Superior Days - Waving the Magic Wand

After shooting my last film in November 2012, I'd no intention of making the transition to digital capture.

Screw learning curves, I thought. There'd been a lot of those over the years.

I was well and truly done, with decades of photographic pursuit behind me. A closed book, both literally and figuratively.

Surprisingly perhaps, at the time I was pretty well content with that. Personally transformative and creatively productive as it was, the Superior Odyssey flat wore me out.

It was only later that I thought to continue doing what I'd learned to do so well. What'd been an integral part of me, since nearly fifty years ago when Heather brought a cheap Topcon back from Europe, and I promptly stole that from her.

Which theft led me here.

Being rendered technically obsolete three times and survived, the digital learning curve didn't frighten me. And I'd learned to bend that curve to my will, not the other way around.

Damned glad today I persevered. My maternal Gogebic Range roots played their long game to my advantage, credit where credit's due.

The intense saturation of digital capture took some getting used to. It makes Kodachrome in all its translucent glory look like wispy memory rather than vivid real life.

The crazy intense digital detail wasn't entirely dissimilar to shooting large format transparency film @ f64, only with limited depth of field.

Happily, the work's gone back to being natively backlit, so there's that.

Truth is, digital capture's not at all similar to film. It's an entirely new medium for an express new age laden with new expectations. Though some of those adhere to old structures regardless, old habits die hard.

At least until the next shooter wielding singular vision and some later generation of magic wand comes along and shatters the old rules for good.

Again. And then again, to the very last.

What digital files lack in authenticity and nuance they make up for in raw, retrievable information piled incredibly high.

Memory not simply recorded, but creatively unleashed.

By the end I knew film's limitations so well that I'd probably never have even tried to capture this on it.

Yet all these years after film's death I waved my magic wand and voila, here it is:

Damned glad I wasn't truly done, back then. Or now.

Today it seems likely I'll stay a recorder of light and moment until the moment light itself plays out for me.

 

Superior Days, Back Then.

The singular advantage of photographing abandoned architecture is that it doesn't move. So I didn't often shoot landscape with the Linhof. 

But sometimes, real life becomes stone still. Occasionally, I grabbed the opportunity.

Gogebic County, 4x5 Ektachrome 100

While the Toy Canon enabled me to blog my Superior adventures in more or less real time, the Mamiya emboldened the entire gig and the rest of today's images are lifted from that batch.

A couple hundred sheets of large format film isn't a lot, and that's all there was left. Over fourteen straight months of fieldwork, I struck more than ten times that many exposures on 120mm transparency.

I was, in a word, profligate.

Much of that work was pure scenic, no decaying human construct need apply.

It'd been a long time since I'd thrown film willy-nilly through great gear. Years and years.

At the end, the finite supply of 4x5 transparencies was far too precious to risk  expanding my horizons.

But 120mm film stock was still plentiful on the market, it proved easy to carry and when not otherwise crawling around abandoned basements or other such with the Linhof, at arbitrary moments I let the Mamiya fly.

And it took the greater world in.

The Mamiya proved a remarkably dependable tool. Had I paired one with the Linhof ten years prior, it might've altered my creative trajectory.

As is, I'm just happy I became an enthusiastic medium format shooter in the nick of time.

Turned out, simply covering my ass paid unexpected dividends.

Be prepared, the Boy Scouts like to say.

Indeed.