Coming on the heels of me finding some slides from the 90s, Scott Kelby announced a photo challenge which took me back to those “shoot and hope” days. Essentially the challenge was to shoot 24 or 36 images and not review the images until at least 24 hours after shooting. This means no chimping, checking the historgram, or test shots. Do it old school! I chose to participate with some images shot in my back yard and the image above from the near the Vancouver depot.
What did I get from this challenge? I was reminded of some of my frustrations from the 80s and 90s where I really wanted to know how things turned out when I took the shot. There was no LCD on my AE-1 and this challenge reminded me of that helpless feeling.
I was also reminded that in film days experimentation was expensive because there was a cost for each photo for the film and developing. Being too snap happy could be costly. In the digital era, if you really don’t like the image you can just delete it and nothing is lost. For me this means experimentation is free and with experimentation (or call it trial and error) I get better. This is something I really enjoy about digital and am thankful for everyday.
Fortunately my other frustration with film, that lack of ability to edit or correct and image, was not realized because I still had to use Lightroom to get the image off the camera. I chose however to only use the ‘Auto’ button for the challenge. Still the ability to make further corrections or be creative exists and that I’m happy about.
And now back to the 21st century….
