In my walks about the area, I occasionally take along a film rangefinder camera -- the Voigtlander Bessa-R. It's a wonderfully little, light, 100% manual, mechanical camera.
The whole concept of film, of not knowing exactly how the shot was captured, and the manual-ness of it all is sometimes a nice change from the instant replay, everything can be automatic equipment that I (and most everyone else nowadays) use. It makes me slow down, think about what I want to capture, how I want to capture it, check and double check the settings, focus to precisely the object I want in focus, think about the depth of field, etc. before I trip the shutter. If I goof, well, I likely won't know about it for several months.
I use a fairly wide, 35mm lens - no zoom. (I do have a 50mm lens for it also, but don't use it very often.) That means I've got to use my feet for composing the frame. It's an interesting and useful exercise. If I want a subject larger in the frame, I've got to walk closer to it. If I want to eliminate distracting elements, I've got to move around until I can find a way to hide them behind a foreground object, or move around until the distractions are no longer in the frame (sometimes difficult with a wide angle lens).
I recently had developed a roll that I've had in there since the beginning of the year. I was curious to see if there was anything interesting and worthwhile. Most of the roll were ho-hum images. The ones below are the ones that stood out over the rest.
Middle Harbor | Spring Muskeg |
Pine and Petersburg Mountain | Buttercups |
No comments:
Post a Comment