Scan While You Can

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…

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The Persistence of Memory

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…

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All Mixed Up?

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…

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The New Normal

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…

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Little Skills

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…

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An Ode to Film

In 1998, the company bought me a film scanner, and the computer to go with it. Within a few weeks of tweaking and adjusting, I was scanning everything. That left two 500-sheet boxes of Kodak Ektamatic SC black-and-white, single-weight paper sitting on the shelves in my office. For a while I kept them, just in…

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