I feel like the period that influenced my work most was the couple years before my first son, James, was born.  I focused my free time shooting film with antique medium-format cameras, and mostly long exposures at night.  I shot everything manually and it forced me to really learn and understand the correlation between shutter speed, aperture, film speed (ISO), reciprocity failure, and assessing the conditions of a given scene.  Even though I don't have time any longer to shoot film for fun, I feel that it drastically improved my photography as a whole.

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