One week down, 51 more to go. I suppose it’s easy to say that this won’t be that hard, a photograph a day, but I’m sure it will become a chore eventually. But I hope not. It’s funny that with a digital camera it’s easy to shoot off 300 photos a day if you go out for an event…but sometimes it’s almost impossible to take just one photo when you don’t feel there is a reason. That would be when one has to “make” a reason.
I’m reasonably good at having a camera with me most of the time. The built in camera in a cell phone helps for those times I don’t want to lug my DSLR around. And the iPhone has some fun (and goofy) camera apps that make playing with it entertaining. I used to hate the camera in cell phones. Sure, it’s nice to be able to get a shot when you don’t have a real camera, but the quality is always total garbage. But in the last year or so I’ve actually come to appreciate the crappy shots a bit more than the perfect images that come out of todays digital cameras.
We spent a whack of time recently going through thousands of my Fathers photos and old slides and oddly, the ones I liked the best were the ones that had that 70’s feel to them (probably because that’s when they were actually taken…duh). But I was trying to put my finger on what I liked about them… certainly I wasn’t nostalgic for flares and big collars on shirts. It was something else. The colours were slightly off from reality and there was a softness to them… a grain. Digital cameras have become so good at capturing exactly what we see in such a precise manner that it sort of takes some of the fun and the surprise out of the final image.
I guess that’s why I’m making a bit of a foray back into film. I have a Nikon F-80 film camera that will take all (most) of the same lenses that the D300 and the D70 use, that’s why I bought the body a few years back, but it doesn’t ever really get out much. It’s almost as bulky as the DSLR so the digital camera always gets grabbed. I tried a small digital camera, but the lens is so puny that it is a pain and it takes too long to decide on exposure meaning you miss the moment most of the time. So that’s why I am out looking for the perfect little film camera now.
Yes, I bought my $40 Holga, and it’s taking some getting used to. I have a roll of colour film in it now, but it’s not something you toss into your purse and go since the back would probably fall off and all the film would be exposed (120 film isn’t inside a protective case like 35mm). I was pretty excited about finding the Minox ML, but unfortunately it hasn’t stood the test of time since the 80’s as I thought it has. The shutter speed indicator isn’t functional so I have no idea what the film is going to expose at for any given aperture unless I do some math…and I hate math. So it goes back today after I knock off the film inside it.
So I have my eye on a little Olympus XA on eBay now. While the Minox was a German cult camera, the Olympus was mass produced so there are more of them out there, but they have a stellar reputation for optics and reliability….and they were built in 1979. So I am now in the market for a 30 year old camera…. all that is old becomes new again.
Anyway, my first week of the 365 challenge is done and here are the results as pulled from my Flickr photostream.
