Micael Widell Newsletter #29
Captain's log
August was a bit of a tough month for my creative endeavours. Partly because I had less hours than normally to do work, partly because the work I did was mostly lens and gear reviews. I have noticed that I enjoy doing pure photography videos a lot more than I enjoy doing gear review videos. But every time some manufacturer or agent e-mails about a new exciting product that I can be one of the first in the world to try out, I often eagerly say yes immediately before remembering that it actually is pretty tedious work to make a proper review of a product.
I also felt slightly burned out from macro photography. I feel like I'm not really progressing in my style – I'm getting a bit bored with my photos. I want to find a more unique expression in my photography. I feel like I am ready for it. I have done my five years of groundwork, learning the basics of photography and macro photography on a technical level – now I need to make unique art with it, that really stands out in some way. I am pretty confident I will find this expression eventually if I keep going, but I am not sure when and how.
/Micael
Film Meditations
Something I often do, when I feel less inspired to do photography, is to switch gear completely. I recently purchased a cheap Yashica A TLR camera (the first TLR I ever owned or used), and I love it. What I love most about it is how small and compact it is, and also the fact that it only cost me $80. For some reason, buying a product at a bargain price adds some kind of extra quality and joy to it, just because it was a steal. Is it just me, or do you agree? Also, the lens on the Yashica A has a wonderful, vintage looking, slightly swirly bokeh which adds a nice touch to the photos.
Analog photography is still a lot of work though if you are developing the film yourself. And if you send it to a lab, it takes a long time and costs quite a bit of money, before you get to see the results. I am pretty impatient so I really want to be able to shoot a roll during the day and see the results the same evening. But I don't have the patience to do C41 color processing at home, as you have to deal with several different chemical liquids, which also have to be in exactly the correct temperature etc.
My solution is that I shoot in black and white, and I use the wonderful product Cinestill Monobath which is a liquid you can use to develop black and white film, at home, with just a single bath for 5 minutes, at room temperature. Super convenient! In this video I made a long time ago you can see more of this process.
For scanning nowadays, I use a light table and just photograph the film with a macro lens - it is much quicker and gives better results than a flatbed scanner in my opinion.
It is not that I think analog photos look better in any way than digital photos. They just look slightly different. And it is not that I really enjoy the process of analog photography that much – it is a lot of work per finished photo compared to digital.
But the mere fact that everything about analog photography is so different from what I am used to, forces me to think and reflect a lot more during the whole process, and this makes it more engaging and interesting, when I feel like I am in a rut with my regular digital photography. It rekindles my inspiration! And the tediousness of developing and scanning, and sometimes making a mistake destroying the whole roll of film, makes me so much more pumped when I return to my digital cameras.
The NFT Craze
My big passion in life for the past five or six years has truly been photography and photography gear. It still is. But sometimes I get slightly bored with it temporarily, and that is when I often let some other passion take over. Last winter it was FPV drones (something I still enjoy and try to practice when I have time and space for it). The last week or two it has been NFTs.
NFTs, if you are not familiar with the concept, is basically jpegs that you can buy and sell official ownership of, using cryptocurrency. Anyone can still right click on these jpegs and download the very same photo you happen to own, but nobody can take away your ownership of a piece that you bought. The whole concept sounds laughable when you first hear about it – why would any sane person pay lots of money for owning a jpeg that anyone can download for free?
But as I have experienced, the minute you try it out for yourself by buying one, something interesting happens. It turns out, even if you just buy a certificate of ownership, the emotions you feel inside are very similar to when you buy something in the "real world". This is why I think NFTs are so popular, and have exploded in the last month.
We are right in the middle of a NFT explosion. Markets have 10x-ed in sales and traffic in the last month. Some photographers have released very, very successful collections of NFTs. A notable example is Twin Flames, a collection of 100 portraits of twins. At the time of writing, the highest sale price of one of these photos is 170 ETH, which right now equals 662 000 US dollars. The funny thing is that when you buy an NFT, you usually don't even get the rights to the photo. You just buy the NFT.
I have been buying into a pixel art project called Crypto Duckies. There are a total of 5000 different pixel art ducks with different traits – some more common, some more rare. They are inspired by the first massively popular NFT project Crypto Punks. An original crypto punk costs hundreds of thousands of dollars at the cheapest these days.
I have been interested in buying my first NFT for months, but never found one I loved the look of, and that I could afford. Crypto Duckies was love at first sight for me. So I decided to buy one. It cost me around $200, including the pretty high transaction fee to buy NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.
Then I felt like I loved my duckie so much that I probably never want to sell it, so I decided to buy one more, as an investment. Then I bought even more of them, until I had spent a lot more money than I had initially planned. It is a risky bet of course. But I feel that if NFTs have a future, which I believe they do, this project is of such a high quality that it should be a winner. We'll see. It is worth pointing out, that you should never, ever, invest money that you cannot afford to completely lose.
The whole NFT economy feels like it is probably a big bubble short term, but I really believe in it long term. That is why I invest money and time to learn all about NFTs, because I think they will be around for the rest of our lives. Even if my duckies go down to zero in value, the money I spent on them caused me to learn many things about how the NFT markets work, and that is knowledge that will be valuable to me in the future.
But of course there will be ups and downs, we are still very early here. I feel like the NFT world is in the same stage that the Internet was back in 1993. It was about to be a big revolution, but most people had never heard of it or used it yet, only early adopters were into it. Then it went through a series of bull and bear markets before being in everyone's pocket two decades later. Either way, it is very inspiring to see artists and photographers go from poor, to making a living from NFTs, in just a few months. This is a revolution for the art world, a revolution that most people do not yet know about.
I think I will make a video about NFTs soon, and also release my own NFT collection as an experiment.
My Published Videos since the last newsletter
Goodbye for now
Thank you for reading this far, and see you in a month! Feel free to follow me on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter in the meantime. If you like my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon. And lastly, please also feel free to tell your friends about this newsletter, and to reply to it if you have feedback or comments :)
/Micael