Cheap point and shoots and daily life

March 25, 2025

How did we get here?

I had a gift card to B&H Photo that I’ve been hanging on to since Christmas, not really sure what to spend it on. But a conversation I had had with a friend about technical proficiency and the role of cheap plastic cameras in pushing creative limits got me thinking. When you think of plastic cameras that obvious choice that comes to mind is the legendary Holga 120. I’ve used one of these before in the past and enjoyed the experience. My problem now is that I don’t have a flatbed scanner anymore or a way to DSLR scan 120 film. So a 120 plastic camera was out.

But then I got to thinking about a 35mm plastic camera. At first I looked for the Holga 135 and other variants of that camera, and they seemed pretty cool but also maybe slightly less refined than what I was going for. I then stumbled on the world of what are basically reusable “disposable” cameras. Things like the Dubblefilm SHOW, various models from Kodak, etc etc.. It was in exploring this realm that I found the Kodak H35N. The little H35N checked a lot of boxes. It shot 35mm, it was plasticky enough that I wouldn’t take it too seriously, it had a fixed shutter speed and aperture, and it was half frame which meant I got twice as many frames per roll of film.

So I ordered one, along with 10 rolls of the cheapest 400 speed film I could get from B&H, Arista 400. Arista/Fomapan is a super budget film. It’s not particularly refined and the absence an anti-halation layer make it kinda glowy sometimes, but I’ve made some good stuff with it before.

What’s this all about?

My intention for this setup was to have a relatively small, cheap, easy to use camera that I could carry with me through daily life. I wanted something that I wouldn’t think too much about or take too seriously, that would encourage me to just shoot freely as things struck me as worth making pictures of in my daily intercourse with life. I haven’t finished a roll in the time I’ve had it so far, I think I’m about 50 frames in. But I’ve been enjoying the shooting experience quite a bit. I see something, I point the camera and shoot it. If it’s dark there is a built in flash I can use for some added light, and that’s all there is to it.

I’m hoping that the setup encourages me to be a bit more experimental in my shooting, the lack of seriousness and the prodigious amount of frames on tap allowing me to let loose and just shoot whatever I feel moved to shoot. The other thing that I’m looking forward to from this is the image review, especially since I don’t plan on immediately developing each roll as it’s finished. So it will be interesting to look for patterns, themes, subject matter that might coalesce out of this body of work. That’s the hope at least!

There are some technical limitations, which is kind of the point. But to make things work I’m planning on shooting a 400 speed film and stand developing in Rodinal. A 400 speed film should cover most of my lighting needs and for situations when the 400 speed film is working out of its element the stand dev should help save what we can from the negatives. Rodinal on half frame might end up being pretty, uh, crunchy, but we’ll see how things shake out. The glowy aspect of Arista might also be interesting when shot on half frame, so, once again we’ll just have to take the FAFO approach.

I’ll keep you all posted!

"Glory to the Soviets," or, Shooting the Industar on the Leica M (again)

March 20, 2025

Every once in a while I like to throw my old Soviet Industar-22 on the front of my Leica M262. It’s kind of a ridiculous pairing on the surface of things. Why would you throw a $50 lens on the front of an M body? Let’s throw an objectively mediocre lens on the front of that nice 24MP M sensor (insert thumbs up). Right? I mean, kind of. But also not really.

I’ve talked about these simple old lens designs before and the long and short of it is that I just love the way they render scenes. There’s a kind of liveliness to them that feels very close to the way we visually experience the world around us. I like my Zeiss Planar that I use as my go-to 50mm, don’t get me wrong. It’s a scalpel of a lens and as a tool that I can trust to just give me a straightforward, objective rendering of the world in front of me. It hardly ever flares, it’s sharp as hell across the frame, has little to no distortion. But this rendering can also feel a little lifeless. These old imperfect, simple lenses seem to have a certain vitality in the way they render. I think the more standard term for this is “character” but I find that term comes up a little short.

I first had this experience with an old Leica Elmar that came on a Leica IIIa. The venerable 50/3.5. A slow 50mm with a simple optical formula that always had a way of rendering with this beautiful organic sharpness, soft contrast, a pleasing way of failing when it did flare, etc etc. All this came together in a rendering that has always stuck with me as a kind of benchmark for how elegantly simple and beautiful a lens can be. One of these days I might need to find another Elmar, either the old 3.5 version or the slightly faster 2.8 version.

The Industar-22 is not as good as the Leica (shocking, I know). It’s got some field curvature, and maybe some decentering, it needs to be stopped down to about f8 before you approximate the sharpness of the Elmar, and it flares in a chaotic frame-ruining style when the sun is just in the right spot. But it is similar in many ways. It is a slightly different but still very simple optical formula that lends itself to that characteristically organic rendering when you can work around some of its flaws, and the results are enough to keep me coming back to this weird combo.

Someone made the comment the other day that they were more and more convinced that the camera is just an accessory to the lens and I think this weird combo goes to prove the point. Photos made with either the Zeiss Planar or the little Industar are both made with the M262, but they’re worlds apart in their “seeing,” so to speak. Each lens delivers a unique take on the world as it translates the scene in front of it in its own unique way. What really makes each particular image is the unique combination of an individual’s seeing and a lenses way of rendering the world in front of us. And when those two factors work synergistically there’s magic.

So, that’s why I put a “shitty” Soviet lens on my Leica

Below is a little sampling of additional photos made on a recent walk with this combination

279 Acres, or, On a Photobook

March 15, 2025

I’ve been making pictures for a while at this point. More specifically I’d say I’ve been taking it seriously for about 10 years or so. In that time I’ve made thousands of photographs. What I have never done, however, is assemble those images in to a larger coherent, concrete project. For much of that time most of my output has been individual images posted on social media or maybe sporadically assembled in to loose categories on a website. In part this has maybe been a byproduct of my more singular (or, parochial) focus on landscape photography until very recently. It’s hard to put imagery into different projects on different themes when you're only working around one central theme.

But even working solely around one theme it has bothered me over the years that I have never translated this output in to something more concrete. I historically barely even print my work. And something that I have been leaning in to more in the last year or so of coming back to photography is making more concrete things and more coherent bodies of images, images that work with a theme or express something greater than any single image is capable of expressing—books, in other words. I want to create more books, larger scale projects in the ways that only photobooks seem (to me) capable of doing. Hat tip to John Gossage for this perspective, really.

The project “279 Acres” is my first stab at doing this. Over the years and the innumerable walks I have collected a body of imagery all shot in a small local park near my home in Kalispell, Montana. The park, as you may have gathered from the title, covers 279 acres of land and contains around 7 miles of trails that meander through the beautiful forested slopes and cliffs that jut up from the Flathead valley.

The project is maybe a riff on a quip from the venerable Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau makes the comment at one point that a circle of ten mile’s radius in the natural world contains enough variety for a lifetime of close observation. As he puts it, “There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.”

A 20 mile diameter circle of untrammeled nature feels like a luxury to most of us. I am fortunate to live in Montana where I can still find such a circle if I wanted to. But because of that luxury of wild spaces I also wanted to push the limits of the premise, to narrow the focus and see what we might be able to do with 279 acres (or maybe even less in the future). In that sense the project is also about small spaces, about the little pockets of natural beauty that commonly exist right in the midst of our lives and about the Thoreauvian push to stop and look closely at the inexhaustible depth of things around us, even in the smallest pockets of it.

But it is also about something beyond that, about the eternal value that these places are capable of presenting to us if we are willing to spend time with them, to contemplate them, and the avenues of meaning which they may (hopefully) open up for us.

I am currently in the process of curating the imagery, settling on a solid collection of imagery (I’m shooting for around 50-75 photos for the book), and then working on sequencing before I send the finished product out for printing. I will keep people in the loop if anyone is interested in the final product.