Saturday involved a whole lot of wasting a nice sunny day in Hot Springs. ..going to a lame 4x4 convention; going over to jason's and then eating at McClard's. Quite possibly the best food in the world
Having a "somewhat nice" digital camera really changes the way you go about taking photographs. There's something more fulfilling in lugging a 35 mm around and using film, but in retrospect, I only get 2-5 photos that I really like ..per roll of film. Pay for the film. Pay for the developing. 2 to 5 nice photographs costs me around 10 bucks.
With my digital model, you still have all of the manual controls and even the option to use various filters and flash units, ..the only negative being the fact that you can't play with the leeway of using different films.
Having the luxury of looking at my photos on an lcd, right as I take them, changes everything. no i don't like that one. delete it. take it again. It was over exposed or under exposed or out of focus or not particularly good enough because i think i can get a better shot from over here or up there, ..the same things you say to yourself after shelling out six bucks at the photo center a week later, but you're saying them THERE, where it matters as it happens.
Its really a luxury that i don't fully appreciate, understand, or deserve.
People who've never sat down and tried to eat lunch with thier hands smelling like developer or fix, ..people who've never flipped through a stack of 100 new photos and gone home pissed because only 2 of them were acceptable, people who've never been stoked about 10 photos they just captured and then accidentally ruined them by getting sunlight on the undeveloped film, ...these people don't understand why the nicer digital cameras are so nice.
Its so easy now that it's insulting. There are going to be more and more people with cameras that can easily take nice photographs. So I guess it all goes back to style and attitude, ..more "what" you're photographing, instead of the quality of your shots. Content over textbook standards. Meaning over quality, etc..
I'm finding out that I just missed the boat on being spoiled rotten, digitaly speaking. I know just enough to know that I've got it easy. Not spoiled rotten, just spoiled.
At my new internship today, I was able to sit in while the film crew set up the lighting and taped an interview with Geleve Grice. That old guy, ..has taken a whole freaking lot of photographs. It was really inspiring.
Also interviewed was Robert Cochran, director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies. He's been partly responsible for bringing attention to Grice's work. "Who knows," he said. "something to rival and perhaps soon outshadow the Disfarmer collection."
Cochran also wrote an article about Grice, in an older issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. Interesting stuff.
Spoiled. Spoiled rotten with a digital camera.