One of the targets I have set for myself is that I will walk a minimum of additional 8,000 steps every day for rest of the year. Walking out of the house with a camera is a great motivator and before I know it, I have surpassed my daily goals in a jiffy.

Yesterday, I decided it was time to play around with a film. I picked up my medium format Mamiya 6 camera and off I went to make some long exposures. The manual settings, the manual calculation of the time it would take to properly expose a photo and the idea that you for to wind-the-film forward were quite therapeutic compared to the rather automated world of digital. I did end up cheating a little.

I used the iPhoneX and an iOS app called Pinhole Assist to calculate the time it would take to expose correctly. By holding the iPhone camera against the 10-stop ND filter, I could get a good estimate of what my exposure times should be. The old-fashioned cable release and iPhone timer app were my other allies. I have exposed two rolls of FujiFilm Provia 100F, I have not clue how my photos turned out, as I have not dropped them off in a lab just yet.

While waiting for long exposures to evolve, I ended up making some photos with my iPhoneX — some long exposures, others views of the city from different angles. These photos were taken in the DNG format using a combination of Halide and Manual apps.

I edited them using my basic workflow that involves the Luminar 2018 and the DarkRoom App, on desktop and mobile respectively. It proved to me (again) that iPhoneX is a very very capable camera, though it suffers in low light and can get noisy. The photos I have shared are from the sunrise and the sunset and you can see the performance of the iPhoneX camera in declining light. Here are a handful of photos from yesterday.

January 29, 2018, San Francisco

A letter from Om

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