"Virage analogique"
Here I am again, after six months. It was interesting to read the post below once again last night. You see, a weird thing happened between here and there. A few days after I wrote this blog post, I went to a shop here in the 14th in Paris and bought a roll of HP5+, a black and white film produced by Ilford camera. I put it in inside an old camera I still had here in a box, and started to take pictures. I was curious to see how it would turn out.
Well, now on the first week of January, I have filled more than 50 rolls of film with images. As well as the Pentax, I tried an Olympus XA rangefinder, and then in June I bought a Leica M6. Mostly because I was frustrated by the lack of control on the Olympus – developing and scanning photographs is a lot of work and it’s frustrating when something doesn’t turn out right and it was the camera’s fault. Anyway, at least with the Leica if it doesn’t work out, it is always your fault, and you can improve and learn how to do it better next time. So it maybe it is a “virage analogique” but for me it is now a straight road, like the one below I took during a recent trip to Spain:
I’m reminded of the blog post I wrote a few years about the Amazon Kindle and paper books, and Victor Hugo’s Ceci tuera cela. Except in this case, it would be a film camera on the left and a digital camera on the right. But I think in this case it is worse, because film photography and digital photography are completely different. In the case of books, one would hope, the words are the same in both cases. But that is a reflection for another time. Anyway, I don’t want this blog to become devoted to photography (sighs of relief from the occasional one or two people still reading). I wrote my up my experience on a lengthy text which will appear on a certain photography-related site sometime soon. I have also committed myself to take at least one roll of film on the M6 with a 50mm lens per week. That experience you can follow over at 52rolls, and my posts will be here: http://52rolls.net/author/hjmcc/ . In the mean-time I will try to write at least one post per month over here. At least.