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 p.2 #1 · What Are You Doing to Get Yourself Out of Your Photographic Comfort Zone? | |
Quite a lot as of now, I think. This hobby has given me an appreciation for physical media and more confidence DIY-ing things, and I've been leaning into that recently as I've been re-evaluating how I interact with film photography. I've wanted to transition away from just paying my lab to do scanning for me, partially for cost reasons, but I also enjoy learning how things work and I think farming out how I actually get to see my images to my lab deprives me of learning a new skill. So, I bought a well-used but good condition DSLR body, an older Nikon bellows/lens kit, and just did my first test shots. I've got a fair bit to go, but I'm incredibly pleased with the initial results and getting a handle on the macro aspects of the kit has been a blast.
Getting the scanning setup has taken priority as it is a money saver for me, so this has been put on the backburner, but a few months back I bought an enlarger to learn wet printing on. I've always enjoyed holding the negatives in my hand, given the physicality of them, but I usually look at them once or twice, squirrel them away onto a shelf, and then view my scans from then on. I realized that the convenience of this deprived me of engaging with them more, as on a website they just become a web file amongst millions and billions of other web files for me to look at, and so I tend to consume them rather than engage with them, even if it is my own website. With printing though, they become a much more singular tangible object to interact with, and I think learning how to make those prints will go a long way in reshaping how I engage with my photos.
I also inherited an extreme susceptibility to shiny things and only thinking about why I actually purchased those shiny things later, so I also decided to change up my cameras as well. I cut my collection by about half and consolidated it enough to where one camera fills one niche without much overlap, whereas previously I bought duplicates of cameras just to ensure I had backups. Since then, I've made sure the cameras in my collection actually matter to me more, and recently I added a camera with no viewfinder, rangefinder, or any of that. I've wanted something very minimal, just film and a way to control the light that hits that film, and have my mind do the rest, so this was perfect. I don't even have an external viewfinder for it - I bought a mini red-dot sight to use as a centering aid and have been practicing how to just mentally judge the framing and focusing. That camera is in the shop for a particularly weird issue with the slow speeds that my camera repair shop has never seen before, but I've enjoyed the use I've gotten out of it so far.
Another thing I've done is also re-evaluate how I share my photos. I've always used my website with the assumption that it was the best way to share the work that I've done, but recently I've re-thought that assumption. I built my website as a way to archive, organize, and display the thousands of photos I've taken. But after thinking about it, in practice I've just been using it as a glorified blog; I share my posts on there with the same four or five people, and anyone I meet I refer to the same singular gallery and not the hundreds of others on the site. Those hundreds of others are never looked at, because that small group of people that I share my photos with have already seen each of them one by one. Anyone new doesn't look at them all either, because it'd take a full two days of just looking at posts to go through them all. This means that for all the work of keeping a site like that up and running, those thousands of photos are hosted just for me to look at once a year, something that now makes less and less sense for me to do given the upkeep. My partner gave me a great idea, in that I could start making DVDs to share with the small group of people I really care about sharing my photos with. They're a fantastic middle ground between the website and something like making physical prints of the photos, in that they retain most of the convenience of digital viewing, but do not require permanent hosting and continual organization. They're also a tangible object that they can hold, and are far more memorable than a web link. I also am a huge fan of cover art designs for CDs/DVDs/albums/those sorts of things, and I think it'll be a ton of fun to make my own for these DVDs. I haven't fully done this yet, but once I smooth out the scanning process I'll start making them, and I've already been working over some design changes to the website in my head to make it work better for how I want to do things.
Longwinded, but I thought it might be appreciated for anyone in a photography rut, I certainly have been for these last few months and this has all been helping me get out of it.
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