Re: Take a moment and introduce yourself
Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2014 4:30 pm
I decided that I wanted a camera when I was 8 or 9 ~ about 1956. My princely allowance at that time was $.10 a week. But after some birthday money was received I was in funds and went to the pawn shop to see what they had. (There was a naval air station in our town and pawn shops did very well.) Amidst the Rolleiflexes and Zeiss-Ikons was an unloved Kodak Brownie Holiday Flash. I put $2 down and started scrounging up the next $3 - no, I didn’t get a particularly good price. I turned pop bottles in for the deposit, washed cars, and mostly saved my money for several weeks. Every week I added to the down payment. Eventually, the beauty was mine. I specialized in group photos of my buddies lined up in front of their bicycles. In their absence, my family members would be artfully placed in front of some object of wonder. Here is my grandmother standing in front of a bison on a trip to Canada. By some miracle I still have the (badly scratched) negative.
When I was 11 my mother re-married. The only relevance of this to my story was that my stepfather had been given a Leica by his brother who had bought it when stationed in Germany. (I’m sure that international treaties of that era required the purchase of a Leica, Rollei, or Zeiss-Ikon by all US service members.) Although both were fine athletes and intelligent men, neither could learn how to use the Leica or for that matter most any other mechanical device - a trait that persisted throughout their lives. But I consistently produced images with my Brownie - it would be wrong to call them photographs. By contrast, my stepfather never managed more than one usable image from a roll of 36. So, one day he asked me to trade. I gave him the Brownie and I got the Leica. I still have it (Leica IIIf with an Elmar f3.5 lens, flash attachment, etc.). Perhaps even better, he included Morgan and Lester’s Leica Manual. I read it many times and was amazed at the photos by Alfred Eisenstadt, Peter Stackpole, and Ansel Adams. I learned how the camera worked and even more important that you didn’t have to line people up in front of something to take their photograph. A true artistic breakthrough!
I used the Leica throughout school. When I got to graduate school I should have given it a good cleaning and bought a new light meter, but instead I was seduced by the idea of actually seeing what I was taking a photograph of so I bought a Canon FTb QL. I was delighted with it. No more inky-dinky double viewfinder-rangefinder. And all you had to do for an almost always decent exposure was to line up the doughnut with the stick in the viewfinder. Being an artiste at this point I usually used it in the equivalent of AV mode. I began with the FD 50mm f1.8 and then added the 28 f2.8 and the 100 f2.8. None of them are Canon’s best lenses from the period, but then I was a grad student and shouldn’t have been buying any of them. I later bought a Canon T70 and used the FD lenses with it. It is a very nice camera and combination. (Several of you NFF members kindly remarked on some photos I took in Indonesia with this setup.)
http://vimeo.com/michaelwhite/mikeandgw ... tadventure" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Although I still enjoy using film, I now mostly use a Pentax DSLR (K5, currently). They are lovely cameras with excellent lenses. And making photographs is still a source of great satisfaction. I’m only a middling amateur who photographs spasmodically but as all of you know, there is something immensely satisfying about envisioning an image and then capturing a bit of it on film or sensor. Indeed, I had a camera shutter fail quietly and completely once while on vacation. Every single frame from 10 rolls of film was black. Yet I still find the mental photographs that I made before pressing the button to be rewarding. I saw them in front of me, maneuvered the camera into position, and then locked them into my memory. They are there still.
Mike
PS Why the OpenWater alias? I like to scuba dive and one of my certifications is for open water diving. The photo in my avatar was taken while doing a decompression stop on ascent (Canon A70 in a Canon housing).
When I was 11 my mother re-married. The only relevance of this to my story was that my stepfather had been given a Leica by his brother who had bought it when stationed in Germany. (I’m sure that international treaties of that era required the purchase of a Leica, Rollei, or Zeiss-Ikon by all US service members.) Although both were fine athletes and intelligent men, neither could learn how to use the Leica or for that matter most any other mechanical device - a trait that persisted throughout their lives. But I consistently produced images with my Brownie - it would be wrong to call them photographs. By contrast, my stepfather never managed more than one usable image from a roll of 36. So, one day he asked me to trade. I gave him the Brownie and I got the Leica. I still have it (Leica IIIf with an Elmar f3.5 lens, flash attachment, etc.). Perhaps even better, he included Morgan and Lester’s Leica Manual. I read it many times and was amazed at the photos by Alfred Eisenstadt, Peter Stackpole, and Ansel Adams. I learned how the camera worked and even more important that you didn’t have to line people up in front of something to take their photograph. A true artistic breakthrough!
I used the Leica throughout school. When I got to graduate school I should have given it a good cleaning and bought a new light meter, but instead I was seduced by the idea of actually seeing what I was taking a photograph of so I bought a Canon FTb QL. I was delighted with it. No more inky-dinky double viewfinder-rangefinder. And all you had to do for an almost always decent exposure was to line up the doughnut with the stick in the viewfinder. Being an artiste at this point I usually used it in the equivalent of AV mode. I began with the FD 50mm f1.8 and then added the 28 f2.8 and the 100 f2.8. None of them are Canon’s best lenses from the period, but then I was a grad student and shouldn’t have been buying any of them. I later bought a Canon T70 and used the FD lenses with it. It is a very nice camera and combination. (Several of you NFF members kindly remarked on some photos I took in Indonesia with this setup.)
http://vimeo.com/michaelwhite/mikeandgw ... tadventure" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Although I still enjoy using film, I now mostly use a Pentax DSLR (K5, currently). They are lovely cameras with excellent lenses. And making photographs is still a source of great satisfaction. I’m only a middling amateur who photographs spasmodically but as all of you know, there is something immensely satisfying about envisioning an image and then capturing a bit of it on film or sensor. Indeed, I had a camera shutter fail quietly and completely once while on vacation. Every single frame from 10 rolls of film was black. Yet I still find the mental photographs that I made before pressing the button to be rewarding. I saw them in front of me, maneuvered the camera into position, and then locked them into my memory. They are there still.
Mike
PS Why the OpenWater alias? I like to scuba dive and one of my certifications is for open water diving. The photo in my avatar was taken while doing a decompression stop on ascent (Canon A70 in a Canon housing).
.......) I play irish pipes, can cook a wicked set of Buffalo Wings, hot sauce and all, been here , there, nearly everywhere, found NFF and got in invite from the CE himself to join as I was looking for an answer to some questions I had about a Retina RF camera, and have been a member ever since. Must be getting close to 6 years now, and made quite a few friends among the NFF community.
.......)