roll call

["Patrick G. Sobalvarro" <pgs@sobalvarro.org>]

I thought at first that these roll call things were going to be a flash
in the pan like last time, so I just ignored them because it was too much
effort to do otherwise, but I seem to have been wrong this time.  Okay,
so here's my entry:

The non-photo-related stuff:
  Age: 	38
  Occupation: computer science research (I do systems and analytical
              modeling of systems)
  Education: 	BS, MS, PhD in computer science (minor in applied math)
		from MIT, the last in June 1997
  Publications: do an AltaVista search if you really care
  Married: 	for seven years; my wife is a management consultant; no
		kids, but planning on it.  She's great; she gave me an M2
		last year.

The photo-related stuff:

I think my fascination with photography started as a fascination for
mechanical things.  My father kept a Kodak Retina and Retinette in his
closet, and as an eight-year-old I would sometimes take them out when my
father wasn't around and gaze lovingly at their workings.  I read the
manuals, looked at the multiple reflections in the lens coatings, unfolded
the flash reflectors, read and re-read the little exposure guides Kodak
would pack with film, that sort of thing.

When I was ten or eleven, my father gave me the Retinette.  I loved it.  I
wasn't any good with it -- it had no rangefinder or meter, and I made a lot
of blurred and underexposed images -- but I loved the thing.  I'm still
occasionally tempted to buy one at a show.

When I was twelve, my income from my paper route allowed me to buy a
slightly used Olympus 35S.  I already knew that what I wanted was a Leica.
There was a used camera shop next door to my school and the owner would
often let me handle the Leicas that would turn up there -- but they were
beyond my reach financially.  The 35S was my camera for many years, and I
still have it.  The lens suffered from flare, but was quite sharp.  I did a
lot of high school yearbook photography with it and enjoyed myself hugely.
I also did a lot of the yearbook photography with a couple of Yashicas that
belonged to the school -- a 35mm SLR and a Yashicamat TLR.  I found the
chromes I got from the Yashica SLR especially to be much too warm, and this
has affected my subsequent choices of equipment.

Nowadays I have an R6 and an R6.2, 21/4, 28/2.8, 50/2, 100/4 macro, and
135/2.8 R lenses, as well as a 400/5.6 Novoflex.  I also have an M2 which
somehow gets out more often than the R cameras, and have for it a 20/5.6
Russar, 50/1.5 Summarit, 50/1.5 Zeiss Sonnar in LTM, and an uncoated 90/4
Elmar.  I have a bunch of old cameras that aren't worth much, because
relatives often give them to me.  Here I'm talking about things like
Graphic 35s, Canonets, Yashicamats, etc.  (Relatives never say, "Oh, do you
want this old Alpa?")  Most of these orphaned cameras don't work, and I
think sometimes that I'll have a try at repairing them.

I have a "dry darkroom" -- a Polaroid Sprintscan 35+ and an Epson Stylus
Color printer, with Photoshop on a big PC -- and I use it very often.  The
printer isn't so great, being 2-year-old technology now, but the scanner is
a beauty, and I would recommend it to anyone.  I've done some wet darkroom
work and found the results rewarding but the process very inconvenient.  I
wouldn't do nearly as much photography without the ability to conveniently
play with images in Photoshop and print them that the dry darkroom gives me.

I don't do much photography of strangers close up.  I think it must be
rather difficult to do without violating the privacy of individuals, but I'm
impressed by how well Eric Welch succeeds on his Web page photos.  I
photograph friends and relatives close up, but not strangers.  Strangers do
often appear in my photographs as indistinct compositional elements who
can't be identified in the distance.  I used to do a lot of the sort of
"calendar" photography you often see in photo magazines -- you know, very
yellow sunflowers waving in the breeze before an abandoned building under a
very blue sky -- but I've lost my taste for that sort of thing and tend to
concentrate less on subjects and more on shapes and lines and shadows now.
Perhaps it's a phase.

- -Patrick