Camera nostaglia

I have just come back from a walk with our dog.  It's fairly cold and very quiet this morning and my mind starts composing commentary.  Yesterday it was about the sensory impressions during the walk and that one, like most of them, never made it out of my head.  Today, it was about my personal camera history.  Not very interesting to most.  However, it's at one end of the spectrum of being a camera geek and I don't mean that in a flattering way.  There is a current dialog among the photographic blogs that I follow which is filled with angst over camera equipment and what it means to photography.  This is really another formulation of the impact of technology on western civilization.   I have long realized that I am fascinated with technology.  It started at a fairly young age, in the final two years of grade school.  Some signal events that remain with me, some 50 years later.  Making a slide rule with log graph paper, scissors, cardboard and glue in Math class.  Making a metal detector with my genius friend in his room, he designed the circuit, I used scotch tape to secure twisted wires around  a transistor, resistors and capacitors.  It worked!

Some eight years later I purchased my first camera, a Canon Tlb and 50MM lens.  I believe I purchased it at Woodward camera in Michigan.  I am not sure why, except to say it was a technology.  My dad had always had a 35MM camera, he preferred to buy used Kodak Retina fixed lens cameras.  I never used one until much later.  I remember one of the first 'technical' age gaps.  Believing that SLR's were 'real' cameras, and those Kodak fixed lens cameras not up to date, I bought my Dad a Rolleiflex SL35M.  He tried to use it, it broke once and needed repair under warranty (these were made in Singapore and had poor quality) and he never did get the hang of match needle metering.  He went back to the Kodak's where it was all manual and one just looked at the Sun conditions and set shutter and aperture, one combination for bright Sun, another for cloudy and you winged it in-between.

I must have learned something about being too geeky, as I bought a Canonet QL17 for my future wife.  Man, I wish we still had that camera, but it got passed on to a dear friend.

I must have learned something about the downsides of the inevitable march of technology when I purchased an 'upgrade' for my trustly Tlb, a Canon AE-1.  That didn't last long, I really could not adapt to the automation.  I sold that one on and went back to the mainly manual Tlb.  That lasted until the 2nd or 3rd generation of autofocus camera's came on the scene.  By then, I had built a darkroom, with an Omega enlarger, Componon lens, trays with working plumbing and a digital light timer.  It is notable, in my mind at least, that I built the digital timer myself.  It was one of the first solid state circuits that I ever understood, a simple 555 timer and digital logic which I understood.  Analog transistors had somehow eluded me, but digital seemed perfectly clear.

Still, I was convinced that following the Ansel Adams Zone system in my darkroom, an extensive series of test exposures and development variants carefully recorded in a notebook, to calibrate my camera to zones, would make me a better photographer.  This is not so much different to this day, but magnified by the endless supply of digital source..  How many raw processors have I tried?  I am embarrassed to say.  How many test exposures have I taken?  And, this despite knowing that after all my technical hard work with the Zone system, I still did not take better photo's.  That was the lesson that I had ignored in Adam's writings, focused instead upon the mastery of technological artifacts and processes, I had missed the actual ability to 'see' a photograph before the shot!