Wyatt Ryan 5/25/19 Wyatt Ryan 5/25/19

Cult Classics

These three cameras have some what of a cult following in the 35mm film community. Each one easily slips into a pocket without much fuss. Prices vary considerably between the three, but all will cost easily above $75 depending on where you purchase them.

Canon Sure Shot, Rollei 35s, and Olympus XA2.

The Canon Sure Shot is the most automated of the three cameras. The only thing you have control over (sort of), is the focus. The switch on the front allows you to “Pre-focus”, though it’s anybody’s best guess where it’s actually focusing. There is a small scale in the viewfinder showing you about where it’s focusing, but I really have no idea what the scale means in practice. Other than the pre-focusing option, all you do is point and shoot and hope that the photo turns out.

A little bit about the camera:

35mm film
38mm f/2.8 Lens
Completely automatic point & shoot (except for the pre-focus)
Decently sharp lens

The Rollei 35 S is completely manual and the most compact of the three cameras. It does have a light meter to help determine proper exposure but finding a battery for it isn’t the easiest; I’ve been guessing exposure. Shutter speed and aperture are controlled by the two front dials. Focus is of the zone-focusing style, which is basically guessing distance and hoping you get it right. This is the most well made camera of the three as well. 1960’s german engineering is something else.

A little bit about the camera:

35mm film
Completely manual
40mm f/2.8 Sonnar Lens
Most compact and extremely well built

The Olympus XA2 is a strange mix between the two other cameras. You must move the switch on the left of lens to determine where it will focus, so a much less accurate version of zone-focusing. Exposure is completely automatic. I feel most comfortable sliding this camera in a pocket since the lens is covered when closed. I’m not sure which one is quieter, this camera or the Rollei. Advancing to the next frame is the same as disposable cameras, with an edged wheel on the right side.

A little bit about the camera:

35mm film
35mm f/3.5 Zuiko Lens
Mix of manual and automatic
Easily the lightest of the three

I will write up a full review of each of the three cameras in the next month or so, going into more detail and showing pictures I’ve taken with each one. In the mean time, I’m going to hunt for a battery for the Rollei so I hopefully get some in focus shots.

Wyatt Ryan 3/24/19 Wyatt Ryan 3/24/19

Enjoying Most of the Process

There are multiple reasons I started shooting film again, but the biggest reason is that it slows me down and makes me more present in the moment. Shooting film is inherently a slow process, and since I started developing and scanning at home, it has become even slower. I’m learning to set aside an hour or two a week to develop film that has been sitting idly by for sometimes two months before I get to it.

Shooting is obviously my favorite part of the whole experience. Developing only takes about 20 minutes from start to finish, hanging to dry takes about two hours. I find the process of developing very therapeutic; I am fully engulfed in the moment, and it feels like my own form of meditation.

After the film has dried, I get to cutting it up into scannable sections to hopefully make it a little more efficient.

BUT, scanning is awful. It’s painfully slow, the software is buggy and reminiscent of early 2000’s Internet Explorer. It’s like someone designed the software back in ‘01 and failed to ever update the interface. Trying to edit within the scanning software feels like walking through the woods on an unknown trail, blindfolded. You take one step off the trail, kick a rock, trip and fall into a ditch. I’m only being slightly dramatic. Pull up the histogram to edit the blacks, mid-tones, and highlights, and what you see happening to your photo doesn’t make any sense compared to what you’re doing to the histogram. It’s incredibly inaccurate and doesn’t loan much confidence in the scanning program.

Another issue I had with scanning was the inability to leave the computer and software to run and go do something else. If you didn't keep clicking on the screen between every photo, it would stop. How incredibly efficient. After digging through a couple pages of Google results, I actually found out there is a solution to this stop-go issue I was having. I had to download another file which was separate from the main program, restart the whole software, and then it would scan continuously like it’s supposed to. I have no clue as to why they chose to keep those things separate instead of just including it in an update. But again, early 2000’s design.

Scanning does go quite a bit faster now, but it’s still the worst part of shooting film. If I have a professional lab do the scanning, I have to pay at least $20 a roll, and that adds up quickly with how much I shoot. Scanning at home is the more economic option, but my $300 scanner doesn’t quite give the quality that the professional lab’s $15,000 scanner is capable of.

If I try to push the scans too much while editing afterwards, they get some gnarly lines going up and down the frame. Everyone loves seeing lines going across the frame and spending 30+ minutes trying to edit them out right?

Unedited scan from an unnamed lab in Arizona. Notice the vertical lines across the entire image.

Any attempt to make the scanner do what it’s designed to do, and it’ll wreak havoc on the scans. I tried to apply the “Digital ICE” function to this picture to have the dust, scratches and other blobs removed from the photo. It didn’t work in the least bit, and honestly I think it made the entire scan worse than if I had kept it off like usual. These scans were a cluster from the beginning, as the lab I went to in Arizona mailed back the negatives on top of one another, which in the film world is a huge no-no. They stuck together, ready to rip off the emulsion from the negatives.

Thing is, just because there’s one awful part to shooting film, doesn’t mean I’ll stop anytime soon. The majority of the process is a blast, scanning just sucks. I leave the negatives under books for a couple days to help flatten them out anyways, and I’ve found myself doing that more often now that I’m scanning at home. Maybe one day I’ll be able to invest in a $15,000 scanner, but that ain’t happening for a long, long time. Until then, I’ll keep dealing with this crap shoot of a system.

Wyatt Ryan 3/1/19 Wyatt Ryan 3/1/19

Whether or Not to Social Media

I’ve been going back and forth with myself for months on this. Countless articles are posted on websites like Petapixel, Fstoppers, and Phoblographer every month regarding the benefits and cons of social media. The information is there, and sometimes it’s quite overwhelming. It sucks up all your creativity! It’s free advertising! Trying to garner appreciation from the masses is mentally exhausting! Think of how many people could see your work!

These things are all correct, which doesn’t make the decision any easier to make. Ask anyone who posts consistently to Instagram about why they do it, and most of them will have a different reason. Some are trying to beat Instagram’s supposed algorithm. Others are trying to keep their online audience engaged. Personally, I was trying to gain followers, so more people could see my work.

I tried a number of different things; posting every day, every other day, every three days, once or twice a week, running ads, numerous hashtags, popular hashtags, targeted hashtags, and lastly, themes. I saw few benefits or changes between these different strategies. People would follow me, and then unfollow me the next day. My followers have hovered right around 650 for the last six months. So, six months of carefully curated posts, paid advertising, finding the “right” hashtags, and nothing to show for it.

I was trying all the right things, so why wasn’t my audience growing? I don’t know, and honestly, I’ve stopped caring. The last few weeks, I’ve slowly posted less and less, not because I didn’t have content, but because there’s more important things to deal with than posting images to social media.

I’ve taken breaks from social media before, usually just a couple week stints. It’s a mental release, and a refocus for me. Trying to manage a social media page is not something I enjoy. The likes and comments are temporary ego boosts, and then lead to disappointment since they couldn’t get more.

This past Wednesday, I deleted Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat after having a really stressful week. It’s insane how much time is freed up when I’m not constantly scrolling over feeds and sending snaps back and forth. I’ve had a lot of work to catch up on since getting back from my trip, and I’ve finally had the “time” to do it. Developing and scanning film are time intensive tasks, followed by the editing, and storage of negatives and saving of the digital files. I haven’t even started editing photos, and I still have a ton of scanning to do.

Once I get them all edited, I can start adding them to my portfolio, sending certain ones off to get drum scanned, and adding those to my store to be purchased. It’ll honestly take a few weeks with my busy schedule, and it would take even longer if I was still snapping and posting away.

This social media break might not end anytime soon, so if you’d like to follow along with my work, you can always check in on my website here, or join in my mailing list (once I figure out how it even works) and emails should go out with updates to things! I’m going to try and blog a little bit more too in my new free time.

So, until next time everyone, thanks for reading if you made it all this way.

Wyatt Ryan 1/9/19 Wyatt Ryan 1/9/19

I'm a failure

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

Photography, like life, is full of failures. And like life, our growth depends on our reaction to those failures. Failed shots often get thrown to the wayside to make way for the successful shots that were taken. The thing is, if you don’t try and understand why those shots failed, you’ll never figure out how to prevent those failures from happening in the first place.

People tend to dwell on the failures in life, no matter how small. The thing that surprises me with photography, is how easy it is to ignore the failed shots and go straight for the keepers. Files are deleted, negatives thrown away, never to be looked at, or learned from.

This issue seems more common place in 35mm film where there are an abundance of exposures to pick from. When shooting medium format, you only get 15 shots max, and the failures tend to hit a lot harder. About a month and a half ago, I spent two weekends going on lots of trips. In the span of those weekends, I shot 4 rolls of slide film, which are $10-12 each. Of those four rolls, I got 4 or 5 usable shots. It hurt, a lot.

I spent the weekends in Lanesboro, the cities, and on the North Shore, and had nothing to show for it. After I was done feeling disappointed of myself, I sat back and asked what went wrong. Once I had my head on straight, I did some research, and found out just how little wiggle room you have with slide film. Half a stop overexposed and you get a shot like the one above. One whole stop and you lose any and all remnants of detail in the snow like the one below.

Overexposed Provia 100, at least I got the focus right… Whitetail Woods Regional Park

Since I had shot so much negative film (Color and B&W) I was going off of the same rules, but to a lesser degree. Come to find out, I should have been doing the exact opposite with the slide film. Negative films have a greater latitude, meaning they have objectively more room for error, and deal very well with overexposure. Slide film on the other hand, typically requires a slight underexposure to prevent any brighter areas from losing detail.

I was doing what I was taught, and in the same vein, I taught myself even more about film. One $45 photography lesson later and, underexpose slide film, meter for the highlights, don’t do that again.

Overexposed Provia 100, Whitetail Woods Regional Park

I’ve spent a lot of the past two years, learning to take my failures in stride, look at them as objectively as possible, and take away what lessons I can. This mentality has helped me grow as a person, and as a photographer.

So, here’s to screwing up everything, and hopefully learning from it. Just make sure you keep pushing on.

Wyatt Ryan 12/5/18 Wyatt Ryan 12/5/18

5 Frames With the Mamiya M645 1000s and Mamiya-Sekor C 55mm f/2.8

My dive into medium format film was hard and fast. Less than two months after I started shooting film again, and after buying a Leica M3, I found this beauty of a Mamiya M645 set up on eBay.

My dive into medium format film was hard and fast. Less than two months after I started shooting film again, and after buying a Leica M3, I found this beauty of a Mamiya M645 set up on eBay. It originally came with the 80mm f/2.8 but I wanted to go a little wider. The 55 f/2.8 offers a full frame equivalent of about 36mm. This lens has barely left the camera, and allows me to hand hold most shots at 1/60th of a second with ease.

The lens itself is small and decently light for being mostly metal and glass, where as the body weighs at least two and a half pounds with the metered prism attached. It's a honker, that's for sure. The body is solidly built, the mirror is massive and claps loudly when either of the shutters is pressed. The 1000s has a mirror up lever (highly suggested for slower speeds) and a multi-exposure opposite of the mirror up. I haven't experimented with how many exposures are possible, but I imagine it could go on endlessly if necessary. Shutter speeds range from 1/1000th of a second to 8 seconds. The multi-exposure lever could be utilized for astrophotography if need be. It's not my favorite camera to lug around, but it certainly gets used the most.

It produces 15 images when 120 film is used, 30 with 220. Each negative is 56mm by 42mm, so not quite 6x4.5. Since the shutter button located on the front of the body is rather touchy, I would highly recommend locking it after each carefully curated shot. Film in general slows you down, but medium format does so even more.

Here's to making those 15 shots count.