WRITINGS & NEWS
I was going to post my favorite photos from last year when I realized I had never gotten around to posting my favorites of 2023. I had the whole album finished and everything, just never got around to it.
These are my favorite photos I took with my actual DSLR camera in 2023. You can click on any of the photos below (in the correct square grid fashion that Instagram has sadly abandoned) to see the full-res photo. Or click here to look at the whole gallery.
There are things iPhone cameras do well and things they struggle with, but it’s always worth having a camera with you when suddenly great moments show up and you wish you could capture the magic.
As much of a time capsule as it is a photo gallery, here are my favorite shots of the year from my iPhone:
This one’s an easy list, since if you’ve scrolled through this blog at all, you know I only shot 4 rolls of film, and they were the first 4 rolls of film I’d ever shot.
I think film photography is never going to be a major hobby of mine, but I’d like to roll it out a couple of times a year and see how my skills develop.
Here they are, my favorite shots from my first time shooting on film:
My first time shooting film, I bought a couple rolls each of some of the most affordable 35mm film: Fujinon Superia X-tra 400 and Kodak Colorplus 200.
When I went to the Houston Rodeo, I thought it would be fun to shoot the carnival at night, so right as we were leaving the concert at about 9:00 that night, I loaded up the Kodak ColorPlus 200 and wandered through the grounds.
If you don’t know, one of the major things about how this film shoots has to do with that number, 200. That means it has an ISO number of 200 (ISO means “International Organization for Standardization,” which does not matter, but just in case you thought it might be a handy anagram, it is not). The number refers to its light-gathering ability - a very low number would be 100 ISO, which would be for shooting outdoors in bright daylight, a very high ISO would be 6400 ISO, which would be for trying to shoot useful images at night.
Above is a good example of the visual difference from a useful Photography Life article about the subject.
If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed that this story involves me a) shooting at night and b) using a low-ISO film, and if you’ve collected all of those pieces together you might be thinking “boy, that seems like exactly the wrong sort of film for shooting a carnival at night!” and you would be correct.
One of the first things I did with the Minolta was to bring it with me on a photo shoot I was already doing.
I didn’t know how any of the film I took would turn out, so I took some test shots at the same time I took the shots on a Canon 1.4 50mm on a Sony A7III - essentially replicating the setup with a digital camera.
And then two months later, I got a look at the results. This is a very slow way of comparing things.
