Photography

I’ve owned a lot of cameras and lenses.

More than average , I’d say. I’ve of course sold more than I currently own. With few exceptions, I regret selling any of them.

Remember how the Nikon F6 printed exposure data between frames?

Or how nice it was having aperture-priority auto-exposure on the Leica M7?

Or the Mamiya 6 with its giant square negatives in an easy-to-shoot package?

I’ve been thinking about this lately while pondering all of the money I have tied up in various cameras and how infrequently I use some of them. My head tells me to sell everything I’m not using often, but my heart won’t let me. I always, always regret selling camera gear, so I think I’ll hang onto all of it for now. At least until circumstances dictate that I cannot.

My last house had a proper darkroom. It was a little janky, but there was a big sink, room for three enlargers, a wet side, a dry side, etc.

When I moved into my new house, I originally planned to turn an extra room in the basement into a shiny new darkroom. That didn’t happen, so I’ve been using the bathroom instead. It works fine.

Here’s my fancy darkroom.

The worst part of the whole thing is that tiny faucet. At minimum I should put in a tall one. As it is now, I need to fill a 1qt measuring cup, and then use that to fill containers. It’s a pain. The HomePod is nice because I can just tell it what to play in the dark.

I don’t have a fitting for the faucet to run a hose into the washing tray, so I just let the faucet pour into it.

I ran some string across the shower to use as a hanger for drying prints and film. Works great.

Here’s the meat of the operation. This is the bathroom closet, converted into the “dry side”. There’s room for this Leitz Focomat V35 enlarger. The V35 is a fantastic piece of equipment, but only enlarges 35mm film. I’m considering something that can do medium format as well. I have two 4×5 enlargers in storage but there is no way they’d fit. I can, however, make 4×5″ contact prints on 5×7″ paper. I love making those, so that should do.

There’s room for all sorts of photo paper and chemicals. I’ve only been making enlargements up to 8×10″ so some of this is no longer needed but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. I also store my film scanner here.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s my darkroom. I was planning to not shoot any film in 2021 but I don’t think that’ll stick, so I dusted everything off and mixed up a fresh batch of chemicals in preparation for spending more time here.

I have for many years kept my photos properly named and in a dated folder hierarchy on my hard drive:

/2020/12-December 2020/2020-12-02-Alice.dng

This requires that I import my photos from a card, then add metadata (Title and Caption), then rename them with the capture date and title, then put them into the proper folder, where they live forever. Whew!

Another step later in my process is to “burn” a copy of each edited RAW file to a JPEG that lives right beside the original. I also create a copy of the best photos in my “Digital Print Archive”. The DPA is swept up and uploaded to Google Photos, Flickr, and my Synology, automatically. This gives me ways to share and organize them later. It also provides the content-based search and face recognition that is so handy.

It’s a good system. Solid. Future-proof. Backups are a known quantity.

But I’m tired of doing it. I’m tired of copying, moving, renaming, archiving, burning, etc. Basically I’m tired of managing everything myself. I edit my RAW files in Capture One Pro and deal with culling, naming, and distributing using Photo Mechanic. They’re great apps, but expensive and so flexible that I spend way too much time tweaking my process.

Some days, today for example, I’m tempted to import everything into the new Lightroom and let Adobe take it from there. This battle has been raging for a few years now and I cannot for the life of me settle it.

The truth is, Lightroom can be configured to keep all of the original RAW files on a local drive, in dated folders, automatically. This helps alleviate my fear of going all-in with cloud storage. I can’t rename files from within Lightroom, but at least I know they’re there. I’ve tried importing, culling, renaming in Photo Mechanic and then importing into Lightroom, but if I’m going to bother with all that I should just stick with C1.

Lightroom isn’t even close to Capture One on features, power, or flexibility. But it syncs my photos to all my devices, including my iPhone photos. I don’t have to do anything. That’s a huge benefit. 90% of my images can be processed just fine in Lightroom. If I want, I can always process the other 10% using Capture One (or Photoshop, I suppose).

This post is just me trying to talk myself into yielding to my lazier tendencies and moving everything to Lightroom. I’m still noodling on it, but don’t be surprised if there’s a new post soon about how I switched to Lightroom (again). Maybe then I’ll spend more time photographing and less time playing with my editing workflow.

(UPDATE January 3, 2021: Here’s the answer )

I’ve prided myself on my ability to shoot a Leica M3 or Hasselblad 500C/M with no meter, no auto-focus, and no auto-exposure. Who needs it? Real photographers certainly don’t! Plus, being fully mechanical means that the cameras require no batteries and should be repairable forever. It’s a badge of honor.

Except, and maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, I’ve grown to like letting the camera do at least some of the work. In fact, I prefer it. They’ve gotten pretty good at it and if I’m honest they do things better than me most of the time.

I guess it depends on the camera. For example, the big 4×5 cameras are slow, deliberate beasts, so having to adjust things just so is part of the experience. On the other hand, when walking around with a digital or 35mm film camera, I want something fully automatic. Since most of the time I’m in walking-around mode, this means that most of the time I want to let the camera do the work.

The realization that I now prefer automation came to me after I bought the Leica M10-P. The Leica of course has a meter and aperture-priority exposure. But it needs to be focused manually. When I must manually focus, I love using the Leica’s rangefinder, but unless I’m range-focusing in bright light there’s no way I’m faster at it than I am with a modern auto-focus camera. Also, it takes two hands and sometimes it’s better when I can just lift a camera to my eye and press the shutter.

Manually focusing a camera is a pain I simply don’t feel like dealing with.

So, I’m finding that although I have my dream camera available, I most often pick up the little Ricoh GRIII. The Ricoh is much faster to use and, honestly, the images are comparable to the M10-P (shhhh, don’t tell anyone).

The same thing has been happening with film cameras. I stopped using the fully manual, no-meter-having Leica M3 and M4 and started using the M6. I wanted a built-in meter. Even more surprising is that lately I’ve been grabbing the big old Canon EOS-1v or Nikon F100 instead. Those cameras don’t have anything approaching the soul or joy of use of a Leica, but I kind of want to point and shoot and move on, ya know?

I don’t know if this slow drift away from manual cameras is simplyi a mood swing or if it’s permanent, but it’s changing how I think about shooting.