things

I need to go back to Chicago later this week, had a call a few days ago from a new client and I need to take care of some rush things for them. It's going to be a busy 6 days, I'm getting off the plane and going straight into strategy meetings with project managers and lawyers, and probably working straight through the weekend. Not sure how much time if any I'll have to do anything related to photography. But I did take a few minutes today to think about what to bring, and so far I'm leaning toward keeping it simple. One Leica, a couple of lenses, a handheld incident meter. No digital except for my consumer level pocket-sized little point-and-shoot, and that only in case I need to do any project site documentation.

The reasons: At the recent shoot with Claudine, I took more digital shots (about 180) than film (about 72). And I fell into the trap of shooting quickly just because I could. End result: 40 of the film images made the first cut for editing, only four of the digital images did.

A line in the Weston movie last night brought it to the surface, a mention of the creation of 1,400 negatives (on 8x10 sheet film) during an entire summer of California travels.

I'll bet some digital shooters routinely capture more than 1,400 images in every shoot they do... and that not one of them has, or ever will, even remotely approach what Weston did on that trip.

Another issue has surfaced repeatedly, including in the last two location shoots. I like to shoot in low light, and the little rangefinder lets me get away with it. With no mirror to create vibration, and with the exquisite balance of the Leica, and with the precision of the split-image rangefinder for focus, I routinely handhold at 1/15th, 1/8th, even 1/4 of a second while shooting at dusk or at night, and almost all of the images are sharp. That's led me to try doing the same thing with digital, and... it doesn't work. Shooting at those same speeds results in lots of shots softened by camera vibration, lots of shots with the focus just-barely-off because of the darker, less-crisp DSLR viewfinder and no depth-of-field margin of error at f/1.4 and with the 1.5x crop factor. Yeah, I know, kick up the ISO... but digital noise isn't as pleasing as grain, and I tend to push low light limits anyway, give me more speed and I'll shoot in less light.

I've shot the two cameras side by side, gotten 95 percent success with the Leica, and 25 percent success with a brand new Nikon DSLR, both of them with top-end fast prime glass.

So increasingly I'm shooting digital when speed matters, which for me isn't often, and film the rest of the time.

Another bit of simplifying: Shooting film while on travel allows me to carry my smaller/lighter/easier to use/ancient Mac laptop.. a 12" Powerbook, only 4 pounds. It's too old/slow to handle the huge download files of the current crop of DSLRs, but functions just fine as a word processing and web machine. So that saves me a lot of bulk and weight.

Now if only other things in life were so easy to simplify.