I own a great many cameras. In fact, I have only ever sold some F2 cameras that I had purchased to do a CLA and sell to friends (the CLA was free) never making a single dollar on the sale. I love photography and cameras are the essential tool to practice my hobby. Yesterday I took the wife and our youngest to the beach, not really planning on staying too long, just a simple walk along the beach and let the little guy play in the sand and jump in the water. 

I decided to take a camera that I had not used in a very long time. That is to say, I dusted it off, I had replaced batteries, test fired and put back on the shelf for the past few years. Time to have a little fun and shoot another roll through the film. I checked and the latest battery was put in around January of this year so it should be good to go.

The camera selected was a Nikkormat EL. A beast of a camera that represents Nikon's first tentative steps beyond mechanical shutters. After a few hours of shooting, a single roll put through it, I decided to do a little write up on it for my site. You can find it HERE. While writing about the camera I began thinking what makes for a good film camera?

The answer we keep hearing is "the camera you have with you"...ok that makes my cell phone a good camera...which it is but is it really what I am looking for in a camera? No, so there must be more to it.

What is a camera?
A black box that holds the film the right distance away from the lens to ensure that the image is properly captured on the film. It may have, not always, a shutter that helps you control the exposure through the speed that a traveling curtain moves. It may have a viewfinder to show you or give you an approximation of what you will capture.

That is it. The rest is usually done by the lens. So a black box that might have a curtain...simple. Anything more is luxury. If you don't believe me, grab yourself a box camera, load it up with film and take it out using the sunny 16 rule for exposure (it is something special to capture an image with something made in 1902...believe me). You are now completely simplified. This set up is little more than a pinhole camera and it removes all the bells and whistles for you to just focus on your subject and composition.

What is a good camera?
So what makes for a good "black box"? Here I have shot complex cameras such as the Nikon F6, still one of my favorite cameras down to the simplified box camera experience I described above. I believe a good camera boils down to one question...What do you want to accomplish?

If you are experienced and are looking for a camera that allows you to move around on a walking tour of a new city to capture some nice shots along the way...then you are after something that will do allot of the thinking for you...a point and shoot up to a Nikon F6. If you want to really focus on your photography, want complete control and to live in the moment of the capture of the image...then you want a no frills black box.

But frankly an experienced shooter knows the rig they want for their occasion. The ones that need help are those entering into photography. For that I say buy less camera and more film. A camera like the Nikkormat EL is perfect. You can buy one for under USD 100, modern batteries work on it, it has a light meter and it can use a wide variety of Nikon F mount lenses. Spend the USD 200 you are saving to buy 20 rolls of film. Now go out and shoot.

I hate to photograph people on the street. I understand people who get ashamed, scared or like me, just don't want to bother anyone. Why would I risk ruining someone's privacy just so I could practice my hobby? Well here is the problem with that approach...photography is about people.

I can take wonderful photographs of a vase, sitting in a perfect beam of light and allowing the shadows to tell a wonderful story. I can print that to perfection in the darkroom, dodging, burning until the message is clear as a bell. But the photographs that keep pulling me into them are the ones of people. 

People doing what people do, riding bikes, waiting for friends, playing or even sitting on their phones looking at instagram. But at the end of the day, it is about people.  I keep forgetting, I keep hoping that the photograph I took of that empty doorway is better without people...that I should wait for people to clear the area for me to photograph it. But what really drew my attention was the people in the doorway. 

It is about people, stupid. 

I came across this thought exercise in "Overcoming Imposter Syndrome in Wedding photography with Trevor Dayley" in the Beginner Photography Podcast. Here Trevor Dayley speaks to an article he wrote where he explores the delicacy of the photographer's confidence versus the need of a great deal of confidence to take a photograph.

While listening I began to realize the amount of ourselves we put into a photograph and in showing this to strangers, does indeed require a great deal of confidence because it is such a part of us. We all take pictures that we do not like, just as we admit that there are facets of us that we do not like. We wish we could be different, we wish we could take different photographs. 

So much of modern photography is predicated on the search for our voice, our style, our unique mark in an ocean of wonderful photography. It is very similar to our own search for identity in the social media obsessed world...and why should we not be obsessed, is not social media a window into the world beyond our front door? 

Why does any of this matter you might ask? Because if we put a piece of ourselves in the photographs we take, is photography not the search of who we are? As we dig into technical information, the physics of lenses and light, are we not looking for better ways to tell the world about us? When we capture that amazing image, not by luck but through careful planning, so we not feel a great deal of pride?  Pride in what?  In the physics that bent the light into our sensor? Or because we feel that the image can transmit what we are trying to say about ourselves?  

Look at the opposite scenario...imagine that you go the New York City, and while on the plane you start looking through social media to get ideas on places to go shoot.  You start to see a reoccurring image that is absolutely wonderful so you mark it on the map, you note it in your notebook and schedule a morning to go out and photograph it yourself. 

You wake up early on the day, happy to see it is a clear and beautiful morning.  You walk out of the sleepy hotel lobby, and start the walk to the Brooklyn Bridge.  As you cross the bridge you take pictures of the bridge and the early morning joggers crossing it with you.  You keep walking and finally get to DUMBO where you can see the Manhattan Bridge and the iconic shot of the Empire State Building through its base.

If you had stumbled across the site, and seen the photograph, taken the photo you would see your imagination come through. But that is not what happened. You took a photo through another persons eyes. You may as well ask AI to create the image for you and sleep in.

So what drove you to take that picture? It is safe, it requires no courage as it says nothing about you.  All the photograph says is that you have the technical skills to take the same picture so many others have done before you. Nice, safe, pretty and empty.

We photographers have a choice to make. We can decide the photography is a transactional art, where we create what people want to see, or photography is an introspective art, revealing things about us as well as the subject and place we photograph. Once we understand that what we aim for is indeed introspective, then we start to ask a whole different set of questions.

Instead of mimicking the photographs we see we begin to ask ourselves what do we want to capture? What image can help tell the story we want to tell? With our current technical skill set, what can we produce that would communicate? 

"If your photographs aren't good enough, you are not close enough." The famous line by Robert Capa takes on a different meaning if we are creating introspective art. "Shoot what you know." starts to make more sense. All of a sudden photography starts to be about us, our mood and what we are wanting to say. When we trip across the image that speaks to us, is it not telling us something that we relate to? Do we not feel that kinship with the photographers and is this not our ultimate goal when we press the shutter?  

Take your Eiffel Tower photo, shoot the iconic shots because sometimes they can be fun but in the end, these will not make your favorite list. That quick snapshot you took with that old camera of the scene that just cried out to you...that one...the one that speaks of tradition, motion and a bygone area that you never really knew but always felt a part of...that image...

A new page on my website under Darkroom Lessons is my experience with the AGO Film Processor.  You can find it at the link HERE.