My photography senses have become sloppy and too consumed in capturing unpredictability. I miss having control of the situation. I’ve posted over 70 sets of photos taken with my Lomo LC-A, Olympus XA and Nikon FE in the past two years. They were simply taken without too much thinking, without hesitance and purely on intuition. Many of them are flops but I continue to post them. Some are gems.
There have been so many great photo opportunities in the Philippines and I just felt like crap when I couldn’t control the situation from the camera too much–parallax issues screwing up my framing, lack of precise focusing and the lack of lens control. I snap away like a child but sometimes I love capturing only the things that only discipline, precise timing and patience can capture.
I miss being in the lab, printing my own black and white photos and controlling the whole process from the moment the an image was captured to the 30 minutes I let the prints sit in the wash. Seeing that I have no lab access and low funds, I’ll be happy to carry around a camera with controls again.
I really packed the wrong equipment for this trip. No. I didn’t pack enough. I didn’t pack my Nikon FE because I had to keep room for my Rebel XT, a bulky lens, and Olympus XA and the tiny Canon point and shoot I hardly used here.
Like I said, I became sloppy. There was a time where I could snap the shutter in between eye blinks, where I can sense how long the moment would stand there before me to photograph. Now with having all this digital stuff and snapping away happily with a film camera that stands on the verge of a serious camera and a toy camera, I’m not as sharp as I’d like to be.
I have never held back from posting any pictures and I don’t intend to, but I guiltily admit to posting my Philippines set with my head in the sand.