tcoen's photostream

I have been slowly exploring photography for over a year now. I've learned so far that I like photographing places, rather than people or things.

Regarding style, I'm still scattered, but converging a bit perhaps. I like interpretations of places. Thus, for digital I like to heavily modify my images. Otherwise, I find digital to be too direct and literal. With film, I feel a translation of the scene has already occured, and I am less inclined to change the result. Especially with B/W. So film actually becomes less work. The designers of film, I think, have acheived an artistic triumph as much as a technical one.

For digital, I mostly use a Sony DSC-R1. It has a great lens that is fixed. This is good because I can't waste money upgrading it.

For film, I have a 35mm Pentax ME SLR with a 50m f/1.7 lens. It's very small for an SLR and features very simple operation. Much simpler than a digital P/S I think. Also, the viewfinder is killer. With a 50mm lens, it's just like viewing the world without a camera (uh, but cropped a bit of course).

I recently started using a 4x5 Linhof Kardan Color 45s view camera. I like the way in which a view camera connects the user to each step in the process of taking a picture. As a side benefit, I can now take incredibly detailed images of banal scenes. The disadvantage is that a single picture takes a long time to take. So the scene cannot be quickly explored from multiple viewpoints, with the best interpretations sorted through later. I am hoping this limitation will help me learn to pre-visualize images better, thus genreally improving my photography. Currently, I think this is the biggest benefit of using 4x5, rather than improved resolution or sharpness.