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I just noticed something.
My mind is now thinking like if having/using a virtual “medium format camera” when i look at my surrounding world and the motives in it. It means i “look around” as if i would have a classic traditional 6x6 or 6x7 studio camera with me, by visualizing the motives in front of me.
Which i assume it is also a form of mental pre-selection process; while you look at the landscape and your subjects - though the sense of a large camera, mounted on a tripod. What does work ? What doesn't ? Could I do things a bit differently ? Do I give up at the first shots or do I dwell a while, to see how i could do things different or better ?
Things like that.
It is almost like a new feeling. Is it really ?
More like a long lost type of feeling and photographic working style.
The digital era of photography has made me blind for that kind of inner calm, methodical and intuitive visualization process. In favor of more fast paced, and in increasingly ways also more “sloppy” ways to "shoot images". iPhone cameras made this condition even worse...
Like: Click-Click, and already forgotten and passed by.
This settled feeling...
So, all of the sudden i get this more settled feeling, inside out. How I used to "feel" with my inner eye, the things i see in my surrounding, through a "virtual 6x6 or 6x7 camera". Pondering about the motives in front of me.
More methodical. Slower. Calmer. With presence ! With after thought.
A higher quality shooting discipline (and experience)
Good landscape photographers when working in nature, probably know this experience very well. The feeling when you are out and about in a slow pace in nature. You and your medium format camera, your tripod - and you "inner eye" become one with the surrounding landscape. You contemplate about the motive / scenery in front of you. And nature opens up to you, almost as offering a spiritual present, through lights, colors, shapes and endless beauty.
Calm. Methodical. Intuitive. Deeper.
The change in me, is rather surprising.
I didn’t expect this really. What have I done in the past many years ?! Mainly, taking “on-the-fly” type of images. On my way home from work. (There is nothing wrong with that, of course. It is its own niche, how to explore nightly motives in low light conditions). But - it seems as if I never really stayed with a deeper presence. Most, I only shoot, pass by, and walk away along my roads.
I do like the calmer style, too - but could barely get myself to be... still.
To Watch. Gauge. Visualize. Working calmly
In fact. I missed that feeling.
I thought it was lost...
to an old, irrecoverable era of analog 6x6 and 6x7 photography, starting in 1987, but ending around year 2000 (ebbing out more and more) in favor for the fast digital point and shoot photography.
I tried to convince myself wanting to revive analog photography during the 2010s. But failing partially - with ever longer growing periods, in which I didn't do anything. Or at least not much of that calm, present analog medium format photography.
What happened ? I was not with my heart.
The 2 decade long quest, for better digital cameras and lenses - became a long winded road, siphoning absurdly large amounts of money and debts...
I am not regretting it.
Those were my personal choices and excitements - whether right or wrong. They were mine by free will. And nobody else to blame on.
The "Rotating Vertex Effect"
The rotating Vertex adapter type of photography - surely put my inner photo world upside down, in most unexpected ways.
I believe ... to the better. |
