Did you know that camera flash produces enough heat in a single discharge to leave burn marks on your couch? I found that out last night while testing my wireless triggers with my new Canon 580 EX II. My wife is not happy with me right now:)

I recently finished restoring a half-a-century old Kodak Tourist camera that I bought on eBay for $10 bucks.  The bellows needed a bit of work and the shutter had to be cleaned, but after a few days of work I got everything working.  Unfortunately, I did not realize that Kodak Tourist cameras take 620 film which is no longer manufactured.  Fortunately, a local camera repair shop had a couple of 620 spindles.  I found a tutorial online on winding 120 medium format film onto 620 spindles and after about 10 minutes with a film bag I loaded my new old toy with a fresh roll of Kodak Tri-X. 

Unfortunately I don`t have a film scanner, so I had to scan the negatives on a regular flatbed.  The negatives look beautiful and the scans don`t do them justice.

A few days ago I finished restoring a Canon Canonet QL17 GIII Rangefinder that I bought at a flea market for $10.  The easy part was replacing all the light seals that turned to black goo with age.  The hard part was fixing a stuck leaf shutter.  I had to take two precision screwdrivers, a pen and a bit of duck tape to make a spanner wrench needed to take the lens apart.  In the end, it took me a little over a week to put everything back together.  Even though I took photos of every step as I was taking the camera apart, I still kept ending up with a few extra parts.  Finally, I think on the fourth try, I got everything looking and working exactly the way it was supposed to and took the camera out for a spin.

The lab kind of screwed up and printed the roll instead of scanning it; I had to scan the paper prints, so the quality is not that great.

I would like to start this article with a disclaimer.  I love digital photography and as a professional wedding photographer find digital workflow much much much better for my business than film workflow ever was or ever will be.  However, even though 99.9% of my work is done with digital cameras, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, I still love working with film for my personal projects.  Please do not misconstrue this article as an invitation to start yet another film vs. digital argument or as an advice to hawk your digital equipment on eBay and start stocking up on film.  This article is simply my opinion – nothing more, nothing less.  If I come off as a snob, I apologize.

In the last 5 years digital cameras became both affordable and ubiquitous.  Even 90-year-old grandmothers I see at weddings are sporting sleek and shiny Canon and Sony point-and-shoot digicams.  Advances in digital photography gave even the laziest of us the ability to produce acceptable snapshots.  The downside of this trend is that there are fewer and fewer people who actually have any desire to learn photography.  At every wedding I have photographed in the past few years I see at least 3 or 4 guests brandishing entry-level Nikons and Canons, crouching down in church isles and unexpectedly popping up in my viewfinder at the most critical moments.  For the most part, they think of themselves as serious photographers sneer at the other guests who are not as well-photographically equipped.  These newly-minted photographers who think that aperture is a type of operetta (I kid you not) never bother learning even the basics of photography and their cameras are perpetually stuck in the “Auto” mode. 

Once in a while, on very rare occasions, I would see among the guests an old man who refuses to part with his venerable Pentax Spotmatic, or a young kid who found a beat-up Nikkormat in his grandfather`s attic.  They diligently check the aperture and shutter speed settings after every shot, they spend 30 seconds meticulously focusing their lenses and lining up their subjects in the viewfinder.  They are dinosaurs in this digital age and other guests point at them and snicker.  I, on the other hand, want to come up to them and shake their hands.

In the days clunky metal camera bodies and lenses that were able to stop a bullet you had to earn the right to use your camera.  If you decided to spend money on an SLR, you had better learned the intricacies of exposure and the tricks of pre-focusing your camera.  You might not have become the world’s best photographer, but at least you had to learn something.

Modern cameras take learning out of the equation.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you are a busy mom wanting to take snapshots of your toddler.  However, this trend is finding its way into places where high-quality photography has always been an absolute must.  I see newspapers and news sites that publish cell phone-quality photographs and I just want to cry.  10 years ago a photographer would be tarred and feathered for even submitting such a crappy photograph to illustrate a story. Today, for the sake of saving money, a blurry cell phone photograph has become an acceptable alternative.

I love digital photography.  In the olden days, I charged my clients separately for film and processing and I always had to be very careful how much I shoot.  Now, I can walk away from a wedding with over 2000 shots and not worry about the cost – only the shots that make the cut will actually be printed.

The one downside of digital photography, at least for me, is that it made me lazy and sloppy.  With film I had to be super careful about exposure – I used external light meters for formal shots, I bracketed like crazy, I had to be certain to get at least one photograph where everyone has their eyes open.  With a digital SLR, I can shoot in RAW format and as long as I don’t blow out my highlights, I can be off the mark by as much as 2 stops and still recover a decent (if grainy) image. 

I miss film.  I love film.  I have over 500 rolls of 35mm film stocked in my refrigerator.  I have about 20 film cameras lying around the house, at least 10 of them in working condition.  I miss my Hasselblad and kick myself for selling it a few years ago.  I miss my Nikon F3 – the first high-end camera I bought after I immigrated to the United States.  In 1996, I paid $1300.00 for this beautiful machine, and it served me well for 6 years, before dying a horrible death in a rock climbing accident. 

Whenever I feel burned out, whenever 60 hours a week in front of a computer and two back-to-back weddings leech all the creativity out of me, I put away my laptop and my digital SLRs, grab one of my 20-year-old Zenits, Pentaxes, or Nikons and go for a walk around the city. 

Nothing seems to clear my mind like the feel of clunky metal camera body in my hand, the click of the shutter and the sound of the winding mechanism pulling on film’s sprocket holes.

I keep hearing news about Kodak, Fuji, Agfa and other film manufacturers discontinuing certain types of film.  I understand that film is no longer commercially viable and that in a few years only artists will be using it.  I also realize that in a few years whatever film is still manufactured will be prohibitively expensive.  That is why everyone who reads this article should send me a roll of film.

I was walking from work a few days ago when I saw a bunch of people dancing down Forbes Avenue in Oakland, singing the Hare Krishna mantra.

Dmitry, you are a disgrace to the wedding photography community. I hope you rot in hell. Your prices are a joke and as a real pro wedding photographer I know you are not making any money from what you are doing and you are just trying to fuck up the market for the rest of us. Get the fuck off the wedding business and go get a job you can handle. Your images all blow ass.

I have two great obsessions in life - books and cameras. When I was doing my taxes for last year and adding up all the receipts, I realized that in 2006 I spent about $400 on books and close to $9000 (that`s nine thousand) on camera equipment, printing and processing. The cost of camera equipment did not surprise me much - cameras and especially good lenses come with pretty hefty price tags. What did surprise me is the amount I spent on books.

Considering that I mostly buy used books that cost, on average, between 2 and 5 dollars, $400 is a lot of money.

However, I am getting off the subject. One of the things I love about photography is going to yard sales and thrift stores and finding old junky cameras, fixing them and actually using them to take pictures. When I went to Belarus and Ukraine in May of 2006 I ended up buying 8 old Soviet-made cameras - different models of Zenit and FED. Since normally I`m pretty busy, I`ve only gotten around to fixing some of them. The following photographs were taken with a 30-year-old FED 5. I replaced the light seal around the film door, but I guess I need to do some more work around the lens. On the bright side, the light leak did produce some rather cool effects.