My Little Game (part 3)

Part 3 of theonlinephotographer’s Little Game threw me for a bit of a loop. “You should not only concentrate on your Top Five categories, but also actively avoid the other twenty.” What?

Really, this makes complete sense to me, and my first impulse was to go back and re-order my categories. After all, there are things in the list that I want to do more of, as I expect they’ll lead me somewhere. And some of the things in my top five (family snaps, for example) while wildly important, aren’t something I want to make a project out of: I just want to document my family. For five things to focus on near-exclusively, I wouldn’t put family snaps in there, especially since my darling, adorable wife now tires of being photographed, and my family isn’t really together all that often. Does this make me a heel? I don’t know. Probably.

So I went back and started looking.

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So I bought a Holga…

I don’t quite know why…

I never bought one when they were still being made. I thought about buying one when they stopped being made, but the price of used ones skyrocketed (briefly). Then I was going to buy a new one, but heard that they were even less good than the originals.

But then Freestyle had 25% off plastic cameras for Buy Nothing Day, and they ran it through the Monday after, and after hunting eBay and studying the (few) different types of Holgas made and looking at prices, I went ahead, threw caution to the wind, and jumped on a new one.

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My Little Game (part 2) – Analysis Paralysis

For part 2 of theonlinephotographer’s Little Game, Mike instructs us to “prioritize your list. Put the things that are most important to you at the top and the ones that are least important at the bottom.” Is that all? “Be intuitive about it if need be; be logical about it if that appeals. Think only of yourself, not of an audience. Eschew thoughts of remuneration. Keep shuffling till you’re satisfied.”

This is a hard one for me.

A couple of years ago, Jeff Curto put out series of short lectures on his Camera Position podcast on photography projects, from conceptualizing, to shooting, to sharing, to archiving (Episodes 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, and 81). In episode 75, Curto instructs listeners to “make a list of at least 20 things that are really important to you.” Try as I might, I could never get to 20.

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Joel Meyerowitz – ‘Where I Find Myself’

What can I say about the first lifetime retrospective of Joel Meyerowitz’s work, with comments throughout by Meyerowitz himself? If you’re the least bit aware of Meyerowitz and his practice, you probably know something about his trajectory, from 35mm street shooter to 8×10 landscape and still life, and Where I Find Myself has it all.

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My Little Game (part 1)

Last Friday, the Online Photographer shared the first part of this Little Game. I don’t know what the rest of the game involves, but I have a few suspicions. Time will tell.

The gist of part one is as follows: take pen and paper, look through your archive, and list out 25 categories of things that you like to take pictures of. These could be genres, subjects, scenes, whatever, but they should be things that get you moving in some way, and not things that you do just to sell or get likes from.

I limited my archive to film, shot in the last 3 years, and still had some 12000 images to scroll through. It was at turns exhilarating and depressing: exhilarating to see all the really interesting/pretty pictures I’ve made; depressing at just how much I’ve shot and (seemingly) how little I’ve done with it (though I’ve written hundreds of posts here, almost all with a handful of pictures or more). But overall, this little game has been quite engaging and fun, so far, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Here’s my list, with some examples.

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Khalik Allah – ‘Souls Against the Concrete’

Several years ago, I took a screengrab of a photo for my ‘Inspiration/To Try’ collection. I’ve returned to it many times, wondering how to get the light, the focus, the blur. I had no idea who took the photo, and at the time, I really didn’t care. It’s a portrait of an older man, close up. His mouth is chopped off by the bottom of the frame. His eyes are intense, bloodshot, looking, questioning, emerging from shadow. Most of the light in the frame bounces off of his forehead and nose, with a bit on his cheek. His hair falls away to a soft blur, and the background is just smooth blobs of light blue and peach.

I had a bunch of thoughts about how to create something like it in my dingy apartment, or with my darling, adorable wife in our lovely home, thinking of strobes and gels, trying out some strobist-type stuff, but I never did anything with it.

I saw a few shots, out in the world, that might work, but I never quite got it, never even got close really, and I forgot about the photo for awhile, moved the ‘Inspiration/To Try’ folder to an archive drive, and focused on… well, whatever it is I shoot.

Imagine my delight when I found it in Khalik Allah‘s Souls Against the Concrete. 

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Mitsubishi MX-III first roll review

Recently, the good folks at the FPP found a cache of 2006-expired Mitsubishi MX-III film. Peel the label off, and what do you have but some nice Kirkland Signature 200! Sadly, there’s no label to peel off, as with the ShurFine 200 I wrote about last week, but given the country of origin (and film canister) it appears to be a Konica (or Konica-Minolta) stock, possibly VX100. Just as soon as I finished the roll of ShurFine, I loaded a roll of the Mitsubishi into the Ricoh 500 ME, and wow! I like this stuff! Continue reading “Mitsubishi MX-III first roll review”