When I was in my photography program in college at RIT back in the 70s, the guy who taught our second-year black & white class had us do an interesting thing: For the entire semester, we could only use one camera, one lens, one film, and no light meter (because the human eye is far more sensitive).
The point was to bake into our souls the operation of our chosen photo system so that we would/could think only about the images we were creating rather than fussing with equipment. It was one of the best lessons I ever learned. My choice — seeing as how my heroes were photographers such as Eisenstaedt and Cartier-Bresson — was my Leica M3, a 35mm leans, and Kodak Tri-X film.
I just bought a new camera (as mentioned earlier): a SONY a6400. I am partial to rangefinders — even fake electronic ones 🙂 I like looking through a viewfinder when I’m shooting.
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- Come to Aveiro if you like to make pictures of people making pictures 🙂
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- It’s only a test, not art.
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- I think she’d rather be doing something else.
Here’s the thing: Today’s cameras can do so many things, but I find myself spending hours reading the docs and testing all the settings so that I can ignore 90 percent of what a modern digital camera can do. I want to set it and forget it because my photo ethos has not “advanced” from the lessons I learned in that black & white class.
This begs the question: Why not get a point-n-shoot? Well, because I’m a pro, dammit, and I have to uphold a certain self-image 😉
I’m happy to report that my new street camera is finally ready for the streets. The images displayed here were some of my tests and are not actually intended to be whatever it is I intend my images to be.
My settings? I’m going with the neutral film profile, aperture-priority, 16:9 aspect ratio, highest quality .jpeg resolution (I’m just not into the whole RAW thing), manual focus and zoom, and ISO 400 for most stuff — I like my rut 🙂
For video (not the priority for this cam): Most of the above except that I’ll switch to the the SONY Log3 profile if there’s time, i.e. I’m not in a run-n-gun situation. There’s a nifty movie button on this thing where I can go from stills to video with one push.
I’m working on a project — not ready to tell you about it yet — for which this camera will come in very handy.