All the hasty experiments during the last rainy days are done for preparation for a soon starting Workshop in our powwow club. People with very different level of knowledge will join. The basic idea is to enable everybody interested to take two rolls of film with an analog camera.
I would like people to bring in their old cameras to see, if we can reactivate them. It would be nice, if these old treasures get out of their boxes to prove themselves. So lets take a look at the first candidate: A brand-new ZENIT E made in USSR – a Beauty of a camera with a HELIOS 44-2 58mm f/2.0 lens. The camera was produced from 1965 to 1986 which makes it at least 30 years old. If you have a camera like this, you have a good chance that it was produced before the Chernobyl disaster.
Listen to the Sound of the Soviet Union in the times of the Cold War with some commercial Funk in the background:
In the workshop we will decide about places that are worth visiting in Bulgaria – from a photographers point of view especially.
A perfect example is бузлуджа. If you have ideas where we can go to shoot our films, please leave a print in the comments. If you don’t have ideas – use google again – help me there – I need your input! Thank you!
Everybody shoots at least a second roll of film over time for him/herself. Following this, we will develop the films and examine the results. The final goal is everybody to make an enlargement of their favourite picture – to have produced a fine piece of art in the end.
For this reason I shall start to equip the darkroom to eliminate some of the obvious failures of last days experiments! I will not always be lucky about saving some shots like yesterday – about the open dark bag and the broken KODAK TMAX 100.
One more remark – triggered by an interested person: If the workshop is suitable for the digital shooter also. You can join yes – but you will not need to wait in the darkroom or dip your camera into chemicals etc of course. Joke. The problem is actually, that digital photography is often equal to point and shoot style. We see something, take a camera and shoot. From than on, the picture goes from chip to hard disk to server, gets changed – we never know, where we will see fragments of this picture again. Its bits and bytes – but now I am getting too far away… Check out Matt Grangers tips about Point and Shoot photography. He has a famous Photography channel and a postmodern moustache – in this clip at least.
The point is – I am in a bar and want to show to the world – Facebook of course – what beer glass I am using to make everybody thirsty. So lets take the shot:
Too much information – all these things makes it hard to focus on the beer. Now I do this again – what is different? I separate my object from the background – compose – my phone focuses – I shoot.
Thirsty? Digital, analog – no difference. There are many resources that explain you “How to take better pictures”. During our shootings we will touch techniques etc. but will not focus on how to take better pictures. The glass in the above picture is fake news btw. – I am having GLARUS – a fine Bulgarian Pale Ale which i don’t link due to too many pop ups etc on their homepage but i can highly recommend trying it!
By using analog technologies you get forced to think, focus, compose etc. before shooting – otherwise, you waste the moment. This is one aspect that differs from the faster photography styles but besides using chip or film – their size, speed and grain/noise – the lens and the eye of the photographer matters most in my opinion.
Take your time, get creative and mix digital and anlog!
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