This category will focus on my photography in the film era.
In April 1979, I was quite proud to be selected to be on the Talon Yearbook staff the following year. At that time, I imagined I would be a writer. During the following year on the staff, however, I discovered that I wasn’t at all interested in writing feature stories, but very much was in…
Continue reading →Readers of my social blog know that I recently moved from one office, formerly the darkroom, to another office, formerly composition, at work. I talked about the work it required and a bit of the history of my workplace. One aspect I didn’t explore much is how I make my work environment feel like home….
Continue reading →Much of the world around us is driven by economics. Exceptions might be institutions like the Smithsonian or the National Archives, but even they are frequently at the mercy of money. That’s a shame, of course, but it’s a reality. In photography, one such reality is that, in the shift from film to digital in…
Continue reading →I recently updated and re-edited a post on our travel blog from a photography trip I made to New Mexico in 1999, Villanueva. Named after the tiny village on the Pecos River where I borrowed a summer house, the original purpose of the expedition was to shoot black-and-white, mostly medium format, film. The re-edited trip…
Continue reading →1984. College. I am the Chief Photographer for the Oklahoma Daily newspaper and the Sooner Yearbook. It’s 4 a.m., and Robert and I have been printing since midnight. The Kodak Indicator Stop Bath has turned purple on us twice as we exhausted it. The Dektol print developer is getting brown. Robert lifts a print out…
Continue reading →I touched on black-and-white filters in an entry not long ago after a photographer webfriend of mine, Tom Clark, said he was returning to black-and-white film combined with one of his very favorite lenses, the Nikkor 105mm f/1.8. I had one of these jewels for most of my film-based shooting career, and it was an…
Continue reading →For decades before the internet and expensive color printing presses, many, or even most, photographs were in black-and-white. The first films were all black-and-white. In practice, the first color film was Kodachrome, introduced in 1935. My career followed a similar evolution. In high school and college, our newspapers were 100% black-and-white, and our yearbooks only…
Continue reading →Since Halloween is approaching, I decided to watch what might be my favorite scary movie, The Blair Witch Project. In the movie, the three film students use various media to record their hunt for the legendary witch, including a CP-16 16mm movie camera. Especially popular with television stations’ newsrooms in the 1960s and 1970s, these…
Continue reading →When I bought my first Nikon in 1982, the Nikon FM fully-manual SLR, in its handsome box was a fold-out wall chart of all the Nikkor lenses available in their system, nearly 90 in all. I framed that wall chart and hung in on my dorm room door. I would think about photography and look…
Continue reading →As we all know, each of us is a product of our era and circumstance. I entered photojournalism in the early 1980s. It was during a period in which black-and-white photography was probably at its zenith. Kodak, Ilford, Fuji and Agfa were all making exceptional silver-based black-and-white films. Most of the images I made for…
Continue reading →When I was 25 I worked for a short time at a newspaper in Ottawa, Illinois called The Daily Times. It has since merged with a neighboring newspaper and become simply The Times. In my short time there, I shot well, in part because I was partnered with another young photographer named Harold Krewer. Harold…
Continue reading →During the heyday of 35mm photographic film, single lens reflex (SLR) camera bodies were very often sold with a “normal” lens on them, a 50mm. There were several reasons for this; the 50mm was small enough that it fit into most photographer’s hands easily, it was cheap to manufacture, it was lightweight, it usually sported…
Continue reading →When I was first coming up through the ranks of photographers in the early 1980s, the technology of imaging was quite different than it is today. For example, the dominant professional camera of the time was the Nikon F3, a machine that was very much like a photographic sports car. I didn’t have an F3…
Continue reading →Long before the digital revolution, my friends and I struggled to find the ideal way to express our photographic vision using film. Film was a fickle mistress at best, since it took a fair amount of finesse plus a huge amount of memorization to utilize film. A lot of photographers in the film era settled on…
Continue reading →In the 1990s, Kodak decided, as they had many times before, to create a new film format, one that would “revolutionize” photography for the common man. This new format, like disc film, 35mm half-frame and 126 before it, would do away with the annoyances of 35mm film and make loading a camera easy and foolproof….
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