Here’s a shot taken last September at Cape Disappointment. Hannah and I had snuck away from the campsite to explore a little bit one morning. The fog was dense and the waves were wild. I’m not super comfortable shooting in those conditions, but I made a few photos anyway.
Picture This is a Daydreams in Analog feature focusing on a single picture.
Some years ago I read that our brains reset after only three days in nature, disconnected from the hustle and bustle of human civilization.
“On the third day my senses recalibrate—I smell things and hear things I didn’t before,” Strayer says. The early evening sun has saturated the red canyon walls; the group is mellow and hungry in that satisfying, campout way. Strayer, in a rumpled T-shirt and with a slight sunburn, is definitely looking relaxed. “I’m more in tune with nature,” he goes on. “If you can have the experience of being in the moment for two or three days, it seems to produce a difference in qualitative thinking.”
There’s been some scientific examination of this theory suggesting that this is true. Anecdotally, I know it to be true. For me, anyway.
This weekend, we got away to Alder Lake Park, not far from Mount Rainier National Park. A few tents, grilling, cooking over the campfire, eating and drinking too much, walking and hiking for hours, taking a dip in the lake, jumping over garter snakes…
It was all very much needed, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
My wife loves her birthday, and I love to celebrate my wife. Two years ago, she marked the day with a pub crawl in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Last year, we escaped to the Olympic National Forest and Victoria, BC. This year, we used her birthday as a reason to take our new camp gear out for a spin.
(Editor’s Note: Hannah’s actual birthday is today. Happy birthday to her!)
But it also came just as the year of too much to do is wrapping up. I pushed myself way too hard for way too long, but I’ve reached a number of important professional milestones that move me a bit closer to the finish line. Camping this weekend was a chance to reset, to refresh my mind, to take in the stars on clear, beautiful nights.
It was nice setting aside the electronics. Being unable to respond to e-mails. To spend time with my wife and good friends, unencumbered with the responsibilities of home and work. To sip a glass of scotch sitting around a fire pit late into the night. To take a moment and smell the blooming flowers.
Summer is almost here, and that first taste of it has me aching for more.
I nabbed this shot one morning walking from my favorite U District coffee shop to my office. I loved the way the 105mm lens captured the detail in the installation, and the colors are just so pleasing.
Picture This is a Daydreams in Analog feature focusing on a single picture.
When I picked up a 35mm film SLR a month or so ago, I was excited for a lot of reasons. For one, the camera itself is just a joy to use. But beyond that, there was something special about taking photographs and having to wait to see whether anything came of them. That’s something sorely missing in today’s world of iPhone photography.
Well, the wait is finally up and… mostly duds. My romantic vision of amazing, thoughtful photographs came to not a whole lot. I got some photos I like, some I thought I’d like and hate, some that barely came up, and even a whole roll where literally nothing developed. Woops.
So what went wrong and what went right?
What Went Wrong:
There were a bunch of things that could have gone better, and here are the few that stand out to me.
1. User Error
This one’s a doozy, and it’s the hardest one to swallow. In a lot of cases, I just missed the focus. I’m still learning how to use the FG’s K2 focusing screen to nail that critical focus. It has a little microprism screen that splits an unfocused image in two, and when the two images come together you’ve got a focused image.
But I didn’t trust it.
Sometimes, when I’d align the images in the microprism, it seemed like it was out of focus everywhere else. So, I somewhat consistently focused in front of my subjects.
I also used a lens hood that was too big and often left shadows on the edges of photos. And sometimes I failed to adjust properly for exposure, relying too heavily on the FG’s mostly very good metering system.
2. Film, development, and scanning matter – a lot
This is the part where I deflect the blame for any photographic mishaps.
I shot entirely on Fuji Superia 400 because, well, it’s cheap. And indeed, it’s a pretty nice film, all said and done. Certainly a better film could have helped achieve better images (where I nailed focus, anyway), but I won’t put too much blame there.
I used a mail order film processing lab, but here too I cheaped out. They did an okay job, but not great. I’m not convinced their chemical processes are top notch – cheap 400 film is grainy, but not this grainy – and most certainly there were a lot of issues with the (kinda expensive!) scans I bought. In one case, for example, two images show up at the same time on a scan. In several others, scanning anomalies appear in the photographs, making them useless for sharing or printing.
Lessons learned, and all that good stuff.
What Went Right:
1. I loved every minute shooting
This one’s huge, and it makes all the difference. At the end of the day, whether any of the photos are any good, I had fun. I had lots of fun.
There was just something relaxing about taking photos with the Nikon FG. The fact that there was no screen I could resort to and make sure I made good pictures was actually a calming experience. Perfection was out of my hands. Mistakes would be made, and I’d deal with them later.
This meant that I could focus more on making photographs that I enjoyed making, and focus less on making photographs that others might enjoy when I post them online.
2. I learned more about who I am as an amateur photographer
It turns out I love manual and near-manual photography. Most of the time I like to set the camera to aperture priority mode, but I love the tactile experience of clicking the aperture ring on the lens, of adjusting the exposure compensation, of focusing the image.
When I started looking at lenses for my DSLR, I poo-pooed the idea of manual focus lenses. That’s too bad, because I’d love a super wide-angle lens, and unless you go with manual focus they will cost you an arm and a leg.
But the truth is, I’ve never actually shot photography with lenses that were meant to be focused manually. Sure, I’ve manually focused imaged when necessary, but using lenses intended to be automatically focused. This was an entirely new experience to me, and it turns out I like it a whole lot.
Will I continue to shoot film?
I recently, kinda accidentally, picked up a 1950s German mechanical camera (Zeiss Ikon Continamatic III). I shot a roll of film on it, but haven’t had it developed yet. While the light meter seems still to be accurate, I’m not sure if the shutter is (though it sounds like it is). I’m looking forward to seeing how these zone focused images turn out.
I also have already loaded another roll of film into the FG.
The biggest downside of shooting film is the cost of the film and its development. On the other hand, you can get great 35mm gear on the cheap these days, and there’s a whole level of joy involved with handling these analog machines (also, they’re fun to read about: for some of my favorite reviews, check out Casual Photophile and Down the Road).
So I’m definitely going to continue experimenting with film, though the DSLR isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. This has just been too much fun.
The sun is finally out. No, seriously. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but Seattle broke a 122 year old record for rain this year. We’ve only been recording rainfall in the area for… 122 years.
In a recent post, I talked about the need to have things to do outside work. Things that are completely removed from work. For me, that’s meant revisiting the things I’ve always liked but haven’t always made time for.
In fact, that’s the raison d’être for this blog. I’ve been making lots of photographs, but the stories go lost on Flickr and other social media.
Hannah and I invested in a camera last year before our wedding, with the help of generous gifts from friends and family. It would be good to memorialize all the year’s big events, to take on our honeymoon, and to document the beginning of our married lives. Plus, I have wanted a DSLR for a decade, at least.
But while I fantasized about a DSLR for years, I cut my teeth on a good old 35mm point and shoot. I remember trying to talk my godmother out of her extra cash at the big box store to buy me a camera when I was too young to know much about them, other than that I liked to document the things I saw. One day when we were at a garage sale, I found a camera on a table. “Go ask them how much it costs,” my godmother urged me. So I did. “25 cents,” the lady at the garage sale told me.
And so it started.
I cycled through a number of point and shoots and disposable cameras in the years that followed (although that 25 cent camera is still at my parents’!), but when I took a photo class in high school my dad let me borrow his 35mm Canon Rebel. I remember when he was saving up for the camera. We’d stop at the store on the weekends to add some more cash to the layaway, until finally he was able to bring it home. He documented the early years of my little sister’s life with that film SLR, and by the time I was using it, though we all had transitioned to digital cameras, it was still an advanced, automated camera that took great photos.
Fast forward to 2017, and we have a neat, advanced DSLR. The Nikon D5300 does a lot great, and paired with the Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 I picked up last year, it can help to produce some really nice photos.
About a month before my birthday, though, I started to wonder again about film. The DSLR can do just about everything I ask of it, but in some ways it can do too much. I stumbled across a good deal on a 1980s Nikon FG with an E-series 50mm f/1.8 lens (you can read about the FG here at Casual Photophile). I’m still waiting on the first four rolls of film to return, but I was hooked pretty quickly. The camera has everything you need, and no more. Plus, the tactile response of the all-manual lens – something I’ve never experienced even when I was shooting a film SLR – just felt right.
So I made the impulsive decision to buy another classic, all-manual lens. I justified it to myself because – thank Nikon! – these vintage lenses still work on the modern DSLR. But it wasn’t just any lens. Nope, it was the classic Nikkor 105mm f/2.5 (you can read about it here at Casual Photophile), the legendary lens used by Steve McCurry (in one of its variations, anyway) for the modern Mona Lisa, “Afghan Girl.”
The lens is a joy to shoot with. It’s sharp, renders beautiful color and bokeh (the out-of-focus area), and resolves detail really impressively. And my copy is from the early 1970s, right after the first major redesign of the lens’ elements and groupings.
When I get those rolls of film back, I’ll have more to share. I finally had the chance this weekend to take the 105mm out attached to the DSLR, and I’m really impressed with the lens. It’s fun to handle, easy to focus, and helps me achieve the photos I want to take.
What the lens is really famous for is portrait photography. I haven’t had the chance to shoot any human subjects, but I have shot some non-humans. The lens really does have a character of its own that it brings to bear on the images I make. And I like that a whole lot.
The past few months have been grueling professionally. I’ve given up a lot of time and energy to my work. It will be worth it, I keep assuring myself. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Only another month or so before I can relax.
In reality, life is mostly good, and I have very few complaints. But I am tired of being tired. Of feeling intellectually drained.
When I started my doctoral program, I quickly realized that work can’t be the only thing I do. With this kind of work, it’s too easy to take it home with you. So I started exploring the types of hobbies I was into in high school – music and photography – and some new ones – cooking and mixing cocktails.
The weekend before my birthday last month, my wife told me that I was booked the entire Saturday. No work, she insisted. No other plans.
The morning alarm went off early enough that Saturday, and my wife and brother-in-law told me to put on shoes for walking and to grab my camera. After grabbing breakfast at probably the best breakfast diner I’ve ever been to – seriously, if you’re ever in Seattle, check out Geraldine’s in Columbia City – we hopped the light rail downtown, before transferring on the Monorail to Seattle Center.
My wonderful wife found a way to combine all my hobbies into a single day. We visited the Seattle Pacific Science Center (finally), and other than playing with all the sciency stuff like little kids we went to a laser light show. But not just any laser light show – a BEATLES laser light show! True love, and all that good stuff. The day culminated in a birthday barbecue back at our apartment.
In the midst of way too much work and way too little time, it’s been important to find ways to ground myself. Sometimes that requires external intervention, like my wife’s that Saturday. But sometimes it takes little more than grabbing a camera and heading out for a long, quiet walk.
This winter and spring have been awfully wet, even by Seattle standards. As friends and family will attest, I’m always insisting that “Seattle gets way less rain – and almost no snow! – than my east coast hometown.”
Not this year. We’ve been soaked with four feet of rain between October and April, more than at any other time in recorded history. And that’s, like, a bummer.
A perfect storm of way too much rain and way too much work has made this winter both far too long and far too short. So when the sun does come out it’s cause for celebration. Give me some of that Vitamin D, please.
Yesterday, my wife, brother-in-law and I wandered down to Seattle’s Seward Park. The park is a forested green thumb sticking out into Lake Washington, and we can see it (if we squint) from our apartment’s entrance. The outer loop features about 2.5 miles of paved road along the lake, with a number of pathways running through the middle.
But while the return of the sun sure is good for my mood, I’m not so sure it’s as good for the ducks. As we entered the path, we noticed three adult ducks and a single, lonesome duckling swimming in the lake. As my wife wondered aloud what happened to the other ducklings, we noticed a red-tailed hawk swooping down as the ducks dove under water. Thanks to some courageous crows (though I assure you I am no fan of crows!), the hawk retreated without the duckling.
Nature, right?
I’m ready for summer.
Daydreams in Analog 