I was discussing photography with friends at lunch today, specifically this article about attaching a 102-year-old movie camera lens to a Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR. The sample photos on there are very cool looking.
We talked about the trend for photographer to try to emulate the look and feel of old-time film photography. You can of course create some of the old-time photo effects on a digital image with Photoshop. Some people actually go out now and buy cheap and crappy film cameras and take photos with them, and scan them in to share online. That’s cool and good and all. But we pondered reproducing the experience of film photography with a digital camera.
Consider a Canon 5D Mark II. If you shoot in RAW mode (as I do with mine), each image file is about 20 megabytes. You find you need multi-gigabyte memory cards to hold a decent number of photos. But maybe you have an old 512 MB card lying around from an earlier camera. That will hold… 25 photos, give or take a couple depending on what you’re shooting and the file compression ratios. A common number of exposures on a roll of film was 24 (and you could usually squeeze a 25th shot in).
And so was born the idea. Take your fancy-shmancy digital camera and a memory card just big enough to hold roughly 24 photos. Go out shooting, without any other memory cards. Do not delete any shots you take until you get home. Post all the shots from your “roll of film” to your photo sharing site.
This puts you into the mindset of film photography. You only have 24 shots, and you better try to make each one count.
And then we went a step further. For a real challenge, find a 32 MB card (or appropriate size for your camera), which will hold only one photo (in RAW format). Go out shooting without any other memory cards. This time, you’re allowed to delete any photos you take. But you only get to come home with one shot. If you think you can improve on the shot on your card, you can erase it and take another photo. if you think you’ve got the best shot of the day, keep it until you go home.
If you try either of these ideas, please point me at the results.
Tags: idea
Interesting. If you can only press the button once with no deleting (leaving you letting good pictures go in the hope of finding a better one later), you essentially have the Secretary problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
that vintage lens is very cool.
Since I have only just very recently (less than 3 months ago) begun using my first digital camera, the idea of making every shot count is so familiar that the challenge is actually to stop worrying about that and just take a lot of pictures to sort out later. My camera till now has been an old manual Nikon F2 with a 90mm portrait lens. So I think in terms of a particular kind of shot, getting them is like still-hunting. It is not uncommon for me to get a roll of pictures back and have only a couple that don’t make it into the photo album.
That said, I usually make sure I have more than one roll of film with me when I go out.