Shooting analog
I love my digital camera, I love taking photos with it and I love the ease with which I can transfer them on to my laptop, fiddle with the colours, crop them, straighten the horizon up and post them to Flickr with a few quick clicks of the mouse. Its easy, its cheap (once you’ve bought the camera anyway) and its a reasonably safe bet that if you mess up a shot, you’ve taken another 50 very similar images, one of which will be good – but – its not exactly good for honing your skills.
Filling up a memory card with images pretty much assures that you’ll get at least one good photograph somewhere in the mix, but through good luck rather than good judgement. The images you’ve taken are disposable, you cherry pick the best then delete the others and in some respects I think that removes some of the care, some of the thought process behind creating a photograph – in short, at least for me, it devalues what I’m doing. I’m a terrible culprit for all of those crimes, I think its hard not to take advantage of the conveniences offered by digital cameras but I’m also aware that in order to get better, I need to slow myself down, think more and break out of the ‘three shots of everything’ mentality.
I recently bought a few film cameras (both 35mm and Medium format) from ebay with a view to forcing myself to slow right down, think about what I’m doing and hopefully produce better photographs as a result – time will tell if it pays off.