It's Today!

I can't stop smiling.

If I had a happy dance, I'd be doing it.

Wearing Rented Shoes

Guy's night out.

I'm abysmal at bowling, but it's hard to be ashamed of that.

#587, Squircle

Two more days.

(1040) #430, Towers

Construction continues. (Compare with December 2005.)

The 'weekly project' idea has run its course. I'll still make every effort to post new photos at least once a week, especially by Sunday - starting again in mid-November. Until then, no promises.

#428, Skyline With Beams

My favourite view of the city, constantly changing.

This photo blog has now been running for over six years, easily making it the longest-running project I've ever done.

To mark the anniversary, I took my camera down to the Bathurst Street Bridge one more time. This image is another take on one of my favourites from the place where I've logged more photos per square meter than anywhere else in the city. The area has changed a lot, and there's more of the same still to come.

#423, Back Alley

I don't even know what that means.

#429, Tobacco

In keeping with the recent streak of photos that fall down in some way (see the two posts below, #464 and #025), this is one that's an absolute disaster that I still think worked out okay in the end.

I'm a novice photographer: I shift and change constantly, working with new equipment and starting over far more often than I should. (If only I could enjoy monogamy in my photography as much as I do in the rest of my life!) This was taken with a Fuji GX680III, a monster of a medium-format film camera that's completely set me back to zero. There's so much that can go wrong that I'm not even sure what the problems are. The dirty tobacco-stained colour is probably from a bad scan, but I can't say for sure because I'm also using an unfamiliar film in a camera without a light meter, and this negative has some serious exposure issues that probably resulted from my not securing the bellows properly when I changed lenses at the end of my previous roll. Although I try not to use with violent connotations to describe my photography - like 'shoot' - I can only say that I had to beat this image into submission.

But when I set up the camera to take this photo, I was looking for a way to convey the removal of the Harley Davidson dealership, driven out by land values and encroaching condominiums, as a desolate and negative thing. I didn't expect the result to look like this, but I don't mind that it does.

One thing's for sure: now that my personal photography is 95% film, my lemon-to-lemonade ratio has skyrocketed.

#464, Between Signs

There's a popular argument that the camera doesn't matter: a great photographer with a bad camera will still be great, and an incompetent with a great camera will still do badly.

That's 89% nonsense.

But the fact is that this was taken with a great camera, which the photographer wasted by missing the focus.

C'est la vie.

#025, Ketchup

It's been fourteen photos since I posted an image captured with a digital camera.

The little digital GH1, fitted with the Zeiss 4/85, has done a good job under adverse conditions. But I've been thinking a lot about image quality and technical fidelity recently, and this image isn't up to my usual standards. The horizontal bands across the image come from amplifying the digital signal too much - iso1600 - and don't look like anything that occurs in nature.

Back when digital was taking over from film, there was a lot of forum-angst over how many megapixels are needed for 'film quality'. But the arguments would revolve around capturing fine detail, which become visible as an image is enlarged. I'm insulated from the debate by virtue of not caring, then or now, but it still seems misguided. It's like comparing the sound quality of a vinyl record to a compact disk by asking how loudly they can be played.

(But to be fair, this image would be comparing an LP to an overly-compressed MP3 - no contest, in my opinion.)

(1039) #815, Lash Miller

I'm falling into a nice rhythm, taking photos on the weekends and developing them during the week. Film can be fun.