Week 1 - Pease Park

Shoot, Damn It

I really wasn't sure what to shoot this week, but I decided I'd go out and shoot something anyway. One of the primary goals in starting this blog was to keep myself accountable; to kick my ass into going out and shooting something every week. I've heard the advice that writers get, that you should write every day regardless of whether or not you want to. Like exercise, it's supposed to make you better through sheer experience and repetition. I am trying to do the same thing (though not every day, it takes me long enough to develop and scan film as it is).

So, on Thursday June 21st, I grabbed my Yashica Mat 124 twin lens reflex and a roll of film before heading out to work. I told myself that I would go and shoot SOMETHING after work. And while I don't think that what I shot was remarkable artistically, I am proud of the fact that I went out and did it. I tried to practice my visualization, not just to take pictures of anything and everything but to try and find the interesting shots available to me.

I'm pretty sure I did a crappy job at that, but you have to start somewhere. I think that every roll of film I put through a camera while being thoughtful about it, even if nothing is clicking that day, is good exercise.

Even though I don't think the pictures are that interesting, though, there are two interesting things I want to talk about with this roll.

Sunny 16

My Yashica Mat has a light meter built in to it, but it's busted and unreliable. I don't even look at it. This has, in the past, kept me from going out with this camera, which is a shame. It's fun to use and it's no heavier than any of my film SLRs.

I recently decided that I needed to develop (get it, it's a photography blog) the ability to guesstimate my exposures without relying on a light meter. So I started practicing using the Sunny 16 Rule.

The fact that every frame of film I shot this week has an image on it means that I did pretty well. Most of them seem exposed correctly, too, so I seem to have been more or less on the money. Black and white film is pretty flexible, though, so I would still use a light meter if I was doing anything in color, or anything very important.

Still though, being able to go outside with a mechanical camera and say "I'm thinking I need to shoot this at f/4 and 1/125th" is freeing. It gives you a little more confidence not to have to rely on another device.

Plus-X

The other thing I want to talk about is the fact that I shot this on my second-to-last roll of Kodak Plus-X, which has been discontinued. This particular batch expired in January 2009. The one roll I have left will almost certainly be the last roll I ever get to shoot.

Plus-X is the slower version of Tri-X, meaning it has finer grain but requires a lot more light. Tri-X has been my film of choice for forever. It's very forgiving--you can shoot it in almost any situation and you can quite frankly abuse it and you still get pictures. It's kind of an easy film to learn on in that regard. It's grainy and old-fashioned looking, but I don't mind. It's kind of like the black coffee of film.

Plus-X, on the other hand, never interested me. If I wanted something with less grain, I'd get one of the fancier slow-speed films. The benefit of Tri-X is its versatility, which Plus-X didn't offer to the same degree. I'm sure many people loved the film, and it's been around forever, so I'm not knocking it, but its discontinuance didn't bother me too much.

But all the same, it was kind of an icon. Sure, it was overshadowed by its faster, more versatile brother, but you always knew it was there. And now it's not.

You'd think I'd have corrected that framing.

Kodak is going through some financial troubles, and no one is really sure how much longer they'll stick with black and white film. They say they intend to stick it out, and I'm sure they'd like to, but... I don't know. Kodak's problems are bigger than the niche market of black and white photographers; they're dealing with Hollywood's transition to digital and with their own failure to effectively compete in digital imaging. I'm sure they mean well, and they say they want to stay in black and white but...they discontinued Plus-X. What am I supposed to think?

I don't think black and white film is going away. Kodak aren't the only players in the game: Ilford in England only makes black and white film and is a smaller, nimbler company that can tolerate smaller profit margins. Fujifilm is so diversified, and makes so much money, that they seem to put out old-fashioned products just to satisfy their own whims. And like I said, I never really shot this film.

But all the same, it's a sobering sign of the times. I have one more roll, and I hope I do it justice. Happy trails, Plus-X.

Last of the Steam-Powered Trains

I've threatened to start this blog for a while.

I just finished graduate school, and I find myself with a great deal of spare time that had been taken up with reading about rhetorical theory. I knew that I should devote this newly-freed-up time to something I've been woefully bad at the last several years: focusing on photography.

I really enjoy photography. Specifically traditional black and white film photography. Oh, I'm not a professional, let me point that out right now. Sometimes I get lucky, I've taken some decent shots, but a quick Google Image search will show you that I'm not any sort of authority. All the same, I'm in love with the process. I develop my film at home in my sink. I rent darkroom space from a lab in town and print when I can. I find the experience to be meditative and deeply satisfying, even if I rarely find the prints to be so satisfying.

I decided months ago that I would spend a year focusing on photography, shooting every week, and posting the results on a blog to hold myself accountable. If I can look back on it at the end of a year and see improvement--even small improvement--it will have been worthwhile.

Two factors have finally pushed me to get on the stick: my birthday and a Kinks song.

I turned 31 this weekend. While that was not anywhere near as monumental a landmark as turning 30 (an event marked by a temper tantrum on my part followed by a great deal of gin), it did serve to remind me that procrastination is the enemy. I am not getting younger, and what better time to mark the start of an educational year than my birthday.

But more importantly, today I was listening to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, and it put an idea into my head that pushed me to go ahead and do this. For those of you who don't know, that album is essentially Ray Davies' long-form exploration of nostalgia. He sings about the England of his youth besieged by "American tourists;" about his old friends forgetting his name; about the good old days that won't return. But at the same time, what makes the album work is that Davies is obviously aware that it's all a fantasy. Nostalgia is a longing for what you remember, not what was; what you remember was never actually there to begin with. It's just a story you tell yourself.

In particular, I am thinking about the song "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains:"

Like the last of the good ol' choo-choo trains,
Huff and puff 'till I blow this world away,
And I'm gonna keep on rollin' till my dying day.
I'm the last of the good old fashioned steam-powered trains.

For me this song captures the inspiring, confrontational, here's-mud-in-your-eye feeling of thinking that you are the last of a dying breed. You're a flag-waver for an older, more pure way of being, and damn the torpedoes, you're going to keep on rollin' till your dying day. You against the world! It's a satisfying fantasy, but it's just a fantasy.

I indulge in this fantasy sometimes.

I'm not against digital cameras at all, but I'm also not interested very much in them. Photography for me is about the experience, and I admit to feeling a certain bit of pride in using 30-, 40-, 50-year old equipment to make an image. Autofocus makes me uncomfortable, I want to set the aperture by clicking the barrel, and I eat film grain for breakfast. I admit that, in my less-than-good moods, I get kind of a chip on my shoulder about it. And then I get to thinking that I'm the last of a dying breed, and that film photography is some sort of grandiose fight-the-power lost cause.

But that's a stupid way to live. Love for the past and respect for a way of working is one thing; making it into an oppositional fantasy is something else entirely. I catch myself thinking along these lines--that by working in an old-fashioned medium, I'm somehow making a statement to the whole modern system--and it's silly. It's like Andy Samberg throwing everything on the ground.

Ansel Adams says that photography is "an inclusive language." There's no shortage of pictures to be taken or ways to take them. I am not the last of the steam-powered trains, and this is not a race. I am just a guy who loves his cameras and wants to do the best he can.

Let's see where the year takes me.