And when I have to shoot something important, I'm very happy to have the instant review features, as well as the latitude of adjustments available when shooting raw.
But, well, it can get sort of boring sometimes.
See, the affordability of high quality digital cameras has created a proliferation of wanna-be photographers that I find incredibly annoying. In the old days, photography was an actual skill that combined both understanding of light, imaging and chemistry, as well as a trained artistic eye. Now, anybody with $1000 can actually make images with high technical quality. Of course, they mostly don't have the creative eye, but it's surprising how many clients can't tell the difference.
Well, I don't try to make money at this so I don't care about the faux-tographers unless they get in my way. But I do like to find ways to set my work apart from theirs, as haughty as that sounds. Sorry.
So, recently I decided to take up film photography again, as a hobby-art thing. So I'll post some stuff here about that in case anybody wants to get into it.
First, I had to gear up. I still have my old film cameras (Nikkormat, Nikon 2000, Yashica Mat 124G) and I got fresh batteries to make them work again. But I was intrigued by the availability of some classic film cameras that were beyond my reach when they (and I) were 30 years younger. So I bought a 1956 Leica M3 and a Mamiya RB67 Pro SD. Then I picked up a Graflex Graphic View II camera and finally a Graflex Speed Graphic.
Don't ask.
Here are a couple of photos of the gear:
First, the Leica -
The View Camera-
And finally the RB67-
Now, a few of my initial photos. Nothing special, just playing around.
Here's an instant film shot from the RB on Fuji instant film. Scanned on an Epson V700 and cleaned up in Photoshop to remove dust, etc.
That actually came out a lot better than I expected, although the instant film is very soft and had to be sharpened up in PS.
Here are a couple of shots taken with the Leica and the Nikon on old, expired film.
I was also pleased with these, but I had to clean them up some to remove excessive grain that resulted from the film being expired about 15 years ago.
I should pause here to talk about exposure. The Leica and RB67 do not have built-in light meters, and frankly, I am a bit rusty using the old fashioned hand-held meters. So I used a combination of a separate digital camera, an old Seiko light meter that seems not to be working very well any more, and a light meter app on my phone. And guesswork. After playing around with a lot of bad exposures, I realized that I just need to shoot more so that I get my intuition back. Turns out the sunny 16 rule plus experience is pretty much all you need in most situations. But I did pick up a newer, modern light meter from a friend to help me out.
Here are a few more shots I took just to finish off this entry. More fun and details next time.
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