 |
||
|
|
My first camera was a Kodak Brownie pocket model that used 120 roll-film. I was ten years old. Those black and white pictures with the curly-cut edges were the best ones I would ever take in my life, not because I was a great photographer at ten years old, but because they inspired me to make beautiful photographs for the rest of my life. A few years ago I had a black and white darkroom. Black and white prints will always be my favorite. There are so many shades between pure white and absolute black that they cannot be counted. (Well, they can, but I’m not going to do it!) Compared with color, black and white prints are an infinite rainbow of greys. Color prints are beautiful, but red is red and yellow is yellow and blue is blue. Whenever you shoot in the sunlight, shadows are black, black, black. I love color. I see in color. Maybe that is why I am more fascinated with the black and white world. Wow! Who would have thought that a red mailbox under a green tree next to a weathered wood fence would photograph like that in black and white. It’s gorgeous! |
|
|
Today I work mostly in color because I no longer have space for a darkroom. Color slides come closest to duplicating what I actually see through the camera lens, and lovely archival prints can be made from slides, thanks to digital printing techniques. In the past, color photographs faded in a few years (usually to hues of magenta and green). Now, slides can be digitally scanned and color printed with archival inks on archival papers that are guaranteed not to fade for sixty years, or longer. Very acceptable! The first photograph was taken in 1826, and we still have excellent examples of black and white photographs created in the mid-1800’s and the 1900’s. Thanks to digital printing with archival processing, color images are starting to approach the same promise of print longevity. My photographic work encompasses a wide variety of styles. I love realistic art, but my current passion is abstract. I see something in nature that, when properly framed in my lens, looks like an abstract painting now hanging in a museum of modern art. I look for patterns, shapes, and designs created by the interaction between objects. I look for the energy in that interaction, for something that halts my attention. What I have taken a picture of may be almost incomprehensible until examined closly, then I expect an... “Aha! So, that’s what it is!”...from the viewer. The world is full of surprises. No matter where I point my camera I find dozens. Every day, in every kind of weather, in every environment there are thousands of wonderful images. Most of them will go unseen by me or anyone else. The world is a big place. I will see only a small part of it in my short lifetime. I will photograph only a very small part of that. It is the tragedy and the legacy of photography, of a photograph well taken—passing moments—lost or captured, forever. |
||
