I know you usually don’t answer this kind of questions, but what would be your no. 1 advice to keep the faith in analog photography? Good job, btw.

3sixty5photography:

Wow. Interesting question. Being that Im sitting her scanning you’ve got my full attention so lets see if I can answer this….

I would say that for me it comes down to the magic of film. Sure I could use a digital camera take a picture, drop it into lightroom and edit it to a perfect curve, then throw on some filters to get a nice grain, throw in some contract and you get a close proximity to a film shoot.

But theres no magic in that for me.

The idea that I can only take a limited amount of shots per roll makes me take a few milliseconds more to compose the shot. It makes every shot I take better and its the magic between the film and light that creates the image. 

The image is captured by a interaction of light and chemistry and I love that. 

Then finally there is nothing better than finally getting images back from the lab. Its 36 frames of Christmas every time I get a roll.

Sure I pay more for film, sure I am limited by it, sure its more work, but all of it is worth it for the magic.  

Hey Tumblr! Happy Tuesday.

Ive spent about the last week consolidating 10 to 15 hard drives into a single massive LightRoom library. Its a crazy thing to see 10 years of your life all massed together into a single place. Seeing how Ive evolved and the pictures I take have changed its both embarrassing and intriguing. 

Even seeing myself 3 years ago feels like looking at a stranger. Weird that photography can have that effect. 

It’s rare that I feel like ranting about the state of social media, especially Instagram and their insane nazi view towards nudity, but maybe having too much coffee this morning has compelled me. This photo, which had no more nudity in it than any bathing suit, or Miley’s wrecking ball photos, still on her page, was taken down; and for what reason? Who knows cause Instagram won’t say why. Email them you may say? Nope. They have no contact information anymore. THERE IS NO WAY WHAT SO EVER to reach IG. So how does it work? I suspect that if enough children, believing that all social media should fall to the knees of their shallow view of the world, flag a photo it comes down regardless of having actual nudity or not. What this system really promotes is the most shallow and childish view of the human experience; if those that live on the low bar complain IG has empowered them by lowering the bar to their level. As you can see from the tumblr notes 15k people connected with this photo and it’s sentiment of love for life. Now by now you’re thinking “Derek what’s the point here?” And the point is this. Instagram activity of its earliest users is down. Artists engagement on IG is down. What IG is becoming is our grandma’s mobile version of Facebook; no long the interesting venue for creative minds to meet and collaborate. All in all. That’s a god damn shame. Thankfully there are still some social media out there fighting against the backslide in the views of the human body, its just too bad IG decided to cow tail to the views of children, but only appropriately it will die the death of 150million 13 year old selfies. End of rant.

Looking for CA based models.

We are starting to plan out some new shoots, new formats and new products for our Etsy store that we are going to be working on this year.

To do that we are looking for models in CA, or models planning to travel through CA.

We’ve already got several shoots in mind, so if we’ve talked, we haven’t forgotten about you, simply looking forward to later in the year.

If you’re interested please reach out. derek@derek-woods.com