pictures and photography

we all go on random youtube binges right?
the ones where it’s a topic that you’ve briefly touched in the past,
and you never got fully into but seemed interesting at the time.

one of those for me is professional photography.
as someone who has done a fairly minimal amount of research into the
more detailed parts of the workflow of it all,
f numbers, apertures, shooting speeds, lens sizes, digital and film,
i can confidently say it sounds like an absolute pain in the ass to get into.

it’s definitely a hobby where people who do it for “the love of the game” thrive,
and people who pick it up for a gimmick simply stare in awe (maybe like me?)
cause i mean, come on, it looks so cool, right?

i spent some time this evening watching videos about the illustrious Fujifilm cameras,
who produce that dreamy filmlike look that i (and apparently a bunch of other people)
are all after nowadays for taking pictures of everyday life.

unfortunately, Fujifilm cameras will run you an arm and a leg and your balls,
so those of us who aren’t even beginner photographers who are chasing that look
should either pay up or shut up, it seems.

in an outrage, i took this photo of my water bottle,
messed with random numbers in the “pro” mode of my phone camera,
and put some film grain, a white border, and a hazy-looking orange glowing date on it
and i ended up with this fine piece of art:

shot with samsung galaxy s21 ultra + photoshop.

i actually don’t think it looks terrible. but what do i know.
maybe i should just take more pictures with my phone and mess with the settings..
it is quite an expensive piece of technology after all.

also, it seems in the world of cameras, everyone has an opinion in the worst way..
it makes it quite difficult to feel comfortable making a single decision on what to buy.
“this one”? or “that one”? all with parameters you could spend all day discussing..

i guess photography is actually a good hobby to get into
if you want to train your ability to stop listening to other peoples' opinions.
which is quite cynical of me, but it’s how i feel right now about it.

i can imagine one day i’ll purchase a nice cheap point-and-shoot camera
with film that i send to some faraway lab to develop and send scans from.
maybe i’ll even post the results here! perhaps look forward to it.

thank you for reading today’s post.
let’s not even get started on filming videos..