My Obsessions
I have spent most of my life obsessed with science, music, and photography. In high school I realized that I enjoyed playing the piano, but I wasn’t talented enough to make a living in music. So I set up a chemistry and biology lab in my parents basement, and proceeded to cut up frogs and make rocket fuel. A few years later after obtaining a Ph.D. in chemistry, I spent five years at the University of Alberta doing research in biochemistry. Soon after arriving in Edmonton in 1977, I purchased my first camera, a Nikkormat FT3, along with a number of Nikkor AI lenses (auto indexing, an early form of artificial intelligence). It was a battleship of a camera, and it accompanied me along with Kodachrome on many treks into the Canadian Rockies under some pretty extreme conditions (e.g. -40° F). It’s still one of my favorite cameras. But like many other photographers, I moved from film to digital cameras, eventually obtaining a full frame mirrorless Canon R5. The rise of LR, PS, HDR, and over-processing led me to become disenchanted with the digital process. I stumbled onto Beaumont Newhall’s “History of Photography” in a used bookstore in Austin TX, along with John Schafer’s “The Ansel Adams Guide: Basic Techniqes of Photography”, and soon became obsessed with the idea of geting back to my chemistry lab roots.
The Craft
The craft of making, rather than taking, a photograph can be refreshing. I commonly view a photograph as a form of expression, an art form rather than documentation. My cameras now are primarily film cameras, ranging from vintage 35mm cameras and lenses, to medium and large format cameras with a range of vintage lenses. I love the look of handmade gelatin silver prints. They have a depth that I have never seen duplicated with an inkjet printer. In addition, the so-called “alternative processes” platinum and palladium along with carbon transfer give me a totally different look that compliments silver. They will never be duplicated with any digital process. A handmade print needs to be seen and held to be fully appreciated. A digital reproduction displayed on a digital screen cannot reproduce the real thing. As a pianist once told me when comparing recordings with live performances, it’s like comparing canned soup to homemade.
Music and Photography
A number of the great film photographers were also pianists (e.g. Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, and Paul Caponigro). Ansel occasionally used music analogies to explain his approach to photography. There’s the famous quote where he stated that the negative was the score, and the print was the perfomance. In one I recently discovered he seems to be comparing the zone system to the keyboard: “The piano has 88 keys, and you have to be able to play all of them. And the range of white to black is analogous to the 88 keys. You have to be able to play all 88 keys in that pallete from white to black.” I would add that it is the imperfections of the historic harpsichord and piano that continue to make them such rich and glorious instruments, and it is the imperfections of vintage cameras and lenses, film, developers, and a wide array of historic printing processes that provide a palette of richness and depth for expressing myself.
