The Costs of Risk Taking
After a couple weeks off, I was out shooting again this past weekend. We took Friday evening and drove to Parke County, land of a million covered bridges. Having been so long since I shot digital for anything other than some portrait work, I wanted to shoot with those cameras on this day. I also wanted to shoot film with the Petri, thinking about using the subject matter for a future “Then and now” post (like the Central Canal Post).
At points I had three cameras out and in hand or around my neck. The Petri was loaded with Delta 100, the M1 Mark II had the 25mm 1.2 and the Pen F had the 45 mm 1.8 on it. Hadn’t specifically planned the lens selection for the day, but those were the lenses on the cameras after the last portrait shoot.
Part of my goal for returning to shooting film was to recover a more measured and disciplined approach to my photography. I noticed the difference the second I started composing and shooting with the M1. I was more deliberate about everything I was doing – composing, checking aperture and exposure compensation. I felt like a better photographer. But the epiphany of the day came later.
The sun was beginning to drop low in the sky as golden hour approached. Most the day had been spent shooting in both digital and film, with some different decisions made for what subject or treatment I was shooting with which based on where I might be planning to use those images afterwards.
As I’ve been shooting with film the past couple months, I’ve noticed a sort of conservatism creeping into my process. I am not sure if it is the lack of confidence or instincts in estimating exposure with a purely manual camera sans a light meter or some sub conscious accounting of a budget constraint that shooting with digital rarely presents.
I don’t think the budget constraint is about money. A B&W film frame is about 20 cents. Processing chemicals maybe costs another 10 cents. After that, I scan and work in lightroom so the monetary costs end there. It’s the real estate within the roll of film.
I was trained as an Econometrician (statistics applied to economic problems). So the ideas of opportunity cost, degrees of freedom and risk aversion are all parts of my consciousness. They all come into play here.
The color image at the top of this post is one of the images I shot on that day in Parke county. It was an unexpected opportunity where I grabbed the M1 and let the Petri dangle around my neck. Such a tricky lighting situation, there was no thought to that decision. The camera did much of the work for me. I was only conscious of making sure the lens was wide open. I lost a little time moving up to the crest leading to the bridge to improve the POV and missed getting the buggy located exactly where I really wanted it in the frame. One shot to get the best image I was going to get in that moment.
If I only had the Petri that evening, I would have waved to the Amish couple and contemplatively enjoyed the scene as it passed in front of me. Shooting it probably would have involved experimenting with 4 or 5 different exposures to get the shot and the one that worked probably would have been the one with the buggy least well positioned in the frame.
Even if the object had been stationary, I think I would have hesitated using up four or five frames of a roll to chance a risky shot – Degrees of Freedom spent. There surely would have been 4 or 5 other, perhaps lesser, compositions with safer exposure decisions that I could have put on that roll – the Opportunity Cost of experimentation. All leading to a decision to play it safe – a Risk Averse outcome.
When I grabbed the M1, It came to me how free I was in the moment to take chances and attempt the spectacular. I had been missing that. That was the day’s epiphany.
The image at the bottom of this post was made with the Petri. It was shot at the end of one of my Central Canal rolls I wrote about earlier. I had one exposure left, I was about to head up the stairs and back to my car. I was confident that I had a roll filled with other good, or at least useful, shots and decided to take a chance and swung for the deep seats on a difficult exposure. It was a whim. Lightroom helped bail me out a little on the back end. I swung hard, the ball came up a bit short, but bounced off the outfielder’s glove and over the fence anyway.
Discipline from film has found its way into my digital work. To be whole, a mentality of freedom from digital needs to find its way into my film work.
There is a tension between creativity and discipline. We need both to take great photographs. What bridges the gap is confidence in our skill set. I suspect many of us are still working on bridging that gap.
