While I’ve been having loads of fun with film, I have another couple of projects in-progress or on hold, and it’s a shame to leave them all twisting in the wind.

So, seeing as a new month is starting up, I’ll interrupt the film fest for this digital interlude.

Happy Groundhog Day!I’m all for slowing down some.

Some months or years ago, someone suggested to use a low-capacity memory cards in an attempt to force yourself to slow down and consider what you shoot a bit more.

I thought this was a pretty good idea, but alas, the smallest SD card I owned at the time would hold about 200 shots from the D7000, and the smallest card I could find on Amazon at the time would hold 50 or more. I thought about buying one, but abandoned the idea, and more or less forgot about it.

Then, I got the Olympus C-5050 from Mom, and the xD card she included would hold a mere 34 RAW files from the Olympus, and so I thought it would be a good idea to try it again.

So I did… I took about two or three months or more to shoot through the card. I wanted to go faster, but the batteries that came with kept going dead… Gotta love old rechargables!

Some 3 year old eneloops solved that problem, but then when I finally shot through the 34 pictures, I found nothing worth sharing.

So I decided to try and shoot the whole ‘roll’ at one time, one outing, and an opportunity came when Hana, Mom and I went to a local nursery.

I didn’t shoot all 34 there… maybe only 25 or 26. And most of those had framing errors due to parallax and my refusal to use the screen for framing. Others had focus errors, also due to my refusal of the screen.

But there were a few ‘keepers.’ I like this little camera.

And the rest of the roll was shot on the way to and in the garage before work. I haven’t quite figured out all the ins and outs of shooting in Manual mode with this little camera, but if I set the Aperture in Aperture mode, then switch to Manual, it remembers the aperture and I can use the thumb wheel to dial in the shutter speed. That little trick was very helpful in securing both of these. The auto exposure modes wanted to massively overexpose.

This is a nice trick, if you ever want to slow down a bit. It’ll be hard, though: cards these days keep getting bigger, smaller, and cheaper.

Olympus C-5050, in A mode and M mode. Files processed in Lightroom 5.

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