They’re migrating south for the winter...
What I did was: buying an old East German camera cheaply, a Praktica, one that has to be (guess-)operated completely manually. Just snap for the hell of it and may God have mercy on us all... no safety net. No training wheels. I then put in a roll of film that was at least 5 years past its final processing date and went a-photographing. I may have accidentally let some light come onto the film at taking the roll out, unfamiliar as I was with the Wissenschaftswunder of the proletariat’s finest camera. Brought the roll to the photo shop and then had to wait for a week. I didn’t had them printed, just developed (who needs all the paper work?). Then I put the negatives under the scanner, hairs, scratches & all...
And then... I was most pleasantly surprised & delighted with the unforeseen results of rough, blurry, spacious, delightful, human images. They satisfy more than one passion: the passion of handwork, of low-tech, true image-making practise and, most of all of image imperfection. No more slick, neat, clean, licked-to-death, anal-retentive überboring photography for me; I leave that to National Geographic, Playboy and other women’s magazines and I go grunge. If it hadn’t rained so much yesterday, I would have dragged my poor body out of the house and bought some more films, perhaps even black & white.
[This is not intended as a snobbish plead for analogue photography nor a damnation of digital superficiality; just a celebration of a rare outburst of passion in me.]
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But digital IS crap! You looka here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.wolfhoward.com/pinhole-photographs/
And THIS:
http://home.saxonia.net/kesselboth/Grafik/zb/w38tisch_gr.jpg
is how my telephone looks (no joke).
See what I mean?
Love your pics of course.
'Digital is crap!' Hê hê, now there's a shirt slogan! I don't know about the crappiness of digital photography: It's all about mentality of the maker, I think. One can make clean pictures with film too. For me, this is not even about the looks. It was just so much fun and special to expose a piece of film to light and not be sure of the outcome.
ReplyDeleteOver the years, I've made 20,000 digital photographs and in the beginning I was so pleased they looked "just like I saw it" (after years of disappointing bleak ones). But now, with film, I am most pleased the pictures DON'T look the way I see it. I don't like (or let's say: HATE) clean, clear things, be it in music, in photography, interior decorating, cars or women. The form is what most people worship, when it's content that should be thought about.
Those wolfhoward pics of the bands are terrific! I hope he uses a true 19th century camera for it, and not an iPhone App (wink).
Cool phone you have, almost Laurel & Hardy style. I used to have one with a dialing wheel for a long time, but then 'the system' made me give it up (I could no longer choose the numbers of the menus). Hey hey! (I'll post some more lomos too, next, if I've got time...)