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  Fujifilm TX-1 | Super-EBC Fujinon 45/4 | Kodak Portra 400 | Pacific Image PrimeFilm 120 Pro  "To the coast" is another fairly atypical photo for me.  I'm really not a landscape person-- they just leave me cold most of the time-- but I have a handful of pictures from specific excursions that I still like.  This is one of them, taken on the west coast of the United States (near Portland, Oregon). (I also don't shoot Portra very often; I have a preference for Kodak's cheaper stocks given a stop of overexposure.  Still, it is a very nice film and has a reputation for a reason!)     This one is exceedingly simple from a compositional standpoint.  You have the subjects (the two people and their dogs) generally clustered along the left-bottom third of the image, arranged along the bottom-left-to-top-right diagonal and in the foreground.  The walkers' sweaters are distinctly colored against the backdrop of dune grasses, causing them to jump out imm...

  Fujifilm TX-1 / Super-EBC Fujinon 45/4 / Ultrafine Xtreme 400 / Epson V550 "Hudson moment" describes, well, a moment featuring someone spending time by the eponymous river.  I've used this image as an example of heavily "weighted" compositions leveraging the panoramic format on a few occasions, as well as in a small series on moments of solitude amidst the big and bustling city. The image is dominated by three important lines.  The top of the safety rail (which lines up with the horizon) rides the boundary of the lower third, while the lampposts establish a strong frame-within-a-frame between them.  With a largely-symmetrical composition, the difference in visual "weight" on the right side (between both distribution of the New Jersey skyline and the subject) pulls the viewer in that direction.  Starting with the sitting person, the railing guides attention over to the other lamppost (particularly if the viewer is checking for lateral symmetry), at wh...

  This is a near-full rewrite of an article that was originally shared on Casual Photophile in August 2024. In addition to tweaking some content, I also wanted to correct a technical error and address some formatting issues that arose during publication. All photos in this article were taken by me, and were exported as JPEGs 2000px on the long axis. In 2016, I bought a camera, two lenses, and a bag full of accessories that completely changed my relationship with photography. At the time, I was on a rangefinder kick (via the Leica M6 TTL and Minolta CLE) and had also been dabbling with medium format (using a Mamiya 645, Bronica SQ-A, and a motley assortment of others) on the side. Within a year, everything else was gone. In the near-decade since, I’ve occasionally tried to get back into “regular” 3:2 shooting through various compacts, but none of them had any staying power. I liked some of them conceptually, sure, but… …I was too hooked on the Fujifilm TX-1, a 35m...