Film, that is. I think I’ve had at least 15 rolls developed in the last 3 weeks. At $6.99 each, this photography thing is getting expensive. I’ve added a few more photos to the gallery from the two rolls I shot last week with the new lens. I really like this lens. Per the advice of the good Reverend, I had been working on shooting at fixed focal lengths and moving around more to work on composition, as opposed to just using a variable length lens to zoom in and out. With the new 50mm lens, I don’t have the luxury of zooming, which quickly breaks this bad habit and instead opens up the door to better composition because I’m thinking more about point of view, depth of field, and lighting.

   

   

The beautiful lady above is of course my wonderful girlfriend, Katie.

The trip to L.A. was great. We spent a lot of time in church with our wonderful friends out there (it’s their church), and got to spend a good bit of time hanging out with our growing family of friends in Hollywood. I shot 5 rolls while I was there, but I am pretty dissappointed with the results. Most of the shots were taken under extremely poor lighting conditions (many times stage lights of one color – yuk!), which led to underexposing the shots to minimize movement. This led to an interesting effect when the film was developed and printed—the saturation of the colors in the shots is extremely high. Had this been the effect I was looking for, I wouldn’t have a problem, but unfortunately a large number of my pictures are like this. Should have used the slow-sync speedlight more.

Also, I have decided that I am going to post not only my favorites, but some shots that were ’almost there.’ I would love to see discussion about what makes any of my shots good or bad—mainly from the point of view of color, lighting, and composition. Feel free to leave comments in the photo gallery. Doing this is a lot of fun for me, and I would really like to work through ways I can continuously improve. Before you rag on me too bad (which I don’t mind), remember that things like graininess and/or pixelation are artifaces of the scanner. In darker areas of some of the photos there are obvious scan lines. I’m currently looking for somewhere good that will develop and scan my negatives, but so far those places are a bit out of my price range for the time being.