I never even purchased a zoom lens until 2003. The papers on which they were printed looked cheap, and the inks lacked permanence.
The quality of supposedly serious black and white digital prints was marginal at best. I was not impressed with the quality of what I saw coming out of digital cameras and the files manipulated in PhotoShop. I resisted putting aside the Nikons, the Hasselblad and the Deardorff. I was pleased but seldom satisfied with what I had learned to do with a camera and with my skill in the darkroom.įor most of the last decade I ignored the innovative photographic revolution that had been taking place - the digital revolution. Over the years I exposed and developed thousands of black and white negatives in a variety of formats and constantly upgraded my equipment and worked on my craft and learning to see. In 1975 I even made a pilgrimage to one of Ansel's Yosemite workshops. I read and re-read Ansel Adams' series on the Zone System and every pertinent technical text and article I could find including several written by a number of the editors of Photo Techniques. Black and white photography has always been a passion.Īfter graduate school until 1985, I taught American Literature and composition, and at the same time I worked hard to perfect my skill with the camera and in the darkroom. It was the beginning of a life-long love of the possibilities of the camera and darkroom which was to become a hobby, and eventually a vocation. The meter and the images in the collection were the Rosetta Stones which connected the technical and physical aspects of photography and its capacity to elicit a viewer's imagination and emotions. In the late 1950's I bought a fifteen-dollar light meter and a paper-back copy of The Family of Man. A few years later, when I graduated from high school, my parents gave me a real camera, a twin-lens Zeiss Ikoflex, and a few years after that a friend at college introduced me to the possibilities of the darkroom where my interest in the technical dimensions of photography grew to include the chemistry and the flexibility of print making.
I was fascinated by the mysterious numbers on the mechanism of the camera with its uncoated Bausch and Lomb f/6.3 lens. It was probably on Verichrome Pan or Super XX with a folding Kodak roll-film camera that had belonged to my grandmother. I was twelve when I exposed my first black and white film in the early 50's. Until recently I have been skeptical of the photographic digital technology pixel heads were trying to sell me. Luddite: Etymology: from Ned Ludd, a member of the organized bands of English handicraftsmen who in 1811, destroyed the textile machinery that was displacing them: one who is opposed to technological change. (the re-creation of black and white photography) by William A.
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