Recently I acquired for myself a half frame 35mm camera. I picked it up at a thrift store for 99 cents no less… go me!! In the past I have always avoided half frame cameras because I figured a negative half the size of a typical 35mm frame was pretty pointless. After all, I already find 35mm to be really small and I’ve long been vocal about my preference for medium format film.
Surprisingly however I’ve grown to love it in a very short amount of time. It is really amazing to be able to take up to 72 frames on a single roll of film which is incredibly economical while still getting the authenticity of working with real film. Street photography has always been a hit or miss proposition at best for me and having more opportunities to capture a “good” image (whatever that means) is never a bad thing.
More importantly however, as a technical and visual exercise I’m finding the camera to be quite rewarding. There is something about working with a half frame camera that is forcing me to pair my images and look for scenes on the street that correspond with each other. In other words, working in sequence, which is something I’ve never felt compelled to do. Finding small visual relationships between two images is really fun and I think works well toward telling a story within the medium of photography.
I don’t know how much of this I’ll be posting to Tumblr and my other various social media sites because I feel like the work is mostly for me and doesn’t necessarily need to be shared. More than likely I’ll be putting these out there every so often though.