I have had a Minolta Maxxum 7000 Film SLR in my clutches for about 5 months. It is not my walking-around camera, but it could be.
There is more where this came from but I just scanned (from negatives) some shots from recent months.
Brooklyn
Film photos are different from digital. Duh. That should go without saying but I think it merits mention after the abrupt evaporation of film photography from general use. It may be the the most rapid disappearance of a format since the DVD erased VHS tapes from stores and shelves everywhere.
Calvary Cemetery
Film has a smoky ruggedness about it, and I for one welcome the dust and artifacts that litter some of these scans. To me the journey from lens to photo should not be so obvious as digital makes it seem. Speckles of noisy detritus express how a picture should be polluted by its travels from the photographer’s eyes to its presentation. I think digital photos have a way of turning reality into hyper-reality, exposing details no human would ever notice, while film represents images closer to the way human beings see them.
Calvary Cemetery
I don’t know if I should say this, but any time I carry this camera out I think I should try to do what K. might have done with it. There is no way to know what that might have been. K. would be doing digital now but I imagine she would have kept film in her repertoire. The first Mandee sign picture derives from this sign. One of K.’s pictures I liked best was of a neon-lit sign.
21st Street & Broadway
Click for more of my Minolta Maxxum 7000 Film SLR photos.
Yes, there is something stark and over precise about digital images. This is perfect for technical or recording purposes but for “emotive” or “art” work it does lack a little soul. I have not used wet film since I got my first digital camera about six years ago. (Indeed my old Olympus still has half a reel of film in it.) Since then I have captured many thousands of images,and printed less than 30 of them. The rest live on various machines, and are reviewed on screen as I need them. Something is definitely lost when there is no physical image to hold and observe.
I like your pictures of derelict payphones, would you like a few of mine? Payphones here in the UK are still relatively numerous and on the whole are well maintained. I do though see a few that have been decommissioned or just plain vandalised. I once saw one that had been blown up, all the sides and the roof were bowed outwards and there was no glass left.
I think if there is a future for depth and expressiveness in digital photography it will start (for me at least) with the RAW format and suitable tools for “developing” shots in that format. RAW is very cool and I think some creativity with a quality photo printer could produce interesting stuff. That gets expensive, though, with the ink cartridges especially. That said, my gf and I should be polishing off my old darkroom gear sometime in the next couple of weeks and developing some film, so I guess there’s no reason to go one route exclusively.
It’s funny, I was just thinking (before I saw your comment) that I should wind down my long-time hobby of collecting payphone photos from site visitors. I have some 40+ pictures in my e-mail from months back that I have not posted to the site yet, making it obvious to me that I just don’t have the proper amount of time or energy to manage this sort of thing. Long ago my original goal was to get payphone photos from all 50 U.S. states, and to so this on my own, but that didn’t seem practical so I opened it up for others to share. This indirectly had the effect of changing my goal to getting payphone photos from every continent, and even every country possible. In this effort I find I am not much of an impresario or community manager, and that I mostly just annoy people without meaning to. I will post the many pictures I have in my queue but today I think I’ll take away the notice inviting folks to send photos to the site. Kinda sad in a way but this manner of sharing photos is pretty outdated and I want to be able to focus on other things.