May 31, 2009

The Project

I’ve had the idea for a while that, in keeping with my ideas of photographic simplicity being tantamount to photographic truth (or to put it in a simpler way; keeping things simple keeps things truer to life), I should try to go a month shooting one camera, one lens and one type of film. This would serve to stop me over-thinking things as can so often be the case when dragging around 3x DSLRs, 8 lenses, 4 flashguns and various other bits of kit clutter that aren’t really needed.

Instead of debating whether the 85mm or the 80-200mm was the better lens for a shot, I’d be forced to work within the constraints of something a little less complicated thereby focusing my thoughts on composition and light. I’ve noticed a degredation in my work at the moment and I’m partially attributing it to this ridiculous kit-clutter which seems to dominate my photographic life at present.

So to this end I have derived a plan based upon those of many others (which always seem to be the very best plans, going by experience). This plan is to buy, learn and use a cheap 35mm camera which must have three features.

  1. A decent lens, preferably around the 35/40mm mark. 50mm will do, but could prove to be a little too long if it’s going to be the only lens I use for my personal work for 31 days.
  2. A manual meter, which only has to give a ball-park figure. The plan is to use Sunny-16 most of the time anyway as I want to get myself back into the swing of recognising light and being able to beat my camera’s meter to working out the best exposure for the desired effect.
  3. It must cost less than £50 all told. This is to stop this turning into a glorified gear hunt, and focus me on doing something worthwhile with this exercise.

With these ideas laid out, I’m going to stock myself up with some HP5 Plus, which normally I don’t like all that much, but is forgiving and is pretty resilient when it comes to pushing and pulling exposure. My typical diet of Delta 100/400 and APX-400 with the odd bit of Pan F on the side is more flexible regarded as a whole, but is a little too specialised for me to choose one and use it for an entire month.

I’ll aim to shoot at least 5 rolls a week, and will then make a book of the best 40 shots from the exercise (that means two really high quality SOOC shots a week).

The Project will start the first day of July… Wish me luck