If you've been visiting this blog regularly lately, you're aware that I've been absent for the past 5 days. My computer gave up the ghost, so I've had to replace it. And, my oldest daughter gave birth to my grand daughter, "Emmelou Rose Fox", this past friday. So, for a few days blogging took a back seat to the rest of life. With that explanation, here's today post.
The following tutorial on how shooting film can help you improve your digital photography was submitted by James Kerr of Sweet As Photography. An avid digital shooter he has recently been experimenting with film photography to help improve his results.
Olympus XA2 - The 35mm Zone Focus Camera I Use
Taking
time out of your digital photography to shoot a couple of rolls of film
can be a liberating and educational experience. Below are a few ways
that digging out that old film camera from the attic can help you to
improve the quality of the digital photographs you take as well as some
of the benefits shooting film can bring to your photography.
Think Twice Shoot Once
Every
few months digital memory cards get both bigger in capacity and cheaper
in price. When shooting digitally we rarely have to worry about running
out of memory. As a result it is easy to slip into the habit of taking
(and keeping) many poor or below standard shots. In effect we can become
lazy and fall into the mind set that if you take enough shots you’ll
eventually get a good one.
When shooting with a film camera
however you are restricted by the amount of frames in your film
(typically 24 or 36 exposures). In addition you’ll want to avoid taking
more than one shot of a particular composition due to the processing
costs associated with film photography. As a result you will immediately
start thinking much more before pressing the shutter release button.
Results From A Recent Roll of Film
Get Back To Basics To Tune Your Photography Mind
Of
course you may decide to shoot a few rolls with an old SLR camera
however it is best to use an auto exposure 35mm compact camera. Such
cameras usually only require the user to select maybe one of three focus
zones (according to how far your subject is from the camera) and maybe
the ISO.
Using a simple automatic film camera removes the need for
you to make decisions before every shot about things such as white
balance, aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation etc. By being
freed from such technical decisions you can focus all of your attention
on two things: selecting a truly interesting subject and ensuring the
composition is the most compelling.
Learn From Your Mistakes
By
taking just one frame of each scene you photograph, when you get the
prints back you will of course end up with some poor shots among the
good ones. When sorting through vast quantities of digital images it is
easy to forget to think about what went wrong with each of the rejected
images as you continue to hunt for a better one of the same subject.
Only having one frame for each composition forces you to think longer
and harder about why the shot didn’t work or what you could have done
better to improve the photograph.
Save Yourself Some Space
Shooting
digitally you can quickly start amassing thousands of poor quality or
reject photographs, that will never be hung up on your wall and will
probably never escape from the depths of your computers hard drive. As a
result of shooting film you’ll be taking fewer shots (hopefully of a
much higher standard) meaning you should have less need for huge amounts
of hard disk space.
Save Time With Post Production
As
discussed above shooting with film should help you increase your ‘keep
rate’, ensuring more of your images are perfect straight out of the
camera. Perhaps the key benefit of this is that you will have to spend
less time improving your digital photographs during post production.
Enjoy The Printed Images
When
shooting film it is easy to forget all of the photographs you took on a
film. Unlike digital cameras you can not immediately review your shots
on the back of the camera. There is nothing quite like the excitement of
picking up your film from the developing lab and having that first look
through the prints. It is also nice to have physical prints of your
photographs, something we as digital photographers rarely do.
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