When I uploaded and started looking at the photos from today’s photowalk in McKinney, TX with the Dallas Photo Walk MeetUp group, I realized two things: 1) I’m getting a bit better, but not much, and 2) my photos from photowalks all pretty much look the same.
So I need to do something to shake things up. But what? Shoot in full manual instead of Aperture priority? Tried that in the Worldwide PhotoWalk a few months back, and may try it again, but don’t really know what that would help. Pick a focus to stick to, say ‘textures’ or ‘shapes’ or somesuch? This might help, if I went on photowalks more often than once a month or so, but the occasional-ness of the walks means that any lessons I learn from one walk are largely forgotten by the time the next walk rolls around, especially since the rest of my photographic work is done mostly from the safety of the apartment. I want to get better at making pictures, and these walks are good as they get me out of the house and shooting with people, but if I keep going this way, I’ll keep coasting along with this part of my photographic practice.
Enough of that.
I took the Ricoh 35-ZF along with me today, and used the D7000 to calculate exposures. This meant that I spent a lot of time shooting at ISO400 instead of my usual 100, so the shutter speeds on the digital side were insanely high most of the day. On the film side, I was mostly at 1/250th or 1/500th (the max for the Ricoh), and at f/11 or f/16. I tried to underexpose from what the D7000 told me, but 1/500th at f/16 is the fastest and smallest the Ricoh will go, so I don’t really know what to expect from the film side.
I shot roughly half a roll of Fuji PRO 400 H color film, and it’ll be awhile before I get the rest of the roll shot and processed. But it was nice to have something else to play with, if it did start to become a bother to have two cameras to mess with all morning. I’m glad I took it, though, and I look forward to comparing the shots from the 45 year old Ricoh with the shots from a year-old D7000…
All in all, the walk was good times, and about a dozen of us (or maybe 16?) went out to lunch afterwords, which was quite nice.
tl;dr: if I want to grow photographically, I need to do many more of these, and I should probably shoot more film.
