Another year has passed, and photographically I should be calling it, a year of experimentation. I did not travel far from home this year, like my wife did. This did not preclude me from trying different things. As you can see from the images below, it’s a mish-mash, a chaos, with no definite theme to anything. Landscapes mixed with boudoir, portraits, babies… I mean wow. I wanted to try using old film cameras in different conditions, either outside in full sunlight or inside matching strobes and light meters. Trying my hands at creating large panoramas. Madness.
One thing I learned this year, is to appreciate film a little more and change my shooting style a lot. There were times when I did not take any digital cameras with me on little photo trips. Since the medium format cameras have a maximum shutter speed of about 1/500 sec, I had to learn how to navigate apertures higher than f8. It's a scary, unknown place for me. I love shooting wide open. I really love making the background in a landscape, out of focus and concentrating on the foreground element. It's just the way I like doing things. Medium format, and even the 35mm film camera forces me to close down the aperture of the lens, because of the shutter speed limitation, and that in turn opened my eyes to a completely different style. I'm still learning to appreciate it.
This is all an experience, because shooting with film not only slowed me down even more, but forced me to make each picture count. With digital it's so easy to just shoot one scene a few times, just to get a better shot. Film of course puts a 36 frame or less restriction (12 with medium format!), and that made me more careful what's in the frame. This also translates well to digital. Taking care what’s in the frame and that everything is set right before pressing the magic button.
So here are my best of 2016. I will admit, it wan't easy pickings, as I really love every frame in this gallery. It's definitely not as coherent and nice as Kasia's, who is growing photographically in leaps and bounds. I really admire that. Then again, I could be biased :)
Enjoy!
