Holga Blog

When I originally came up with the concept of the Derek’s Rant column (is that what you call a post on a blog?) I intended it to be thought provoking.  A prevailing trend I see in society is that we are becoming more sheepish.  Even eccentric individuals aren’t as eccentric or individual as they used to be.  We’re becoming a giant flock herded by mass marketing.  Communication has made the world very small.  It’s a double edge sword.  Rather then form your own opinion you can just Google search something and read everyone elses and use that as the basis for your decision making.  In some ways that’s a lot like consulting a Ouija board for advice.  But then again I’m writing this in my kitchen in Newport News, Virginia and chances are reading this somewhere else in the world.  I have the opportunity to communicate with you and to me that’s awesome.  I really don’t want to preach to the choir and the converted.  I don’t want to convert you either.  I only want everyone to form their own opinions based on their own experiences.

Film Photography is not a hobby for me.  It is an art form.  My art may be pointless and meaningless to someone else, but it’s a form of self expression.  When you see a print I made you are in essence seeing a part of my soul.  I made a decision to use a particular camera to achieve a particular image.  I chose a particular film.  I did what I could to achieve the level of exposure and contrast in the developing and printing process.  Most importantly, I composed the image that you see.  This process may have taken a fleeting moment faster then a blink of the eye or it may be something I’ve worked out over the course of weeks, months, and in some cases years.

Shooting film on a fully manual camera, or a camera with no settings at all vindicates me.  If nothing else I know enough to be dangerous with a camera.  I did it all myself.  I am an artist.  I am not an amateur.  I may not be a commercial photographer and my work may not be up to the standards of the masters, but being called an amateur is a way of saying I’m a couple of rungs lower on the ladder then a professional.  I don’t see myself on the same ladder as a professional, I have a totally different agenda.

I’ve been on the search for the Holy Grail for a compact camera for taking candid and documentary type photographs.  It had to be capable of being used manually.  I love rangefinders and bought a Petri thinking it was much smaller then it actual was (probably because of the Petri 35).  The 7s is as heavy and just about as big as my SRT 101 with a 50mm standard lens!  I love the camera, but it didn’t meet all of my needs.  Now I think my search may be over.  I wasn’t looking for a poor man’s Leica, more like a poor man’s Rollei 35!  I found it in a 20 dollar Ricoh 500g I scored on eBay.  It took a little bit of work to get it in shooting order because it needed new light seals.  Thanks to the 99 cent craft store felt with a sticky back I know have my take just about anywhere fully manual 35mm camera with a sort of wide-ish 40mm lens (A focal length I really like).

It's hard to tell how big a camera is, so the film and beer are there for scale.

My first roll went pretty well.  I didn’t shoot a whole roll because I didn’t know if my light seal job would work.  The last shot was taken when I raised my camera and captured a man with a shopping cart walking into the frame while riding in the passenger seat of my wife’s car I wasn’t trying to be Henri Cartier-Bresson or Garry Winogrand, if I had been trying I would have failed.  I was capturing a moment of time in my life.  It’s an honest moment.  Even though I don’t know the man pushing his groceries home he is my neighbor and we live in the same community and shop in the same stores.  I wasn’t “slumming it” taking pictures in community that I wasn’t apart of.

My last deployment took me to Naples and Rome, Dubai, Rhodes (Greek Island) and Marsailles.  I took a lot of pictures with my Canon Elph SD1000.  I’m pretty happy with how they came out as “vacation” type photos but I would have taken more thoughtful pictures with a manual camera.  I didn’t have much interest in shooting “street” photography because I wasn’t in that mindset.  I was out to enjoy myself as a tourist.  A couple pictures I took may have fallen into that genre, but I wasn’t going out with the intent to document street life in foreign countries.  This time around that is specifically what I aim to do.  I really think it could end up being my best work.  I have a clear vision and goal.  I want to capture all of the impressions that everyday life made on me.  But I lived it first, it’s important to me to be a part of life before I try to document it.  I don’t believe in using my camera as a shield or living my life as a 3rd party whose telling a story.