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Part I : Camera Junkie |
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Wednesday, 05 May 2004 |
My photographic journey is rooted in equipement; I realized only relatively
recently that the most important part of photography is the highly sophisticated
computer that is situated a few inches behind the camera and not the camera,
lens, film, filter, developper, or whatever technical tool you use.
My quest
for the best camera is not really interesting, except for me, that's why i'm
going to tell it here once and never talk about it ever again... I started
photography with a 35mm SLR, Minolta X-700 to be precise. I had a darkroom
in by basement with my brother and statred learning basic darkroom technique
by myself. I did what I do for a lot of things in my life : I read... I went
through the University's library whole photographic section : alternative
processes, the Life photo encyclopedia, and of course Ansel Adams's classics,
The Camera, The Negative and The Print. A few years ago I decided that I wanted
to take things to the next level, and bought myself a Yashicamat 124G, a 6x6
TLR, and joined the university's photo club. I really liked the bigger negatives
and how they made nice 16x20 enlargments. I started to hang around e-bay and
bought a bunch of cameras, over the next years, i've probably owned and sold
20 minolta cameras, as well as russian rangefinders and a 4x5 press camera
that I try to use more and more. I sold all my Minolta equipement one day
and bought a Nikon F4 that I still have but don't use a lot.
I always prefered the bigger negatives but when I started shooting more and
more color, I found the cost of processing and printing to be too much for
a student's budget so I decided to get a digital camera. Since my main output
was the internet, i figured i wouldn't print anyway. I shopped around, and
finally settled on a Fuji S2 Pro digital SLR. I got it in the summer of 2003
and kept it for 8 months total, shooting more than 6000 frames with it. I
realised that digital was not for me, black an white prints from digital lacked
some thing that I couldn't define (as well as suffering from blown out hightlights
and loss of shadow detail. Also, I missed the darkroom and I spend already
all my work time in front of a computer screen, so I didn't want to spend
my leisure time in front of a computer also. So, I sold the S2, and bought
a Hasselblad camera that I hope is gonna follow me for many years to come.
It's a nice compromise of weight-size-negative quality, and I use it for studio
shoots and familiy photos. So why go bigger ? Good question, and I'm not entirely
sure that I can answer this one... I've always liked unusual things, things
that make you think, things that very few peoplehave a knowledge of and use,
so it's probably one of the reasons. Using strange lenses to take amazingly
huge negatives with cameras the size of most people's television, is my idea
of an unusual way to do photography. It certainly is unusual when you consider
today's photography market that is moving more and more towards digital, with
film companies cancelling film production (my favorite film was AGFA APX 25
that was cancelled a few years ago...) and camera companies putting new techno-wonders
every month on the shelves. ULF photography is a way to "reclaim" the craft
of photography but then again, so is LF, so why go larger than the standards
? One useless fact that got me seriously thinking about ULF is that 11x14
is the smallest negative where you can fit a human head completely at 1:1...
Since most pictures I take are either portraits or nudes, I started thinking
about "human macro photography", framing at 1:1 of the human form, but on
negatives big enough so the final, large printed image was life-size. So I
started looking around to find a user 8x10 camera, but I know me, and 8x10
would not be enough and I'd eventually go bigger, and bigger, and bigger,
until I reached the final ULF destination of 20x24 (but then again I could
get a special order of 48x72 inch film made and do life-size foot portraits...
well, we'll see about that when I win the lottery...). So I decided to build
myself a camera, and started planning for a 11x14 camera, which was the absolute
smallest I felt I could go without immediately looking at the next step.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 07 November 2005 )
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