It's nice to have an excuse to blog and I need to keep myself honest. For any photographers that come across this entry, thanks for inspiring and sharing your work. It's a cold, cruel digital world for those of us who have not achieved Influencer status. Know that your things may still appear in Google search and will be appreciated by people that never get around to clicking or commenting.
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| Kansas City First Friday - July, 2019 |
And you know what? Your photos don't have to be perfect to matter. I've taken to using old, manual focus lenses on Fujifilm gear. Sometimes the focus isn't quite right and the image still tells a story.
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| Kansas City First Friday - July, 2019 |
In 2018, people captured roughly 1,200,000,000,000 (yes, trillion+) digital images. I'm not trying to be a nihilist, but it's a miracle if anyone sees your photos but you. So why not just live life and play with light?
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| Kansas City Maker Faire - June, 2019 |
If you happen to find this post and have gotten this far, thanks for helping keep Blogger a viable platform. We need digital commons with some semblance of continuity. If you love photography and are really excited about things you have seen and images you have captured, I'd love to read your comments. That's what really matters in a disposable digital world.
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| Kansas City Maker Faire - June, 2019 |
Out of those trillion how many are really good photos or just snap shot like 99% of what is shot on a phone imager?
ReplyDeleteDigital has led to shoot as many images as possible. On film a photographer would think about the image, the photo output they wanted, proper depth of field, proper exposure, and minimal dark room time. How many really think through their digital work? I admit I sometimes do way too much snap away when I have my OMD out than when I have my film gear out.
Film seems to say, where do I want my main subject, what zone falls where, how do I expose the film for what I want from the paper to match the zones.
Digital says subject in FOV, shoot away I can fix that post processing.
Depending on your cine lens and what it was used on you may need to tweak away with rear optic to sensor plane distances. Also image circle as many of the cine lenses were used on 70mm so a digital sensor will be centered more on the lens center which can be great or problematic.
Thanks for your comment. Valid points. I learned in the film and darkroom era - never had much access to the latter. I had to know the film and the equipment capabilities and be able to adjust exposure without a live histogram.
DeleteThere are a lot of really poor images sitting on harddrives, SSDs and smartphones. Conversely, there were also a lot of bad snapshots out of Brownie film cameras that were beloved in families and are still in photo albums today. Obviously, the digital detritus outnumbers film detritus by several orders of magnitude.
I enjoy watching how my 19-year-old and her friends use images. They spend inordinate amounts of time creating perfect images for use on the team members' Instagram accounts. They also take intentionally bad photos and turn them into memes for the Finsta shadow accounts. Kinda intentional crappy video is an emerging aesthetic among Instagram and TicToc influencers. That's good, because I have seen kids taking 30-minutes doing a prime location shoot on phones in what would have been a blow-and-go for me doing something with a High School Senior.
There's also a subset of young users that opt for imperfect permanence in the form of Fujifilm instant photography. Kids will get together and shoot with their phones and then whip out an instant camera for things they put in their wallets or above their desks. It's a trend that mirrors the return of vinyl albums. It's really an interesting and strange time.
For sports photography, I still need to know what I am doing to capture the best images, but I do burst at 7-FPS to get the best moments and expressions. That's no different from what professional sports photographers used to do with film that an employer was paying for.
For street and walkaround, I really enjoy the process of using manual lenses. I pick the ISO, shutter speed, and f-stop. Manual focus means thinking about image composition and I almost always shoot wide open. What you see is what you get with me. I shoot JPG and try to nail the image in camera. That goes for fast cross country and track shooting as well.
Related to image circle size, I have multiple camera sensor sizes to pick from:
Olympus PEN was 35mm 1/2 frame = APS-C on Fuji X-H1
16mm C-mount = Sony 1 V3 That's a methodical camera with no automatic metering on manual lenses.
8mm D-mount = Pentax Q
I am lusting for a 4/3 micro for C-mount lenses that have a larger image circle than a native 16mm frame. That Cooke Ivotal C-mount is exceptional in that it has rear element glass as large as anything I have seen in a full-frame 50mm f1.4 lens. It is beautifully machined and a joy to handle.
Anyway, it is truly a blessed era in toys available for experimentation. The Pentax Q cost me $130. The Nikon V3 was $280. I have no need or desire for their native, autofocus lenses. They are dedicated manual lens tools.