The G2 ended up coming with me everywhere I went. With this gallery, I did street photography, still life and portraits and kind of let loose, departing from the more restrained work I had to do in my commercial photography studies. So I started taking photos and made a Tumblr album called Summer of G2 to host it. I think a lot of photographers find freedom when they shoot film, but I found it here instead. The Canon G2 ended up coming with me everywhere I went.
When I saw it, I said to myself, 'That’s the one.' The body also has a classic look to it, something ineffably iconic of its era. I also picked it out because its maximum aperture is F2.0. It turned out that Raw was very uncommon for cameras at the time apart from pretty much Canon cameras. The camera I ended up settling on was the Canon PowerShot G2. So what was the first camera you settled on? I made a list of qualities I looked for: cameras with CCD sensors that shot Raw and, initially, were released around 2001. That really interested me, so I started spending hours poring over DPReview looking for cameras. They stood out in a way apart from modern digital files: The dynamic range is narrower and the shadows have a character that looks different from those of modern CMOS cameras. So I asked myself, 'What will be the thing people look back to next, after film?' I started digging through Flickr archives of photos taken on older point and shoot digital cameras, or 'digicams' as some people called them, and felt there was something different about them.
#Digital camera retro how to
There were definitely a lot of talks in class about photographs looking too 'digital' as well as instructions on how to add more of an 'organic, analog' feel to your images.Īt the time, I observed to myself that the re-emergent fascination with film was probably ephemeral, specific to the current zeitgeist and highly rooted in nostalgia. There were definitely a lot of talks in class about photographs looking 'too digital' as well as instructions on how to add more of an 'organic, analog' feel to your images. I was in a commercial photography trade school and watched many of my peers either straight up shooting film or trying to recreate the aesthetics of film in editing. At the time, the analog revival was really taking off. I first got into older point and shoots back in 2014. Tell me a little bit about your interest in these cameras. I know you spend a lot of time shooting with digital cameras from the early and mid- 2000’s. This image, of the band Pleather, was shot on a Fujifilm FinePix E900. Sofi shoots a lot of portrait work for publication in the Pacific Northwest. My Seattle clients include Seattle Weekly, The Stranger, City Arts and the Weekly Volcano in Tacoma. I do photography and animated GIFs, mostly for journalistic purposes.
#Digital camera retro professional
Tell me about your professional work as a photographer. Lee only graduated college two years ago, but in that short time has amassed quite a few clients in the Pacific Northwest by shooting beautiful images that, yes, feature blown highlights, chromatic aberration, rudimentary noise reduction, coma and more.
And it's the limitations of these cameras that help to set Sofi's professional work apart from the crowd. His work covers the genres of Equestrian, Landscape, Abstract or Nature and combines nearly two decades of experience to offer exclusive limited-edition prints to the international stage from his film & digital photography.Film nostalgia in photography might be all the rage today – it seems a lot of people are hungry for that 'organic, analog look' – but for Seattle photographer Sofi Lee, nostalgia for vintage digital compacts is a lot more fun. He is familiar with and shows great interest in medium and large format photography with products by Phase One, Hasselblad, Alpa and Sinar and has used many cinema cameras from the likes of Sony, RED, ARRI and everything in between.
#Digital camera retro series
He is member of Nikon NPS and has been a Nikon user since the film days using a Nikon F5 and saw the digital transition with Nikon's D series cameras and is still to this day the youngest member to be elected in to BEWA, The British Equestrian Writers' Association. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts, holds a Foundation Degree in Equitation Science and is a Master of Arts in Publishing. Originally specialising in Equestrianism, his visuals have been used by the leading names in the equestrian industry such as The Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI), The Jockey Club, Horse & Hound and many more for various advertising campaigns, books and pre/post-event highlights. For nearly two decades Sebastian's work has been published internationally.