Ten years gone

Tags

artistry, beginnings, cameras, Canon Rebel XT, chair, digital photography, garden, ignorance, ordinariness

 

IMG_0001.jpg by Richard Keeling on 500px

Ten years ago, give or take a few weeks, I bought – with great excitement and not a little expense – my first digital SLR camera.

A Canon Rebel XT with the kit lens, a distinctly underwhelming 18-55mm slow zoom.

Not that I was really aware of that at the time. I was king of the photography world. Having spent a bit more than $1000 on the camera, I felt like I possessed the supreme instrument of photographic excellence. Certainly, the reviews and ads I had perused before making the purchase led me to believe something along those lines.

I had pretty much fallen for the positive press surrounding this camera. It was one of the earliest affordable (as in not costing many thousands of dollars) ‘serious’ cameras. One that was supposed to take your photography, especially if you were coming from a point and shoot camera, either film or digital, to the next level.

It didn’t. In truth my first year’s output from this Rebel XT was frequently inferior to the results I had been getting beforehand with my older Canon G2 Powershot. Not least because I didn’t really know what I was doing. The photograph above of my back garden, for example, was shot at an unfortunately slow 1/20 sec and shows signs of camera shake. The depth of field was too shallow, the ISO too conservative. Considerations that are second nature to me these days but simply did not enter my consciousness as I played with my new and wonderful camera.

On the other hand it’s a picture that’s not too terrible. It shows the scene as it was. A rather uninteresting scene, to be sure, and not one that would win any awards for composition, but as record of time and place it serves perfectly adequately. Looking out at the same scene today reveals a largely similar view, a pointer to the slowness of time as much as anything else. Even that garden chair is still there, a rather unexpected measure of the durability of industrial plastic.

The rather sweet irony of this particular photograph, blankly undemonstrative in its ordinariness, is that it reveals a genuineness that is, to my eyes, wholly absent from the massaged mass-production that dominates digital photography, at least popular digital photography, today.

Of course, there was and is a whole artistic aesthetic that embraces images such as these, if not exactly this image. This one wouldn’t be embraced by anyone except me I suspect. And even I don’t really embrace it. It’s much more of a point of history than anything else.

That enough though.

When I stopped being a photographer…

Tags

artistry, cameras, convention, digital photography, fashion, film, film photography, Forest Park, forums, history, photography websites, process, technique

…and became an artist.

Not the world’s greatest artist, but artist enough for me.

No ‘ah-ha’ moment. Just a gradual realisation that the ephemera of photography, stuff like lenses, cameras, resolution and sharpness and a thousand other technical details, didn’t really interest me any more.

For that’s what held me back. Concentrating on the tools and not on the result of using those tools. Following, almost slavishly, photography websites like DPReview, Digital Photography School, and The Digital Picture. Don’t get me wrong, these are good sites full of information, advice and active comment forums, yet they concentrate on the minutiae of photography. The nitty gritty. Technical details down to pixel level.

Clearly, if you look at the comments and follow any of the forum threads, information like that is enough for a lot of people. More than enough, judging from the sometimes heated discussions comparing this vs. that.

But it’s all noise in the end. Distracting noise. It removed me from the true point of being a photographer, that is to produce an artistically satisfying image.

Dead Tree, Forest Park by Richard Keeling on 500px

I can’t deny that going back to shooting film helped enormously with this change in attitude. It’s been a full year now since I took up a 35mm film camera and I’m on average shooting 2 rolls of 36 exposure 35mm film and 1/2 a roll of 120 film a week. More images, usually, than I capture using my digital cameras.

Going back to film moved me back to yesterday’s cameras. There was nothing to keep up with any more.

Those photography sites I listed above very occasionally contained an article or comment about film photography, but with the emphasis on it being a niche interest utilized by few and abandoned – happily – by most. Yesterday’s technology. Quaint, nostalgic, the province of the eccentric or the backward. Once in a while, an enlightened author would attempt to highlight the history of photography and try to place today’s digital obsession into some sort of context, but, judging from many comments, such an attempt at perspective flew over most people’s heads. They just weren’t interested.

That’s fine. You don’t have to be a film photographer to be a great photographer. But, to be a great photographer, you need to be a great artist.

So away from the latest and greatest I moved. Not a moment too soon really. It costs money to keep up with all this progress. I spent far more than I needed to. None of it made me a better photographer. A better collector of camera stuff maybe. Perhaps that was once the point, yes, for the urge to collect and complete is pretty strong within me. Not any more though. On the one hand I can look at my collection of lenses and say – “Wow, what a comprehensive set I have. I can cover any photographic eventuality!” On the other, I can look at that collection and see them sitting there, often unused, just things to have. Paradoxically, a mark of inertia. Not artistically helpful at all.

Obviously, that’s not quite the whole story. I can make good use of any one of those lenses. When I do, I feel pleased. But each is simply a tool, a conduit of process. What matters is the result. Today, I deliberate restrict myself to a single or limited repertoire of lenses. Currently with my 35mm shooting I’m using the second lens I ever bought. A cheap consumer grade lens, the Canon EF 28-105mm 3.5-4.5mm II if you really want to know. Discontinued and superseded. But using it is giving me a lot of pleasure. Both in the using and in the result.  


Egret seen through a bush by Richard Keeling on 500px

I also believe it is making me a better photographer. Or, at the very least, a more thoughtful photographer.

More than black and white

Tags

C-41, color, cost, developing, economy, expense, film, home developing, kit

 

Behind the Loop by Richard Keeling on 500px

My local camera shop, Creve Coeur Camera, raised the price for developing C-41 film by 50% this month.

Now a roll of 35mm costs $7.50 to develop only. Prints and scans are more, naturally enough.

I suppose the economics of what is an increasingly niche process compelled them to raise prices, but the net effect as far as I am concerned is to finally push me into home developing my color film.

I’ve been developing my own black and white for almost a year now. After some trial and error – but surprisingly less than I anticipated when I began – I can confidently develop a roll and get good results. I view developing as no more tricky than dealing with digital images, with an equivalent sense of relief from successful downloading a memory card as with storing a freshly developed film. In truth, having the film in hand is rather more reassuring feeling than having the digital image on my computer, even with backing up multiple times as is my habit. Arguments that digital formats are perhaps less apt for archiving than a strip of cellulose acetate resonate with me.

So an order for a Tetenal C-41 developing kit went into B&H this evening and no longer will I be trekking out to Ladue to drop off my color rolls.  I’m sure I will need a little practice to get color right, but I’ll get there, and will have the pleasure of doing it myself. Isn’t photography fun?