Portrait of the photographer
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. And it`s the limitations of these cameras that help to set Sofi`s professional work apart from the crowd.
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.
Tell me about your professional work as a photographer.
I do photography and animated GIFs, mostly for journalistic purposes. My Seattle clients include Seattle Weekly, The Stranger, City Arts and the Weekly Volcano in Tacoma. Nationally I´ve worked for Vice.
Sofi shoots a lot of portrait work for publication in the Pacific Northwest. This image, of the band Pleather, was shot on a Fujifilm FinePix E900. Photo: Sofi Lee
I know you spend a lot of time shooting with digital cameras from the early and mid- 2000´s. Tell me a little bit about your interest in these cameras.
I first got into older point and shoots back in 2014. At the time, the analog revival was really taking off. 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. 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.
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.
At the time, I observed to myself that the re-emergent fascination with film was probably ephemeral, specific to the current zeitgeist a ...
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