On Home and Biscuits and Gravy

What makes a home?

I woke up this morning at 7:30 to a text message from my grandfather that simply read, “Biscuits and gravy at 8:45” So, with an offer like that on the table I responded with, “Count me in” and proceeded to get ready to head over to their house to participate in some delicious breakfast. I decided to grab the 5D on the way out the door to show them and to take some photos around the exterior of the house before breakfast. I did not photograph the exterior of the house at all, really. But I did take some time after eating breakfast to walk around the inside of the house with the camera.

Canon 5D Mk1 + Canon 50/1.8

This house has always been an important place to me. Growing up I would often spend summers here with my grandparents and in many ways it was a place that always felt more like home than my own home back in Washington. It took me a long time to realize that what I loved and what felt so special about this place was the unconditional love of my grandparents but that’s a whole other story. We can do the psychoanalysis in another post. But whatever the mechanism, this place has always felt deeply special to me. It’s changed a lot over the years but it felt nice to go around and photograph places within the house that have some deep emotional resonance. It’s maybe one of those Ship of Theseus problems, in a way. The house has changed, parts of it are no longer what they used to be, but at some level it’s still the same, still somehow tied to deep core memories, and it was nice to try and get a piece of that in photographs.

Another Canon 5D

Wherein I ramble about color and an old 5D Mk 1

Canon 5D Mk1 + Canon 50/1.8

So, I’ve been sitting on an eBay gift card that I got for my birthday for the last couple months or so. At first I was leaning toward putting the money toward another M mount lens, but, in light of some recent epiphanies about focal lengths and how it generally doesn’t matter at all what you put on the front of your camera, the idea of buying other lenses just feels like a waste of time. If anything I’ve been selling them off. So lenses are out. Then I thought about the old Canon 5D I had way back in the day. I picked one up during the internet craze when everyone was talking about how magical and “film-like” the colors were. I don’t actually remember why I got rid of it, but, regardless, I was able to scoop one up for around $160.

I still have the Canon 6D which was initially purchased to scratch the occasional itch to shoot an SLR but Jess has long since adopted that camera as her own for when we go out on walks with cameras, so, picking up another 5D felt like a good use of the gift card. I also did always like the colors that came out of that camera. In that regard the hype was actually pretty spot on. Also, having transitioned to shooting a lot more color now, I was much more interested in the color capabilities than I was when I owned it in the past.

And I will say that working with the files for color work is amazing. The camera just seems to output really beautiful colors with very little post-production work necessary. I just apply a camera-matching profile and make basic tweaks to exposure, color temps, highlights and shadows, etc etc.. All that basic panel stuff, and that’s about it. Working on these files compared to working on the modern Canon files or even the Leica files is a walk in the park. It feels like it takes a lot of fiddling with both the modern Canon and Leica files to get the colors right. The Leica files are easier but neither are as good as the old 5D “classic” files.

All in all, so far pretty stoked to have this little camera back in the lineup