Justin Mott offers some good new year photography resolutions of his own that photographers of all levels might want to follow.
Personally, he reinforces one trend I began this year of shooting more with my “Nifty Fifty”. In the past, I only used it it when it was the optimal lens choice and focal length for a given situation. On my city walkarounds, I preferred to use my various zoom lenses mixed with my phone camera photo grabs for many of my “street” shots. This arrangement and process began to feel cumbersome as I began wanting to travel light on those walkarounds. The efficiency of the phone camera grabs was good for immediate editing and getting images “out there” on Social Media, etc., but afterwards I found, in spite of having one of the best phone cameras available, some shots simply did not measure up to the images of the same subject/time/place I captured for comparison with my full frame Nikon DLSR. It also meant having pictures in multiple locations, furthering the complexity of image file management down the road.
The recent resurgence of film photography has fascinated me to the point that now, years after it began, I finally decided to go back to my film/darkroom days where my interest in photography is rooted and shoot my first roll of film for the first time since the mid 1990s.
As one who was schooled and worked many days and hours on end in darkrooms over several years, I thought getting back into film after 20+ years of digital photography shouldn’t be difficult at all. That said much has changed with the new incarnation of film. For one, Kodachrome is no longer available for color film photography, my absolute favorite for capturing the best 35mm images back in the day. Most of what I did in school/work during my early days of photography was of a commercial nature, so technically perfect and high-quality realistic sharp images were what was in high demand. There was nothing like processing an 8 x 10 color transparency in the darkroom and taking a look at it after it dried, and it was almost looking like the real subject, not a positive image since the resolution was so high and grain almost invisible! Creative photography was not something I was involved with professionally but was my favorite genre on a purely artistic level. Black and white gilm photography was paramount for me in the creative realm then and still is today in the digital world.
This all brings me to today, and my planned venture into black and white photography after decades away. As mentioned, much has changed since then, so to venture forth, I wanted to begin with a familiar “constant” from my past. With that said, I decided to go with the first two basics, a camera and film. I chose my Nikon Photomatic FTN 35mm camera I’ve owned since 1974 for my camera and Kodak Tri-X 400 for my film. While Kodachrome was my favorite color film, but it is long gone. Kodak Tri-X 400 was my favorite black and white and needless to say. I was elated when I found it is available today!
I am looking forward to this endeavor and still looking at film processing and print options. To get the most out Kodak Tri-X 400 film, they closely work together, almost one and the same. I was never able to get all the creative and extraordinary images out of Kodak Tri-X 400 back in the day that others did, so now is my chance to make happen, what didn’t back then.
Late in September 2022, I traveled to the Trinity River / Downtown Dallas area to shoot some pictures. Normally, I take a backpack with one of my Nikon DLSR cameras and lenses. This day, I wanted to travel light, so I just took my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and my Leica D-Lux 7.
While I had only planned to shoot a few river and skyline shots from a distance, then leave, that did not happen. As often happens, I began walking and exploring instead. I hiked down the levee to the Trinity River bottoms trail and kept walking when I discovered the view of some landmarks and infrastructure was very much different and interesting than what we all usually from street and ground (or drone) level. It was captivating, and I kept walking further, shooting pictures with my smartphone, until it “crashed.” There was a message saying the camera had overheated, so it had to close. It was only a mild 91 degrees, which is not hot by Dallas standards, and I’d never had any film or digital SLR/DLSR or.any camera for that matter “shut down” due to the heat, ever in my decades of shooting, including many middle of summer 100+ degree days in TX. The camera did not come back on no matter what I did, and I could see many potential good pictures ahead on the trail.
Fortunately, I had my taken my small Leica D-Lux 7 along with me. It was working, but as with moast mirrorless cameras, it was eating battery power up as I continued to shoot and didn’t have an extra battery. In the end, I was able to capture most of the images I wanted between the two cameras that day. The picture in this post of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge taken from below at the river botttom level was taken with my Leica after my smartphone “shut down.”
I experimented with the choice of camera gear I took with me that day and learned a lesson with that experience. Fortunately, it was not a serious shoot, and had it been, I would’ve had my backup Nikon cameras and gear available.
I am sharing this experience as a caveat for those who set out with a smartphone “only” to capture important images. Keep a backup camera close.
The statues along the Esplanade are some of my favorite photo subjects at Fair Park in Dallas. I went to the State Fair of Texas yesterday and took the picture below. I usually go when the weather is nice and sunny, but it was overcast yesterday and the first time I have taken a picture of the statues in the flat natural light that a cloudy day provides. It is much different than all my past photos of the statues I have taken in high contrast sunlight. These statues have stood in the virtually the same place since the Fair Grounds opened in 1936, but the natural and artificial light sources that illuminate their surfaces have been changing ever since and with that how they are perceived visually. I first saw these statues as a child, and see them differently today as an older adult than I did then. All this reminds me of the quote below from the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. It is a quote that increasingly comes to mind as the years pass for me.
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
This statue is the work of Lawrence Tenney Stevens and was created for the first State Fair of Texas when it opened in 1936.
