Blog

The photographic blog of Sean Wood (aka motionid)

Out with the new and in with the old or out with it all?

So I started shooting medium format film for a few different reasons. I like the "look" of film. I like the mood it gives you. I like it's unpredictability. I like that it's not easy to get right. I like that it can give pictures a timelessness. I like that medium format photography is a slow process. It's manual focus. It's slow lenses and manual winders (most of the time). You can make big prints. And when you manage to get all of the details correct you can make a great picture (or so I've been told).Another reason I changed formats and mediums is because I realized that my old digital photos were easy to copy. And when I realized this I understood that what I thought were great pictures were not. Anyone could take them. So I thought I should try harder and set myself a challenge to try to shoot the same subject matter with a different camera. Give myself a challenge to see what I could achieve. And so after countless rolls of film and a huge amount of time trying I finally realized that I suck at medium format photography. A friend of mine took a look at my pictures recently and told me not to give up on the old stuff I'd done. I think I'm slowly starting to see his point. And what's interesting about this is that what he's saying not only is that my old stuff was better but, given it was so easy for anyone to replicate even the old stuff was not much good. I think I may need to revisit the whole idea of taking pictures.