I’ve been a bit quiet here on the blog lately. Apologies. I haven’t been particularly busy, or, rather, I haven’t been busier than normal (which isn’t particularly busy), but I’ve been a bit uninspired on the photography front.
I had a couple of rolls in progress since the snafu at the Worldwide Photo Walk, I just didn’t shoot much, just a quick snapshot here or there. I’m working on a bit of a long-term project with the phone, but I won’t have anything to show for awhile. I’ve been looking at good pictures (read: art pictures, and pictures by famous historical figures) and reading some criticism, and it’s left me a bit adrift.
Anyway, after more than a month of hauling around two cameras full of film, I finished a roll in the LC-A a week and a half or so ago and finished the roll in the FG late last week. I developed both on Friday, scanned and processed over the weekend, and so I finally have a few pictures to share… not as many as I hoped, perhaps, but enough to get through a week anyway.
So let’s get started off on the wrong foot…
I pulled 38.35 frames from a roll of Lomography Color 100 in the Lomo LC-A and found exactly none that I’d be proud or happy to share… Every shot had some sort of problem.
Let’s go through them all, shall we?
So first up, something I’m often guilty of: banal/random/hackneyed subject matter.
Granted, these are all from something I’m working on, albeit not in film, and they’re all reasonably sharp and more or less pleasant enough. But, and as mentioned (obliquely) above, I’ve been looking at good photographs and reading a bit of criticism, and maybe I want to do more than just shoot whatever grabs my fancy, or maybe I’m tired of just shooting to shoot. Maybe I want to do something with my hobby and maybe just snapshooting isn’t it.
So that’s one error, of sorts, if not a huge one.
Next: framing.
Now with a hip shot, or a quick yank-the-camera-from-the-pocket-and-shoot, some framing errors can be accepted, and maybe even forgiven, as with this shot I grabbed of Garry, one of my coworkers.
At least Garry has a nice grin on his face, and at least he’s not too blurred. The whole picture is a blur, but at least Garry isn’t too blurry. And given it was a total hip-type shot, I suppose some amount of forgiveness is in order.
But what was I thinking here?
Maybe I was trying to shoot the crescent moon over the water tower… with the 32mm lens on the LC-A. If that’s what I was up to, this is probably about as good as I could get, with that particular camera, on that particular night, while walking quickly to the Masjid for Salat. Still, with a bit of creative leaning and stretching, I probably could’ve squared up the tower a bit, maybe.
Still, not horribly egregious, I suppose, but still not anything I should be sharing, really.
Next up: mixed lighting.
As you know, if you’ve paid any attention, I scan and process my own film with a D7000. This makes color correction something of a subjective sport. In the past, I fixed white balance on the frame numbers for most films. Well, I’ve recently discovered that the frame numbers are often not white: they’re yellow on Fuji films, for example, and with this Lomography film, I don’t think the film stock is is black, really, or whatever film they’re making it from is so far gone that the stock goes maroon when you balance the color for the scene.
This isn’t often a problem, but with tricky lighting it gets very tricky.
I went back and forth and round and round trying to get the color even close on this one. I ended up trying to get the pale green/yellow of the sweet potato vine (the little patch of vine under the canopy, just left of the center) close, and that seemed to get everything else close too.
But combine that with camera shake and… maybe something interesting, maybe not…
And in the realm of strange color, I have no idea what went wrong here. I think there was some sort of developing issue (see, for example, the yellow splotch on the left), but I really have no idea what went wrong at all.
And then there’s the heavily blurred left side and top right corner and the general lack of sharpness overall, which is mostly due to my poor judge of distance, especially when it comes to the metric system… what is .8 meters in feet? and how far away from that flower pot is that, and what aperture and depth of field can I expect in full shade from the LC-A in Auto mode at that distance?
Allahu Alim (and a bunch of people who are far better judges of distance than I).
I didn’t get the color right, either…
Next up, I just set the distance to .8 meters, shoved it in the bush, and took a picture, thinking that surely something would come out. As with most other blind shooting: good luck with that.
And finally, the piece de resistance: a nice combination of all of the above, plus a winding error from the LC-A.
Now, granted, I joked the color up just a bit for this, but only after trying and trying and failing to get it even close.
So that’s 11 bad shots from the LC-A. Stay tuned: some decent-ish shots from the FG are on the way, InshaAllah.
