There's a new photography blog at the Times,
called Lens. There are only
a few posts so far, so there's no judging it on content at this
stage of the game, but it gets high marks for presentation. The
navigation is really beautifully done, and there's a full-screen
mode and blah blah blah. Go play with it and see.
But what caught my interest was
the short essay from Fred Conrad, whose beautiful photo is
above, about what it means to shoot on large-format film in the
digital age. I love everything he has to say about it, and this will
sound silly but it ties in with my admiration for the ToyCamera app.
I've linked before,
elsewhere and surreptitiously, to
this interview with the creator
of the app. If you haven't seen it, it's worth reading. I'm
one of those people who really mourn the death of Polaroid "instant"
film. I was a devotee (particularly of the horizontal version that was
resuscitated, for a time, for use in the JoyCam). The best thing about
Polaroid film was that it
wasn't instant — you had to wait
for it. You took your shot, you waited to see what you got, and then
maybe you shot again. But you were never frivolous about shooting when
you were using Polaroid film. You thought about what you were doing
and made every shot count, because you were always aware of the small
number of shots per package of film, and the relatively high cost of
each.
Until I read that interview with the ToyCamera creator, I
hadn't really thought about how the functionality of it was fueling my
attachment. ToyCamera re-crops your shot, asks for your approval, then
(somewhat) randomly applies a filter from its bag of tricks. You wait
while it processes and only then do you see what you got and ask
yourself if you want to shoot another. It's a completely different
experience from the woefully uneventful act of shooting with a digital
camera.
I don't wave my iPhone around while I'm waiting for the image
to appear, like we all did with Polaroids, but I am often tempted to
stick it in my pocket while it does its thing.
