The question that's been bugging me is whether this camera can make a beautiful picture. Hold on, let me clarify: the question is, whether, in my hands, the camera is able to render a scene with the clarity and nuance that I desire. I've made pictures that are clear, that tell a story and a few that have a gurgling sort of drowning-man beauty, like, the blurry monochrome that a man drowning in daylight might see just before he looses consciousness.
This evening I made a hundred and ten dollar investment in Kodak 160 ISO Portra 4x5 film. NC for Natural Color. If you count the developing costs, I will, it's another hundred dollars. That's 210 dollars towards fifty pictures. At four dollars a shot, you bet I'm careful. But, and here's the thing, I have trust in the medium. I know that, if my exposure is on, and I've spent at least some time under the dark-cloth, I will have twenty square inches of a projection of the world, preserved onto acetate. With a little work in Photoshop, or the darkroom, I should find beauty there.
The digital camera, I do not yet trust. It's sensor is smaller than a postage stamp, and the lens is little larger than a contact. I am still nervous about approaching the world with this little box. So a couple hours ago, when a slash of orange light fell onto our ever cluttered table, and the floor around the table glowed with late summer evening blue, I grabbed my little Canon out of my back pack and, trusting it's image stabilization, held my elbows at my side and snapped away. This was the result:
