jeromemartin.ca

Summertime

It's a warm week here in western Canada. I'm spending some time working, relaxing and photographing in my back yard.

Yesterday I used my digital camera for this shot and my Seagull TLR for other photographs. The two cameras could hardly be more different: the Seagull uses 120 film and produces negatives which are 21/4 inches square. One gets 12 photographs from one film.
And, of course, I'll have to process the film and print photographs from it. The camera is inexpensive and fun to use.
The Seagull does not have a built-in light meter. I use a Lunasix meter which I bought in the early 1970s to use with my view camera.

Manual film cameras used with hand meters allow photographers to make significant creative decisions with regard to exposure and shutter speed, although digital cameras also allow for various automatic and manual settings for particular purposes. Learning photography using manual cameras allows students and photographers to learn about about the effects of focal length, shutter speed and depth of field.
One of the limitations of using any camera in an automatic mode is that we expect that the camera will do exactly what we want it to do. In many cases it does: but we lose a lot of control in the process.

Seeing What's Around Us

Photography is about seeing and understanding what is around us. It's about understanding ourselves and our world. It's about stopping the world for a fraction of a second, then working with the image we have made. It's an intuitive process.
I spent part of today photographing in my yard, using black and white film as well as digital. Digital works well for blogs, but it's not the format in which I do my personal work. However, it's handy and useful.
Point and shoot cameras – digital or film –
“I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice." Minor White
“A very receptive state of mind...not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.
“Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.”

Montreal PQ

'Bitte...'
'Bitte?'
'Please. Por favor.'
'Ah, por favor!'
The German tourist and the hotel waiter both laughed. The waiter added a new German word to his vocabulary, one that already included several languages.
This is an international city, one in which French, English and other languages are spoken on the streets and in the shops. It's a cultural and historic city, full of beauty and joie de vivre.

Tomorrow: The Musée de Beaux-Arts.