UNIT 4 - AO2 (3/3) - Documenting My Photography

From the around the end of UNIT 3 I had recently picked up a 1956 Twin-Lens-Reflex or "TLR" 120 film camera, with its waist-level viewfinder, you have to look downwards into the huge, bright square viewfinder which entail reveals a mirrored image. So far for me personally, I've found medium format photography to be the most exciting way to take images, especially when using a TLR camera. There's a unique and characterful experience that comes when shooting one of these things. That's why I wanted to find a way to document my photography when I shoot on this thing, it allows the viewer to see the creative decisions and scene to get a sense of what's going on around me. To do this I would have to create a rig that would connect to the bottom of the TLR and arch up high enough so that I could attach my A7R to the top of it to record what's going on in the viewfinder. After finding the right materials materials I assembled it all together and got the cameras ready to shoot. I loaded a fresh roll of HP5+ into the TLR and walked into town, the picture to the right of this text shows my friend operating the rig. I'm not going to lie, trying to take photographs and look down the viewfinder at the same time was incredibly tedious and frustrating at times. The way the video camera and mast was placed made it hard to look at the viewfinder properly. It wasn't covert either, whilst I was walking around town it made me stand out among the crowd which was good and bad at times in terms of taking photographs. It was really heavy as well. The total weight of the rig was nearing 2kg and after an hour it my arms arched a lot, to fix this I went to staples and picked up some string to make a neckstrap to take some of the weight off my arms.

The collage below shows the moments and photographs that I captured on a walk into Sheffield City centre the following day. All of the Images on the Left are what I saw through the camera at the exact moment of capture and all of the images on the right are the resulting photographs.

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Now that I've actually shot a roll of film and have the moments of the photographs captured alongside them, I'm quite taken away, for me it's changed my perspective on photography and how I take photographs as you don't really think about yourself when taking photographs on the street, which is why I find it intriguing to see the moment in through the camera and seeing my own creative thought process and reactions to different scenes. Although I didn't have chance to make a full video, I've made this short montage looking through the TLR during my walk into town.

In conclusion, I am really excited about this new technique I've experimented with in this piece and the photographs that were produced as well. Unfortunately however, shortly upon arriving back home, I would come to find the TLR's Aperture dial broken somehow so my aspirations to further explore the world of Medium Format and shooting on the TLR have been shelved until I can find a future replacement.