Light, Color, and Gesture and Good Reflection
Jay Maisel, New York photographer mentions light, color, and gesture. Gesture can be a persons’ hand position, the way they stand or what they stand on. It also seems to work for inanimate objects. This bloom seems to emerge from the murky waters and come blazing into the light. Lighting is key as is more shallow depth of focus. Sometimes the image works better if everything is NOT in tack sharp focus. And sometimes, what’s implied while a little blurry is more than litteral pictorial tack sharpness. 
An Uncommon Place
What often fascinates me is that photography still has a rich source of black and white images. The orginal image for the one shown here is a riot of Fall color. But the texture favoring nature of B&W images still rules when color may be a distraction. What do you think?
Forbidden Garden beyond the gate
Toy Camera Still Works
Fast forward to the present day, that old plastic camera still works. It requires 620 film. The only difference between 620 and the current 120 film is the diameter of the spools. Thanks to a couple of mail order camera stores, I was able to get 620 rolls of film ready made.
I’m told, I could do it myself if I had a stock of the right spools and a film changing bag. I’m not yet there for the “do it yourself”.
The results are not bad although I have to get broken of my habits from using a modern DSLR. Here is a photo taken last Fall — September 2012 in Nevada using my boyhood camera.
Winnemucca NV
Way Back When Film was king
I started with this “toy” camera. It is plastic with a very simple shutter. The lens is plastic and has no adjustments. As an 8 year old boy, I thought it was pretty good. The hardest part was loading the film spools and getting it wound to the number 1 exposure.
Today, it would be a hot item for lomography. It did not however have light leaks and other defects built in to create special effects. With a little fumbling of the loading or unloading, you could get some of those effects just fine.
I found a few of the old negatives and put my scanner to work on them. One of the first was a photo of the neighborhood kids next door. It looked pretty classy with a few light leaks, maybe from my young hands handling the film spool. The second photo is taken to document our trip out of California around 1948. You can see my mom, and my sister somewhere on the desert. This was probably on route 40 headed to Needles and points East.
Neighbor kids as models.
Mom
Out West: Cities, Open Spaces and Between 