Last Friday I had a film noir style photo shoot planned. The model I was photographing is one of my favorites. I arrived about an hour before she did to do some final location scouting. As always with digital photography the originals were all color and were converted to black and white in post-processing.
Black and white photography is one of my favorites because I feel I get to photograph the person’s soul rather than their clothes. For me, color sometimes gets in the way.
Yesterday, I read a social media post on a well-known photography store asking followers what their what was the dream photography location. As you can imagine the vast majority were the iconic locations. Yosemite, Iceland, Patagonia, Antarctic, and so forth. This got me to thinking, all those are awesome places and I’d love to photograph them but are any my dream locations. My answer was no. I’m not sure of my dream location but I am pondering it as a result of the question.
My dream location isn’t going to be the iconic area that has been photographed ad nauseam.
What about the back roads of Kansas, Missouri, or Nebraska? We rarely see the landscapes of those areas. We see loads of Yosemite, mountains, waterfalls, the ocean. We see lots of locations of what many of us think of as exotic.
All of this reminds me of a couple of trips. One my wife and I went to visit our son when he was stationed at Camp Lejeune. We were going to the beach one day. The bartender at the hotel where we were staying said she hadn’t been to the beach in years. The beach was only a mile away from our hotel. Then the time in Colorado where my wife was admiring a view of the mountains and the local said, “yeah it’s always there.”
My dream location is maybe my local area with time to spend just cruising the backroads finding what I can find.
I can art but that doesn’t mean I can envision art. It is much easier to photograph something or someone that already aesthetically looking. The true artist can see the aesthetic value of many ordinary everyday subjects. It is our vision to bring out the beauty in the ordinary. Look don’t just see.
I haven’t been in an antique store in a couple of years and the last time I was I wasn’t interested in any cameras. Yesterday I wandered into one and found two. The Wirgin Wiesbaden Edina and a Kodak DC 120 Zoom (1997 digital). The Wirgin Wiesbaden is a 1950s vintage 35mm film camera and it was loaded with film. The Kodak has a 10 mb memory card. Both cameras work. the display screen on the digital is not working properly but the camera works. I need to get the film developed out of curiosity. From what I can tell there doesn’t appear to be anything on the memory card but I will check when I get to my compact flash card reader.
Yesterday I wrote about challenging myself with older gear well now I have two more pieces of older gear to try out.
Digital photography has made photography easier today than in the past. White balance can be set to auto or a number of presets and it can be changed multiple times per session using the same card. Film speed can be adjusted from photograph to photograph. In the past, using film we had very limited choices of white balance and film speeds and they couldn’t be changed on the same roll typically. I know we could push a film speed and we could add different filters to the lens to affect color temperatures. When I began photography it was unthinkable that I would be able to take a photograph with an ISO setting of 12,800. In fact, it was very difficult for me to even find film faster than 800. I know we don’t really have film speeds or white balances in digital it is all a program that makes some adjustments. While that may be true, it functions the same way in practice as the old film speeds and white balance.
Today, we can also store hundreds or thousands of photographs on a single card rather than be limited to 36 or so exposures. We can also quickly see our work through a screen on the back of the camera rather than wait until we got the film developed and prints made. Modern digital cameras will even “develop” my photograph and the image be completely usable straight out of the camera. While I may not instantly have a physical print in hand I can have portable devices that could make a print at the click of a button.
I can also take my images and process them in ways that were well beyond most photographers in the past using programs such as Photoshop and the myriad of similar programs and applications available, some for free.
I suspect this is why some “old-timers” in photography or those who want to be like an “old-timer” thumb their noses at modern digital photography. I love the look of photographic film. It is different than digital. I love that there are those who want to keep film alive, albeit I believe film will eventually die except for a few very niche photographers. Because of all these things we can spend more time on composition, content, creativity, and people who may have never ventured into photography. I’ve come to a point where I don’t to discount anyone’s choice of medium to do their photography because I may just learn something new or be inspired by their creativity.
Photographer Clay 