New Roll / Standing In The Scene (Patreon)

Hello! Here's another roll of Ektar 120 through the Fujica GW690i, but this time not expired. Here it is on Flickr, and here it is on Drive.

This roll was more work taken on my expedition to San Juan Island a month or so ago with some friends, this time with fresh Ektar 100.

I thought in this installment I would try something new: I read a lot of short-form timely news/commentary writing every week, and I thought I would share a few favorite recent reads here if anyone was curious.

"Two Days Talking To People Looking For Jobs At ICE" by Yanis Varoufuckice [pseudonym] at n+1. If you would like to understand the types of people that decide their dream job is throwing people into concentration camps, this is the piece. It's masterfully written and paints a vivid image; just don't expect to be in a good mood after reading it.

"Bringing Sexy Back" by Kate Wagner at Lux Magazine. Kate is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and this piece is an excellent example why. She deconstructs how constant surveillance has made us unable to indulge our own experiences as private entities for us and only us. She shows how the urge to label and categorize oneself often serves as a mental trap, rather than as liberation. As someone who spent years in the closet partly out of a fear I was the "wrong kind" of transsexual, this story resonated with me.

...

This most recent batch of GW690i rolls have demonstrated to me three things. One: I'm getting better at getting my metering right; early on with this camera, I struggled with trying to get high-contrast scenes shot in a way that looked half decent (or, I just completely messed up my metering entirely).

I am no longer struggling with that, at least for negatives, which have enough latitude that I can generally expose a scene within a stop of the image I have in my head (like above) and it'll come out close to it. For positives... well, I just dropped off a roll of Velvia yesterday for 36 Views, so we'll find out.

Two: I am no longer fighting the camera. The first dozen rolls through the Fujica I almost always blew at least one shot every roll because I didn't load it right, or I had the settings wrong, etc, because it's a finicky device that will absolutely punish you for carelessly taking photos. I have learned it like the back of my hand, and I haven't lost a shot due to camera unfamiliarity in a hot minute. (Unfortunately I do think it might have replaced my D750 in my brain's object-mapping regions, because last time I shot digital, I was rusty, lol.)

Look at the center of the image, just faintly visible on the horizon: that's Tahoma.

Third, and most importantly, I believe I finally understand a compelling way to view the world through the Fujica GW690i's 90mm Fujinon lens for most scenes. There are many reasons I wanted one of these cameras, including how sharp and full of contrast the lens is. What I had not considered, however, was that the 90mm length on a 6 x 9 camera "feels", essentially, like the human eye. (That length translates to roughly 40mm on a 35mm/full-frame digital camera.)

Human-eye-equivalent is a remarkably difficult length to adapt to when shooting, because it feels like it can often dull the truly spectacular parts of a scene that you might highlight at first as a photographer. It is not wide enough to give a true sense of grandeur when faced with a towering structure, but it's also not tight enough to compress a scene down to its most compelling elements. You have to invoke awe with a scene that you might as well be standing in.

The style that I appear to have developed to demonstrate this is, indeed, a foreground-heavy one that feels more anchored. I love to stack elements of a scene in distance, but the way I've been shooting with the GW690i feels like it's made me point the camera toward my feet more often. To look at what the scene feels like, not as a photographer, but a human being standing there. Because the negative is so large and the detail is so crisp, I feel like I can spend the "resolution" of the shot more on the foreground and structure of how each element is composed with one another, leading the eye out to an enormous scene in the frame that...

...really rewards a closer look at every individual element in the shot. This is of course not a be-all, end-all way to style an image, but I feel like it's becoming distinguishably mine, and I like it.

I still have some more rolls coming, and I should be getting back Pride photography in the near-ish future, which I'm excited for!

Thanks for all your support, as always!!!

Vicki <3