Visual Art by Jacob Mann

Lake Awosting

This picture is the only one in my collection that was shot on film. It was fall 2002, my digital camera at the time was Sony-707 which was not bad with 5 megapixels, but it had small and  noisy sensor. I've decided to give film a chance. To get the best possible quality I've decided to try a medium format camera. These cameras tend to be pretty expensive, so I've chosen Ukrainian camera Kiev-88, the one that looks like Hasselblad. With nice collection of lenses it came to around $1000. It was a lot of metal and glass to load my photo backpack with. Then one rainy day I've walked 9 miles to reach Lake Awosting and took this picture.

Kiev-88 is all manual camera, so I've used my Sony-707 to measure exposure and shot pictures with Kiev-88. But what killed the whole idea was scanning. Affordable film scanner was around $1000 but it gave very ordinary quality, a lot of noise, lousy sharpness. Really good film scanner was priced around $3000 which was out of my range. So after spending $2000 on big chunks of metal and glass I've got picture with quality comparable to my Sony-707. I was able to return all this equipment back and stayed with my little and light Sony-707 until  next year when I've bought Canon-10D.