365 Project

12-04-16

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Day 339 / 704 – Devil’s Slide bunker

My first “real” camera was some used thing about 20 years ago, film, 35mm, no idea what brand it was.  I had one lens, I don’t know if it was changeable.  It was a brown rangefinder camera.  I didn’t know what half the controls were, I didn’t understand much about how exposure worked, or take careful notes about what I shot so I could see what effect changing settings had.

I just loved to shoot with it.

And I mostly shot black and white.

Most of the shots on 365 are black and white.  Sometimes when I look over the pages, I jump when I see a color one go by.  I have always been attracted to black and white.  Maybe there is a little cheating involved in black and white.  You don’t have to color to distract you, but at the same time, the focus will be squarely on what you put in the frame.  So maybe it isn’t as much of a cheat as we think.

Some shots are appropriate for black and white, some for color.  It’s hard to know what is better until you look at it.  When I shot film twenty years ago, the film determined what you shot, and if you wanted to change from one to the other, then you were done with that roll of film.  So I stuck with what I liked. Black and white.

Now, since I can do it in the computer, and I can manipulate the tones of the black and white image much more than I could before, I get to chose after.  It’s a great freedom, one I don’t have any problem touting.  Film isn’t better or worse than digital.  They each have their strengths.  I am happy I’m shooting digital.  I like what it has to offer.

But I wonder where my old film camera is.  Just because I’m curious.

12-03-16

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Day 338 / 703 – This almost didn’t get taken.  I was pretty stressed for time, and we had to get back to San Francisco so Meg could get to work on time.  A 4 hour drive in California into a major city can easily turn into a nightmare.

Luckily, Meg was smart enough to stop.  We took a few minutes to roam away from the car and this was one of the results.

The point here is pretty simple: good things happen when you take the time.  It’s something I have to remind myself.  When I’m on a trip, I want to move on to the next thing, I want to make sure I maximize the things I see, rather than take the time to do it right, or to do it well.

Time is the friend of the photographer.  Whether it’s taking the time to think, to pause, to consider about your shot, to get the settings just right, or even showing up at the right time, time is your friend.  Even the ‘value’ of a photograph seems to go up the further from the time it was taken we get.

Almost all of my shots that I like the most, I took a little more time to get that shot.  I didn’t just raise the camera, shoot, and move on.  I have posted plenty of shots here that I rushed, that I pressed my time.  And still, sometimes I rush things more than I need.

Sometimes you have to.  Like the time I took a picture of a cow in Florida, then heard a shot fired.  The cows heard it too, as they started running.  That’s a good time to move on quickly.

I need to remind myself to slow down, that the time spent is worth it.  And you would think that, with all the times it’s worked out, I wouldn’t need to remind myself.  But I do.  I think a lot of work is rushed these days, and we aren’t giving our best to what we make.  We aren’t giving our work the time it needs to truly be great, or failing that, better.

More on this topic soon.