Hello. I'm Gene, I'm a photographer and I've been musing about photography for some forty years. I first started sharing these musings on a blog site called Gene's PhotoBlog, but because blog sites are really set up for daily, diary-like entries and these musings are closer in spirit to essays, I moved them here.
First of all, there's nothing extraordinary about being a photograher. Everyone who owns a camera or snaps a disposable is a photographer. One of the things I love about photography is that it's a democratic medium performed by nearly everyone.
But for some of us the bug goes deeper, getting into our psyche the way playing guitar or piano does. It's partly a fascination with dials, knobs and lenses, partly an arm wrestle with f-stops, shutter speeds, and focus, and partly a quest for images that transcend the hardware and software, letting you see in a new way. That's what photography does best. It makes you a better seer and observer.
With photography, you can start early in life, or late, it really doesn't matter. If you start early, as I did, you have the pleasure of looking back over decades of work, re-experiencing images and recalling the circumstances surrounding them. Take this picture of bullwhip seaweed, for example.
bullwhip seaweed, Laguna Beach, California, 1963 (Kodachrome II)
(click on image for a larger, clearer view)It was taken when I was a skinny 18-year-old with my first 35mm camera, a $40 Exacta mail ordered from Olden Cameras, New York. It had a waist-level viewer, 58mm lens, and no pentaprism. Shooting verticals was murder. You had to hold the camera sideways, away from your body, while trying to align everything. Landscape mode was fine.
What's remarkable to me is that I can look at this image 40 years later and say, not bad, kid! Even more remarkable is that this Kodachrome slide survived. I've been through many changes in life and lived in many places. I'm sure there were other slides from the period, and some B&W shots, but this is all that has survived from this camera. And with the wonderful technology of a film scanner I was able to bring this 40-year-old image into the digital age.
So there's me, a young first-year engineering student on Christmas break on a trip with two buddies, Kent and Gary, from the University of Arizona in Tucson, travelling in a VW Beetle Kent borrowed from his sister in Phoenix, driving down from a visit to Pasadena and Caltech to look at some prime southern California beaches. Pretty place, Laguna Beach. Upscale even then. But what really caught my eye were the creatures in the tidal pools and this seaweed washed in with the tide.
The engineering degree never happened. I've not seen those buddies in 40 years and have no idea how their lives turned out. I live in Ontario now and have the tame beaches of the Great Lakes instead of the dynamic Pacific Coast. But through this image, I remember.
(15-Sep-2003, Revised 16-Jun-2004)
www.NorthernJourney.com -- gene@wilburn.ca