How does the experience of taking photos differ between the various types of cameras you have used? How does your style change as a reflection of these differences?

Vivienne:

I’ve used three cameras this year: my phone, a manual digital Canon camera, and most recently, the disposable camera Newspaper provided us with this year. I developed my photo style using my phone, where I take multiple photos of one subject, choose the best one, then edit it using the built-in photo adjustment software on the iPhone. The phone’s main strength as a camera is its versatility: my phone is always in my pocket so I can whip it out and capture spontaneous moments. In comparison, I had to plan ahead of time if I wanted to bring the Canon camera or the disposable camera to a photo shoot, especially for the Canon. Although it’s a digital camera, the exposure, focus, and color grading are controlled manually and I had to set up the settings to get the photos I wanted. I ended up coming to locations multiple times with an idea of what I should photograph. As for the disposable camera, I had a similar process of coming up with an idea of what to photograph, but my subjects tended to be more uniform to highlight the graininess of the photo. I liked leaning into the nostalgic blurriness of the disposable camera. Even on the other two cameras—which are crisper and have more accurate colors—there’s always some distortion of colors or size, and the photo is never 100% the same as how it looks in real life. I love highlighting the difference between how a camera sees the world and how our eyes see it, and the disposable camera was a great way to bring that out. Overall, my style stayed the same—dramatic lights, lone subjects, and using the rule of thirds—but the way I experimented with taking photos changed between the three cameras. I still prefer my phone for convenience, but my favorite is the disposable camera for novelty.

Ellen:

I’ve had experience with three types of cameras, each offering a different way to capture a moment. During my time on the Excalibur Yearbook staff this year, I was given the opportunity to use a single-lens reflex camera, one of the many camera options available for staff. I learned the different ways of controlling the modes and manual settings with the intention to take a perfect picture. This camera taught me that photography is as much about quality and clarity as it is quantity. In contrast, most of the photos I took for Photography Section galleries or for schoolwork were using my iPhone camera. Unlike the SLR camera, my phone camera did not need manual adjustment to reach the perfect exposure and lighting. The resultant ability to take many pictures with clear quality and versatility is useful for journalism. Occasionally, I use my Polaroid to take candid pictures of my environment for fun. While the other two cameras focus on crisp quality, the digi camera focuses on an aesthetic blur that inspires nostalgia unlike any other camera.