bobmarleysghost posted:

I've spent many a meeting staring at the wall and contemplating my life

feigning interest posted:

feigning interest posted:

Time heals everything. Everything but love. How I got in to Leicas



Love. Hate. Love. Hate. And love again.
When I left home under a cloud at the age of 16 my father gave me a fast fifty Takumar and a book of Ernst Haas' work.

"Here, you'll need these," he said. For a couple of years I kept body and soul together with that fifty and a Sun tele on a pistol grip fronting two Spotmatics. Just barely.

A meager body and a sliver-thin soul fell in love with a metallurgical engineer. I was burning steel - she showed me how to push a bead with a Redi-Arc and put it back together. We made out in the back of the truck I was repairing. It took two years to figure out she was an alligator in cat's clothing. Two years of blood and snot after that I finally left her.

"I liked you better when you were weak," she said.

I turned what was left toward the door and was about to close it behind me when she said, "Wait, I want you to have something." For some reason I stopped. Tired. An empty face with an unknown route to an unknown station. Numb. The fool with no name stopped.

She came out of our, no, her, bedroom with her M4 and a 50 two-0.
"Do something with this," she said and closed the door for me.

I hated it. How do you frame with a thing like this? I shot transparencies not black and white. No goddamn easel. Depth of field? Where's the preview.....? Oh.
But I loved it. Small. Quiet. Light. Light years sharper. A visual fetish.

And the smell of her every time I put my eye to the finder.

But I hated it. How do you load film? Are you serious? I got over it.

Like the alligator I kept coming back. Still shot reflex because it made sense. Gave up on black and white and nearly the M4. Got a 28 for it. Kept shooting slides.... By this time I was doing 90 percent of my work with a pair of F4s bodies. And a pair of M6s. Same 50. Same 35. Mostly Kodachrome.

Then I went digital.

Reflex in digital was easy. Canon and Nikon killing it. Superb. Moved through the Ds and then worked with a guy who had a Fuji S3. Remembered that. Called it the "Skin Job." He got it. The M4 and M6 were parked and what the hell was I gonna do for a quiet gentle camera when a D3 was a gravel truck leaking hydraulic at a Strauss ball. Auditioned Sonys and Lumixs and whatever else with the tiny perfect lenses. No, no, no.

Ironically great cameras in RAW or black and white but their JPGs kinda blew in color. I like JPGs.

And then I gave up. Looked at the Ms sitting on a bookshelf. Shot twenty-something rolls of Velvia one day. Sent it to NCPS. Hated the film. Kept coming back to those cameras. Didn't have a film after Kodachrome went. Astia. Provia.... No, no. no..... Ektachrome... no...no. No.

The big C got the engineer - her dad let me know. No parent should have to bury a child. Thirty years since I'd seen him and there we were at her service. He cried. I was numb. Again. We drank to remember. I pulled the M4 and the fifty out of my jacket and put it in the casket, just below the overlay where no one would see it. Said something stupid.

The next morning I listed the M6 and rented an M8. Then an M9. No, no, no....

The alligator was worm food. Dreams of an M4 haunted me and every once in a while one crossed my path. But there isn't any Kodachrome anymore so I would roll over and kick a sheet off. Maybe throw on some music until I could sleep again.

Most of my work is done with a D3.

But my always camera when I'm just me, tired of being strong, tired of turning a numb face to the world, is a little X100. Skin Job's little brother. A may-as-well-be 35mm FOV with a finder that lets me see what's actually going on in a non-reflex, quiet, gentle camera.

Sometimes, when I put my eye to the finder, I can still hear the vicious sweep of a reptile's tail but it's faint. Faint, yet still there in the distance of time that healed nearly all.

quote:

hapsnaps 3mo
Makes a great image. Don't underestimate older seniors though, she might be planning to buy a computer and get to grips with it..........

Doggles posted:

KinkyJohn posted:

I would like to imagine Mark sitting there at night trying to decipher the comment, getting angier and angier until he takes it out on his wife + kid (assaulting them with the hasselblad brick of course)

mAlfunkti0n posted:

I was going to get out of photography because I was "bad at it" .. then I find stuff like this and think "you know .. I wasn't terrible"...


Reflections from Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A. / The Queen City by jorge molina, on Flickr

8th-snype posted:

I'm at work so I'm extra cranky but I found the best retoucher:

http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/crg/5548466384.html

Let's take actual good portraits like the spiderkid and actively make them worse, yes this is totally forth a 50/50 split.

change my name posted:

I just want to say that I found out there's porn and escort rings operating on Flickr through this thread, so there's that I guess.

Helen Highwater posted: