Re: Erwin Puts On Digital Photography You make your living from creating images, and one would expect that people
in your position would be oriented more toward image creation than "taking
pictures."
I have an entirely different orientation, for what I believe are perfectly
valid reasons. I am an amateur. I shoot for my own pleasure. I work in an
industry that is totally unconnected with photography, art or design. When
I shoot, it is not because I am on assignment, or because I must try to
please an editor or because I am hoping to add to my stock of photographic
images in the hope of future sales.
And, after over 2 decades of being in denial, I now have come to grips with
the fact that I am no artist and never was one. My particular skill set
lies in other directions. That is how I was "wired." So I no longer try to
create images that consist of what I sometimes mockingly refer to as
"interesting shapes and colors."
Instead I utilize photography as a tool to preserve historic images of
things that are in a state of change. I shoot lots of areas that are
undergoing urban renewal. Like trolley car routes that are being replaced
by busses. Last year I did a series of shots of those bright red fire call
boxes that were mounted on poles throughout my home town, and that were
being decommissioned after 100 years, because now people can call the Fire
Department on their cell phones. I am currently working on a project of
creating photos of a group of municipal buildings that are scheduled to be
torn down to make way for luxury condos. The municipality has purchased a
large parcel of land and is now building all new Police and Fire
headquarters, municipal services buildings, a high school and other
facilities. In two years, none of the current buildings will remain.
Nobody else has even thought of saving images of those scenes.
There are places all across America that have never been photographed. I
got my inspiration for this work from seeing a series of books from Arcadia
Press called "Images of America," with each book featuring one town or one
neighborhood of a large city. When I saw the book on my own home town, with
photographs and paintings of places that were familiar to me--some of which
went back many decades--I became hooked. I was fascinated by seeing how
places used to look--places that I grew up in.
So for me the key word is "Realism." I do not want to manipulate an image
in any way. I want it to look just as it did when I snapped the shutter.
That means no attempt to use angles that flatter the location, such as
avoiding litter on the street or buildings in decay. I use the normal lens
almost exclusively, because I want to minimize the effects of apparent
perspective distortion. Perhaps I'm being overly flattering in my
estimation of the value of my work, but I do believe that my images will
have a great deal of historical value many decades from now. Too bad I
won't be around to find out for sure.
Manipulated images don't offer any spark for me. In fact, I find many
advertising shots to be boring, even though they may have been created using
cutting-edge techniques. But I could spend hours at flea markets going
through boxes of old photos. Looking at the clothing people wore, the cars
they drove, the buildings they worked in, the old street signs, the old
uniforms.
I spend many hours with the National Geographic CD collection--the one that
has every magazine they ever published. The old ads are fascinating. Some
people may find this all boring, but I am mesmerized by that stuff.
Given the type of slow (some might say "plodding"), intuitive kind of
photographer that I am (I routinely use tripods, lens hoods, cable
releases), the kind that takes several minutes to set up the shot, the kind
that goes to some pains to be sure that the horizon is perfectly level in
the viewfinder, the kind that brackets--can you see how, when someone posts
that I ought to get with the times and use equipment that will let me take
400 shots per session--that I just look back and say, "So what?"
Even on my digital camera I usually shoot while on a tripod, and I use the
camera's remote control as a cable release. If I shoot 80 images in one
day, that is a lot. I am just not oriented toward taking tons of shots, and
hoping that a few of them will be keepers.
Over the past two years I "updated" my equipment and have added 4 Pentax "P"
Series bodies and a couple of normal lenses from the "A" series--twenty
years old, and for me it is a big update! I probably should do large-format
photography, but I don't like the idea of lugging that equipment around, and
of paying a lot for a single shot. So I continue to use 35mm, but I operate
my equipment more like it was 4x5 than 35mm. The stuff I photograph isn't
moving. And I don't have to meet a deadline by which the images must be
ready for publication or broadcast. I can wait a few days to get my slides
or prints back.
I'll leave it to others to make images of "Interesting Shapes And Colors."
Jeremy
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