Notes On My Own Photography

 

The purpose of this essay is to make life easier for those of you attempting PhD dissertations on my photography. Good luck guys.

(Tongue out of cheek. . .)

I've been making photographs since I was thirteen, when I built a more-or-less darkroom in my parents' fruit cellar at 518 W. Woodland, Ferndale, Michigan. I was having my few 120 size (2 1/4" x 3 1/4") Kodak negatives processed locally, but I'd occasionally make contact prints in the darkroom. I also had some of my grandfather Stearns's 5" x 7" glass plates available to print. During WW II film was scarce, and my local photo shop would get a shipment -- I think it was on Saturday -- and then quickly sell out. I'd rush down and be there when they opened. Sometimes I'd score. Sometimes not. I suspect none of this early stuff survives.

As best I can remember I didn't have a camera during Air Force basic training or pilot training, though there are one or two pictures in my collection I suspect I shot. I don't know with what. 

After combat ended in Korea I started occasionally going downtown in Taegu and shooting pictures. I know I had a Kodak Pony and a second, unknown 35mm camera, because they're hanging around my neck in a picture Rog Gillespie shot on a Korean beach. There were three of us interested in photography and we got together and built a darkroom. That story is in my "History" memoirs, so I won't repeat it here. With a wife and son back home, I had very little disposable cash, but I saved every penny I could, and finally was able to buy a Zeiss Ikoflex 2 1/4" x 2 1/4" camera -- sort of a poor-man's Rolliflex with a fine Zeiss lens. I made some of my best Korean pictures with that camera. Most of the time I was doing street photography, though I didn't know that until much later. I've always enjoyed shooting pictures of people doing the things people do. 

Looking now at my scanned transparencies and negatives it appears that when we were stationed in Rapid City, Great Falls, and Beausejour, Manitoba, I confined my photography mostly to family shots, though there may be a wider range of interests among the un-scanned negatives, all of which are in the hands of Clint and Rachel, my oldest son and his wife. It appears that I didn't photograph at all while we were stationed at Richards-Gebaur AFB, outside Kansas City.

  But after Richards-Gebaur I was sent to the radar site at Ubon Ratchathani in Thailand. I don't remember what camera(s) I had at Ubon, but I obviously had at least one, because I shot a fair number of pictures there, one of which is the "Basket Shop," a favorite of mine. I also shot a few people pictures in Bangkok when I was waiting for a flight to my next assignment in Can Tho, Vietnam.

In Vietnam we lived "on the economy," which meant I had an opportunity to go back to street photography. The other thing that happened was that I began playing poker regularly and won enough money to buy a Canon 7, which was a serious Leica competitor. I cruised Can Tho in my jeep and shot a lot of people pictures with that camera.

  From Vietnam I went to Colorado Springs, where we were able to rent 1115 N. Cascade Ave. from Colorado College. That house had a fine basement room which let me, for the first time in my life, enjoy a well-equipped darkroom. I also was able to buy a used Leica M2, and a used Leica IIIf, both from a local camera repairman I got to know. I also found a beat-up 4 x 5 speed graphic, which I stripped and turned into a stand camera, though I never learned to do a thoroughly satisfactory job of developing sheet film from that camera. A couple years into our stay in the Cascade house I traded my Canon 7 for a brand new Leica M4, which turned out to be my all-time favorite camera until digital came along. I bought that camera from Tony Godec who had a camera shop on Tejon street.

  I started going for long walks with a camera, and I started doing street photography again. My jobs at ADC and NORAD headquarters also called for a lot of travel, and I always carried a camera and shot pictures. I was buying Tri-X and Ilford HP 4 in 100 foot rolls and rolling my own 36 exposure cassettes, which I then developed at the kitchen sink in two or three-roll tanks using microdol developer.

  By chance I ran across a used copy of The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson in Henry Clausen's little book shop on Tejon, and suddenly I was able to fit what I was doing into a frame of reference. Later on I ran across Robert Frank's The Americans, and received a further education.

  In 1972 we bought 20 Grand Avenue in Manitou Springs. It's a huge house with five bedrooms and seven bathrooms, but there was no place to set up a darkroom. I stopped shooting and stored my enlargers and other darkroom equipment in the unfinished basement. In 1973 I was sent back to Thailand to command the remaining radar sites in Southeast Asia. I took the M4 with me, but had almost no time to shoot pictures. When I returned in 1974, I sold all my photographic equipment.

Over the following years, without a way to set up a darkroom I lost interest in photography -- at least in active photography. I added some books on various photographers to my library, and came to be interested, especially, in the work of Walker Evans and Elliott Erwitt. Evans's style seemed to fit my own, and Erwitt has a terrific sense of humor. I always wished I could meet Erwitt. He's a year and a half older than I, and I think our personalities would have meshed.

  After I retired from the Air Force in 1977 I became fascinated with computer programming and very soon started doing software engineering, and at one point teaching. Again, all this is in my memoirs. In 1992 we sold 20 Grand Avenue and bought 45 West Boulder, a condo in the Colorado Springs Park Place condo complex. I rented an office at 31 E. Platte Avenue in downtown Colorado Springs, and about three years later moved the office to 29 E. Bijou. My wife, Autumn, and I began spending winters in Florida and summers in Colorado.

In 2000 Casio came out with the first really usable digital camera: the QV-3000EX, which had a 3.3 megapixel sensor -- enough to do serious work. In April I bought one and got back into photography in a big way. Just about every day I'd leave my office for a hour or two and walk downtown Colorado Springs, shooting pictures. The beauty of the condo was that our front windows faced Monument Valley Park, Monument Creek, and across the creek and through the park, the railroad; above that the mountains and Pikes Peak. But if you went out the back door you were in downtown Colorado Springs. After dinner I'd grab the Casio and go for a walk in the gathering dark.

  I shot on the streets day and night with the Casio until I bought an Olympus C3040Z, which was another 3 mpx camera which had some minor advantages over the Casio. At the end of 2001 I switched to the Olympus E20, my first DSLR and a camera that gave me a 5 megapixel sensor. A real step up. I still shot with the C3040Z when I felt I needed a smaller camera in my hands. Somewhere along the line I switched to the Nikon E5400, a 5 mpx camera in lieu of the C3040Z. In January 2004 I bought a Nikon D100 which gave me 6 mpx and the ability to use interchangeable lenses. From there it's been an upward climb from the D2X to the D3 to the D800 and the D750. Along the way I've acquired an array of lenses that'll let me do just about anything I want to do. For serious street shooting I still prefer a small camera with a 50mm lens. I have the equivalent of that combination in the half-frame Olympus Pen-F with a 25mm Leica Summilux lens.

  I mention all these cameras to make the point that it doesn't really matter what you're shooting with as long as the camera in your hands can deal with your subjects. Advanced cameras can make certain things possible that less advanced cameras can't handle: birds on the wing, for instance. But three or four of Autumn's favorite 17 x 22 prints hanging in our home came from the 3 mpx Casio.

  At the Bijou street office I scanned a number of my negatives. My scanning equipment and technique probably weren't as great as they could have been, but the negatives still exist, stored in paper spills and catalogued with contact sheets. My only concern about the negatives is that they're stored in plain paper spills, and with age the chemicals in the paper may destroy the negatives. You may be left with my own scans, many of which are pretty fair. The scans are stored on my computer and backed up a minimum of three times, including copies on DVDs.

  With digital I pull my pictures off the camera, do a quick run through them, removing stuff that's really bad and sometimes stuff that's unnecessarily repetitive. Then I date the shoot and put the whole thing on a DVD named "Capture." Capture disks are dated, and sometimes the dates overlap. I'll end one day's shoot with a file too large for the space left on a DVD, start a new DVD, then come back to the first DVD when a day's shoot is small enough to fit. Were I to make contact sheets with capture files, they'd be pretty close to what I used to see in contact sheets from 35mm film.

  Once the "capture" operation is finished, I can proceed safely to do a final cull. At that point I bring the remaining shoot into Bridge, throw out the shots I don't want to keep, convert the survivors to digital negative DNG files, add my metadata -- ownership and copyright -- and name the files with the date and a sequence number. I then run through the survivors with Camera Raw, and using Shift-Double Click on the White and Black sliders, get the dynamic range as close to perfect as possible. If necessary I'll go further and use some of the other Camera Raw sliders to improve the result. Sometimes I'll even use the adjustment brush or graduated filter to improve things. But all this is done in Camera Raw. The DNG file always can return to its original state.

I try to confine each batch of pictures to a maximum of 30 so that I can make a contact sheet with a max of 30 entries. As I work with the current batch, I often throw out pictures I originally saved. (When I say, "throw out," remember that they're still available on the "capture" disk.) I end up, as I think all photographers do, with tons of useless stuff I just couldn't bring myself to dump. Once I've gotten as close to 30 pictures as possible in a group I index the group in Lightroom, keyword the pictures, write the group to the current DVD, and print a contact sheet. Once the DVD is as full as I can get it, I close the disk, make two backup copies of it, store the three disks in different places, and start a new DVD. When I started doing this I was using CDs. Beginning with disk 53 I switched to DVDs. As I write this, I'm working on disk 120.

But the DVDs aren't the whole backup story. I have copies of the pictures on at least 3 external drives. One of those drives is stored in the car in hopes that if the house goes up in smoke that drive at least will survive.

The pictures stored in this way aren't the final versions. I often convert digital photos to black and white using Nik's Silver Efex Pro. The presentation copies of the black and whites as well as those that remain in color are on my computer and backed up on my backup drives as Photoshop PSDs. They're in the picture files for my webs.

  Street photography is my favorite thing, though here in the Florida boonies I have little chance to pursue it. Earlier I mentioned Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Eliott Erwitt and Walker Evans as influences. I've also been drawn to the work of Andre Kertesz, Mark Riboud, Eugene Atget, Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, Helen Levitt, Lee Friedlander, Steve McCurry, Tod Papageorge, and certainly Gene Smith, to name a few out of too many to name. I sometimes wish I could do the kind of thing Martin Parr does, but though I try, I'm just not cynical enough. I think both Bruce Gilden and Joel Meyerowitz are vastly overrated. One very strong influence has been Garry Winogrand. As I wrote not long ago on Luminous Landscape: Winogrand has a fundamental grasp of human intersection with reality. He shot a range of subjects, but that mystical understanding comes through in most of his work.

I look for modern street photographers who understand the genre, but more and more I see people who believe that a picture of a street is street photography, and who don't understand that the intersection of a soul with the street is what it's all about, or that most of the best street photography doesn't include a street.

 

July 2, 2017