Dear foreground* happened after getting seriously bored with photography and the process and everything that comes with it and in an attempt to avoid the seemingly inevitable divorce deciding to carry only two items; a camera with a lens on it and a tripod, which wasn’t much different from what I had been doing before except that it now meant a different and a lighter camera with a different lens on it.

There is a mental block in here somewhere because I refuse to believe that the 5D, my go–to camera until not so long ago, is so boring, or downright evil, that it somehow ruins or messes up every attempts at creative processes.

Sure, I like that little Fuji camera. For some reason photographing with it feels more natural, more effortless than with the ones I have used the most before it. I seem to assign much of it to the physical layout of the camera, how it has an aperture ring and shutter speed dial, and as such it looks and feels more like the cameras I remember since before digital, some of them my favorites. Nostalgia? And it has a decent viewfinder and an approach to manual focusing that isn’t terrible, for a digicam. Perhaps this newly–found natural and effortless has somehow ruined the 5D for me. Or I just needed a break from it.

Maybe..

Drive through.

Part of the reason I thought shooting traditional landscapes with the Fuji might be a good idea was to get get some distance from my until–then preferred method of photographing landscapes, which centered around a shift lens. The X100S offers no such a thing, and the idea was to create a mini–method of photographing using a fairly strict approach.

• One focal length. Nothing new about that actually, in practice I had been shooting most of the traditional landscapes with one lens. Only a very different one.
• Level camera as accurately as possible. Not new either, just something that needs to be done.
• Crop all images to 5:4. From left and right only, equally from both sides. This produces images where the optical center is in the dead center of the frame and when done with a perfectly level camera this can add to a feeling of a calm perspective (not the words I was looking for but they’ll have to do for now). It can also introduce some pretty awkward placements of the components of the photo, sometimes ruining it, sometimes breathing some life into it.

Behind the sun.

A place of substance.

Turn.

Not entirely unhappy about them, the images, in spite of their somewhat strict nature. Or, maybe because of their strict nature. Either way, as someone who has been flirting with the idea to give up on photography I can live with that.

More here.

*Dear foreground is only a keyword in some metadata files, for sorting images. No exhibition is planned.