shooting with a camera on a tripod
Was home from work by 12:30 and out the door loaded down with camera gear by 1pm which in terms of Light and Time, felt like around 3:30pm by normal standards. The sun is low in the sky around this time of year and each second not out taking photographs is a moment wasted. Shooting on a tripod takes many more seconds than I am used to but I would not consider those moments a waste. I would call them heavy though, with 2 pentax 67s (one was really just a rear lens cap that could take pictures, had I put a fresh battery in it) in a bag with, with said bag and my tripod over a shoulder.
Normally when I shoot with a 35mm camera the picture taking process is one of Reaction, and then later when looking at the print, Contemplation.
When looking at a ground glass screen with one hand on a twist lever that will make the lens point in a different direction, Contemplation came soon after Reacting. And with a shift in position a slightly newer reaction came from seeing what could be included or excluded from the frame. Naturally this is what happens all the time when taking a photograph but if I normally shoot intuitively 80% of the time and deliberately the remaining 20%, then today’s lesson was just the opposite. I thought a lot more and shot a lot less. 5 rolls of 120 film, so that was only 50 photographs in an hour. If conditions are right, 5 rolls of 36 frame 35mm film can easily be shot in 10 minutes or less.
Overall I learned 2 things.
1. Tripods take time to use. The trade off is being able to shoot at f22 with 100 speed film and that ought to be worth it.
2. What I really realized was that if you step back and really Look, anything is interesting to photograph. The plan for the day was to walk to the train station and go one stop to Matsudo, then walk from Matsudo-eki towards the river and the old industrial district. That was the plan, but I never made it to my station as I got caught by all sorts of things to photograph.
I’ll post some scanned prints sometime later.
