The Journey Begins…
There’s a saying around my house that I hear altogether too many times – “My husband is a moron!”. I guess you could say I’m at it again. In a photography rut, I ponied up some cash for a 1983 Nikon FE2 35mm film camera and a 50mm f/1.8 lens. I am seriously starting to wonder if my wife is right about me…
First, what the hell was I thinking?!? Well, my thought process was as follows: I eventually want to graduate up to a large format camera – probably a 4×5 but maybe even an 8×10. Living in Colorado there is no end to the beautiful nature just waiting to be captured in super high resolution. Sure, I could make the jump straight from digital to large format, but it’s been a LONG time since I’ve had to rely on my brain to make a great photo. I like many you have become a slave to the LCD and Histogram on the back of my camera. I take a bunch of shots, see what they look like, adjust settings, rinse and repeat.
The biggest draw to getting back to film for me was twofold: Resolution and dynamic range. With a 35mm negative strip (or slide), I am guessing that I will be able to see up to a 50% increase in resolution and one to two stops of additional dynamic range – possibly more if I’m shooting monochrome. That’s a big deal. What the heck is this dynamic resolution that I mention? Slight diversion – the human eye can see something like 20 “stops” of light. The typical digital camera can only represent about 6 or 7 “stops” of light. All that detail in the shadows and highlights gets lost when using a digital camera unless you are either a) really know what your are doing, b) shoot a lot of HDR or c) are really good with photoshop. Film traditionally lends itself to capturing more “stops” of light. More light = more detail = one happy photographer!
The last thing that sucked me in to this great experiment was the challenge. Do I take good photos because I know what I’m doing or is it a by-product of machine gun shooting through a scene and picking the one good image out of 100. There’s a time and a place for filling up the buffer and in this time and this place, I want to take my time, enjoy the scenery and still be able to take some damn good photos.
So, here I am with a new (old) 35mm film camera, 8 rolls of film (4 of which are the uber saturated Velvia color slide and 4 of which are the Acros black & white). I’m itching to get out to get some shots taken this weekend and then I wait for the postal carrier to return the fruits of my labor. Will this be successful? Who knows. I surely don’t. I suspect it will be a fun adventure with plenty of ups and downs along the way, of which I will be sure to document in this blog.
