My previous post spoke to a few things i wanted to do this year. One of these was to dust off an old (30 years) Yashica TLR camera and shoot a few rolls of film through it. Sounds simple enough.
Truth is, like most photographers that have gone digital, there are a few basic skills that new technology allows me to ummm...well, shortcut. These shortcuts have caused me to get a bit lazy in my basic skills. What am I talking about? Well, exposure metering (judging the light needed for a photo) is pretty much automatic these days. Steadying the big, heavy camera?...we have optical image stabilization for that....who needs a tripod and a manual cable release these days! Black and white film?...Just flip a switch and Voila...black and white pics! Need to get closer to your subject?...just hit the zoom button...vs physically moving and composing your shot with a fixed focal length lens/camera. I had to go wayyyyy back...to the basics I had learned more than 30 years ago.
Well, I shot my first two rolls of black and white. I pulled out my rarely used old tripod, found my cable shutter release, and hoped that my "needle and pointer" light meter on the old camera would be accurate! I "Bracketed a few shots", but paid closer attention to what I was doing, because unlike erasing a pic you don't like in digital, this medium format film/processing costs money!!
I grabbed my wife and daughter, asked them to do a quick sitting for me, under duress, since they had not "fixed themselves up" etc., put them next to a window and fired off 24 shots. The shot of my daughter above, was one of the resulting photos. It was an old camera and black and white film, so I chose a rather "old school" pose.
Back to basics...and a look at the present through an old camera brought back to life!
