Do you ever dream about photography? I have to confess I sometimes dream about shooting. Last night I dreamed I had a camera that shot both digital and film. After shooting a lot of digital, I switched to film, and suddenly the light got magical and there were lots of mysteriously cool people about, and I got a lot of promising shots. Then I had to rewind the film using a fiddly plastic control wheel as on a DSLR, which took a long time, and then when I opened the back—no film inside. I woke up thinking I blew it again.
Whew—you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to deconstruct that one!
_____________________
Mike
Did you catch any fish?
Posted by: Bill Mitchell | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 01:11 PM
I, for one, do not miss film one iota. Good riddance! I'm a partial Luddite, it turns out: I just bought a tube (new, no less) integrated amplifier from China, and a hybrid CD player also from China. The tubes are on top of the cabinet, like sculpture.
I live on eBay...
Here's the best street photograph I've yet taken: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ubereye/2764512431/
One question about that Czech guy: is this a put on?
Posted by: michael | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 01:11 PM
Dear Mike,
Sometimes a 24-300 f/2.8 VR apo zoom lens is just a 24-300 f/2.8 VR apo zoom lens.
Or so I've been told.
pax / "my printer's bigger than yours" Ctein
Posted by: Ctein | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 01:12 PM
Another thing: Cameras almost never work right in my dreams.
Mike J.
Posted by: Mike J. | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 01:24 PM
Coincidentally, early Wednesday morning I had my first photography dream -- more of a nightmare, actually:
http://lovelyangel.livejournal.com/540147.html
I can do without these. (^_^)
Amy
Posted by: Amy S | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 01:38 PM
I think the dream that most suggests that my brain doesn't work right is the one where I find cool expired film in a weird camera store, get all excited about seeing what happens to it when I shoot it, and then wake up and realize that it was all a dream:
http://www.wireheadarts.com/blog/dreams_film/
Posted by: Wirehead Arts | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 02:35 PM
It's funny, this year I've had *so* many dreams about photographing. Long and complex ones too.
Sometimes I've been quite excited about the pictures I took.
It's been a wide variety of cameras too. Old, new, film, digital, compact, rangefinder, very old, BW, small plastic 126, etc.
Posted by: Eolake Stobblehouse | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 03:24 PM
Maybe it's just that the film vs. digital (and negative vs. slide) questions never really go away. I was reading an interesting negative vs. slide comparison just this week - and this in a world of digital. The link is
http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com/2008/08/provia-v-160pros.html
Cheers, Tony.
Posted by: abcoates | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 04:43 PM
Yes, when I was heavily into photographing slides for fun and competitions, I used to dream of photographing with my eyes! Open and close and presto out would appear and drift inot view an an image that very somewhat surreal. I was sure the images were of slides I already had taken, but with a twist. It got to the point where I felt I had no choice but to look through my entire slide collection. It turns out, in my dreams I was combining images to create new ones that never really existed. If I wink ;>)I might create another image yet.
BTW, I guess I thought my head was the camera!
John Roias
JMR
Posted by: Johgn Roias | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 06:38 PM
Dear Tony,
It's not a good comparison. I couldn't say (without inspecting the originals) what's causing the fellow to see such marked differences in the sharpness of his scans, but it most assuredly is not inherent characteristic of the films. Not at a mere 1200 ppi. Something has screwed up his experiment.
He also doesn't know how to extract the maximum tonal information from either film.
Not a useful article, in my considered judgement.
pax / Ctein
Posted by: Ctein | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 07:36 PM
Dreams? No. Nightmares? Yes.
Posted by: Ken Tanaka | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 09:55 PM
Good sex dreams- infrequent, at best. Camera dreams- always the same. I lost my camera, I lost my camera, I lost my goddang camera!!!
At least they're good when ya wake up...
Posted by: Stan B. | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 10:25 PM
i dream about photography when i'm not doing enough shooting. I think all that creativity starts to pile up in some part of my brain and needs to vent. Gosh, one could say the same thing about one of our other natural drives..
Posted by: dyathink | Saturday, 16 August 2008 at 11:59 PM
I have had this dream where Nikon designed a camera back for my F4, that allowed for almost simultaneous digital capture of what I was going to get on film (I believe it captured TTL the very last instant before the mirror retracted into it's up position), so as to be able to preview and know whether I got a shot or not.
I was able to get that camera back, but not the deluxe model above it (it being too pricey), that had a histogram setting you could view on the camera back also, which could be set to the various types of manufacturers' films, as well as the varying film speeds, to show where your image was going to fall within the parameters of the specific film you had loaded in your camera.
I didn't mind at all that I didn't have the deluxe camera back model, being the all snooty and traditionalist film photographer that I am... that I didn't need that novice, new-fangled feature to tell me whether or not I was exposing properly... :-)
Been awhile since I had that dream... and do believe that it is the only one I have ever had, to my recollection.
JPH
Posted by: JPH | Sunday, 17 August 2008 at 12:03 AM
Just last night, I had a dream that I was at a concert in some sort of high school gym, and out of the blue the Roots came out on stage and no one was up front. I grabbed my camera and ran down there and proceeded to start snapping pics, only to get some weird error. I opened up the battery slot and someone had used it to store cigars, which had been crushed under the battery and ruined the camera.
So, let that be a lesson. Never store cigars in your camera, folks
Posted by: Chris Wage | Sunday, 17 August 2008 at 03:33 PM
um, Chris, i should probably not admit this but my Dad gave me a camera years ago. I used to shoot the occasional roll of b&w with it. However, at that all knowing age of 18 i didn't give a crap about photography, i just needed a safe place to store my hash where my parents and my 19 brothers and sisters would never find it. You got it. Damn, what a waste of a great what-ever-its-name-was-but-is-probably-a-classic-today-camera. If i knew then......
Posted by: dyathink | Sunday, 17 August 2008 at 06:49 PM
Had a dream not too long ago in which there was a moment of spectacularly beautiful and rapidly changing imagery all around me, and I was desperately trying to shoot a multi-frame panorama of it with a hand-held 4x5 press camera equipped with a strange sheet film magazine.
Wonderful to have you back, Mike.
robert e
Posted by: robert e | Tuesday, 19 August 2008 at 02:35 PM
Lately I'm having lots of camera dreams, but it's because I'm watching lots of ebay auctions for a pentax 67, (lost one for a complete kit by $10-grrr) so I keep dreaming of that. But then last night I dreamed I was in the darkroom and the lights kept coming on and I couldn't figure out why, until it turned out that I wasn't in a darkroom at all but someone's kitchen in Minneapolis with a friend that lives in Australia. I'm really not sure how all those disparate things converged in one subconscious location.
Posted by: Julie | Thursday, 21 August 2008 at 10:55 AM