Benjamin Postlewait's photostream  

Vista from Cape Meares along the Oregon coast.

Had been too long since a Roy posting, so here's one from a few years back. He's not cold, no. But he is in fact quite cool with his flashy kerchief and all.

Have been posting a lot of dark and dreary pictures of late, so I figured a change was due.

Struggled more than usual with whether or not to crop this picture down (to a square crop) so the big patch of magenta wasn't hovering above the meat and potatoes of the flower. But I didn't, obviously. Truth be told, I'm foolishly stubborn about cropping. My goal is to always get the composition just right in-camera and aside from straightening a horizon I generally refuse to crop my images whatsoever.

What's the point of that? I don't know. There are many times that I will play around in post-processing and find a crop that I like, but I scrap it because it's modified from the original. No, not that it's too modified. But simply because it's modified at all. I think it's like some subconscious form of self-punishment for not getting it right in the first place.

And so I limit myself to straight-out-of-camera compositions and, aside from the very recent Holga shots, 2 x 3 aspect ratios.

That's my confessional.

Told you it was foolish.

Upper Butte Creek Falls during excursion number one with my Holga 120WPC last month. Interesting how extreme the vignetting turned out on this - not that I mind (as I'm generally a fan of vignetting). If I remember correctly, I decided to expose this for probably 120 seconds (or so) as it was pretty dark and rainy by the time I made it down to the falls.

Having this camera, and the view it gives me, makes me want to get back into hunting for waterfalls and revisiting all those that I haven't been to in a while.

This is the first exposure from the first roll of film through my new Holga 120WPC that I got for Christmas.

To be honest, I'm just a smidgen shy of astonishment that anything on the roll turned out at all - let alone the very first image. I was a bit skeptical (and hesitant) to send these first few rolls away for development as I figured it was akin to burning my money, but I was delighted this evening when I got both rolls back and all the images actually turned out.

Have a lot to work on still. I would like to get to the point where exposure and composition (no viewfinder) don't feel like absolute guesswork with a shrug of the shoulders and a cross of the fingers. And to figure out why the shutter often gets stuck open when I use a cable release. I also had a plan to scribble down my exposure time for each frame for future reference (that didn't happen, and I wish I had). Oh well, new challenges.

Anyway, here's picture number one of what will hopefully be many from this camera.