Quadromatic...

Those of you that follow me on Twitter have noticed that I have, of late, been spamming my Flickr account with pictures of a decidedly analog nature. For some reason I got a wild hare (hair?) up my ass (in thinking about it, I’m pretty sure I’d prefer a wild hair in my ass over a wild hare, although neither seem terribly pleasant) this weekend to take actual pictures on actual film, in real live 35mm. The picture above is from a four-lensed Lomo Action Sampler, stuck out the window of my SUV as I was driving through our neighborhood.

Now, to be honest, while I take a lot of photos and have since the early 80s, it’s been at least a decade, if not longer, since I’ve last loaded a film camera, as I was an early proponent of digital. Some interesting things I learned this weekend:

1. Film cameras were, and are, a pain in the ass. You don’t know what the fuck you’re gonna end up with, and you actually have to plan. The Lomo cameras I shoot with aren’t exactly models of modern technology, so I have to actually give some thought to aperture size, shutter speed, and ISO. On my Nikon DSLR I can just snap away, adjusting on the fly, and one of the 30-odd pictures I take of every subject is sure to look okay. Not so much here, which brings me to…

2. Just pull your wallet out of your back pocket, open it up, take out your debit card, and hand it to the first homeless junkie you find. And then tell him your PIN. That’s what this shit costs. Well, it’s not that bad, but by my math it’s about US$0.50 every time I press the shutter release. Which makes me want to spend some quality time exploring point #1.

3. It ain’t like a bicycle. I burned two full rolls before I remembered how the hell to shoot a fully analog camera.

My pleasant discovery, though: completely unlike digital cameras, where the photos seem kind of transient, when you take a roll of exposed film to the lab, and come back in an hour to pick up an envelope with a stack of photos in it, and you go sit in your car to see what you got, there’s a certain… something… Completely undefinable. Don’t get me wrong. I love my DSLR, and I’m currently snooping around the various camera stores for an upgrade path. But there’s something to be said for pulling out the old shit and taking it out for a spin.

What does this have to do with music? Same thing. Put aside the new hotness for a weekend and pull out My First Four Track and write a damn song. It may be a huge pain in the ass, but it’ll do two things: first, it’ll make you appreciate the toil and hard work of your local plug-in makers (har har har), and second, there’s never any harm in some new (old) perspective.