[Leica] Mr. B. D. Colen speaks

[kanner at acm.org (Herbert Kanner)]

Since Jayanand got auto-biographical, I thought I'd do the same.

I started developing film and making contact prints at high-school age if 
not before. I think my first exposure to Kodachrome was around 1948 when my 
wife, a friend, and I made a trip from Chicago to a series of national 
parks. The friend had a borrowed Leica (F, I think) and 50, 90, and 135 mm 
lenses. I was hooked. He and I alternated possession of the slides every six 
months, and projecting those incredible slides repeatedly brought back vivid 
memories of the trip. 

Eventually, I bought an Omega enlarger and started getting serious about 
B&W. Never was particularly pleased with any of my prints, and the majority 
of my shots were still Kodachrome. Around 1971, temporary unemployment which 
in a recession promised to possibly last a year, caused me to accept a job, 
relocation expenses provided, with ICL in England. To my annoyance, I found 
that Kodak UK was on strike, that a million rolls of Kodachrome was in their 
premises waiting to be processed, and that the nearest place to get the 
stuff processed was in France. I decided then and there that this was a good 
opportunity to try to develop some skill at B&W.

I had not brought my enlarger to England, so I joined a camera club in order 
to use their darkroom. It turned out that the hours of availability did not 
suit me and I bought an inexpensive Opemus enlarger. But I stayed with the 
club, which had monthly competitions, sometimes prints, sometimes slides. In 
time, I even wound up with prints that I was proud of. An interesting aside 
comment is that they expected 16 x 20 prints but I managed to get by with 11 
x 14. 8 x 10 would have been totally unacceptable except for one time when 
the had a competition expressly for "small" prints. What amused me was that 
in this country, where people had little money, big prints were expected; 
when I got back this relatively richer country, I saw competitions just full 
of 8 x 10 prints an smaller.

One day, I decided it would be neat to prints some of my slides, so I bought 
a color head for my Omega. I first tried the Ilford process because it was 
reputed to be the most archival. I ultimately came to grief with it when I 
tried to print a picture of my Abyssinian cat, a mountain lion colored 
critter. He'd come out greenish or reddish; no way could I get his true 
color. I switched to a Kodak reversal paper and got a perfect print on the 
first try.

In time, I realized that if prints were my objective, color negs were 
obviously the way to go, and I switched my operation to developing color 
negs and printing them. For color balance, I just used very crude tools: the 
Kodak viewing filters, and usually got a good print on at worst my second 
try. Very rarely did it take three tries. 

Alas, a few years after acquiring my pride and joy, an M6 TTL which I've got 
to get around to selling one of these days, I just burned out on darkroom 
work, and several rolls of film are still sitting around unprocessed. I 
might in time have gone back to the darkroom, but my wife decided that we 
needed a second bathroom, and there went the darkroom. I gave away the 
equipment.

Having spent too many hours of my life in front of a computer, both 
professionally and for entertainment, I was very reluctant to get into 
digital photography. Ultimately, I decided I had to find out if I could live 
with it, so I bought a cheap Nikon point-and-shoot and Lightroom 2 and 
played around for a while. Having decided that I could live with it, I then 
thought about a camera with a full-frame sensor. I was pondering Nikon or 
Canon but kept wistfully remembering how much I enjoyed using the M6 and 
finally decided that at my age you can't take it with you and sprung for an 
M9 which I just love. I use the two lenses, 35 an 90 chrons that I bought 
when I got the second-hand M6. They both were made in Canada, some time in 
the '70s. The 35 came from a dealer, the 90 was bought from Henning Wolfe.

Herbert Kanner
kanner at acm.org
650-326-8204

Question authority and the authorities will question you.




On Jul 6, 2013, at 11:25 PM, Jay Burleson <leica at jayburleson.com> wrote:

> With Dr. Ted's famous quote used to sum it all up...
> http://www.the.me/b-d-colen-on-the-distraction-of-color-the-subject-is-black-and-white/#ixzz2YKfnZYo6
> -- 
> Jay,
> 
> Jay Burleson Gallery <http://jayburleson.com/leica/gallery/index.php/>
> "A photographer is simply someone who is
> looking for something that can't be found.
> The photograph is the record of that attempt."
> 
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