Now, picture a family of six. Two adults in their thirties, and four children, one in a stroller who yells if the parents stop moving, one excited about going into second grade, one in preschool, and a kindergartner. One of the six is lugging an old Canon Rebel DSLR, but it isn’t either of the grown-ups, nor is it the soon-to-be-second grader, who is itching to become an adult already even though her mouth is half baby teeth. The one with the DSLR is the kindergartner.

Springtime in Shelburne Falls means one thing: the bridge of flowers. Every April, local amateur and not-so-amateur florists cover an old walking bridge in flowers, transforming it into the centerpiece of a cozy downtown. It’s on that bridge that the Kindergartner carries his camera, which his father (me) has hung around his neck. He uses it to take photos of every last flower on a bridge of hundreds, much to his stroller-bound sister’s chagrin.

I don’t have nerves of steel. I probably run a household with too many rules, too many safety rails, and plenty of helicoptering. Often, when I’m working in my office upstairs and I hear the children laughing, I mishear it as crying. (In my defense, one of their favorite games includes pretending their stuffed animals are crying.) So how was it not only possible but actually easy for me to lend my “grown-up” camera to the family kindergartner?

In this article, I’ll explore why the DSLR is great for a kid even as young as five years old, how to reduce the risks of damage to the device, and what all of this has taught me about parenting.

Why a DSLR?

DSLRs can be serious, expensive cameras. Why, then, would I risk such a precious gadget by putting it into the tiny hands of my kid?

Well, not all DSLRs are expensive. When I bought it years ago, my Canon Rebel XSi cost somewhere in the $300 to $400 range. If you were to buy one now, you’d have to get it used, and you’d pay less than $100. I don’t think I would have made the same decision if I owned a Hasselblad. But I’ve always been on the novice side of the amateur spectrum, and it would take a lot more development of my photography skills for me to justify owning a truly professional camera. That said, after my experience lending my son my inexpensive DSLR, I’d now make the same decision with a more expensive camera.

Okay, cost and risk aside, why give my kid a DSLR? Why not let him just shoot photos with my phone, an easy-to-use device that’s so well-protected you’d think it was a bomb because I’m so clumsy that I drop it on a daily basis? Surely that would give the child an idea of photo-taking.

Well, many parents will tell you that, to a kid, phone = games. That was my experience, anyway. My kids would ask me to use my phone to take pictures. I’d hand it to them, and after a few minutes (tops), they would be asking if they could play Wordscapes.

But there are other reasons, too. Taking pictures with a phone is just bland. Is there anything less satisfying than tapping that phone screen and getting little to no feedback on whether or not you took a photo? They’re awkward to hold, they’re easy to drop, you don’t have a strap to wrap them around your neck. While that all sounds like the complaints an adult would have, I suspect from my son’s behavior when trying to use my phone’s camera that it just isn’t as enjoyable an experience.

I’ve also had the following experience with each and every one of my four kids (how’s that for a sample size?):

1. The child asks if they can take pictures with my phone.
2. I give them my phone.
3. The child runs away excitedly with the phone to go find a cool rock to photograph.
4. The child returns within thirty seconds, drowning in tears because when they tried to take a photo they swiped instead of tapped, and now they’re in slo-mo, or video mode, or panorama mode, and they can’t escape the Sisyphean hell that is endlessly turning until the panorama photo is complete. If they don’t return with tear-streaked face, that can only mean that they’ve swiped completely out of the photo app and they’re here to ask if they can play Wordscapes instead.

I’m not going to completely shut down the idea of a child using a phone to dabble in photography. Honestly, learning how to tap instead of swipe seems like a good fine motor skill to teach. And there are probably some terrific technical solutions. There’s so much good software working behind the scenes that, with a phone, kids can take photos without thinking about aperture, shutter speed, and tricky things like that.

So, in a pinch, I’ll let my kids use my phone as long as they sign a document stating that I warned them they would get frustrated, and that any tears hereafter are not the fault of Dad.

In a 2019 article about choosing your kid’s first camera, James wrote about why the point and shoot camera was a good fit for his young kids. That wasn’t the case for me.

After the positive experience I had lending my son my Canon Rebel on that trip to Shelburne, I bought him a point and shoot the following Christmas. He doesn’t use it. It actually really took the air out of his interest in photography. I can’t say for certain what it is, but I suspect that, while people often comment that kids don’t notice the quality of things (like cheaper animation in movies, junk food versus healthy food, etc.), I think my son could tell that his photos just didn’t look as good on that point and shoot as they did on the DSLR.

The DSLR Embodies Process over Product

My kids aren’t like me when I was a twenty-year-old creative writing major, having an existential crisis over a comma. They don’t know the rules, and even if you told them the rules, they probably wouldn’t care about the rules. At least, that’s how it is with my son. And what did that lead to? Experimentation. But there’s very little experimentation to be done on a phone or a point-and-shoot, both of which detrimentally simplify the photography process.

In elementary art lessons, teachers talk a lot these days about process over product. Meaning that, when a kindergartner sits down with some painting materials, you want them to focus on seeing how the materials work, practicing with them, rather than focusing so much on whether their corner sun looks perfect. As my wife, a former Boston public school art teacher will attest, that curiosity for materials and love of process often goes away, and while her kindergartners were able to keep art fun, her fourth graders were frustrated when they couldn’t get their art looking exactly the way that they wanted.

That’s something that’s easy to overlook about a DSLR. They’re neat. They have buttons all over the dang place. To a kid, the symbols accompanying the buttons and menus of a DSLR might as well be hieroglyphics—just as incomprehensible, just as fascinating. The tripod is its own mechanical wonder of snaps and extendy bits and stuff your dad says be to careful with unless you want to get pinched. These are tools that kids love quickly, and that are easier to teach a kid to take care of. I swear, kids can tell when something is cheap.

And here’s the most surprising thing about my Shelburne Falls trip. When we returned to our Airbnb, I took out my MacBook and got everything ready.

“Hey, Buddy!” I said, “Let’s take a look at your pictures!”

I transferred the photos that my son had taken that day, imported them into Lightroom, and created him his own library within which he could view and edit his photos any time he liked. After a few minutes setting all of this up, I realized that my son was off playing with his siblings, and even as I pulled him away for a moment (“Your photos, man! Don’t you want to see?”), it became clear that he didn’t really care how his pictures came out. He didn’t exactly say “booooring” but he might as well have.

For him, the fun wasn’t looking at the photos. The fun was taking the photos. As so often happens, we learn more from our kids than they learn from us.

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So, I did. And I’m glad I did. But it’s time to move on. The 50mm lens is tired and boring. After all, it has been the “standard” lens for a hundred years, and a hundred years is a bit too long for a thing to go unchallenged.

And anyway, the “standard” title comes of dubious origin. According to most people who care to speak about this sort of thing, the 50mm lens is the standard lens because it is the photographic lens which most closely approximates human vision. Though if we ask anyone who makes this claim to kindly elaborate and elucidate, most can’t or won’t. 

The truth is, 50mm lenses do not accurately approximate what we humans see. They just don’t.

Ignoring the fact that our vision is binocular, and ignoring the fact that our retinas are concave and not flat like the plane of a film or image sensor, and ignoring the fact that we have foveal and peripheral vision, and that our overall field of view tends to be closer to 180º while a 50mm lens shoots a field of view of approximately 47º, ignoring all that…

Wait, I don’t recall where I was going with this.

Wait. Yes, I do!

Ignoring all of the physics and human anatomy stuff that I won’t claim to totally understand, we should’ve known by anecdotal evidence that the “50mm as human eye” crowd was wrong. They can’t even agree what’s standard amongst themselves.

For as long as the internet’s been around, every conversation around the 50mm standard lens eventually devolves into argument.

Someone somewhere tells someone else to buy a 50mm lens because it approximates human vision and some freak weirdo stumbles into the forum to claim that “AKSHUALLY” 35mm, not 50mm, is the standard focal length because that’s what the human eye really sees. And then they’re interrupted by the quirky freak weirdo screaming that the Konica 40mm is the standard lens because that’s what the human eye really sees. And then they’re interrupted by the rich freak weirdo screaming that the Leica 75mm is the standard lens because that’s what the human eye really sees. And then they’re interrupted by the—you get the idea.

The simple truth in the origin of the 50mm lens as “the standard” is that the 50mm lens was simply the most cost-effective lens for a camera company to package and sell with their cameras. Lenses of that focal length happened to also make images that looked good, and pretty normal, so we all called it the standard and dutifully proselytized that everyone should buy one and the camera companies sold a hell of a lot of nifty fifties.

Consequently, the actual reason that the 50mm lens has been “the standard” for almost a hundred years is because most pictures over that time were made with a 50mm lens, and we got used to it. Most of the shots we saw in magazines and family photo albums and slides and snapshots from holidays and everything else were made with a 50mm lens. The images, through their sheer ubiquity, made the lens that took them the standard.

And I think that that definition is much more useful and practical than some strange correlation between a camera lens and human vision. For me, the standard lens should always be defined as simply the most-used lens.

But something interesting has happened in the last decade or two.

The most popular cameras in the world aren’t made by Canon or Nikon or Kodak, and they don’t come with a 50mm lens, as they had between (basically) the 1930s until the late 1990s. The most ubiquitous camera in the world today comes attached to a phone with an half-eaten apple on it, and the focal length of the “standard” lens on this most-used camera has an equivalent full frame focal length of approximately 26mm. In terms of “real photographers” that’s perilously close to ultra-wide territory. Not even wide-angle. Ultra-wide!

So, without even trying, iPhone and smartphones at large have essentially shifted the “standard” focal length away from 50mm into the realm of the ultra-wide.

I, for one, love it. I love wide angle lenses. I think they’re more dynamic, and it takes more work to get a good picture. With a wide-angle lens we can’t rely on the crutch of subject isolation and bokeh. We have to concentrate on filling the frame with interesting things. We have to get close to our subject.

The result is that we have pictures which, in fact, don’t look like the everyday. The new normal lens makes images that contrarily don’t look like what we see with our human eyes. Which gets us closer to the whole point of photography, the very reason why we should even bother making pictures with a camera: that is, to show us something we can’t see every day.

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James reviews the Leica Elmarit-R 28mm F/2.8 wide-angle fast prime lens for Leica R mount and digital mirrorless cameras!

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Unfortunately, my enthusiasm is checked based on Ferrania’s prior struggles and the opacity in their communication.

Ferrania has a history of announcing and then not releasing products. Their initial Kickstarter promised a color film, and we all know how that went. And then last year we heard that their ISO 80 black and white film, P30, was soon to come in 120 format. That has yet to materialize. Quite frankly, the company has seemed to vacillate between existing, and not, for the past several years.

Granted, the last couple of years have been notoriously challenging for all businesses. It’s no real surprise that a smaller film manufacturer is struggling. And granted, too, that after months of virtually no updates, Ferrania thankfully seems resurgent. Ferrania P30 is once again in stock, and the company recently rolled out a fairly interesting QR code system to track production information on individual rolls. That’s genuinely unique in the industry (at least from a consumer facing standpoint).

Getting back to Orto and the announcement, Ferrania pointedly waited until April 2nd to announce Orto, so I do think this is a legitimate product announcement as opposed to an April Fool’s stunt. Let’s be clear. Orto is real, and I’m not claiming otherwise.

But is the new Orto any different than Ferrania P30? Sure, the boxes say that one is pan-chromatic and ISO 80 (P30) and one is ortho-chromatic and ISO 50 (Orto). But are they?

As part of his excellent deep dive into film stocks, the Naked Photographer illustrated that Ferrani P30 showed an ortho-chromatic response, in that it didn’t seem to respond to red light (or green for that matter). That’s kind of a big deal since the film’s box proudly declares itself “Panchro,” as in pan-chromatic.

The skepticism and confusion isn’t helped by the fact that Film Ferrania has never released proper data sheets for P30, and that it doesn’t have one posted for Orto at this time. Maybe P30 has a more limited spectral response but isn’t “technically” ortho-chromatic. But given the testing by Naked Photographer and my own shooting, it looks to be pretty darn close. And I can’t help but notice that even Film Ferrania recognizes the similarities between P30 and the new Orto. It calls the two films “cousins,” they share the same development recommendations (Film Ferrania doesn’t actually publish official development times, again frustrating), and Orto shares P30’s general contrast and low-grain. Even the ISO of 50 seems strangely similar, given that many recommend shooting P30 at ISO 50 anyway, to get a little more latitude from the finicky stock. Ferrania’s own recommendations even point to this.

The real issue here is the lack of data sheets from Film Ferrania, both with Ferrania’s earlier film, P30, and with the new Orto. If you’re new to film, these sheets might seem like inscrutable technical documents, but they actually contain a wealth of information. Using filters is one of the great creative tools in black and white photography. Data sheets show what your options exist. Night shooting means you need to understand how a film responds to extremely low light (i.e. reciprocity failure), data sheets tell you how to convert your exposure times. Does your film need to be exposed differently under Tungsten lights? Data sheets.

It was somewhat excusable for Ferrania to not provide documentation when P30 was in an alpha state. After all, an alpha of a film emulsion indicates the final formula might change, so you don’t want to put all that in writing if it’s going to need revision a year later. But P30 is years old at this point, and we still get nothing more than the ISO from Film Ferrania.

Small film producers like Adox put out industry standard data sheets. Rollei uses modern graphic design to make their sheets not just informative, but engaging to a more casual reader. Even little Film Washi, which is run by one guy, puts out datasheets with meaningful information.

Of course Ferrania is not the only offender. Lomography also has fairly light documentation. They look quite nice (they even give you photo examples with different developers) but good luck finding much in the way of technical details. I give Lomography more of a pass, since they are rebranding other film stocks and their whole vibe is experimental. But it’s still not great for consumers and we’d be better off with that information.

But Film Ferrania is making their films, that’s their whole thing. They clearly have done extensive testing and they have the information. They must, to make the film. The only conceivable reason not to share technical documentation is that it would show the new Orto and the old Ferrania P30 to be extraordinarily similar.

To be clear, I believe Ferrania that these are distinct offerings. I do not believe this is simply an exercise in branding. But a total lack of technical documentation, given that Ferrania itself recommends the same development times between the two, indicates to me that information would only serve to further conflate these already very similar products.

Ferrania P30 80 ISO Film (35mm, 36 Exposures)

Buy Ferrania P30 80 ISO Film (35mm, 36 Exposures) featuring Panchromatic Black & White Negative Film, ISO 80/21° in Standard Process, High Contrast and Fine Grain, Rich, Deep Shadows, DX-Coded 35mm Canister. Review Ferrania P30

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All that being said, Ferrania P30 is the most distinctive black and white film I’ve ever shot. I truly love the look of the film and it feels completely unique in today’s film ecosystem. Seeing Ferrania go dark with production truly bummed me out. As a community, we are better with Film Ferrania in the market. It’s just that given the lack of information Ferrania historically puts out about its films, I’m forced to question how distinct of an offering we’re really getting here, with the new Orto.

I think of a company like Adox, which is making similar low-speed, fairly specialized offerings with a small team. Not only are their products much more differentiated, but we get the same technical specifications we’d expect from Kodak, FujiFilm, or Foma.

Once Ferrania’s Orto gets into the hands of testers, I hope we see lab and real world use meaningfully differentiate these two films. I truly hope we see this company continue production and keep introducing new ideas into the analog world. It cannot be understated how difficult making a film emulsion is, and the fact that Ferrania came through pandemic lock-downs and a period of hideous global supply chain constrictions to resume production is a minor miracle that I am grateful for.

I will keep shooting P30, because it is a beautiful and unique film. But I can’t help but find Ferrania’s latest release, and it’s lack of documentation, a little frustrating.

Buy Ferrania film from B&H Photo Here

Ferrania P30 80 ISO Film (35mm, 36 Exposures)

Buy Ferrania P30 80 ISO Film (35mm, 36 Exposures) featuring Panchromatic Black & White Negative Film, ISO 80/21° in Standard Process, High Contrast and Fine Grain, Rich, Deep Shadows, DX-Coded 35mm Canister. Review Ferrania P30

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[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]

The post Opinion – What is going on with Ferrania’s new film Orto?  appeared first on Casual Photophile.

Sitting alone in my office I can think of dozens of examples of people who do the same thing over and over while expecting different results, and these people are as far from the actual definition of insanity as it’s possible to be.

How many rockets exploded on the launch pad before the Saturn V successfully delivered a human being to the surface of the moon?

I think also of a small child strapped into ice skates, feet jittering on a lake of ice, firing slapshot after slapshot toward a gaping net and missing every time. But the child keeps shooting expecting that, eventually, one will go in.

My daughter failing to hold a handstand over and over. The bird watcher who walks the same woods every week in hope of seeing a rare bird that they’ve never seen. Old-timey prospectors, panning for gold.

The whole of life is repeating the same things over and over. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t. Doing things over and over and enjoying the unpredictable results is the reason we’re here. There’s nothing “insane” about it.

But I must admit, this week, that the flimsy bon mot around insanity has started to sound a bit more solid for one simple reason. Because I’ve been shooting Polaroid film.

The Three Fs of Polaroid Photography

This week, I discovered my own witticism. That there are three F words that encompass the whole experience of shooting Polaroid film.

The first F is a happy one. Fun!

I load a fresh pack of Polaroid 600 film into my delightfully retro Polaroid Amigo (what a name) and smile down at the small box of ‘80s tech cradled lightly in delicate hands. The expectation that I’m about to make beautiful, unpredictable, experimental (ooh, experimental – I’ve read the word in Polaroid’s press releases!) instant photos is too tantalizing.

I wander around dumbly, my eyes crinkled, the corners of my lips lifted in a slight innocent smile. I can’t wait to take a picture.

This is the fun.

I love my daughters. They’re cute and happy and always oblige me when I ask to take their photo. Today is no different. I place my oldest on a stool by the window, where natural light streams inward upon one side of her face. It’s a basic window light portrait that I’ve shot hundreds of times in the last decade. But it’s pretty.

I frame her in the charmingly vacant viewfinder, nothing more than a square of hollow plastic passing through the camera, and press the shutter release.

The mechanical Polaroid shutter flicks open to capture the light. I hold still, and so does my daughter. She’s well-trained by years of her father using old, slow, rather dumb cameras. The shutter flicks closed, and the whirring gears of the Amigo fire to electric life.

The Polaroid photo is gripped by a metal hook deep within the belly of the camera. It’s drawn forward to the spinning compression rollers and squeezed through, the development chemical raked across the exposed photo material to create the slowly-developing instant photo.

The picture ejects smoothly from the camera, and, miraculously, a photo has been made. I gingerly take it from the camera and place it face down on the table allowing it to develop over the next twenty minutes.

During those twenty minutes I look for more photo opportunities. I shoot a shot of the family dog, now old and whitened, with strange skin growths that the vet assures us are normal and weakening hip joints that slow him down just a little. The photo ejects with the whirring clatter, and it joins its developing predecessor on the table.

A still-life of some sort of grass my wife tells me looks nice. A close-up photo of my second daughter, smiling. A shot of a retro electronic device that I love. A photo of a homemade birthday card featuring the Nintendo character, Kirby.

I’ve shot eight shots in fifteen minutes. I give the photos half a day to develop there, on the table.

When I come back to the photos later that night, the fun is over.

Now it’s time to consider those exploded rockets. Those missed slapshots. The gold a lie. The prospector lying desiccated in a river-less canyon, his only reward the corpse of his pack mule laden with bags of bad luck.

The second F is Failure.

The first shot of my first child is brutally under-exposed. The image is blurry. There’s no sharpness and zero shadow detail. It’s a terrible photo.

The still-life of the decorative grass is exposed well enough, but the entire shot is soft and the framing is way off. The charmingly unsophisticated viewfinder lacks parallax correction for close-up shooting.

The photo of the electronic toy is barely visible. The homemade birthday card is indecipherable. There’s one picture that’s nothing more than a blank, blueish-brown nothing.

The close portrait shot of my second child is also under-exposed. Her beautiful smile is barely visible. There’s an over-bearing green cast dousing the entire image in a sickly hue. It’s like the office sequence of The Matrix, except we don’t have that cool flip phone.

I’m disappointed. In myself. In the camera. In the film. Maybe I didn’t plan enough. Maybe I shouldn’t expect so much from Polaroid film. Maybe I needed more light, or a camera with a flash, or fresher film.

I drive to Target and buy two more packs of film at $21 a pack. Forty-two dollars for sixteen photos.

I load the film into two different cameras. One is another retro camera, the Polaroid 600 One Step. This camera also lacks a flash, but buoyed by quiet self-assurance that if I adjust the exposure compensation dial I’m sure to get better shots, I press on. I load the second pack into the modern Polaroid One Step 2. This new camera has a flash, new circuitry, and has given good results in the past.

I spend the next week shooting instant photos of life. My young daughter’s birthday celebration, the birthday cake, her indoor camping trip in our living room (complete with tent). A winter morning as we make our way to school. Shots of my other interests and projects in vintage electronics and game systems. More pictures of my dog. Photos of fruit.

Throughout the process I become painfully familiar with the third F of Polaroid photography.

The third F is Frustration.

Though I’ve had success shooting Polaroid film and cameras in the past, I’m not sure it’s worth it these days. And that’s what’s frustrating. The uncertainty.

The good Polaroid photo is too elusive. Acquiring it makes no sense. The shots are under-exposed, except when they’re over-exposed. The shots are never sharp. The flash is too flashy, except when it doesn’t fire for some unknown reason. Sometimes the development chemical spreads unevenly, or not at all. Occasionally the camera spontaneously ejects a photo without making it into a photo.

My vast experience with making photographs does not help.

I adjust exposure. Does nothing. I use a flash or don’t use a flash. Doesn’t really matter. I frame the shot with my own estimated parallax compensation. Might as well smash the camera. I shoot outside. I shoot inside. I shoot in a studio with full light kit. I use a tripod. I do everything I can to make it work, and it doesn’t work. At least, it doesn’t work well enough.

Fuji Instax and Polaroid Instant Camera Buyer's Guide!

We spotlight every single instant film camera available to buy right now in today's instant camera buyer's guide!

See, the thing is, Fuji makes Instax film and cameras to shoot it. The film works. The cameras work. And I hate to say it, because I truly love Polaroid’s cameras, Polaroid’s history, and that Polaroid film is bigger than Fuji’s, dimensionally.

But Polaroid film never works. At least, not consistently or well enough to justify the cost.

What’s most confounding, though, is that I’ll still buy Polaroid film and I’ll still shoot Polaroid cameras. I can’t stop. I don’t know why.

What was that bon mot, again, about insanity?

This article launched with the headline that Polaroid photography brings with it three Fs. Fun, failure, and frustration, in that order.

But there’s another F word that comes with making Polaroid photos, a fouth F word that I left out of my newly crafted witticism. The fourth F word is, in fact, the one that I mutter most when shooting Polaroid film. But you’ll have to use your imagination, because this particular F word is not fit to print.

You can get your own Polaroid at F Stop Cameras (my shop)

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[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]

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In Sun and Shadow, Ricardo Reyes, a man in a Mexican village, wages war against a fashion photographer who, in Ricardo’s view, is engaged in unforgivable photographic appropriation.

The story’s opening paragraph is intended to align the reader’s allegiance. In it, Bradbury describes a clicking camera held in the “tenderly exploiting hands” of a photographer. We may not know it yet, but by these words the reader should suspect Bradbury’s position; that the photographer exploits not just the camera, but much more besides.

From the window of his village home, Ricardo watches in annoyance as the photographer uses Ricardo’s alleyway as a backdrop. The photographer positions his fashion model subject against the cracked plaster of the building opposite Ricardo’s. He places her delicately against Ricardo’s own banister, with the weathered paint so artfully peeling. He positions Ricardo’s own son, Tomás, in the alleyway, within view of the camera’s lens. This is the final straw.

Ricardo shouts out the window to the photographer and model. “You there!”

Ricardo’s wife, Maria, embarassed, urges him to stop. “They’re not hurting anything.”

Storming out the door, Ricardo replies to his wife with Bradbury’s exaggerated sense of humor.

“I’ll cut off their heads!”

When he reaches confrontation range, Ricardo tells the photographer to get away from his house. The photographer assures Ricardo that it’s okay, that they’re only making fashion photos. The photographer is sure that this argument will work. He will tell Ricardo that they’re taking photos and Ricardo, like hundreds of others before him, will understand and let them get on with their work.

Ricardo won’t allow it, and he makes his point:

“You are employed; I am employed. We are all employed people. We must understand each other. But when you come to my house with your camera that looks like the complex eye of a black horsefly, then the understanding is over. I will not have my alley used because of its pretty shadows, or my sky used because of its sun, or my house used because there is an interesting crack in the wall, here! You see! Ah, how beautiful! Lean here! Stand there! Sit here! […] Oh, I heard you. Do you think I am stupid?”

Ricardo eventually berates the photographer until, exasperated, the photographer flees the alley. The battle has been won but the war is not ended. Ricardo wants the man gone not just from his alley, but from his entire village.

When the photographer tries unsuccessfully to pay Ricardo to leave him alone, and then announces loudly to his model that they’ll go take pictures on the next street over where earlier he’d noticed “a nice cracked wall there[…]”, Ricardo announces (louder still) that he’ll follow them.

Keeping pace with the fleeing photographer and his model, Ricardo once more makes his point.

And this paragraph, I think, is the heart of the argument. Ricardo wants his family and his friends and his village, his life and his place in the world, to be seen not as props, but as people. He demands no less.

“Do you see what I mean? My alley is my alley, my life is my life, my son is my son. My son is not cardboard! I saw you putting my son against the wall, so, and thus, in the background. What do you call it – for the correct air? To make the whole attractive, and the lovely lady in front of him?”

“We are poor people,” said Ricardo. “Our doors peel paint, our walls are chipped and cracked, our gutters fume in the street, the alleys are all cobbles. But it fills me with terrible rage when I see you make over these things as if I had planned it this way, as if I years ago induced the wall to crack. Did you think I knew you were coming and aged the paint? Or that I knew you were coming and put my boy in his dirtiest clothes? We are not a studio! We are people and must be given attention as people. Have I made it clear?”

Here, Bradbury has broached the subject of class and economics. Ricardo is poor. By contrast, the photographer and his model, with the hat boxes and makeup cases and assistants and expensive gear, must be rich. Bradbury shines a light on the power dynamic at play here, and the cultural looting done by traveling photographers who spare no expense for the perfect background or the artfully weathered wall, or the beautifully devastated face. The cracked hands of the sweatshop worker in Sri Lanka, or the blood-rimmed eyes in the blackened face of the coal-miner. The blistered feet of the man pounding pans in the streets of Kolkata for less money per day than an American would accept for a minute’s work. The photographers go out to hunt for the underpaid of the world, before returning to “civilization” to collect their pay.

But the photographer in the story isn’t listening. He’s moving his production along to the next alley. Once there, he comes across some colleagues shooting their own fashion shots. Here, Bradbury sprinkles his sense of humor, as the photographer greets his irreverent colleague and apprises him of the situation.

“How you doing, Joe?”

“We got some beautiful shots near the Church of the Virgin, some statuary without any noses, lovely stuff,” said Joe. “What’s the commotion?”

“Pancho here got in an uproar. Seems we leaned against his house and knocked it down.”

“My name is Ricardo. My house is completely intact.”

To this point in the story, it’s not perfectly obvious whether Ricardo is a fanatic lunatic or a reasonable man simply taking a stand against what he sees as an injustice. Bradbury presents the counterpoint to Ricardo through a number of characters within the story. These assert that the photographers aren’t doing anything wrong, that they’re simply making a living.

Ricardo’s own son laughs happily with the photographer. Ricardo’s wife tells him to leave them alone, saying in no uncertain terms that “they aren’t hurting anything.”  When the photographer positions his model in front of a local shop, one which possess a “nice antique wall[…]”, Ricardo is stunned to find the shop owner watching the photo shoot with mild amusement.

“Jorge! What are you doing?” […] “isn’t that your archway? Are you going to let them use it?”

“I’m not bothered,” said Jorge.

Ricardo shook his arm. “They’re treating your property like a movie actor’s place. Aren’t you insulted?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” Jorge picked his nose.

“Jesus upon earth, man, think!”

“I can’t see any harm,” said Jorge.

But seeing that no one is going to stop the injustice, Ricardo takes action. As the photoshoot continues, he surreptitiously positions himself for the next salvo.

The photographer directs the model to pose this way and that, delicately composing his shot for the maximum effect, and just as he’s about to fire the shot, Ricardo bounds into frame and drops his pants.

“Oh, my God!” said the photographer.

Some of the models squealed. The crowd laughed and pummeled each other a bit. Ricardo quietly raised his pants and leaned against the wall.

“Was that quaint enough?” he said.

The plot of the story continues in this way for another page or two (the entire story is only eight pages long). Ricardo thwarts the cameraman by dropping his pants whenever a photo is attempted, all while a growing crowd of his fellow villagers look on bemusedly.

The photographer soon sends his assistant for a policeman. When the unhurried policeman arrives, he assesses the situation and sees no fault. Ricardo is simply standing there, naked. And in the policeman’s estimation, there’s nothing wrong with a man of the village standing there with his pants down.

They argue the point, but Ricardo has found allies in the villagers and policeman. When the photographer finally gives up, he tells his models “Come on, girls, we’ll go somewhere else.”

Ricardo is ready with a victorious reply.

“France,” said Ricardo.

“What!” The photographer whirled.

“I said France, or Spain,” suggested Ricardo. “Or Sweden. I have seen some nice pictures of walls in Sweden. But not many cracks in them. Forgive my suggestion.”

As the story ends, the photographer and his models retreat down the street toward the docks and Ricardo watches in satisfaction. He relives the moments before and plans his evening ahead. Here, Bradbury uses gorgeous lyrical writing to remind us of his position. That the world is not made for just some of us, it is here for all of us, and we are all equally deserving of it.

Now, Ricardo thought, I will walk up the street to my house, which has paint peeling from the door where I have brushed it a thousand times in passing, and I shall walk over the stones I have worn down in forty-six years of walking, and I shall run my hand over the crack in the wall of my own house, which is the crack made by the earthquake in 1930. I remember well the night, us all in bed, Tomás as yet unborn, and Maria and I much in love, and thinking it was our love which moved the house, warm and great in the night; but it was the earth trembling, and in the morning, that crack in the wall. And I shall climb the steps to the lacework-grille balcony of my father’s house, which grillwork he made with his own hands, and I shall eat the food my wife serves me on the balcony, with the books near at hand. And my son Tomás, whom I created out of whole cloth, yes, bed sheets, let us admit it, with my good wife. And we shall sit eating and talking, not photographs, not backdrops, not paintings, not stage furniture, any of us. But actors, all of us, very fine actors indeed.

By the end of the story, Ricardo is confirmed as a quiet hero. As the photographers flee and Ricardo pulls up his pants, the villagers literally applaud him.

Bradbury wrote this story in 1953. At that time, photography as a mainstream middle-class pursuit was relatively new. The Leica M3 didn’t exist yet. Most people didn’t know what an SLR was. Kodak hadn’t yet begun monetizing our living memories as “Kodak Moments.” And yet Bradbury was already writing about cultural photographic larceny.

I shudder to think what he’d write about the era of smartphone cameras, and Instagram and TikTok. An era in which travelers (often wealthy ones) seek out the “authentic” places (often code for “poor”), stand in line with dozens of other “photographers” and slice away their little piece of someone else’s world for display on social media. All without ever really interacting or experiencing the true cultures of the people whose land they’re shooting.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s no crime in photographers of a majority culture photographing people of a minority culture, or the other way around (though this happens far less often). That’s called cultural exchange, and it’s good.

But I think the critical judgment of whether something is cultural exchange or cultural appropriation should be held in the hands of the minority. It’s the duty of the majority to listen to the minority. And if any one member of a minority takes exception to the actions of anyone of the majority, that should be enough. Just one voice calling out for justice should be enough for the majority to listen, as happened in Sun and Shadow.

If, in the story, Ricardo had not existed, there would have been no conflict. The photographers would have absorbed the Mexican village into their photographs and carelessly jetted away. No one in the story, besides Ricardo, thought that the photographers were doing any harm.

Ricardo was the one voice. The one protesting minority voice amongst his indifferent fellows.

“Am I the only one in the world with a tongue in my mouth?” said Ricardo to his empty hands. “And taste on my tongue? Is this a town of backdrops and picture sets? Won’t anyone do something about this except me?”

No one in the story does, in fact, do anything about it. Ricardo is, in his own words, the “one man like me in a town of ten thousand,” who allows the world to go on as it should. “Without me,” he opines, “all would be chaos.”

Sun and Shadow currently appears in Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories

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[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]

The post Ray Bradbury’s Sun and Shadow Shines a Light on Photographic Cultural Appropriation appeared first on Casual Photophile.

In any case, I’m back with another article repeating my thesis that film photography doesn’t have to be expensive, nor inaccessible.

The problem, as I see it, is that people new to the hobby are following all the wrong advice.

They’re watching the popular film photography YouTube channels (because the algorithm perpetuates the popularity of these few channels instead of giving more grounded creators an outlet). New photography likers are captivated by the big Instagram accounts and TikTokkers, many of whom obsess ad nauseum over legacy prestige brands like Leica and Hasselblad. The never-ending focus on gear over happiness is not only toxic, it’s also a dead end.

But I got you. If you’re a college or high school student aspiring to some level of engagement in the hobby of film photography, and I know that there are many people out there who fit that description, take my advice. It’s simple and fairly obvious.

Buy a cheap film camera. Learn how to use it (so that you don’t waste film and money).

I wrote about this wild idea extensively more than two years ago, in an article headlined We Should All Be Shooting Dorky AF SLRs, and I stand by that article totally. We don’t need expensive cameras, or even new cameras. And this idea has re-established itself in my mind after news that Leica released a brand new M6 last week.

We Should All Be Shooting Dorky AF SLRs and Here's Why

Save money, save time, and improve your photography shooting one of these unpopular, ugly and amazingly capable autofocus film SLR cameras.

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Okay, here’s where I digress for a moment and talk about Leica’s new M6.

To start, big ups to Leica. They created a new (old) film camera in 2022. Amazing. That’s like what Nikon did in 2005 when they made my Nikon SP 2005 Limited Edition. Except Leica’s new M6 isn’t a limited edition. It’s a standard production model. Even better! Really great.

However, I’d like to make two points about the M6 that makes the new camera something of a wet blanket.

First, is a pedantic nitpick.

Leica’s new M6 is being marketed by the brand and their network of influencers as a re-release of “the best” Leica M film camera ever made. Excuse me? “The best” you say?

Did we all just collectively forget that the original M6 from the 1980s was intentionally down-specced from the Leica M3 upon which it was based? That parts of the camera were made out of cheaper alloys and that the internal moving parts were no longer assembled in the previous Leica M style in which components were hand-shaped and fitted on a workbench to mate perfectly within each camera’s chassis? Did we forget that the very day that the original M6 debuted in 1984, it did so as a camera not only technologically inferior to Minolta’s CLE which released four years earlier, but that it would eventually be superseded by the Leica M7? Did we forget about the M7? Because the M7 exists. And it’s better than the M6.

My second point of contention is that the new Leica M6 costs $5,295. Congratulations, Leica. This camera has changed exactly nothing within the entire ecosystem of the hobby. You’ve added no new blood. Your new camera has made zero appreciable impact. In fact, the only way that the new M6 will change anyone’s life is if it falls on someone’s head.

I don’t mean to whine. It’s just that we spent two years being teased by Leica that they were going to release a new film camera and, crucially, they floated the idea that it would be affordable. I had visions of a pared back M. Or at least a camera that didn’t cost basically the same as their current M-A and MP film cameras. Oh, well. I guess I’ll just keep waiting for MiNT’s camera. That one sounds interesting and affordable – two necessary factors for bringing new people into this hobby.

But enough complaining. It’s not Leica’s job to convince people to try film. That’s, uhh, my job, I guess. So, back to that.

If you want to shoot film inexpensively and make great photos, here’s what you do.

Go to any respectable camera shop on the internet (I run one, but there are plenty of others as well), and buy a modern, fully specced, entirely goofy 35mm film SLR camera manufactured between the years 1993 and 1999. You’ll recognize the camera type that I mean instantly. They look like Toyota Tercels and they made trillions of them.

Consequently, they cost $60. And happily they do everything better than that $5,000 camera that Leica just released (and that’s the body-only price). Read the full article that I wrote about buying a cheap AF SLR for further details on which models to seek out, and the finer points.

Ten Great Point and Shoot Film Cameras From $25 to $99

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If those dorky SLRs are too dorky for you (dork-core fashion is everything right now, what’s wrong with you?) then buy a point and shoot. Same idea. They are more advanced than a Leica, if you can believe it. They take good pictures. They cost under $100. They fit in your fanny pack, or cross-body, or whatever we’re calling them these days.

Let’s say you buy one of these cameras. You’ve spent $100. Okay. Now, chill out with the bad photos. Don’t spray and pray. Shoot one roll of film per month. You’ve got 36 chances to make a great picture, more than one photo per day, per month. The cost to buy the film and the development budget on that, even using an expensive lab, won’t be higher than $25 per month. At that rate your total annual outlay to be a film photographer will be $400 in the first year, and $300 per year after that. Surely we can swing it.

You can further minimize your cost by finding a local film lab. Shipping film across the country to the Instagram-famous film labs is expensive. But there are film labs all over the country that don’t advertise anywhere. They’re just content to print peoples’ holiday Christmas cards and run a small frame shop in the back room of the storefront. They don’t care about developing film, but they’ll do it, and they’ll do a good job because they’ve been doing it since you were in diapers. I live in a stupid little town in Massachusetts and there are three businesses within a twenty-minute-drive radius from my house who develop film for like, $8. I don’t have to ship it. The pictures look fine.

That’s all I’ve got for you today. Good luck out there.

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[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]

The post Leica’s New M6 and Solving the Film Photography Accessibility Problem appeared first on Casual Photophile.