Lately, I’ve been frustrated.
I have no camera. (Well, no lens. I lent my Nikon 18-70mm to a friend who is studying in Ecuador. In exchange I took one of his favorite shirts.) I haven’t been able to make images, something I’ve enjoyed with consistency up until September. I reviewed the Canon 7D last weekend, and that was a bit of a release. Now: back to square one.
I have collected some concepts that I want to explore with the camera. I want to do something with mega-size churches in the Portland area. There are a bunch of homeless people that live in a tent village in the forests near the Portland area. Local mission workers bring them blankets and food. I want to explore that. I heard about marijuana growers down in Corvallis. People that rely on farming in the urban center interest me (and supposedly this happens in Portland.) I am interested in the persistence of the screen in culture (think: work and home, phone, computer, television etc.) I want to do a series on parking-garage attendants in the wee hours of the morning. Ah, yes, but no working camera.
Wrong. I have an old Canon AE-1.
I’ve become so familiar with the workflow of digital image-making. The process is so immediate, the results are immediate. However, this is a relatively new phenomenon in photography. For nearly one and a half centuries photographers couldn’t immediately see their images.
Unfortunately, I have let this mindset limit my creativity. Equipment shouldn’t limit one’s image-making. It will change the way a photographer works, to be sure. An 8×10 view camera and a pocket-size digital camera simply function differently.
They do both make images, and I have found this to be the important thing. It isn’t so much the how that is significant; it is the action that matters.
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