[LRflex] Re: Why?

Hi list,

My dad was a newspaper reporter and photographer and in the  
mid-1930's had both a Speed Graphic and a Zeiss Ikon. After I started  
grammar school in 1936 (I'm 76 years old), I used to help him on  
moonlighting jobs by carrying the big leather camera bag of film  
holders and the Graphlex wooden tripod, which I learned to set up. I  
still have that tripod and use it occasionally. I also learned arcane  
chores such as cleaning all battery terminals with anabrasive rubber  
eraser just to make sure before loading the big Bright Star D cells  
into the Graphic's flash gun. They were the preferred, high  
performance battery of their day.

We kids showed up posed in many pictures for stories he wrote for his  
newspaper, the Tampa Morning Tribune, and those he sold to trade  
journals, magazines and other newspapers.

He took up photography early on when he had trouble getting the  
subject of a story and a photographer together with him, a threesome,  
and decided that doing the photography himself was the easy way out,  
as he only had to get two people together.

At the end of WWII, when I was 15 or so, my brother and built a dark  
room in our garage and I began to learn how to use a Kodak Vigilant  
folding camera and make my own prints, mostly of dogs, cats, model  
airplanes, regular airplanes and so forth. Then after college came  
marriage and 20 years with a Rollei TLR while our family grew. In  
1973 my dad passed away and I inherited two M4s and three lenses, my  
first 35mm camera. Why two bodies? He needed one for b&w, one for color.

In about 1986, I switched to an R4 to use zoom lenses with slides, to  
compose and crop in the camera. That led to an R7, an R9 and a DMR a  
year ago.

I still have about 100 of my dad's Ikon negatives of me and my  
brother and sister and am now editing and scanning about 2000 Rollei  
b&w negatives of my family and pictures I made in Japan and Korea and  
shipboard during the Korean War. My next chore will be editing my  
closet of 35mm files of more family and travel pictures.

The darkroom in our detached garage (placed out back away from the  
house where the horses used to be kept) had card board walls and  
leaked so much light that we had to wait for dark to use it. I think  
about that sometimes when I open digital files in Adobe Bridge and  
Photoshop and print color pictures right here at home. It is all but  
incredible to me.

However, I still use the R9/DMR today essentially the same way I  
learned to use the Vigilant way back when, 60 years ago: to think  
first what is most important for that image, f-stop or shutter speed,  
and go on from there. It keeps me grounded; not too different, really.

Let me thank all of you who have written their "Why?" stories; I  
enjoy them very much.

With all best wishes,

Bill


On Feb 28, 2007, at 7:49 AM, Philippe Amard wrote:

Hi Flexers,

I was just curious to know why we picked up our, call it hobby, job or
passion.

If I may start this thread with my own experience, my interest started
during art classes at school, not that we took photos or spoke about
photography, but the teacher would ask us to "frame" an interesting part
of  a view we liked - whatever it was  - by forming a rectangle finder
using our fingers. This is how I got interested in "framing".

Consequently, and being very clumsy at painting, I worked during the
holidays to buy myself a second hand BW lab and a much used Foca (French
Leica clone)
After many a night spent in the lab, I progressively got interested in
colour - slides came up "cheap" for I had had the opportunity to buy an
impressive out of date but still usable stock of K25 from a supermarket
(some of you will remember the "cloth" envelope with its strings :-D ).

Then life went on, with its ups and downs. But with a(ny) camera still
either round my neck, or within arm's reach - I must confess a couple of
years' video fit when the kids got born though.

I missed the lab - Iflfomar/brome - and K25 until I recently went
digital and the magic of PS, LR, Spix and more. And as someone on the
list wrote once, I now feel like a kid again wanting to experiment and
shoot everything. Well, I guess the virus is still there then.

What about you?

Yours
Phileicangemix

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