Yesterday, I handed over a large shopping bag filled with cameras, flash attachments, lenses, and other photography accessories to someone who will use the cameras to teach college students about photography. None of the cameras had been used for close to 10 years, and the oldest camera was first put to use about 50 years ago. All were film cameras, anachronisms in the age of digital photography.
The oldest camera, an Argus 35mm viewfinder model, was bought with my meager earnings as a teenager. The cost, as best I remember, was around $60, a small fortune for a high school student in 1966. I used the camera to shoot pictures for my high school yearbook and newspaper. I experimented with photography, taking walks through the yard and in the woods looking for views that caught my eye and became studies of light and dark. (Color film was too expensive.) I experimented with f-stops and shutter speeds and became confident at estimating exposures without a light meter. I continued to use the camera in my first real newspaper job, a 1968 internship at a weekly newspaper in Wadesboro. I learned to wind 35 mm film onto a reel to develop the film and then print the pictures.
The bag of cameras also included a couple of Minolta single-lens reflex cameras. Graduating to an SLR widened my photographic world, and the through-the-lens metering system helped make sure the exposure was right. These cameras got me through four decades of family pictures — babies, toddlers, first-day-of school pictures, graduations, weddings, reunions, vacations. Many of the products of those cameras hang on the walls of my house or hide in photo albums stashed in a closet. I took about 1,000 slide picture and wore out my first slide projector watching the results of my work. Only at the advent of digital photography did I finally get around to buying a quality Kodak slide projector, which now hides in a closet, unused for years.
When digital photography first arrived, few professionals envisioned it replacing film photography, and I could not imagine the day when digital would be as good as film. But that day came rapidly. The first bulky, heavy digital SLRs were slow and not as high-resolution as professional photography demanded. But the technology leaped ahead, and now the cell phone on my belt takes pictures that rival the quality of my old film cameras. Film photography has collapsed to the point that photo film is very difficult to find.
The point-and-shoot advances that opened photography to the masses who did not care to learn how to set f-stops and shutter speeds or consider exposure values were adapted to the digital platform, and film was doomed. At some point nearly 10 years ago, I quit buying film and switched fully to digital with a new digital SLR, which I still use, though it is a few generations behind the latest DSLRs.
I still miss my old film cameras whose f-stops and shutter speeds I could manipulate to get the exposure I wanted. Now, I try to interpret the "programs" embedded in the camera to fit different light, speed and depth-of-field situations. I have yet to be fully satisfied with the results of most of those programs.
Nevertheless, I will never go back to film photography — as if I could, of if anyone could. Kodak has "taken my Kodachrome away," and Fuji has taken away its Fujicolor, too. Digital provides instant gratification and occasional second chances to fix the first exposure attempt.
Photography still provides a means for jogging memories and for treasuring moments. Now, I keep my pictures, not in photo albums or slide trays but in computer hard drives, CDs and portable hard drives, backing up these files multiple times to guard against loss.
What I work so hard to save is still priceless — memories of moments that fill a lifetime.
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Monday, April 21, 2014
The old Kodak came out every Easter
My wife and I did not pose for photographs on Easter Sunday. We arose early, went to the sunrise service, stayed for breakfast and then caught a fast nap at home before the 11 a.m. communion service.
Dressed in our Easter finery (actually outfits we found in the closet, all worn before but cheerily bright with spring colors), we did not even take a "selfie" with either of our phones.
Sixty years ago, my mother would have lined up her five children for pictures taken with her Kodak folding camera. Its 120 film captured only light and shadows, no colors. Seeing the pictures now, you have to imagine the colors on the dresses she sewed for my sisters, the ties my brothers and I wore, the Easter baskets with dyed eggs and the grass and trees in the photo. I still have the old Kodak she used for decades. It sits unfolded on a bookshelf beside one of the group pictures she shot of us, the camera's black and chrome parts perfectly matching the blacks and whites of the photograph.
When I developed an interest in photography as a teenager, I discovered that Mother's old camera had f-stops and shutter speeds, even a "B" and a "T" setting. I realized I could use the "T" (Timer) setting to take four-hour pictures of star trails in the northern sky from the front porch. The "B" (Bulb) setting was probably never used. If the camera was ever used for an indoor picture, I never saw it. After my experimentation with her old camera, Mother complained that I had changed the settings, which she had kept the same for decades once she found a setting that suited bright sunlight, the only lighting allowed for her pictures. She'd never be able to find the right settings again. So she never took another picture with that camera, which was replaced by an Instamatic and a Polaroid and other gift cameras. Years later, when she was throwing out old possessions, she gave me the old Kodak, and I've displayed and treasured it for years.
In almost all of our family pictures, one person was almost always missing. Someone had to snap the picture in those years before selfies and self-timers. The one photo of the entire family was taken by our cousin, who came over from next door specifically to snap the shutter. The picture shows the entire family — Mother, Daddy and the five children. For our parents' 50th wedding anniversary in 1987, we had the picture painted and gave them a large framed copy.
I don't remember whether the occasion was Easter, but it probably was.
Dressed in our Easter finery (actually outfits we found in the closet, all worn before but cheerily bright with spring colors), we did not even take a "selfie" with either of our phones.
Sixty years ago, my mother would have lined up her five children for pictures taken with her Kodak folding camera. Its 120 film captured only light and shadows, no colors. Seeing the pictures now, you have to imagine the colors on the dresses she sewed for my sisters, the ties my brothers and I wore, the Easter baskets with dyed eggs and the grass and trees in the photo. I still have the old Kodak she used for decades. It sits unfolded on a bookshelf beside one of the group pictures she shot of us, the camera's black and chrome parts perfectly matching the blacks and whites of the photograph.
When I developed an interest in photography as a teenager, I discovered that Mother's old camera had f-stops and shutter speeds, even a "B" and a "T" setting. I realized I could use the "T" (Timer) setting to take four-hour pictures of star trails in the northern sky from the front porch. The "B" (Bulb) setting was probably never used. If the camera was ever used for an indoor picture, I never saw it. After my experimentation with her old camera, Mother complained that I had changed the settings, which she had kept the same for decades once she found a setting that suited bright sunlight, the only lighting allowed for her pictures. She'd never be able to find the right settings again. So she never took another picture with that camera, which was replaced by an Instamatic and a Polaroid and other gift cameras. Years later, when she was throwing out old possessions, she gave me the old Kodak, and I've displayed and treasured it for years.
In almost all of our family pictures, one person was almost always missing. Someone had to snap the picture in those years before selfies and self-timers. The one photo of the entire family was taken by our cousin, who came over from next door specifically to snap the shutter. The picture shows the entire family — Mother, Daddy and the five children. For our parents' 50th wedding anniversary in 1987, we had the picture painted and gave them a large framed copy.
I don't remember whether the occasion was Easter, but it probably was.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Perfect pictures require keeping a camera handy
Whenever you see that perfect picture is when you don't have a camera handy. It happened to my wife and me twice in the last couple of days. The first time we were on the road, somewhere in Cumberland or Robeson County, I think, on a rural, two-lane road, late Friday afternoon. The sun was setting, and I was shifting my head to dodge the glare of sunlight that my dark glasses couldn't shade. Then the sun dipped below the tree line on the horizon, and the scattering of high clouds turned pink and red in a glorious display of natural painting. For 20 minutes and about as many miles, the colors in the sky shifted, brightened and dimmed as we watched in awe.
"If we only had a camera," my wife said.
"There's one in the trunk," I replied. "Do you want to stop?" But we were in a hurry to get where we were going (aren't we always?), so we didn't think it worth the trouble and the delay to stop.
Later that cold night, when the temperature would drop to around 10 degrees, I stepped outside and looked up at the dark sky, which was illuminated more brightly than I had seen it in years by the southern constellations. Orion's belt was brightly jeweled, each star distinct and clear against the darkest black background. Sirius in Canis Major trailed behind the hunter, and Taurus the bull menaced him to the right, bright stars marking the tips of his horns and the Pleiades forming a cloud above him. The clear sky and chilling temperatures had combined for the perfect star-viewing conditions, turning the dark dome of the sky into its more perfect imitator, a planetarium's ceiling, where each star is perfectly visible and their numbers are uncountable.
Modern men have little appreciation of God's promise to Abraham in Genesis to make his offspring as numerous and uncountable as the stars in the heavens or the sands on the shore. Urban skies, with their competing light and air pollution have dimmed out all but the brightest stars. We lose the overwhelming magnitude of that divine promise.
On Friday night, with the right equipment, a fast camera and a tripod, I might have captured a view of the sky as it was 5,000 years ago, before electric lighting, overpopulation and air pollution dimmed everything. But I was not equipped for such a task, so I hold it only in memory and inadequate words.
For readers who appreciate the visual, I offer this link to a blog offered by someone who keeps her camera handy and uses it well.
"If we only had a camera," my wife said.
"There's one in the trunk," I replied. "Do you want to stop?" But we were in a hurry to get where we were going (aren't we always?), so we didn't think it worth the trouble and the delay to stop.
Later that cold night, when the temperature would drop to around 10 degrees, I stepped outside and looked up at the dark sky, which was illuminated more brightly than I had seen it in years by the southern constellations. Orion's belt was brightly jeweled, each star distinct and clear against the darkest black background. Sirius in Canis Major trailed behind the hunter, and Taurus the bull menaced him to the right, bright stars marking the tips of his horns and the Pleiades forming a cloud above him. The clear sky and chilling temperatures had combined for the perfect star-viewing conditions, turning the dark dome of the sky into its more perfect imitator, a planetarium's ceiling, where each star is perfectly visible and their numbers are uncountable.
Modern men have little appreciation of God's promise to Abraham in Genesis to make his offspring as numerous and uncountable as the stars in the heavens or the sands on the shore. Urban skies, with their competing light and air pollution have dimmed out all but the brightest stars. We lose the overwhelming magnitude of that divine promise.
On Friday night, with the right equipment, a fast camera and a tripod, I might have captured a view of the sky as it was 5,000 years ago, before electric lighting, overpopulation and air pollution dimmed everything. But I was not equipped for such a task, so I hold it only in memory and inadequate words.
For readers who appreciate the visual, I offer this link to a blog offered by someone who keeps her camera handy and uses it well.
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