WRITINGS & NEWS
There are things iPhone cameras do well and things they struggle with, but it’s always worth having a camera with you when suddenly great moments show up and you wish you could capture the magic.
As much of a time capsule as it is a photo gallery, here are my favorite shots of the year from my iPhone:
This one’s an easy list, since if you’ve scrolled through this blog at all, you know I only shot 4 rolls of film, and they were the first 4 rolls of film I’d ever shot.
I think film photography is never going to be a major hobby of mine, but I’d like to roll it out a couple of times a year and see how my skills develop.
Here they are, my favorite shots from my first time shooting on film:
My first time shooting film, I bought a couple rolls each of some of the most affordable 35mm film: Fujinon Superia X-tra 400 and Kodak Colorplus 200.
When I went to the Houston Rodeo, I thought it would be fun to shoot the carnival at night, so right as we were leaving the concert at about 9:00 that night, I loaded up the Kodak ColorPlus 200 and wandered through the grounds.
If you don’t know, one of the major things about how this film shoots has to do with that number, 200. That means it has an ISO number of 200 (ISO means “International Organization for Standardization,” which does not matter, but just in case you thought it might be a handy anagram, it is not). The number refers to its light-gathering ability - a very low number would be 100 ISO, which would be for shooting outdoors in bright daylight, a very high ISO would be 6400 ISO, which would be for trying to shoot useful images at night.
Above is a good example of the visual difference from a useful Photography Life article about the subject.
If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed that this story involves me a) shooting at night and b) using a low-ISO film, and if you’ve collected all of those pieces together you might be thinking “boy, that seems like exactly the wrong sort of film for shooting a carnival at night!” and you would be correct.
One of the first things I did with the Minolta was to bring it with me on a photo shoot I was already doing.
I didn’t know how any of the film I took would turn out, so I took some test shots at the same time I took the shots on a Canon 1.4 50mm on a Sony A7III - essentially replicating the setup with a digital camera.
And then two months later, I got a look at the results. This is a very slow way of comparing things.
In both photography and videography, there's a learning pattern that everyone goes through.
Everyone starts out the same way. You go out on their first shoot, you’re very excited, you come back and look at what you’ve shot and realize how much you’ve missed and how badly you messed up.
So, you learn. You go out, determined to not make the same mistakes again. And you come back and look at what you’ve shot and realize that you’ve made entirely new mistakes this time.
You go out again, determined to learn from these mistakes, and this time you come back and discover still other mistakes that you have made, and also that some of the original mistakes have snuck back in when you weren’t looking.
This goes on for a while.
Eventually, things level off. You find that you’re able to come back from your shoots and you have everything you need. You can enter into your edits comfortably, knowing that you’re leaving your shoots with what you needed.
Then, you start to notice that these edits are getting exhausting. You have so much footage or so many photos that it’s incredibly time-consuming to edit everything. Why do you have forty-six exposures of the bride, all from the same angle and with the same expression? Why did you shoot six minutes of footage of this band playing when you know you’re only going to use an 8-second clip? Just scrolling through all of this is taking way too much of your life.
So, you get better by getting thriftier. You learn what you don’t need, and your edits become faster, and your life becomes easier.
And now, here is where I start to diverge from a lot of other photographers and videographers I run into. Because I just don’t run my shoots that way.
