Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Unfortunately my copy of the Pentax Spotmatic F has an issue with the 1/500 and 1/1000 shutter speeds. The timing of the shutter is such that it is captured on the film as a black band across part of the frame. In among the images that turned out I have thrown in some Nikon P7000 images that represent the failed images. This is possible because I was using the Nikon as my exposure meter. You can’t beat a digital camera for the immediate feedback they give so why not use that to advantage when shooting film. I hope to find the time this winter to adjust the shutter as this is an otherwise excellent camera. For now though I will use a different camera with my screw mount lenses.

Another film bites the dust and scratches, as of October 1, 2012 Kodak has discontinued P3200 T-max. I have to admit I never really liked this film and when I did use it I got mixed results. This particular roll was severely out of date so I overexposed it by two stops. I set my camera for 800 ISO and let it be processed as if it were 3200. The result was as good as I’ve been able to achieve with this film so maybe I was on to something right before it was too late.

What makes digital photography so great also is the source of a problem.  When the barriers to taking pictures are so low  you can create a difficult situation sorting through them to find the ones to keep.  Keeping them all is no answer either it just delays the selection to some later time.  With film there are fixed limits to how many frames of film you might have and how much you might want for later, digital blows through that barrier allowing thousands of pictures on a memory card.  There is an easily determined cost to film that goes something like (Film $6 + Developing $3.00 = $9.00 /36) = about 25 cents per shot.   Once you have a digital camera the per shot cost is virtually nil.

So it becomes very tempting to just keep shooting and taking a multitude of pictures with digital but it’s when you have to pick out the worthy ones while being careful to not delete something that might have a distinct value later that you might wish you had used more restraint.  The upside of course is that you increase your chances of capturing an interesting moment but that can be done with film too it just requires more active participation on the part of the photographer.  Instead of snapping you should be looking and thinking.

Of course I am guilty of this myself  this digital “contact sheet” may illustrate my point. I spent nearly as much time going through these images as I did taking them and that is not the way I want to spend my time.

Post Script:  Between the time I wrote this post and am posting it online I’ve done this again, ending up deleting more than half the pictures I took from a single day.