Pentax Auto 110

 County Road 1, Ostrander, Minnesota, October 2011

You can't find 110 pocket camera film anymore, but I caught this photo - on a negative smaller than a thumbnail - on the versatile Pentax Auto 110 with 18mm prime lens, on Kodak Verichrome Pan 125 ASA film.  Lovely stuff.

Christmas Pictures!!!

 

Evan and Sarah wish you a blessed holiday season!

Happy Father's Day!

Bernard Jones (9), Plymouth Belvedere (10)

Bowie, Maryland, Spring 1977

When I was twelve, just having joined the Boy Scouts of America, I began working in earnest on my first merit badge, Photography.

My father very graciously let me drag him away from his yard work, to be my guinea pig for my "improper technique" shot of posing him directly in front of a tree, so that the trunk appears to be growing out from the top of his head.   The next exposure is of his 1968 Plymouth Belvedere, my favorite car he ever owned, parked on the street in front of our house.

Happy Father's Day, Dad, and thanks for putting up with me all those years! 

Kitties

Tommy and sister Nernie, Bowie, Maryland, 1974

The essence of every photograph, if it is to appeal to the emotions, is that it is a snapshot. Here is a snapshot I took when I was nine, of my Maine Coon cat, Tommy, and his grey-haired sister, Nernie.  I was surprised at how patient they were with me.  Posed though it is (and nicely so), it remains a snapshot.  Thus, it is not "real" nor "art."

When people with cameras decide to get "serious" about the photography craft, they are imb(r)ued with the sotto voce instruction that they must undo everything they have hitherto learned and practiced about photography.  "Snapshot" thus becomes the dirtiest of all sobriquets, and the newly-minted "fine arts" photographer instead shifts all his focus toward making "clever" images that are fraught with "irony."  "Irony" is code language for "I am more hip and sophisticated than thou."

One positive side-effect of the digital photography craze is the reemergence of the snapshot, that impromptu photograph taken and enjoyed for its own sake.

So, enjoy!

Rediscovered Negatives: Im Augenblick

Flatbush Avenue at night, Brooklyn, New York, 1988

An artist friend emailed me recently, commending my photograph of the tire shop in Pixley, California I had taken with my cell phone camera.  As she is an accomplished artist, I was very pleased to have received the compliment.

The bane of most photographers' existences -- unbeknownst to them -- is that the more advanced they become (either aesthetically, or in the business) the more they let themselves be enslaved to the superior technology of their expensive camera gear.  Over time (and I am not exempting myself from this observation), their work becomes slick, but stale.  All the oomph has been taken out of it as they've progressed from Pentax K-1000 to Nikon FM-2 to whatever the hell digital camera kit with the bells and whistles people use nowadays.

The cameras to which I am most enslaved are the Rolleiflex SL-66 and Nikon FM-3A.  So, when I get into a compositional rut, I head out with the Polaroid Colorpack III, a disposable camera from Walgreen's, or my camera phone.  When one's tools are primitive, the photographer must exercise his creative mind fully to overcome his camera's flaws.

When I took this photograph, in 1988, it was with 110 film on my Kodak Ektralite 10 camera -- a pocket camera that makes photos roughly the size of 16mm movie frames.  My mainstay on a student budget was the Ricoh KR-5 Super 35mm SLR.  But it was the Ektralite that kept me "honest."

This image can be found in much poorer quality on my website, but last year I finally found the negative, hiding in a box of letters.  I was quite pleasantly surprised at the quality of the Verichrome Pan negative exposed on such a cheap camera.