For the love of square: it's #squaretember!

in
 
 

I love shooting square, so of course I had to talk about this new initiative by @andrewmcclees to promote the square format.

During this month of September, @squaretember will be featuring some of the images shared with the hashtag #squaretember.

The only requirement: the photographs have to be shot natively in square format, no cropping.

Go ahead and share your square images!

Fun photography ideas for the summer

in

I'm a winter person, I don't like much about the summer. The heat, the crowds, the hars light... none of them.

It's usually a bad time for me to go out and make images, so I spend most of the summer inside writing, editing and reading.

This year, I came up with 6 different photography ideas to try. From a homemade pinhole lens to use oil from a can of tuna to emulate the Holga look:

#1 Photographing the clouds
#2 Homemade pinhole lens
#3 Fireworks
#4 Night photography in a forest
#5 The Holga Look
#6 Infrared

It was fun and I learned a lot from every one of these projects. I hope at least one of them inspires you to try something different!

The dangers of night photography

in

The full moon is here. Last night was going to be my best chance to make a photograph of a moonlit landscape -clouds are coming for the rest of the week.

I wanted to make a long exposure of the full moon above a nearby canyon. I thought it'd be a cool image.

This place is not remote. Still, the closest town is a few kilometers away. I drove there and parked the car in the empty parking lot around 11pm. There's a viewpoint where I was planning to make this image from.

The moon was still rising above the walls of the canyon, so it was pretty dark outside. I grabbed my phone and turned on the flashlight, and opened the door.

As soon as I stepped out of the car, I heard it. It was a shot. I didn't know if it was a gun, or a shotgun, or something else. I didn't know in what direction. But it was close.

In retrospective, and having talked to some people, I believe it was a device used by locals to scare the wild boars from the vineyards that populate the landscape of the area. I'd never heard it before, but they say it sounds like a gun.

At that time, being alone in the dark in a place where I thought there was no one, it didn't feel that way.

I got out of there as fast as I could.

Probably a place I won't be visiting at night again.

My dream camera

in

Have you ever thought about what your dream camera would look like?

Mine would look something like this.

I want a mini Bronica SQ. Smaller and lighter, using a new type of film for 5x5 frames, 16 exposures per roll.

The viewfinder would stay the same, a little smaller due to the overall size reduction. You'd be able to switch to a fully electronic viewfinder (very much like the Fuji X100 series) with a live preview of the exposure and the film you have loaded in the back. This preview can simulate pushing and pulling as well.

If you run out of batteries, it should still work using the optical viewfinder.

I'd like to have just one lens, a zoom lens with a range of 20-300mm. f/4 would be more than enough.

When taking a long exposure, it should be able to show you the image as it's being "built". Of course, simulating the effect film will have on it. This way, you could stop it once it looks good and not before or after.

This would be the perfect camera for a hybrid shooter.

What would yours look like?