path: root/camera.txt

I was recently testing the Hasselblad X1D. I only had the camera for a few days and I was sick for the first three of them. I lay in bed and played with it a little, but I ended up with only two days to photograph with it. Wanting to try it in a variety of situations I headed out just before sunset one night, hoping to do some sunset shots and then some twilight images. 

We've been in this area now for over two months. I had noticed quiet a few images that I knew I wanted to make at some point and having 50-megapixels at my disposal seemed like a good excuse to get out and shoot them. I read the kids a few stories out of the Norse Myths book they're currently enthralled by, tucked them in and then grabbed the camera and dashed out the door to catch the fading light. 

I realized before I'd gone far that I was too late for a few images, the sun was already behind the trees and would near the horizen by the time I made it to the lake. So I abandoned the lake idea and pulled over at the first decent looking field I saw. I got out spent a few seconds taking in the scene and then... pointed the camera and pressed the shutter. Well, that was boring.

For nearly three years now I have been shooting everything with manual focus lenses and fully manual exposure. Everything. Landscapes, street scenes walking the cities, kids playing, running jumping swimming. I compose, I focus, I meter, I shoot, I adjust, I refocus I reshoot. It's a process, one that's become part of me at this point, which is something I never realized until I pressed the shutter on the Hasselblad and realized, oh, right, that's all there is to it. 

I felt less a part of the process, less invested in the result. 

I felt let down. Being out and doing nothing but shooting made me want to shoot more, that part was good, but it made me want my lenses, the feel of metal turning. Hard stops when I reached infinite, satisfying clicks when you turn the aperture ring, which of course doesn't exist at all on most lenses of the last twenty years. 

I worry this sounds fey and lame. Like some hipster lamenting the bygone era of records or lumberjack shirts. But then, I'm not really sure I care if that's how it sounds because that's not what I mean. I don't want some previous time to come back, I just think the technology of that time was much better than we might think.

But then I have an attachment to the tactile parts of the process of making a photo. Possibly others do not. I enjoy the process of turning the focus ring and snapping through apertures. Sometimes I count them. That way I can focus on the scene and know what my depth of field is without having to look at the info on screen. 

and am glad that I have found a way to have the best of both worlds, analog process, digital and analog results. 

I don't really miss film the way some do, a little maybe, again the tactile part of standing in the dark, feeding and winding the film into the metal wheels, hoping it wasn't touching as you spiraled it on, but I certainly don't miss paying for film. And I'm far better at developing in darktable than I ever was at working with prints in the darkroom.

Sometimes technology moves so fast and pulls us with it so fast we don't get a chance to process what we're giving up. I didn't start out with manual focus lenses because I was nostalgic or missing focusing and metering. I started out with them because I was frugal and they're cheap. My favorite lense, a Minolta 50.. f/2, which I suspect is no one else's favorite lens, cost me $20. My most expensive lens, which is a 100-300 zoom, which I pair with a 2X teleconverter, was a whooping $200. 

I got in because I was trying to get some good glass without spending a fortune. What I didn't realize was happening was that photography was again becoming a process in which I was a key participant. At first I missed shots all the time. I still miss shots, but far fewer. My focusing skills have become much better and I can meter a scene in my head within a stop  or two without consciously thinking about it any more. I see the kids playing, backlit by the morning sun coming through the trees and I just sort of know that I'm going to want about f5.6 to hold them in focus but let the trees and light blur, and in this light, shooting at 100 ISO I should set the exposure around 1/80, maybe faster or slower depending on how much light is getting in the trees, but I know my starting point before I ever raise the camera to my eye.

That sounds pretentious again perhaps, woohee, look at how skilled I am. But it's not skill, it's repetition. Do anything for a while and it becomes *second nature*.