thegistofit /

I love shooting under low light conditions. The main lens purchase that I’ve made recently was an EF 28mm f/1.8 prime lens, primarily for shooting under low ambient light conditions. But this lens is currently the lens that I use for more than 90% of my shooting.

Although a lot of people would consider shooting with a 28mm prime lens to be pretty limiting, I’m using it as an exercise in learning how to let go and just get the shot. Before getting this lens, I used to spend time zooming the lens back and forth, trying to compose the image in the camera frame before hitting the shutter. I don’t know how many spur of the moment shots I probably missed by fiddling with the zoom, instead of just taking the damn picture.

This is a roundabout way of saying that although I originally bought this lens for it’s low light performance, when it sits on your camera and rarely gets switched off, I inevitably use it under any and all conditions. And even though I love shooting under low ambient light conditions, I also tend to love the dramatic images possible from breaking the rules and occasionally pointing the camera towards the sun. Since I’m very attached to the idea of keeping my retinas intact and functioning, my strategy usually involves pointing the camera in the general direction that I want, glancing through the viewfinder with my eye a couple of inches away, and then looking away while I fire off a couple of frames.

Rules are made to be broken, and sometimes I get lucky.

For a number of reasons I’ve been in a bit of a creative funk for the last couple of months. One way that I’ve used to break out of that stale place was to dig out an old 35mm film camera that I’ve had stashed in a box for years. It was originally a hand-me-down from one of my brothers, back in the day. The Asahi Pentax SP1000 was originally introduced in 1974. The copy that I have uses a Takumar 1:2/55mm lens. Fortunately it hadn’t been stored with the battery in it, so there wasn’t any corrosion in the battery compartment from a leaking battery. It took a couple of trips to different shops to find a suitable replacement battery, since the original batteries used in the Spotmatics contained mercury and are no longer sold. If I’d done a bit of on-line researching beforehand, I would have found that alternatives are available and it might have saved me some gas.

So after putting the battery in and confirming that the needle on the light meter seemed to respond to light, I loaded up some Ilford FP4 film and went out for a walk around the canal in downtown. It felt odd at first to walk around, taking pictures, without pausing after each one to chimp the shot. After a while though I just gave in to the almost zen-like simplicity of it.

Growing up I never got the hang of photography, because there wasn’t the feedback loop of being able to look at the exif data for each photo to learn what worked and what didn’t. Too much time and too many rolls of film with only one photo out of the entire roll that looked any good, and no idea at all of why that one turned out. Of course I never had the self-discipline to take notes on every single photo I took. It’s taken a solid year of taking pictures with a digital SLR to give me enough knowledge of shutter speed, f/stops, photo composition, for me to have the skills to take an old-school 35mm SLR out for a spin and take photos that I’m satisfied with.

No chimping allowed, and I got several shots out of a roll of 36 that I’m happy with.