January 2010

I’ve been trying to shoot more film again lately. My DSLR has made me a bit lazy. I usually use the Program setting an don’t think about things much. On one hand this frees me to just look at things and shoot, but on the other hand it’s caused me to get worse at making good exposures. I shoot in RAW format exclusively so I’ve been spoiled in that I can fix about 90% of all exposure and color issues. I also don’t have to deal with the tedium of scanning, which I hate. Not to mention getting film processed. I’ve made a New Years resolution go back to film more. Not only that, but I’m going to shoot film with my Leica M3 only. It’s back to basics completely…totally manual, no autofocus, no meter. It’s been a little scary, but that camera is such fun to use that it’s getting less so.

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Photo: Jem Cohen

Vic Chesnutt died Christmas day. It’s been all over the indie music blogs and a lot of the mainstream press as well actually. He was one of those musicians that I’ve always been aware of, but hadn’t really gotten around to exploring. I saw him once when I was working at the Black Cat. It was pretty amazing. I had never heard most of the songs, but I remember being totally captivated. The last week or so I’ve been listening to his last two records a lot and it really bums me out that I didn’t motivate myself to go see him when he was in town a couple months ago. There are some more really beautiful photographs of Vic by Jem Cohen in the photo section of his site as well.