The Camera

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History

My father had just taken a picture of me.

My mother would show me a black and white picture my father had taken of something we did, ask me to remember that moment and say something about it. This helped me learn to remember and to think. It helped me remember that early moment in my life.

Some 15 years later, my father gave me the light meter and camera he had used that day. The meter was a General Electric with a black crinkled body. The camera, an early Kodak Retina II rangefinder. I pushed a button under the solid metal body, and as I opened the metal hatch over the lens, the lens slid forward on a black folded bellows. I'd set the F stop and shutter speed, put my eye to the rangefinder and focus till the yellow double image became one. Click.

Closed, it was a thin camera I could carry unnoticed under a sports coat, excellent for shooting candid photos. I was already on the shool paper and the audio-visual team. My classmates said I learned to become invisible with that camera, invisible till the picture was taken and the camera was already moving away from my eye.

Another student took some unflattering photos of teachers, so cameras were banned in school. To be permitted, one had to have a specific reason to bring one. Because of the quality and the decency of my photos, I was the only person to have blanket permission to carry a camera in my last two years of high school.

The Retina is also how I got in the habit of wearing a sports coat and bow tie -- it hid my camera. It quickly showed me how teachers and the upper crust students were influenced by clothing.

At the time, my uncle was the photographer of the family. Although not rich, he managed to buy a really good 35mm camera every two to five years, often trading the older one in. He liked my compositions. He also understood the framing errors on close up photos caused by having the viewing lens some distance above the picture lens. When he saw another camera he wanted, he gave me his first true single lens reflex camera, a Kowa SLR with ground glass focusing. Alhough not a camera with through-the-lens metering, it opened the world of close-up photography to me, and the lack of good metering prompted some sophistication about incident and reflected light metering.

I started using close-up lenses for macro photos. The image degradation taught me that the subject can, and should be made to appear more important than the quality of the photo. Later, following this theme of making the subject stand out, I detached the non-detachable lens to shoot extreme close-ups using a toilet tissue roll as an extension tube.

Having taken the camera part way apart, the next time the mirror mechanism failed, I took it apart and repaired it myself. When it failed again on a trip out west, I repaired it in the front seat of the car, stopping at a radio-TV store to have one wire soldered back in place.

(Phil has the Kowa now. I think I loaned or gave it to him for some optical work after it would no longer function as a real camera. The Kodak Retina II is still in Connecticut.)

The ability to photograph close-up objects makes photography a way of intensified seeing. The art of photography is in framing things so they would stand out beyond the common perception.

Poor Uncle, he didn't realize till too late what he'd done... Where Uncle would take a few documentary and scenic photographs, I would go for the striking close-ups, night shots, anything that stood out. Somehow, we saw less and less of Uncle's slides.

It wasn't long before I was developing Anscochrome and later Ektachrome slide film, buying it by the 100 foot roll. Big mistake, Ektachrome. It fades! Kodachrome does not; at least not so quickly.

Before going to college, I applied for the Famous Photographers School correspondence course, hoping I could work on it on the weekends. When the representative saw my slides, he said I didn't need the course -- I could teach their instructors something! I remember my reaction quite well; I told him that while that may be true, I needed to learn the business end of it -- how to make money with photography. That wasn't in their curriculum, so I didn't sign up.

Seeing I had grown beyond the limits of the Kowa SLR, Dad bought me a Canon FT. We eventually built up a bit of a collection of lenses for it.

Seeing the distant perspective of objects taken with a telephoto jars the brain, making the object seem more important.

I loved that effect!

A few years later, we saw a Canon TL with a macro lens, I think at Bob's Camera in Waterbury. (There was also Goldie's Camera, I think.) We bought it for Mom; though I soon appropriated the macro lens. It took Mom a while to learn that photography is the reverse of painting and sculpting -- you have to see what to take away from the picture instead of putting what you want into it. Which means you have to actively see everything, not just what you want to photograph. Once she learned that, her European art training took over.

My parents visited the Canton Camera Club in Connecticut, and soon joined. When some of the members complained that she won all the prizes, they made her a judge, limiting her unfairness to the judge's competitions. If she entered it, she won it. More than once, I heard her say she wasn't entering a photo because it would be unfair to the other judges.

Mom's thing was mostly scenic photos. I stuck with macrophotographs, intense telephotos, some night photography -- anything that made one thing stand out.

I just about wore that FT out by the time I got sick with MCS. All of our cameras developed problems with the film transport mechanisms for the volume of film we shot.

At the university, engineering majors had to take some "humanities" courses to "round them out." I took Astronomy, which turned out a worthless bore; and Art Appreciation, which I at least understood. (I still think they didn't have enough dementia in that course to make it interesting.)

One of our projects in art class was to take half a class period to present our hobbies. The discussions on technique, composition, and merit that my slides provoked took the whole period and kept me from showing the entire set. Though I really didn't think that much of my work, the pictures completely bowed over the teacher and the students. I remember at one point the entire class was laughing at the contrast of something I had on the screen, and I along with them.

My English teacher, seeing something deeper in the way I wrote, asked me to show her my slides. Wow'd her too. (She later tried to seduce me; but by then, I already had a girl friend, the IBM 360. That relationship seemed to have more of a future. I just couldn't see myself with a still flighty university English instructor some five years my senior.)

To me, designing and building something useful is the ultimate form of human expression. Writing and photography may be fun; but it just can't compete with seeing a machine you built do something that really makes a difference in a lot of people's lives, even if they don't realize it.

Photography is an important bridge to the verbal skills. Without the discipline of seeing, as taught by the camera, there is little to describe; hence no roots for eloquence to grow upon.

In college, I roomed with a professor who collected Tiffany and Natsler pottery. An gallery wanted to exhibit some of his holdings. When he showed them some of the photos of wine glasses and flames, they wanted to exhibit my works. Alas, printing costs were prohibitive, so we never did that. Perhaps we should have; I'd gotten orders for some of those pictures after some fellow Organic Chem students saw them by chance. Art work does fetch more from a gallery than a fellow student. Maybe we should take another look at some of those, see if we can drum up some interest in the galleries in Half Moon Bay and Sausalito. Never know!

I also worked on designing automated 35mm processing systems about then, thinking I could get the process down to an hour or two and go commercial. Dad talked me out of it. Two or three years later, fast developing equipment hit the market and while-you-wait photo processing shops sprang up, moved into larger grocery stores, etc. Perhaps Dad saved me from an early case of MCS, or maybe a fortune. Who knows!

In 1989, having some money and time, I had the Canon FT professionally cleaned and reconditioned. But in the mid 90's, a table laden with computer books fell over, hitting the book case the camera was hanging from and taking it all down. The zoom lens mount broke off and the Canon's Preview/self-timer lever screw broke. With the high price of film and the move to electronic media, I never had it repaired. It is in storage at Oscar's. Aside from that vital lever, the body and the other lenses are probably good.

When a friend had a moving sale in the late 90's, I picked up some old 35mm cameras. One was a Mamaya Secor Spotmatic with selectable spot or average metering. That had been THE camera I wanted before we bought the Canon FT. There was also an East German Practika SLR, and an Ashai Pentax, which I sold for a song at a fleamarket.

Till I ran across a book on Pentax camera history, it hadn't dawned on me that the Ashai Pentax, the first of the Pentax line produced by the then unknown Ashai company, might have been a collectable. Whoops!

Electronic Cameras

The tools, I had predicted in the late 70's, writing a proposal to my father about developing them. It wasn't quite "Photoshop" that I had in mind then, but it would have been an early step towards that. I had been thinking about simple exposure touch up and morphing tools after reading an piece on mathematical image enhancement in Industrial Research magazine.

In 1992 or so, I started using a Silicon Graphics Indy computer and a Sony video camera, later a Fischer video camera to make photos for the web. When I showed up for an interview on a web project for Hewlett Packard in 1995 or 1996, the interviewer presented me with printouts of my Lego photo cartoon on Why Mad Scientists are Mad.

(That was probably the only model video camera Fischer ever made. What I liked about it was that the flat horizontal case didn't look like a conventional video camera; people didn't know what I had, and usually ignored me; whereas after the Rodney King beatings, a few police seeing me with a Sony camcorder on the street either asked me what I was doing with a video camera, or commented bitterly about video cameras.)

Although video-to-computer images left much to be desired, any image impressed people in the mid 90's; especially if it moved! I used the SGI Indy to produce a live web image of myself that refreshed every five seconds, and used it on agency and job interviews. People would do the interview just to see the web video. It created a memorable impression, which always helps get more consulting work.

My prized Indy and a spare, if one can still can a 100mhz computer a prize, are at Oscar's warehouse. On one of the drives is perhaps a thousand surveillance photos of the ranch. The past few weeks, I've been sniffing eagerly at an SGI O2 computer with advanced video and audio features. The guy only wants $250 for it. If I had _any_ income stream, it would be sitting here now, probably with the generator running!

In the fall of 2002, I saw a pocket 007 USB pen camera on sale for $25. Only 320x240 resolution, and having all the quality of a pinhole camera, it was better than nothing. The upgrade to a $59.95 640x480 model with a real glass lens came shortly. Most of the photos on the Camping site till late 2003 were made with these. You can see the horrid pixilation, poor contrast, and lousy color rendition; but for the price... I remember the first time I saw the 007, it was $135 for 170x120 pixel black and white version; not $59.95 for full VGA screen color.

As painters have long known, it isn't the brush, it's the subject and the painter. But a good brush never hurts.

I'm not throwing out the pen camera. It's small enough to keep with me. In these modern litigation prone times, it pays to have a camera with you every time you get in your car to document any accident or incident you get involved in. The very fact you are documenting it puts the other party on notice that they can not fudge the facts.

Today

While this does have a typical SLR/camcorder type viewfinder, it just isn't the same as ground glass. Nothing gives you the same level of minute detail that you hope to capture, nothing shows you the depth of field, color, and lighting, nor give you the level of control in focusing that you can see on that ground glass in an SLR camera. The grainy pixilated view in the video viewfinder isn't even close!

Then there are the firmware bugs... a color mode that does not always change, dramatic aperture differences in the manual modes, etc. Early production model. I'm still finding bugs. I'll prepare an engineering/human factors evaluation report for Minolta and see if it gets me a firmware upgrade. [There were no firmware upgrades, and they didn't care about a report.]

And worse, to see anything, you have to have the camera on. It's not light coming in the lens and bouncing around on prisms and mirrors that you see in the viewfinder, you aren't doing dry shooting, you are running a complex video computer. It's video you see; the CCD array is running, the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chip is running, the LCD screen and illuminator are running, and every time you move, you hear the camera churning a little bit as all his complex hardware and software tries to re-focus the image. It eats batteries whether you take pictures or not. Run-time is estimated at 300 minutes or 200 photos; I think it's substantially lower.

Rechargeable lithium metal hydride batteries came to the rescue. With those, the photos are free.

The features outweigh the lack of ground glass viewfinder quite nicely. Well, almost quite nicely. As another friend said when discussing digital cameras vs our old SLRs, It's the best we are going to get short of paying a few thousand. But now, the film is practically free!

Walking around taking photos, I couldn't help but think of Uncle, the photo buff of the family. By giving me his old Kowa SLR, he opened the world of photography and vision the way no rangefinder camera ever could. He taught me just enough to get me started exploring the media. (Mostly, I read a bunch of books, then went exploring to see what I could do. That, and the examples in the photo magazines taught me the art. But then, Mom's an artist; I've seen art all my life.)

Konica and Minolta merged. I think Uncle had a Konica SLR at one point; I know he had many other cameras, including a Leica. He passed away recently. As I held this camera, I felt Uncle's loss. I wish I could show him this camera and some of the photos I've taken, and remind him that he gave me my start in photography. I wish I could show him the echoes of his actions so long ago.

I remembered Mark Woodward, with his prized Hasselblad, which he kept with him much of the time. He spoke a lot about photography; real photography using real film. One of the things he wanted to do, is to set up a scanner to digitize old photos for others at various shows. The price? Giving him copyrights. He said that when he died, he wanted me to get the negatives and prints he'd been buying up. Never happened. I really don't think I have the right place for them. Perhaps someone else does. Some other things he didn't want anyone else to get their hands on; but death is not usually a well planned and orderly process. If he'd lived, I think I'd still be on the ranch, or at least been able to skip part of my stay in the tent. So many plans, and some products with really great potential fell with him. I just didn't know how to market them.

Unfortunately, there seemed to be some issues getting photos from the camera to my computer. I thought it was a driver issue. It took several days to find out the computer already had the driver to see the camera's memory as a disk drive, not as a camera.

In three days, I took close to a hundred photos. In seven, I'd shot over 250 and purged at least half that. With zero cost for film, and instant replay, it's easy to see what you got and try again till you get a composition and exposure that looks good. All it takes is time and batteries.

[I shot over 7,000 photographs the first year, probably more than I shot with my Canon FT in ten years. Or maybe not. In s little over three years and 19,000 photos, I'd worn the camera out.]

I also found that Wal-Mart will convert the contents of an SD Ram chip to a CD-ROM for under $4.

I am still trying to remember the "visual rules" I'd developed to spot and compose a good picture. I'd never described them in word form; but I once knew them. I am exploring the elements of composition, of design rules using pebbles on sand, footprints of birds, and other simple things. The photos are not very good... but I'm getting better at it.

Thanks, Bob!

And another thing happens. One becomes a more interesting person. Opportunities for conversation pop up. "What are you taking pictures of?" "Yes, that's a nice scene." (Actually, I'm taking picture of this...)

To attract interesting people, or to wake people up to make them interesting, you have to look like you are doing interesting things yourself.

If those things are interesting enough, you are judged by what you create rather than by what plot of land you own or don't own in this property centered society. It can elevate one beyond the stature of a mere property owner.

-JVV-

Postscript: I've shot some 5,000 photos in seven months. Looking back at the change in me before and now, I have to say the camera really did wake something up in me, pull me back together in some way. I'd get up with sunrise and hunt for something to shoot. That means looking for things and actively imagining how they can be framed and represented before deciding whether to put the camera to the eye. It was amazing how temperature, air pollution, and nutrition affected the ability to practice this creative skill of imagining how to represent things.

When the road dried out enough to produce choking clouds of rock flour every times anyone drove by, and Verizon's baud rates plunged to the point where I often couldn't upload my pictures at all, I slacked off. The game was up, so to speak; the challenge gone.

Till Verizon screwed up the baud rates, I had a reason to really hunt for photos. I'd like to say that I've shot just about everything worth shooting; except that's not quite true. There was always something I could find if I just looked harder, thought more about how to represent what I had in front of me. I suppose I should have started walking in the other direction, seeking out the trails though the woods. But the air pollution proved to be another obstacle. I still shoot pictures; just not that much.

I expect that's going to pick up quite a bit when I move in May. Not only will the area be new, I'll have a higher speed link.