Despite living next to the main University of Toronto campus for years, I'm still finding new places to go and new things to photograph. Six of the fifteen posts from the last thirty days have been from there, another was from the same city block, and I have three more that I've uploaded to my gallery host but haven't included here (yet).
And to think that I like to travel.
A stoplight caught in the sun's reflection cast onto a concrete stucco wall.
There's a certain level of nonsense around rangefinder photography, some of which involves not cropping images. (It must be the integrity of their precise viewfinders that people are trying to preserve. After all, printed photos and mounted slides always show the full area as well.) Photos with black edges on the narrow sides, like this one, have kept the full width of the scanned negative. The long edges come away with white borders, though, which aren't that tempting to include.
Transparency scans do have black edges on all four sides, but that's still not enough reason for me to use the much more `spensive stock.
I don't usually photograph landscapes, but I really like how this photo comes together.
There's very little that isn't improved by a curled-up sleeping cat.
Even if I am allergic to her.
I keep deleting what I write here.
Essentially, it's the idea that the meme of a small thing triumphing in a big world assumes a lot.
I'll just say that this photo is a good choice for today.
There's something really wonderful about transparency film: holding such perfect miniature images, and seeing them shining with light, is an experience that exceeds anything possible with negative/print film.
Too bad the rest of it is such a hassle, though - not to mention its eye-blurring expense.
In a rare and (hopefully) precedent-setting move for me, I've experimented with three different films, and like the cheapest one the best.
Checking to see if there's any truth to this 'unobtrusive rangefinder' thing.
(Not that much, actually, but the light changed.)
A surprisingly popular photo, from my third roll of film and second roll of black and white. I have four more rolls in the shop, so at least there'll be some new material for this weekend.
And yes, I know these are donkeys.
The point of my weekly project is that it would motivate me to take more photos. After all, if I'm committed to publicly showing at least one photo per week, it should shame me into taking better images, or at least more of them. I was in one of my periodic slumps, and it has worked to keep me active through a couple more in the 62 weeks since then.
But I never considered that there could be a time when I'm taking a lot of photos, but literally have nothing to show for it.
So instead of more images of doors and walls, here's a photo that I took this week of the reason for my lack of current material.
The flight deck of the Zeiss Ikon is one of the most beautiful control layouts I've ever seen. The focus and aperture controls are on the lens, and everything else is right here. Film counter and advance lever. The shutter button on top of the power/lockout switch. The position of the dial marked "A" means that the camera's in Auto Exposure mode, and rotating it so that the "A" is from -2 to +2 is the exposure compensation control. Rotated further, it's the shutter speed selection. Lifting that same dial changes the film speed / iso sensitivity; its current position one-third of a stop below the red "400" means iso320, since I like to expose colour negatives one-third of a stop over what the film is rated for.
And that's it. Sure, there's also a lens release button, a film door latch, a release button and rewind crank. But compare that to my D700, which I used to take this picture. It has twenty-eight different controls on the outside of it, and that's being conservative - i.e., counting the drive mode dial but not the individual modes, and the four-way controller as only one button. After a year and a half, I'm still not sure exactly what that camera does.
I'm almost done my seventh roll of film with the Ikon, and I'm using my Nikon F100 alongside it for this weekend. It's been an interesting couple of weeks.
