Not long after I moved to Chicago in the mid-1980s, I saved up enough to buy a used Minolta 35mm SLR camera from a reputable shop on Broadway. I used that camera for several years, but I never bothered to learn anything about photography and never took it off program mode. I thought that a good camera would just take good pictures. Needless to say, I was never very happy with my results, and with the cost of film and printing and never liking much that came back to me, I ended up putting my camera away.
When I first started shooting with my DSLR, I had trouble getting things from how I saw them in my brain to how they came out in my finished images, but I knew that it wasn't the camera--it was my lack of knowledge. So with experience and reading and workshops and learning from others, I'm a lot better now about having an idea in my head translate to my images. But sometimes other things creep in to foil my ideas, like cold, or time, or weather, or light.
Yesterday it was snowing in the late afternoon and I took a break from work to run down the street to the riverfront park. I wasn't disappointed by the scenery. But I did have an idea for this week's self-portrait that I just couldn't make work. Too cold, snow blowing around, couldn't get the right angles with my tripod, and just a little bit of self-consciousness out on the pier.
This isn't a film shot, but I wanted to make it kind of gritty, black and white, a little brooding, reminiscent of film. And I'm trying film again, but this time reading up on how to use it so that I can get the most out of my experiments with my old Minolta.
So, this isn't the shot I planned but that's sometimes the way this goes. It's all an adventure and an exploration, and I'm all in.
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