FatBear, I looked through your earlier digital phase on Flickr. I _instantly_ recognized the location/shot of Cannon Beach.
We owned a store in Cannon Beach for 24 years and commuted from Manzanita. That photo was a scene I passed every day on the way to work. I rarely do landscapes, I leave them for everyone else. I just decided to stop and take that shot one day when I was trying to tell someone where I was from. There's another one farther down taken from the north with lots of sunsettie colors that I took for a graphic on our website.
The humidity is usually near 100% around there so it is a rare day when photos come out really bright and contrasty. But it would be misleading to shoot it on a day like that, anyway, because they are so rare. Nor would it be honest to punch up the contrast and saturation and make it look like it was taken on a day like that. I do admit guilt in emphasizing the sunset colors in the Ecola Viewpoint photo. Rules are made to be broken.
Since the early2000's, most people have come to favor punchier,higher-contrast digital images. Your photos LOOK as if they were shot and processed 15 years ago, with a softer,lower contrast look that was relatively common back then.
That was what you got from any digital camera that I could afford back then. Additionally, many of them were taken in very flat lighting. A sunny day is rare on the north Oregon coast, and overcast is better for many things, anyway. The ones taken in Liguria were in late October during one of their rainiest falls in decades. We drove up into the alps and actually drove behind a huge waterfall that arched out over the road. We drove down into one of the Cinque Terre villages and a mudslide sealed us in. Finally a guy in an Ape offered to lead us out over the sheep trails. (We followed him and made it.) As a result I got those moody shots where someone else might have taken a shot worthy of a postcard. I like them both, but can't see wasting my energy on a shot that you can buy for a dollar off of a rack.
The amount of work that goes into some of those mushroom shots might surprise you. I think of them as portraits of very patient subjects. Some work, some don't. My two best mushroom photos were taken on B&W film in the OM-1n with fill flash. One is sepia toned and one selenium. Neither of them is online.
Most of the mushroom shots were done with either two flashes or with reflectors for filling in shadows or both. You can see one of my diffusers behind one of those tiny mushrooms. I just couldn't get it to stand out, so I put a background behind it, just like any portrait photographer would do. Except most portrait photographers do not work in overalls and kneepads.
Why mushrooms and what does this have to do with MF? I like mushrooms because you can present an everyday object in a way that almost nobody has ever seen before. I started shooting them like this in 1987 and could find nothing like them in any publication. I scoured the Internet for mushroom shots before I took the risk of putting such weird photos on Flickr and found nothing like them. Now I do - in fact there are whole Flickr groups for mushroom shots and I see some that I wish I'd taken. I do not claim they are "copying" me, but I do take at least some credit for making them a popular subject. Of course that probably means I will have to move on to bryophytes...
And what it has to do with MF - to me, anyway - is that mushrooms led me to MF. First I bought a Baby Linhof with a couple of 120 backs and refurbished it. Then I used the movements and the amazing sharp lenses to improve my shots. But with mushrooms your camera is in the dirt, sometimes even down in a hole that you have to scrape away. And it was hard to get my face down there to look at the ground glass - the "underground glass" as it were. So I bought the Mamiya RZ-67 because it had a waist level viewfinder. Boy that was nice. If you've never used a waist-level viewfinder, don't. You will become addicted. Right now I think some of the modern DSLRs have articulated screens on the back. I would only buy a new digital camera if I could either 1, tilt the rear screen up to let me focus and compose from above; or 2, plug in a separate monitor on which to view my focusing and composition.
If there is an expectation that
every photo must be punchier and higher contrast in this modern age, well I hope it is an affectation that passes. I think it is important to fit the characteristics of the image to the subject and to what you want to say with it. And sometimes you have to accept what you can get in the conditions. Doing the best you can with what you've got is becoming a lost art in America. Buying the best is the modern way. I guess I'm just old-fashioned after all.
