| The New Flame
I did not understand why the flame of photography once again had been rekindled in my heart, and why it seemed to be permanent this time. Lord knows I had tried often enough in the past to rekindle it.
As a kid in the late seventies I was into photography with a crunch. I read about it and practiced it continually. I joined a photo club, by happy accident the best there was in Denmark, and it helped me grow in leaps and bounds, culminating in a simultaneous gold- and bronze medals in the national exhibition in... 1981, I think.
Then I moved from home to pursue religious studies and hopefully some kind of creative career. Both these pursuits were more important to me than things like home and family, so I tended to live in somewhat perfunctory homes, like the student I sort of was.
Once in a while I decided to take up photography again. I had sold my original Pentax equipment, but over the years I bought and sold a Minox, a Rollei compact, an Olympus OM2 system, a Polaroid, A Konica Big Mini, and finally re-purchased a Pentax ME Super with three lenses.
I had some successes and some pleasure, but it never lasted more than a couple of months each time. But this time it feels different. Why?
I finally found the clue in my new equipment, a Nikon Coolpix 950 with flash and a wide-angle converter. Together with my Apple Powerbook portable and a printer, and not the least, the Internet, this is all I need.
No darkroom! I hadn't had one since school, I had used odd and unsatisfactory temporary solutions, and it just did not do it for me. I just do not feel creative without a great deal of control over my images.
Digital imaging at a decent price has just now poked its charming head into a range of image quality I feel comfortable working seriously in.
So I am rekindled. I read a bunch of magazines on photography each month, I plan a ton of different uses for my creativity in this area, creative, commercial, and just plain goofing around, and I have oodles of fun.
I admit I still slaver on reading about medium format Mamiyas, Fujis, of Contax rangefinders, and professional SLR systems, not to mention the quality of large-format systems. But I just can't be having with the hassle of films and chemicals. I can take a picture, and anywhere I am in town or the world, I can put it immediately into the laptop and put it on my web site or mail it to my friends. And in a quality people hardly believe when they see it.
This is all not even beginning to consider all the advantages there are to the digital "darkroom". Routine corrections that would take much skill and hours to do in a darkroom can be done easily in seconds on the computer. And in full colour too. (Colour is not inferiour to b/w, it is just that few artists are up to the challenges of colour. Seriously. In the world of fine arts, no one would consider for a moment an artificial divide between monochrome and colour.)
And everything digital is improving significantly year for year, lord knows where it is headed.
Verily I say onto thee, it is a brand new world.
- Stobblehouse |
