The 120 Experience

Growing up as an amateur photographer, all I could afford to shoot was 35mm. I loved to shoot it and put hundreds of rolls of film through my Canon AE1 and FTb; but always wanted to try my hand at Medium format. I mean, what photographer doesn't dream of going to a bigger format?? Well, needless to say Digital came along and I feared that my days of an Analog format were done.

There is still something nostalgic and somewhat romantic about using film, with no indication of how the shot will look untill you see the negative and print. Also the knowledge that there is a limit to the number of shots that you will take because the roll will end, instead of battery failure or your card fills up.

So, staying true to myself, I decided to take the plunge... My dad, who is an amateur photographer and the genesis of my love for photography and many other things for that matter, had an Agfa Isolette 1 camera that he had picked up somewhere that he gave to me to play with.
I was instantly in love with the fact that I was going to actually be shooting Medium format. Like any true adventurer, I needed a travel companion down this journey of the unknown. So I found another Isolette for sale cheap online and convinced my uncle to buy it and we would do this together!! We had already planned a backpacking trip, so he found a local place that you can actually still buy 120 roll fill by the roll, and away we went.

We did have some challenges though... Neither one of the Isolette's lenses would focus, so we used f22 which is where the lens will focus from about 2 feet to infinity. Doing this caused us to use some pretty ridiculous manually held exposure times, but all in all it was a lot of fun to experiment with.

This 120 experience was amazing, to say the least; and difficult to hold back to find shots worthy of the only 12 exposures that I had to send through my untested rig... Here are a few of the shots:

JCY

Revisiting Old Playgrounds

I've been feeling nostalgic lately... I have lived in the same city my whole life, and have gone to our downtown area a lot to shoot old buildings and events. I recently went and forgot to grab my camera on the way out. I started to see all of these things in different ways that I hadn't noticed before; different angles from new perspectives.
I immediately hated the fact that I was there with out my camera. But what I realized, was that when I go downtown to shoot, I go looking for the shots... I don't just let the shots come to me. I don't absorb my environment and enjoy the sites like it's the first time.
So I grabbed my iPhone and took the shots I came upon. In hopes of that when I get to go down to shoot again, I'll be able to capture what I've always seen, but never visualized

JCY

A New Endeavour

Well this will probably be another lack luster attempt at a blog, but here it is. I built the website Still Living for a project in my Masters classes and have hopes to actually own the site in the near future (right now it is hosted by MU - until I am no longer enrolled, I think). Not sure what this will eventually be, but here it is.

JCY