Today, day 2 of my forced residency-style-stay-off-of-social-media-during-the-day-week I spent a large part of the day in my darkroom. It was wonderful! I managed to get my first roll of film from my new little Yashica 635 developed (Kodak TriX) and the film came out beautiful! This little camera is pretty mint! I also managed to get a few prints done of one of the images which will give me something to practice toning later. It has been awhile since I have done print toning…but I found that I have a bottle of metallic toner…unopened! Has anyone tried this before? I do need to get more blue though…
*I would post a photo here of the prints I did today BUT our network at home has sucked today and it is taking waaaaay too long to upload. Check out my Instagram or Twitter feed if you can. It will be up there soon as my 365 photo for today!*
Which brings me to a bit of a strange topic. I am realizing that I have camera preferences. I’m sure there are many of you saying “so??” but it seems like sort of a big deal to me. In many ways I feel bad saying it! I have found over the last two days of film developing and scanning that for medium format film especially I prefer the images from my two main cameras (my Hasselblad 501c/m and my Mamiya C330), my Holga, and now my Yashica 635 over the Kodak Brownies I have played with. I know I am not really making a fair comparison here at all, and I’m honestly not trying to compare. I just notice that I get much fewer usable images from the Brownies than I do from the others. Perhaps because the Brownies have a much slower set shutter speed? I just don’t have a ton of luck with them. I still have one more new-to-me Brownie to try, and I am definitely not giving up on the others, it is just an observation of my work this week. (Side note: I am still totally on board with the idea started by a few of my Twitter friends that Kodak should release a new Brownie type camera! This doesn’t change that!)
I think a major reason I am not a big fan of non-slr or tlr cameras, is that I am a very bad judge of distance. (Just ask anyone who has gone on vacation with me! I am famous for saying “oh, that isn’t that far, we can walk!” *an hour later* “Yeah, I really didn’t think it was that far!”) Therefore I have a really hard time figuring out how far I need to be standing back from an object for it to be in focus when I only have measurements to rely on and I can’t actually see that said object is truly in focus or not. I am practicing and trying to get better at this. I have been shooting a lot with my Lomo LCA which you also have to set distance and not just focus with. I have had fairly good results with that one, but I’m still having some issues. Does anyone have a rule-of-thumb or any good tips on judging distances for photos?
Tomorrow is a waitressing-day-job type of day for me. I do intend on uploading some new images to Flickr tomorrow night though. I’m also hoping to ride my bike into work tomorrow, and since I always have at least one camera with me, that could always lead to a small photo outing!
For now though, I’m off to bed.