Photos and time
I have been taking photos for a long time.
When I first started as a child plastic Kodak camera that used 126 film cartridges I couldn’t even frame the image correctly. The rangefinder on that camera as misaligned and the misalignment changed between shots. Every picture came out weird and off-center, but I loved every single one of them.
When I was a little old, but still not a teenager, I bought a 35mm point and shot of some long forgotten model that needed duct tape to hold the battery door closed at flea market. I took countless rolls that summer with that camera only for all of them to come out blurry and poorly exposed. My biggest joy was taking pictures of the fireworks on the 4th. It didn’t matter that the fireworks were probably 5 miles away and were just barely visible from the house I still took two rolls of pictures. They were all nearly black with only just the faintest of hints that some light was reaching the film. I didn’t care.
Those camera were lost time, but to this day I still find the same joy every time I pick up a camera. Event if I am just taking a picture of my license plate so I can pay to park.
To capture something more than faint streaks of light you need to add thought to the joy. Which adds time to the process of creating the picture. Sure I still take a lot of snapshots that have little more thought than “I like this, how can I frame it so others will see what I like?”, but they still have thought.
Recently, I have been experimenting with still life photography. If you subscribe to my Instagram feed (and why wouldn’t you, link in the header of this post) you will see some of these experiments. I’m enamored with the trichrome process, where I take three back and white photos with different filters and combine them in Photoshop to create a color image. The images come out looking like a 1960s dream. I have also been trying my hand a macro photography and it’s still early days yet, but its fun.
Another way I am putting thought into the photos is via deconstruction. The idea is to disassemble a thing and try to a single photo of all the parts. My first attempt is still a work in progress and all I can show in this post is a preview. I am in process of disassembling a Yeshiva Lynx-5000 range finder camera. It doesn’t work - something broke in the shutter mechanism - so I am not destroying a working camera. I had hoped to have the picture before now, but it is taking me far longer to disassemble the camera than I ever thought it would. I will add a preview of the process and if you have any thoughts let know.
