Documenting Thirty Days

This weekend has been hectic. Besides having to be in a hospital for an unpleasant amount of time, I was able to have an artistic adventure. My cousin is a photographer (it's mainly a hobby of his) and he is really great. He travels as often as he can and has been to Iceland, Ireland, Croatia, numerous states and national parks, just to name a few. He shoots mostly nature landscapes. When I was looking through his photos, I noticed that he had quite a few of long exposure nature landscapes, which are my favorite! I really wish I could share some of his pictures, but he doesn't have any work online which is too bad. When I went to visit him, he gave me a tour of all of his equipment and showed me hundreds of his prints. I asked him for any advice he had for gigs and what not, but he doesn't do gigs whatsoever. I do respect that though, as he is making art for himself.

Here's some of his equipment (my phone's camera is awful).

He has five cameras, all of which are Nikon. He also has some nice lenses such as a 300mm f/4 and a 80-200mm. He has a few other ones, but those were my favorites in the bunch. Most of his equipment is from before 2000, but everything is built so well so it would really be a waste of money to upgrade to any newer models of what he has. The only somewhat new piece of equipment that he has is his Nikon D300m, and even that is six years old now. He still uses film, but unfortunately it's a bit of a hassle and is a thing of the past. I personally love it, but there is no doubt that it is inconvenient to a certain. I think film will always be number one in my heart because it is more personal in a sense. When you shoot digital, I feel that you can mess up more because you have the liberty to; you can just look at the screen and see what you need to fix about the photo. With film, you want to think a little bit more about what you're doing because you won't be able to see what you shot until the film is developed, so you want to make it worthwhile. That's my personal feel for it, of course everyone has a different opinion and comfortability.

'Twas a great art adventure, and one that definitely inspired me.