Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Pointing a Path to Shoot

This afternoon my trusty Nikon D70 was acting up again — a common issue with digital SLRs that age is that the memory card bay starts to act up. Occasionally, the card can’t be read or the card reads as if there are no images on it or it says it needs to be formatted. As someone who diligently formats their cards before every shoot, this is a sad occurrence. All seems to be well for now, though it lead me to think about photography and how much I do love it despite its frustrations. Technology, right?

That lead me to start thinking about film. The Girl™, when I first met her was a pure film shooter — her photos are marvelous. However, she too ventured into digital, and its ease and speed won her over.

While my father had a complicated SLR set-up when I was younger, he gave it away to my uncle and I never picked it up again, despite a lingering ideal that I’d like to take photos as a hobby one day. The camera that re-sparked my interest for real many years later, was the Yashica T4 (known as the T5 in Asia and a bit more lusted over). At the time, I was deep into skateboarding and its culture, and an article about Spike Jonze (before he became mainstream movie famous) and the Girl team picking up these now-cult cameras made me want to scratch that subconscious itch. I picked up a crappy Canon point and shoot and that was my first “real” camera before I delved into a few forays with some vintage manual SLRs and then digital point and shoots which led to the Nikon D70.

The Yashica T4 nostalgia this afternoon led me to find this post from Hypebeast regarding Terry Richardson’s usage of the Yashica T4 as his secret weapon.

Which made me consider the year-or-so of thoughts I’ve had about going back to shooting film again more regularly.

Announcing these thoughts via Twitter garnered some interesting tidbits from Antonio Carusone who linked this Yashica T4 blog and from former JPG Editor-in-Chief, photography community builder and whose blog is mighty fine, Laura Brunow Miner who linked this T4 review from JPG.

While I’ve decided to stick out the building lust for a Nikon D700 for now, the idea of shooting film again does intrigue me in a solid way. I’m considering a SXSW photo project of sorts — at the very least using film instead of digital to take my photos at SXSW this year, of which I’ve taken quite a bit of in years past.

A new spin on an old activity.