Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/04/07
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Photography has been integral to my life since I was 14. Before that I looked at pictures and wondered "how did they do that". I grew up in southern Sweden and a friend of the family was an air-line pilot with a large collection of "Life" magazines. I spent hours looking at these and somehow the pictures caught my imagination. I also loved taking things apart (clocks, cars and cameras) and in the process trying to figure out how it worked. Cars are easy, bunch of oily parts and they are quite easy to assemble. Clocks were trickier and most of them showed times that had no relation to reality once assembled. Cameras are quite logical, I figured out how the shutter worked, how the aperture worked and all that. The magic was in the fact that these mechanical parts would produce a reverse image on a piece of flexible plastic! Maybe I am still trying to find out how it happens! Photography is also a way to "remember" - even with 3 - 400,000 negatives on file, some dating to the early 60's, a print from one of these will transport me to the place and time when it was taken. Very few of these shots have meaning to anybody else but me, except that they show my view of the world at that time, a subject that probably is of limited or no interest to anyone else. There is also the Gary Winogrand axiom: "I take pictures because I want to see what it looks like in a picture"! I find myself often taking a picture of a 3 dimensional object just to see what it looks like in 2 dimensions for the same reason. No digital technology can replace the anticipation of holding up a trip of Tri-X and looking at the image and neither can an ink-jet printer replace the thrill of seeing an image appearing on a piece of paper in the developer. This said if I had to shoot commercially today I would be so digitally wired that I would need a portable generator. For my own pleasure and inquisitiveness the black/white film and print still is the best. Tom A -------- Tom Abrahamsson Vancouver, BC Canada _www.rapidwinder.com_ (http://www.rapidwinder.com/) (http://www.rapidwinder.com)