Film

I’m reading that new Leibovitz book and am enjoying the hell out of it. I love photographer biographies, and although this one is more along the lines of discussions about photos, she does it in a more or less chronological order, and you can see how the work progresses over time.

The book is not about technique, but she mentions a couple of tidbits that I thought were interesting. When she was shooting 35mm, for example when she was touring with the Rolling Stones, she generally had three cameras with her, each with a prime lens: 35, 55, and 105. She’d put the 105 on whichever camera had a light meter (I assume she used cameras which didn’t) and basically used it to meter rather than running across the room with a hand-held meter. Then she’d use the other two for her primary shooting.

Makes me want to shoot a few rolls of film. The only semi-working film camera that I have is an old Konica that I bought at a pawn shop in the Village my first year in New York – I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. It’s a piece of crap, really. I believe I shot a total of three rolls of film on it before it became apparent that the shutter would jam whenever it was even slightly cold. I put it away until it got warmer and in the interim I bought my first digital, and never looked back. Now it sits on my window sill in the nostagia technology boneyard.

Anyways, point is, I’m all rev’d up and I want to do some work today, but instead I’m sitting at my desk in cubicle land.