First Photo Chat Get-Together

Let’s get together! Yes, how about getting together to chat about our photographs and the stories behind them. What was your intent in making the photograph, what were you trying to say, was it a success? If you made your print, were there any particular challenges involved?

This is not a discussion focused on gear — the idea is to share insights, get constructive feedback, learn a few things, relax and make new friends!

Well, if this sounds interesting and fun, how about joining me in beautiful downtown Doylestown, PA, in the heart of scenic Bucks County, and we will get together over a cup of coffee.

Photographers of all levels are welcome.

I think a total of 3-4 people is the right size. Bring only a couple of prints to discuss. Obviously the prints should be Black and White and should be film based!

The first get together will be on Sunday, February 21st, 3:00-4:30 at the Zen Den coffee shop, located on ‪20 Donaldson Street, Doylestown, PA 18901.

Email or call me at 215-348-9171 if you are interested. First come first serve!

I look forward to meeting you!

First Photo Chat Get-Together

Let’s get together! Yes, how about getting together to chat about our photographs and the stories behind them. What was your intent in making the photograph, what were you trying to say, was it a success? If you made your print, were there any particular challenges involved?

This is not a discussion focused on gear — the idea is to share insights, get constructive feedback, learn a few things, relax and make new friends!

Well, if this sounds interesting and fun, how about joining me in beautiful downtown Doylestown, PA, in the heart of scenic Bucks County, and we will get together over a cup of coffee.

Photographers of all levels are welcome.

I think a total of 3-4 people is the right size. Bring only a couple of prints to discuss. Obviously the prints should be Black and White and should be film based!

The first get together will be on Sunday, February 21st, 3:00-4:30 at the Zen Den coffee shop, located on ‪20 Donaldson Street, Doylestown, PA 18901.

Email or call me at 215-348-9171 if you are interested. First come first serve!

I look forward to meeting you!

Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS)

You know him/her. You may even have been him/her.

I will be the first to admit I like film cameras irrespective of what their purpose is. They are neat, precision mechanical devices. One of my happiest moments was when I finally got my brand spanking new Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic F after all the research and agonizing over the various alternatives. That and the nifty 55mm f1.8 screw mount lens that came with it. Half the fun was going to the camera store, looking at all the cool cameras, then pouring over all the glossy company literature day after day that was stuffed under my night stand on the floor. I especially was captivated by the discussion of Honeywell’s multilayered coatings used on its Super-Takumar lenses.

You can imagine how sad I was after the camera’s pentaprism got dented as a result of traveling with me when I happened to get into a little car accident. But I was happy again when I was able to save up and get its replacement, a brand new Nikkormat FTn with a 50mm f2 lens – the gateway into Nikon land! I couldn’t afford the Nikkormat the first time around, but I had it now!

The Spotmatic and Nikkormat were fine pieces of equipment and their lenses served me well. No doubt they still would!

Guess what … I have gone through a lot of gear. One of my friends has kindly called it equipment churn. But I don’t have a problem with trying new brands or different formats to see I how like them.

While it is true that you can make a great picture with any camera/lens, anyone that says there isn’t something special about the intimate relationship you have with a particular mechanical device and how it works is simply not telling the truth.

So there, I’ll say it; you should be one with your equipment and enjoy what you are using! I am, and I do!

But the demise of many dedicated brick and mortar camera stores has made it near impossible for many to touch and feel film cameras and their lenses. If you live in or near a large city maybe you still have a place to go with a decent used film camera case, but if not, you’re stuck purchasing online or over the phone, sight unseen.

Look, I have kissed a lot of frogs along the way, only to end up selling them because I felt they were too complicated to use, or they didn’t intuitively enable me to produce what I wanted to produce, etc. And I can honestly admit I don’t have a problem with that.

So what about GAS? I think GAS occurs when you have too many cameras and lenses that you don’t need, and acquiring them becomes the journey instead of actually getting out in the world and making pictures.

Let’s face it, it’s fun to buy things and certainly it’s not as scary as having to put yourself out there and possibly fail at what you set out to do, or not enjoy yourself because of unreasonable expectations you or others have created or instilled within you.

This is not to say that it’s wrong to own and use more than one format for different applications, or even two types of cameras of the same format, such as a rangefinder and a single lens reflex (I do). I think where things go haywire is when you start buying much more than you can ever reasonably use because you feel a need to have things that go beyond your true need to use them. That does not mean it’s a bad idea to own a lens that you may only use ten percent of the time.

There is nothing worse than being in a position where you need that lens to make the picture and you don’t have it. In fact, while it is well known that Henri Cartier-Bresson used the 50mm lens to make the vast majority of his wonderful pictures, he also used other lenses on occasion when the need called for them. On the other hand, the great photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt favored the 35mm lens, but also used others when necessary such as the 90mm for his iconic portrait of Marilyn Monroe.

The bottom line is that unless you require specialty focal length lenses for things like wildlife, you can pretty much conquer the world with just three lenses – the normal, the mild wide and the mild telephoto.

OK, so have I succumbed to the dreaded GAS? Of course I have and I can stand before you and admit it!

Its happened once or twice, but in the end I was able to fight off the demons lurking inside … like the time when I walked into the camera store and saw all those used but mint Leica R ROM lenses for my Leica R9 camera. I knew what they were, what they were worth and they were sitting there all in one location in front of me! Carrying a credit card can be a curse and before I knew it they were mine … mine! I honestly couldn’t help myself. Fabled fixed focal lengths and zooms I had never dreamed of using before — I was now fantasizing how I would employ them to enable me the flexibility to make pictures I had never made before or ever had an interest in making!

While I used a 50mm lens or its equivalent to make the vast majority of all my photographs, I made all the necessary justifications and the deed was done. Yes I made a Faustian bargain with the devil; the deal was too good to pass up and having them would make me a better photographer. Wrong! Once I had these Teutonic gems in my possession you can’t imagine what a distraction they became, not to mention how much space they took up in my camera bag and extra weight they added!

To make a long story short, after much self-inflicted angst, most were sold (although a few replaced my basic older and slower versions … I am only human you know!) and all was well again, financially and photographically.

A Strip of Wood and Why It May Be Your Most Important Piece of Equipment

Fred Picker was right.

Most will never see many of their photographs hung on a wall. There are a number of reasons for this. In fact most digital photographs remain on the computer and are only displayed on the Internet. And many who print their analog photographs often consign their work to the boxes that contained the printing paper used to make them. Sad but true!

But let’s say you are printing and mounting your photographs; have you taken the necessary amount of time to really examine them in a contemplative fashion over a period of time to determine if they are good and say what you wanted said? For many the answer is no.

Fred Picker had a great idea. He said it was important to mount a strip of wood on the wall in a place where you could view your mounted prints, lit in a manner they might normally appear in, and at a height they would be normally viewed. He was right; I have one in my workroom, lit by focused eyeballs. This simple setup enables you sit back over a period of time and really decide if your prints are keepers or material for the circular file. This can be painful, but valuable for several reasons: (1) you can actually see your prints on a wall, which is most gratifying if you have never experienced this before; and (2) you can determine if more work needs to be done in the darkroom to make the final print better, or whether it just makes sense to cut your losses and toss it because it really isn’t that good after all.

Think about it, how many hopelessly boring, even if technically sound photographs have you seen on the Internet?

So please consider this deceptively simple device: go to Home Deport or Lowes, get a strip of molding and attach it to the wall. That’s right! Print your photographs, mount them or have them mounted, then stand them up on the strip of molding and study them for a while.

One of two things will happen. Either you will come to the decision that the print you are studying is a statement of what you saw in your minds eye and is deserving, or you will decide that it needs more work or isn’t very good after all. In any case you will have learned a lot and taken a major step to create what speaks to you and is only your best work!

Looked in the Fridge the Other Day … My Plus-X Supply

Looked in the fridge the other day and wondered if I should be nervous or not. Kodak discontinued Plus-X several years ago and it was a sad day for many of us. Since that time I have been nursing a stash of rebranded and now expired Plus-X that I purchased from Freestyle Photographic Supplies in Los Angeles. Not the most convenient to use… 24 exposures per roll instead of 36, but I took what I could get and have about 50 rolls or so left. Ok, so that’s the bad news, because I love Plus-X and have used it on and off for years. Sort of like my LL Bean waxed field coat that is about 15 years old and is no longer being made. Yes, it has holes in it but I love it. It’s an old friend. My wife thinks it is time for it to be retired, so I need to find a different version from Bean, Eddie Bauer or someone else and learn to love it too.

Back to the Plus-X … I will adapt, find a near replacement or perhaps something even better.

Don’t get discouraged or caught up in the argument that film (and paper) is dead; instead, just take a look for example at the black and white films Freestyle lists in its inventory:

  • Adox
  • Agfa
  • Arista
  • EDU Ultra
  • Ezox
  • Foma
  • Fujifilm
  • Holga
  • Ilford
  • Kentmere
  • Kodak
  • Rollei

And there are others out there that Freestyle doesn’t carry! In fact, there a number of black and white film alternatives that didn’t exist or where not easily available 5 years ago!!!!

So there really is a wealth of black and white film … and the opportunity out there for those that want to use this wonderful medium!

Edward and Brett Weston: Dune

What a wonderful book! If you like gorgeous black and white landscape images focused on the great deserts of the Southwest … and you like Edward Weston and his son Brett Weston … then this book is for you! Actually, even if you are on the fence about photographs of sand dunes, this is a book that deserves to be on everyone’s bookshelf.

It’s an interesting concept carried out masterfully. The book contains great introductory essays by Edward’s one time wife and muse Charis Wilson, and Brett’s friend and biographer John Charles Woods. Also included are wonderful excerpts taken from correspondences between father and son.

But what really counts though are the beautifully reproduced images of the great sand dunes, presented in a way that enables them to stand on their own for the treasures they are, but also in a manner that allows us to compare and contrast the vision of two of the Twentieth Century’s most important photographers.

This extraordinary book is bargain and still in print. Get it; you won’t be sorry!

Impressionist Art and Paul Strand’s Photography … What Can Be Learned?

This past September, just before it left town, I was able to see a really great exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – “Discovering the Impressionists…Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting”. Well, I finally am getting a chance to write about it!

What a lucky opportunity! Apparently this was a “once in a lifetime special exhibit of Impressionist art associated with Durand-Ruel who as an art dealer in Paris that both championed and supported the new painting genre. Organized in part by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this was the show’s only US stop. The exhibit presented over 90 paintings including well-known favorites — but more importantly, many that had not been seen in the US for decades, or ever before! Included in the exhibit were works by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Manet, Cassatt and others.

To say it was an eye opener would be an understatement, and it certainly put an exclamation point on the notion that those who wish to improve their photography can learn a thing or two (or three or four, or many more!!) from studying the great painters.

Here are a few observations:

  1. Most of the paintings were horizontals, but there were some notable vertical presentations.
  2. All were rectangular in shape.
  3. There was a great feeling of light, whether the subject was landscape or portrait. They were luminous!
  4. Many of the scenes were of everyday life – people and their surroundings that included buildings, bridges and landscape.
  5. One series of 15 paintings by Monet focused on a grouping of Poplar trees seen in different seasons of the year, different light, and in different weather conditions.
  6. When looking at the paintings it seemed the perspective is what I would describe as close to “normal”, meaning not to wide or not to compressed.

I thought about these points for a while and it all brought me back to the wonderful Strand exhibit I had seen in ten months earlier – also at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Strand was very careful in thinking about his composition and so were the Impressionist masters. Strand focused on scenes of everyday life – people and their surroundings, just like the Impressionists. No exaggerated perspective in Strand’s work and the same was true of the Impressionist paintings I saw. This was particularly evident when looking at Renior’s tightly focused “Dancers” series. Well guess what, it turns out that Strand used only one lens for his 8×10 and 5×7 (modified to 5×6) cameras – a 12 inch Goerz Dagor. That is normal lens (e.g., analogous to a 50mm in 35mm format) for 8×10 and a mild telephoto for his 5×6. If I were looking at the paintings as photographs I would have guessed the same thing! There was a purity of vision and focus in both the paintings and the photographs.

All of the above is not meant to say that Strand was bald copier of the Impressionists. What I am trying to say is that I saw a lot in the Impressionist exhibit that could be and should be applied to photography, and upon reflection was applied by one of the greatest photographers of Twentieth Century.

Living a Photographic Life

I previously spoke about keeping your head in the game. That idea relates to the joy of living a photographic life. The question is how to do this! Let’s face it; most of us have non-photographic jobs, family obligations, etc. So short of making photography your livelihood, what can you do? Obviously you will want to go out into the world and make photographs. Trouble is that most don’t have the time or ability to do that on a regular and continuous basis. So our avocation can’t be our vocation. Time to move onto Plan B, which for most of us is the real world. But living in the real world doesn’t mean we cannot live a photographic life.

Here is a list of ten things you can do.

  1. Make photographs whenever you can. And don’t feel you have to travel to some “exciting” or otherwise exotic location. Come to the realization that there is much around you that is interesting if you are open to it.
  2. If you have a darkroom develop your film and make proof sheets.
  3. Carefully examine your proof sheets and make prints of only the best images.
  4. Read books about photographers.
  5. Study monographs you own of your favorite photographers
  6. Go to the library; take out books and monographs on photographers you aren’t familiar with.
  7. Go to new and used (one of my favorite things to do) bookstores and search for books and monographs on photographers you aren’t familiar with. This is a lot more fun than looking on line.
  8. Utilize the Internet for interesting and useful forums, blogs and websites for good ideas.
  9. Visit museums and galleries for photographic exhibits. You will be inspired by the works of the masters and learn you are as good or better than a lot of what is being shown. That alone should inspire you to press on!
  10. Take a photographic workshop with someone you respect that is supportive and will help you.

Bonus idea — visit museums and galleries for art exhibits. Yes, that is what I am saying! Believe it or not you can learn a lot about composition and light, and use the experience to develop new photographic ideas.

I am sure you can think of some more ideas yourself. Now go and live a photographic life!