I think it would be interesting to be dropped off someplace completely foreign (not knowing where I’m going ahead of time), shoot all day, have my memory of it wiped, and then look at what I shot. Kind of like Winogrand—who waited a few years before processing and printing his exposures so he’d have no [...]

I’ve got some relatively set preferences for lens lengths, but as I shoot more formats, I’m discovering that I have sometimes very different tastes for them. For straight 35mm and 6×6, I don’t like anything longer than "normal": 80mm on 6×6 and 45mm on 35mm. (I actually find 50mm a bit long on 135 and [...]

I picked up an Olympus Pen FT 35mm SLR at the end of February [2007]. Because it’s half frame, the viewfinder is vertical rather than horizontal, and I was really curious to see if it would affect how I see through it. I’ve been using it as my primary normal-lensed camera for a few months [...]

I’ve noticed an odd trend lately: most of the people I know who aren’t geeky in any way (aren’t technically inclined, aren’t particularly curious about how things work, and, not wanting to be bothered with technical details, tend to favor point-and-shoot or fully automatic cameras) seem to be really into classifying things. When some of [...]

About a week ago, I took a walk in a local park with a Hasselblad 501C/M and a 350mm lens to see if I could get down with long lenses, which I generally don’t like very much (see previous post). I didn’t feel like I’d done very well at the time, and the film I [...]

Yesterday started out beautifully. It was almost 80°F in the sun, which was a welcome change from the cold New York winter, and I went to Peach Hill Park, which is an old apple orchard. I haven’t fixed the light leak in my one particular copy of a Spartus that’s my favorite landscape camera (it’s [...]