My wife and I packed our bags for an overnight stay at the Pollywogg Hollër, a B&B in New York State. My love/hate relationship continues with the Mamiya C330, with it's bulky size and its need for a tripod, but the beauty of the film size and the simple meditation of working a mechanical camera is wonderful. I am generally happy with the photographs I achieved to get on film, but there were others that simply didn't make the cut, although I wished they had. This is always the test for me. I could go completely digital, as I have years of experience with digital dating back to the first high end DCS460 SLR(6Mb) back in 1996, but photography to me remains a contemplative process and the mechanical process of composing, focusing, setting depth of field, metering, were all essential for what I wanted to capture on my trip. There is a certain mystery that begins when the shutter is clicked, and there is no preview to let you know you have the shot. Maybe I like to torture myself this way, maybe I want to be like some excited kid opening his birthday present, every time I go to the lab to pick up my fim. But there is a certain freedom to do all your thinking up front, click the shutter, and move on. I'm not a luddite either, As I stated earlier, I have had several years of experience with several models of digital cameras. However there is also the security of looking at my clean sleeved film that I can put in a box and not worry about my box catching a virus, crashing and losing all it's content, or the chance that I lack the necessary tools to open and read what's in the box in the future as technology continues to go through a speedy metamorphosis.
But overall, the reason I lugged this mechanical monster around was not just for the sake of the end result, as a point-and-shoot camera may offer, but for experiencing the process as a whole. This is probably because of my training (or lack of ) as a photography student in traditional photographic methods. As this is good meditation for me, it is still imperfect because of the many shots losts due to the moment lost, focus problems, bad exposures, and etc. This is why it is a love/hate or yin/yang or perfect/imperfect experience. But I do this because I can and not because I have to make a living of it. If I had to make photography a professional career (as I always think I still might try) then the answer would be digital without a question.
And so I present my photographs wrought from the beastly Mamiya C330 of Pollywogg Hollër:
http://www.pbase.com/jamesbogue/pollywogg_holler