It's all about the photo...that's it

It's all about the single photograph in the end, whether it's from a well planned project or a shot that just happened, only the singular image will remain. When I see a photo hung on a wall I don't ask myself " was this part of a series?", "what was in the frame before or after?", I don't demand to see the contact sheet. I look at the photograph and appreciate it for what it is.

It's hard to decide what "the shot" is and it's especially hard in today's digital world to toss away the rest when "the shot" is selected. I can understand holding onto various photos from a shoot with the idea of possibly compositing them together, "I like her arm her but her expression is wrong," etc., but after all that is it worth keeping the rest?

I constantly go through my hard drives looking through catalogs of photos weeding out the duds. I hope others do the same, I can only imagine in ten or twenty years we'll start to see retrospectives where we get to troll through a photographers hard-drive to view the detritus of his or her career. It may prove insightful to some but in the end, is it not the final image that will stay with us?

One of the reasons I love film is it automatically makes you edit your work, to look for the shot in the roll or rolls of film and print it. Sure, you could do all of them and today, scan all of them, but it's time consuming and there's something about film that just let's you know you found the one. Maybe it's because I know I have the neg and can go back at any time if I change my mind. Maybe it's because, unlike digital, I did not take a gazillion shots and can easily find the best in the meager selection.

The photo above is "the shot" from a roll of film I just developed. I was experimenting with pushing some old FujiFilm Pro 400H to 800, shooting a bunch of random stuff over a few days. On this particular day I was waiting for a bus in the rain on my way to a Marilyn Minter artist's talk downtown. There was something about the way Josie was holding her umbrella, the droplets formin on the top and the light that just screamed out "get out your camera and shot this". I pulled it out, waited for the right moment and took two shots just before our bus arrived. I shot wide open and aimed for the top of the umbrella so the droplets would be in sharp focus.

The camera of my dreams

Recently a Pentax Digital 645 Camera has been recurring in my dreams, always a different scenario but the same camera. Now, I know Pentax had announced a digital 645 a few years back and it looked like it might have been a reality when the prototype was displayed at Photonika in 2007 but was dismayed to learn the project was scrapped last year. A few things about my drems are odd; I haven't thought of the Pentax 645 Digital since I read the little blurb of it's demise over six months ago and I really never spent any time looking into the specifications of the camera other than it was a 645 Digital using a 31mp Kodak sensor and would ship with a 55mm lens. The camera in my dreams isn't quite that camera, it was more like a classic Pentax 645 manual focus with a digital back but it was one whole unit, the camera had a very classic feel to it. However ti did have a feature I thought was incredible, the sensor could be upgraded later. Ihave since learned this was a rumored feature.

I don't know what this dream means. Do I desire this imaginary Pentax 645D? Do I desire a digital medium format? Well, yes I do. However, I don't find what camera makers such as Hasselblad and Mamiya are making desirable. I want a digital medium format that feels and performs like my beloved Mamiya 645 Pro, it's simple, it has manual focus, it's modular and I can use it with or without a grip. I hate auto focus and I hate manually focussing with auto focus lenses even more since there is no prism. What's going on?

Maybe it's my Mamiya getting back at me, seeping into my subconcious. I took her out and put rolls of Portra 160 in the two backs and two spare magazines in preperation for a shoot but I never picked her up. I did feel bad and yearned to shoot with her so I decided not to leave her in the studio locked away for weeks at a time and brought her home. I still haven't shot anything. She was probably jealous that I took the FujiFilm S5 pro with me this weekend and not her. Why did you take me out of the studio just to leave me behind on a long weekend? I need to get back home and show her some love, maybe I'll finally take some photos on the east river or those night photos I keep saying I'll do.