I remember the Virginia Slims cigarettes advertising slogan (I didn’t smoke them) “You’ve come a long way, baby” and I feel something similar goes with me and my photography. We can dispense with the “baby” part, because I’m all grown up and even old, like I’m 76.
But that doesn’t stop me from every once in a while looking back to see how far I’ve come from that summer of 1956 when my amateur photographer dad loaned me his Kodak Retina 2a, a light meter, close-up lenses, and a tripod, and I then went on a 3,000 mile bus ride across America, into Mexico, and through Canada with a bunch of kids my age. I was fourteen years old.
Anyway, my dad was shocked at how good my photos were when I returned, perhaps the only time I ever really impressed him. He was a businessman, a Republican, and very conservative, while I was a Democrat, a liberal, and only later in my life any kind of a businessman.
So, from 1956 onward, I was always interested in photography, but seldom could afford the film and developing expense. More discouraging yet for me was the inability to see what I was getting until days, weeks, or months later. That was a photo-killer for me.
Of course, when digital cameras came along, I was right there and had been doing digital movies for a while before that. But I had an early Nikon Coolpix and a D1X (at $5K a pop) when they first came out. Using the D1X, I photographed more than 30,000 rare rock concert-posters and had to build my own vacuum table for that.
But all of my early years, from around six-years old onward, I was a committed naturalist, with little better to do (until I discovered girls in my teens) than collect and document natural history. In fact, I became so interested (and skilled) in herpetology (especially frogs and salamanders) that I was given a little office-desk in the herpetology department, way back in the stack of preserved specimens at the University of Michigan Museums building.
In those years I captured, measured, and released thousands of specimens, mainly Michigan salamanders, in which I was interested. So, when I hear about photographers who brag about their hiking and roughing it, I have to chuckle, because I did that in spades, but in the Midwest and all across Texas, suffering everything from heatstroke (in Enchanted Rock State Natural Area) to being eaten alive by mosquitoes in Michigan and Florida swamps, and so on.
When I mention that I have taken many hundreds of thousands of nature photos, I’ve been called a liar, but I’m not. Photography can be a lonesome thing, in that my extended family might like to see perhaps 10 or so of my photos at a time, but after that their eyes start to roll. I have stopped asking if anyone wants to see what I’m doing photographically, unless it’s photos of my grandkids. That’s just the way it is. I am sure other serious photographers feel the same way. Not only is there not much of a market for photos, there is not even anything but a passing interest in looking at them for most people. LOL. That’s a little background and its leading up to the reason I am writing this account, which is:
I thought I would talk, not about my interest in photography per-se or techniques, but rather about how that interest has changed over the years, because I see all of the different phases I have gone through being echoed and acted out by various photographers on the online photo forums. And they don’t all get along, but I believe they will (if they live long enough) come to understand one another.
As mentioned, I was a naturalist, and a dedicated one at that. My life was filled with nature collecting, documenting, journals, measuring and, as I got older, photographing. I lived and breathed nature study and that for many years. Even after I discovered that women were as interesting as nature, I still did a lot of nature work and collecting. Did I hike? You bet and lots of it, carrying as little as I could, and going as far as I could.
As someone who was interested in bogs, there was not only carrying a tripod, camera, lenses, diffusers, and what-not, it was doing it in hip boots, and whatever protected me from the cold or sun. Bogs are also (or can be) dangerous places to be, dangers to our health due to sinking through them (not to mention poison oak, etc.), but dangerous always to the bogs themselves. Bogs are a very fragile environment.
And climbing, well I did my climbing during two trips to Tibet, so blisters I know. Living in the flatlands of Michigan, there is not much to climb, but plenty to muck around in, because it’s all wetlands. It’s the same with lower Florida and the Everglades, a place I have been to many times.
As for how my photography morphed, I am getting to that. Originally (and especially) I was interested in field-guide quality nature photos, perhaps at first as regards identification, but later I wanted field-guide quality photos that were good photographs technically, too. However, I did not want the artsy-fartsy, and in my photos, whatever so-called “attractive” compositions resulted from my work were more by accident than design. But this too changed.
As time went by, yes I wanted to “capture” that photo and for it to look good too, but over time I found that I also wanted the specimen to “be in context,” so I wanted more and more of the surrounding habitat to be in the photos too. Ultimately, this was just a back-door way to introduce composition and its art. It took me quite a while to admit to myself that I was starting to like not just the context of the photo, but for it to have perhaps a little mood too. And that, my friends, is a slippery slope for a naturalist.
I was getting arty, but something else happened that was even more “horrific,” and that was that I was losing my taste for hunting specimens, either critters or plants. Now this was a serious segue indeed, because it meant that instead of planning this or that nature trip to find this or that critter or plant, I was becoming more interested in what might be called “found” photos.
I never liked sneaking up on a lizard or frog all that much, but I did it with skill and consistency. I was good at it too. I was once told that I had contributed the largest collection ever given to the university museum I worked with. I have no way of knowing if that’s true, but it was large enough.
And now I was finding that I didn’t care for the “hunt” on principle. The whole idea of “gotcha” photographing was beginning to fade or to even become repulsive. That really turned me around from where I came from.
Instead, this whole idea of found photography (photographing what I found beautiful or moving) took up more and more of my time, until that is all the photographing I felt like doing. No longer did I chase a damselfly, a Giant Swallowtail, or a frog or lizard through the fields and swamps. I couldn’t do that to them, anymore than I would like to be hunted.
Instead of fielding a mini-expedition hundreds or even tens of miles away, I found myself circling ever more near where I live. Of course, I also was getting older and less happy carrying a backpack or a lot of gear. I had gotten my gear down to a 10” messenger bag in which I carried two diffusers, a tiny flowerpod tripod, various clips, polarizers and neutral filters, a shower-cap for rain, and any other lenses I wanted to have. I always (or usually) walked with my camera/lens fixed to my tripod head, which I know is supposedly a “no-no,” but I have never had a single problem in all these years, knock-on-wood.
My lens journey would take an article in itself, but suffice it to say that I had collected well over 100 really great lenses, but after a while I began to sell off lenses, those that were perhaps considered “legendary,” keeping those that were fast, sharp, and highly-corrected for the various aberrations, etc. And I found myself getting into more and more of the so-called “exotic” lenses, enlarger lenses, scanner lenses, large and medium format lenses, and so on.
And since for a good half of the year Michigan is too cold to do much outside, I began to do more over those months in a little studio I put together right in my house. I had a large studio about one block away but, although I loved the space in the large studio, I liked better to be able to slip away in a half-a-minute to my tiny studio and photograph, especially in winter.
And I found, to my surprise, that working in the studio, more slowly and carefully, did good things to my photos and was fun. I became increasingly interested in composition and before long photographers online were telling me that they could recognize one of my photos at a glance. I didn’t realize that I had a style, but upon thinking about it, obviously what I had been trying to arrive at myself was what other photographers were calling my style.
So, here I sit as the summer of 2017 begins to wane, looking toward winter and having to be inside. It is OK, since I seem to do more with a little than when I have a lot... of subjects. I have tried some serious hikes this summer, with boots, knee-pads, not to mention mosquitoes and horse flies. I have to say that I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to, forging through waist-high grass, shrubs, shaking off bugs galore, and the like. And my eyes for distant subjects are not what they used to be.
I now enjoy more carefully setting up and taking photos, either indoors in my tiny studio or outdoors along the edge of the wilds, cemeteries, gardens, parks, trails, and so forth. And I have found that my earlier hunt-for-the-right-specimen has telescoped down to finding totally attractive ways to photograph what is right around me at the time. Imagine that!
As you can see, not only cameras and lenses change, but we change over time. Of course, I can relate to nature photos, field-guide photos, compositions, and even abstracts. I have been there, done that, or am still doing that.
Here is a photo I took this morning. I went out in the fields and took some photos, but ended up back in my tiny studio photographing some Hibiscus flowers. To me, the moral of all this is to do what completes us, what makes us happy at the time and the heck with those who don’t like it or only like what they themselves do. For me, I can like many different kinds of photography (if it is good), not just my own, and I do. But of course, like all photographers, I like what I do, and to me that IS photography.
Photo with Nikon D810 and the El Nikkor 105 APO
