haphazard thing. Good photography takes well focused intent, more than anything else. The camera, the kind of camera, is mostly irrelevant. Seeing and making what you see into a photograph comes pretty naturally after a lifetime of practice, but I still have to consciously, actively be looking for something specific.
And it's good to practice. A lot. It gets better and better the more I practice.
Soon I'll be up to grabbing a digital camera again. The digital camera unbounds some of the notions of constraint in a film camera: set any ISO you want on a frame by frame basis, no media cost, few if any constrictions on number of frames you have to work with, no processing time burden (yes, even an instant film camera has a processing time burden, because you cannot really see what you've got with today's instant films for up to about 12 hours after you make an exposure, although you can guess after about ten minutes...). Et cetera. On the other hand, instant - truly instant - review makes experimentation much much easier. The learning mindset changes a bit with these differences.
And while it is work, and it isn't easy, it's all fun. To me at least.
G
Looking for faster turnaround and a bit more constraint, I pulled out the Polaroid SLR670x by MiNT, loaded a pack of 600 B&W and constrained myself further by requiring manual metering/setting for every exposure. There are only 8 shots on a pack, so I figured I could make 8 exposures on a walk if I worked at it. Good results! I blew exposures on three of them, but the rest are all usable photographs. Yay! I repeated this yesterday, this time loading the SLR670a with 600 Color ... Short walk because it was too damn hot to walk my usual hour to hour and a half yesterday, so I only made four exposures. But three of them are good, and one died of overexposure. I'll finish that pack on my walk this morning, and move on to a roll of 35mm next.
This just points out to me once more that good photography is not a haphazard thing. Good photography takes well focused intent, more than anything else. The camera, the kind of camera, is mostly irrelevant. Seeing and making what you see into a photograph comes pretty naturally after a lifetime of practice, but I still have to consciously, actively be looking for something specific.
And it's good to practice. A lot. It gets better and better the more I practice.
Soon I'll be up to grabbing a digital camera again. The digital camera unbounds some of the notions of constraint in a film camera: set any ISO you want on a frame by frame basis, no media cost, few if any constrictions on number of frames you have to work with, no processing time burden (yes, even an instant film camera has a processing time burden, because you cannot really see what you've got with today's instant films for up to about 12 hours after you make an exposure, although you can guess after about ten minutes...). Et cetera. On the other hand, instant - truly instant - review makes experimentation much much easier. The learning mindset changes a bit with these differences.
And while it is work, and it isn't easy, it's all fun. To me at least.
G
