For a while I’d been thinking about trying to take photos with an old film camera. Having started with digital right from the beginning, I had never done this before. I wanted to rid myself of the electronics, the blinking lights, beeping sounds, glowing screens and automatically calculated exposures, and get down to the bare essentials: recording light on a film surface with a purely mechanical device.
Then last May, one of my favorite photoblogs, T.O.P., published this entry. That was all the encouragement I needed. I took to the streets armed with my stepfather’s 1972 Kiev 3A. Not a Leica, but a rangefinder camera, still; I got used to its technical deficiencies and after a while actually came to like them. They push the photographs somewhat into the realm of Lomography but I don’t mind the least.
Shooting with an old rangefinder is quite a different experience from using a DSLR, not only from the point of view of the photographic process itself, but also in the way you interact with people when you hold it in your hands. A DSLR armed with the customary heavy zoom lens looks menacing. The Kiev, as I found out, elicits mostly smiles. Walking around with it is as much an exercise in interacting with people as it is an exercise in photography proper.
I haven’t shot many rolls so far, and the experiment is still ongoing. Here’s a selection from what I have at the moment. Click the photo for a slideshow.
Tel Aviv. Click the photo for more.
