A New Camera, and a Very Long Way to Collect It

A friend of mine, Dave Whenham, read my blog post extolling the virtues of a P&S camera, and especially the one I used to have in the 1990s.

I was waxing lyrical about the camera and how much I missed it.

Dave had a Ricoh FF3-AF from the same era and said that he was happy to give the camera to me as a gift.

It took a bit of jiggery pokery, but needless to say I drove 250 miles round trip to have a cup of coffee and a natter with Dave, as well as collect the camera.

Some might say the economics of such a trip don't stack up.

But time spent with a friend is never wasted.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to try the camera out. Dave had loaded a roll of FP4 Plus into it before handing it over, so I had a new camera and a new roll of film to try.

Saturday was a bright morning, and I was hopeful of a good day out.

By the time the train arrived in Bristol, it was lashing it down.

What is it with these train trips and poor weather?

Anyway, I was out. This time wearing my winter wax jacket and waterproof shoes, so onwards to shoot the film.

I chose Bristol because I know it really well, and that meant I could target different areas, all within easy walking distance.

I'd say the camera did a great job. This is my pick of the roll

The Ricoh is a Point & Shoot and, as such, it doesn't have all the dials and controls of an SLR.

But that's OK.

Sometimes you just want to shoot the camera and make pictures.

I relied on the fact that by the 1980s and 1990s, film cameras, especially point-and-shoot cameras, had become remarkably reliable when it came to metering and focusing.

Shooting the first frame, I was surprised to see a red light appear in the viewfinder.

Upon closer inspection, the red light turned out to be an icon showing a mountain.

That'll be infinity then.

The viewfinder is large enough for this type of camera and really usable.

The shutter button allows a half press to lock focus and exposure, but over 36 frames I didn't manage to half press it once.

I simply ended up with an exposure.

A bit of a hair trigger then.

I'd dialled in 200 on the ISO setting. Unusually for a camera of this era, the Ricoh doesn't rely on DX encoding on the film cartridge.

That's good news, as it means I don't have to worry about the camera choosing the film speed for me or having to calculate exposure compensation around it.

The lens cover is easy to slide open when you want to take a photograph, and there are no false-open positions where it looks open but the camera won't actually take a picture, like the LC-A.

The camera also has a tripod mount and a self-timer, so tripod-mounted excursions in, say, a church could be accommodated, although I didn't try that on this occasion.

Auto wind is another feature of this camera.

I know this because there is no wind-on lever or knob, and because the high-pitched scream that ensues when a frame has been exposed is a little alarming when you first hear it.

The mechanism also takes an inordinate amount of time, considering the thing is winding on a single 35mm frame.

Never mind.

No films were harmed in this experiment.

When you reach the final frame, a light appears on top of the camera to tell you so. The camera, however, appears to operate normally until you notice the light.

Some cameras can get 37 or 38 frames out of a 36-exposure film, so I wondered if that might be the case here.

It wasn't.

Rewinding the exposed film back into the cartridge is achieved using a slider on the bottom of the camera.

The motor screams in protest and takes considerably longer than it should to rewind the film.

Once the camera has completed the rewind, another high-pitched noise is emitted over the already screaming motor to tell you.

Nice.

Simply stopping the rewind motor wasn't a design choice then?

There is a flash onboard, but I didn't use it.

So there we are.

A new-to-me Ricoh FF3-AF, courtesy of a good friend and 250 miles of driving for a cup of coffee, a natter and a camera.

I'd say that's a pretty good deal.

 

Bristol and Constantinople

If you walk around Bristol docks, especially Bathurst Basin, you may spot something odd.

Byzantium.

Clearly, this building was built more recently, certainly younger than when Constantinople existed.

I spotted it, raised the Holga to my eye and captured it.

Then I started seeing the architectural motif on other buildings. In fact, it’s everywhere.

I'm no architectural photographer. I'm just a bloke with a Holga.

So just grabbing the shot and moving on is OK.

And that's really all this photograph is. I saw something interesting, pointed the camera at it and pressed the shutter

What Happened Next?

When I look at this photograph I am reminded of the "What Happened Next?" round of Question of Sport. 

I'd stepped out of Illy Coffee in Kensington, London and raised the LC-A to my eye and captured the scene.

So what did happen next? 

No idea, I'm afraid.

Always another day.

Photographed on a Pinhole Camera

One of the things about photography that I have been commenting on in recent posts is the fact that there is always another day. We can always return and try again.

But there is an extension to that. More to the discussion than just there is always another day.

There is always another camera.

There is always another film.

There is always another view.

There is always another time of day.

There is always another chemistry and time combination to try for development.

What all this is doing is giving us permission to experiment in an environment where we don't need to view photography as getting the picture right the first time in the camera.

In fact, I don't think that is a desirable endpoint at all for any photographer.

To pick up on an earlier post, it gives us permission to fail and I think that is liberating.

It seems obvious to me that commercial photographers haven't got time to be messing about and, mostly, they have been given a short time to get the "photo" for the client.

Harry Borden, a portrait photographer who has shot the rich and famous, says that he's typically given an hour for the shoot, of which the subject often messes about, burning valuable time.

So for him, getting it right first time in camera might be important.

OK, so maybe not right first time in camera because an hour is a decent chunk of time, but if the subject burns 30 minutes by being a little uncooperative, the pressure must really be on to nail the brief.

Harry Borden also speaks about the moment that he knows he's got the frame, nailed the brief, and then he starts trying other things. He experiments.

But the constraints of a commercial photographer are miles away from the freedom with which the hobbyist operates.

As a hobbyist there is no client waiting for the photo, no stressed art director screaming for the cover picture for a Sunday supplement.

You have all the time in the world.

You can come back another day, you can try another camera, you can pick a different film, you can choose the golden hour in the morning instead of midday, you can choose Rodinal over HC-110.

There isn't a scenario that I can think of where that isn't true.

Well, perhaps there is.

If you go on an expensive holiday, say to Peru, and you are able to shoot at Machu Picchu, you probably aren't going to go back a year later simply because you weren't completely happy with the photographs.

Preparation becomes more important when the opportunity is difficult or expensive to repeat.

But then again, that's not really unique to the hobbyist photographer. Harry Borden talks about the preparation he does for his client-led shoots. He knows what he is there to do before the subject walks through the door.

Research, in its most basic form, can mean looking at Instagram and Pinterest which might show you the typical photographs taken of where you are going. It might also provide travel information to tell you about the best time of day. Visiting a library might show you a book that provides a completely different perspective for that destination.  You can think about what you want to photograph before you get there.

When I went to Chichen Itza in Mexico, I had an hour to wander around and take photographs.

I found that plenty of time.

The pictures weren't all portfolio standard and they weren't the best work that I've ever done, but enough of the two rolls I shot there were good enough that I didn't feel the need to return to Mexico.

And perhaps that's another important part of this.

The point isn't that we should keep going back until we get the perfect photograph.

The point is that we can.

Perhaps this is where I question the whole idea of needing a camera that gets it right first time.

Obviously, such a camera is desirable. Who wouldn't want a camera that nails the exposure, gets the focus exactly where it needs to be and produces a technically perfect file every time?

But I'm not sure I want the camera making all of those decisions for me.

Maybe that is why I enjoy film photography, when all is said and done.

Perhaps the imperfections are part of the point.

If I use a camera that doesn't always get things right, I have to make more decisions myself. I have to think about the light. I have to think about the exposure. I have to decide where to stand. I have to decide when to press the shutter.

And sometimes I'll get it wrong.

That's OK.

There is always another day.

Another camera.

Another film.

Another view.

Another time of day.

Another developer.

The photograph doesn't have to be right first time, but it will be mine.

Be a Human.

We live in a world where AI is integrated into the tools that we all use. To some people, this is problematic, while others see the trend as nothing but good. Wherever you sit on the discussion, one thing is clear: we are all human beings and we all have a choice.

In photography, we have an idea that the camera doesn't lie and, while that notion has repeatedly been debunked, there is something in that concept that we hang onto.

Modern digital cameras are no more than computers purporting to be a camera. Computers run software and therefore the ability to integrate AI into a digital camera isn't beyond the realms of reality. In some cases, that is exactly what happens.

AI tools are already able to "fix" photographs in camera without being asked to. They can overcome a lack of skill and the physical shortcomings of smartphone lenses by using Generative Image Manipulation. You can handhold a smartphone at 600x magnification and end up with a perfectly sharp picture.

Try doing that with an SLR camera and a roll of FP4 Plus.

For clarity, I don't believe that everything AI produces is worthless and neither do I believe that everything humans do is too valuable to be changed, questioned or interfered with. Humans have been churning out the equivalent of pigswill forever.

I'm sure when the printing press was invented, the Church wanted to use it to benefit humankind by mass producing exact copies of the Bible. They must have been disappointed to learn that pamphlets were also being produced with dirty stories in them.

AI is a tool and we, as humans, must learn to use that tool to our advantage, just like early farmers became skilled ploughmen or we all learned how to drive a car.

There is something in the AI debate that people are overlooking, and that is the belief that the future will be either AI or human, but not both.

But the reality will be somewhere in the middle, like it always is.

Humans can choose to act as humans.

In recent times there has been a move in education away from the Humanities towards those skills that might get you a better job.

So what about those people who aren't interested in money but are interested in writing or painting?

Didn't the great painters and writers of the past rely on patrons and commissions to pay the rent? Weren't paintings by great painters found on the wall in Parisian cafes because the artist had needed a meal?

What happens to creativity when a machine can produce something technically perfect in seconds?

Perhaps the answer isn't to compete with the machine.

Perhaps it's to do something the machine can't do.

Perhaps it's to be human.

Maybe the question that we should all be asking is not whether AI is good or bad, but how much of the decision-making process, in photography at least, do we want to abdicate to a machine?

And that, in the most roundabout way possible, brings me back to photography.

The bit of photography that I enjoy is the bit that I do. All those little decisions and changes to the settings of the camera that bring me closer to producing a photograph, as a negative and then positive, that I have imagined and pre-visualised when I was looking at a scene.

Now, if I fail, the failure is mine.

That's being human, isn't it?

In the film A Good Year, the character Uncle Henry says, "Failure often elicits great wisdom."

Isn't that a human trait?

How do we know what we are trying to find until we fail to find it?

So I implore you all to grab a camera and be a human.

Make your decisions, but once you've done that, live with the results.

Stop believing that if only you'd had a different lens, or the light was better, or you'd dialled in f8, you'd have produced a masterpiece.

Perhaps you would have, but it is by no means certain.

Make the work as a human.

Failure isn't to fail. It is an opportunity to learn.

If the results aren't quite up to your imagined photograph, well, you can always try again.

To Keep Trying

I've photographed this scene on Polaroid film, Fujifilm Instax Wide, 35mm film, 120 film and 4×5.

And none of them have quite been right.

Or, at least, none of them have looked quite how I wanted them to look.

I've changed the film. I've changed the format. I've changed the camera. I've tried different ways of approaching the same scene, but I'm still not quite there.

Perhaps that's the point of photography.

Perhaps we're never quite satisfied with the first attempt.

There's always another film to try, another camera, another way of seeing it. Another opportunity to make the photograph that's in your head.

And maybe that's what keeps us coming back.

To keep trying.

I just want to make photographs

I watched a YouTube video recently in which the presenter set out to give us the hard truth about the state of photography.

Apparently, digital is better than film. Not just a bit better, but better by pretty much any measurement you care to apply.

He also suggested that film technology had effectively reached a plateau by around 1990.

It got me thinking.

I'm not going to argue that my Nikon F75 loaded with FP4 Plus is technically superior to a modern digital camera. It plainly isn't. Give me a modern digital camera and a few minutes with a spreadsheet and I suspect digital will win most of the contests.

But I'm not sure that's the point.

I've always found the digital versus film argument slightly odd. You don't hear painters arguing that another artist's work is somehow inferior because they painted on wood rather than canvas.

Nobody looks at a painting and says, "That's very nice, but imagine how much better it would have been if he'd used the latest canvas technology."

Different mediums have different characteristics. That's the whole point.

And photography should be allowed the same freedom.

There's a good example within film itself.

Kodak introduced T-Max. Ilford developed the Delta Professional range. Both represented newer film technology than the traditional emulsions that had gone before them.

But nobody points at someone shooting Tri-X or HP5 Plus and laughs.

Nobody says, "You're still using that old film? T-Max exists, you know."

Because we understand that the films are different.

Tri-X has its character. HP5 Plus has its character. Delta has its character. T-Max has its character. You choose the film because of what it gives you, not simply because it happens to contain the newest technology.

So why does the argument suddenly change when we put a digital sensor into the camera?

There is another part of the "film plateaued in 1990" argument that interests me, too.

Did film actually reach the limits of what was possible?

Or did we simply stop looking?

From the 1990s onwards, enormous amounts of money were poured into developing digital imaging. Sensors, processors, storage, noise reduction, autofocus, image processing — generation after generation of engineers were given huge budgets to make digital photography better.

Film didn't get anything like that.

The market was moving away from it. The investment followed the market.

So perhaps film really had reached its technological limits.

But perhaps it hadn't.

Perhaps if the photographic industry had spent the next forty years putting the same sort of money and research into silver-halide technology, we'd have seen films that were dramatically different from those available in 1980.

Finer grain. Faster films. Better reciprocity. Greater latitude. Better colour. Who knows?

We'll never know.

And that's the important bit.

We can't point to the lack of progress in film after 1990 and conclude that film had reached the limits of what was technologically possible.

All we can say is that the incentive to find out largely disappeared.

But even that isn't really my main argument.

I'm not particularly interested in declaring a winner.

Digital is an extraordinary technology. It is more convenient, more flexible and, by almost any technical measurement, considerably more capable than the film cameras I use.

So what?

Photography isn't a competition to see which medium can produce the highest number on a specification sheet.

I shoot film because I like what film gives me.

Someone else shoots digital because they like what digital gives them.

Someone else might shoot wet plate, Polaroid or something I've never even heard of.

They're all valid.

A painter doesn't need to use the "best" medium.

Neither does a photographer.

Perhaps photography is one of the few art forms where we're expected to choose our medium by reading the specification sheet.

I'm quite happy to ignore it.

I just want to make photographs I like..