- Joined
- Mar 1, 2005
- Messages
- 887
- Format
- Medium Format
Greetings APUGers. I haven't explored the forums at all until recently, so I only just came upon this ability to introduce oneself to the community. I guess it's about time. Especially since I've posted quite a bit now and again. So who in tarnation am I with this wonky name and all, and where do I get off writing this precise English? I'm Canadian, born and raised in butt-ugly Toronto of the immigrant waves and spicy multicultural stew. My father is Danish, my mother Finnish, hence the Danish first name and anglicized family name (the real name is Videbaek, but my father had to choose between "a" or "e" when announcing himself to the Canadian authorities as an immigrant; no "ae" vowel on the keyboards, so he chose "a" and a good thing because it works better.) My grandfather on my dad's side was a very good landscape painter, especially when it came to watercolour, so drawing and painting was in the family and I've been doing both for as long as I can remember. But only for personal reasons. I did study drawing at university (studio drawing of the nude) and became a very competent draughtsman, but I didn't have the cojones at the tender age of 19 or so to try to become "an artist". In the downtown immigrant neighbourhood where I grew up, kids had to do well in school and go on to university to become doctors, lawyers or engineers -- or get shot, twice in the head out back, girls too. My parents weren't that extreme, but university was a must and so I did a degree in English and French literature & language. Afterwards I was qualified to do almost nothing but I got a job as an editor in a legal publishing house where, incidentally, I learned how to write precisely and correctly. Lawyers are the worst sticklers for punctuation, spelling and grammatical correctness. At least Canadian lawyers are. I got an irate call once from a dusty lawyer out in Alberta who pointed out that a comma was incorrectly placed in one of my publications! I endured a long lecture about the grammatically correct placement of commas. "I apologize, Sir, for the lack of quality control in this instance." "Will it be correct in my next edition, young man?" "It certainly will be, Sir, you have my word on it!" The university was altogether more forgiving. Anyway, somewhere along the line I met my wife, Minna, in Toronto. We fell in love. I followed her to Finland, leaving the Great White North for the Small White North. I knocked her up. We were happy about it and got married shotgun, gold-plated. I landed work, first as a technical writer in telecommunications, then later as a marketeer also in telecommunications. I jumped ship to advertising, where I worked for a spell of years as a Copywriter for Helsinki ad agencies (in English, my Finnish still isn't good enough for me to claim that I can write it at least not with a straight face). I burned out at that shtick, then moved to a meteorological equipment firm to work again as a marketeer. In the meantime, about 4 years ago, I discovered photography by asking my father to loan me his old Leica M3 which he'd bought new in Copenhagen in 1954. A buddy of his was a photojournalist and got him the camera half-price. I have no idea why this came into my mind at the time but it must have had something to do with the fact that my dad's eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he couldn't use the camera anymore -- couldn't see the dials or numbers, never mind see through the rangefinder. I felt sorry for my dad but also for the old, famous, unused Leica. So I borrowed it, and started going out at night in Helsinki during the winter, taking long night exposures, freezing my right index finger on the shutter-button at the B setting. I had only the vaguest ideas about exposure times and available light, and no light meter. So the first bunch of rolls came back black. I invested in a light meter, and was thrilled to get a roll that actually had images on it. These included "Runeberg 1, 2 and 3" which I've posted on APUG as lith prints. These were the pictures that opened my eyes to the possibilities of photography as a graphical medium. There was a special character and beauty to these pictures. Ever since, I've been working steadily to expand and improve, acquiring a Hasselblad from a friend at a very kind price and starting to develop B & W films myself. I bought the better "how-to" photography books and studied them thoroughly. Developing my own films was another huge leap forward in picture quality and expressive possibility. I love photography, one can do things with it that one cannot do with drawing and painting. I especially love how it portrays movement. There was a group of modern painters active in the 20s and 30s who were devoted to portraying movement with painting -- they were inspired by photography, but never seemed to realize that photography does it so much better! Drop the paint, boys, grab the cameras. The point being that I seem to be very different from the photographers I've met and most of those posting on WWW forums like APUG. Photographers seem to make a set-in-stone distinction between photographs and drawings, paintings, etchings, etc (everything else). For me, they're all one and the same thing: pictures. For me, photography is just one way to make a picture. Actually, I photograph as a draughtsman. I use the camera like I would use pencil or pen & ink, the only difference being that the camera can be much faster. I don't get ideas as photographic ideas. I just get visual ideas and then, in thinking them through, I decide how best to carry them out: drawing, painting, photography, combinations thereof, whatever. It's a richness, a joy of seeing. All this has led me to decide on a career change: I'm studying graphical design (yes, with photography as a sub-set) and shall become a graphical designer. I intend to become a very very good one, but we shall see -- I understand the economic realities of the workplace and one's own ideas about what is excellent must be subservient to what a customer needs and wants. Also, Finland is crawling with highly qualified graphical designers, most of them mediocre (as in any field), but scrabbling like hell for the work out there in this small market. Also, I know almost nothing about the whole digital side of photography, and I must know everything and more about it by the end of my studies. Not to mention the whole digital work-flow. I know spots in the flow, but must master the entirety. A lot to learn! That's the best thing about photography. Once you've well and truly mastered something, in mastering it you will have discovered all kinds of other things that must be learned and mastered. Doors, doors, doors and doors to open and go through for a lifetime. It's wonderful. That's it. Greetings to anyone reading this. I send you my best regards. Svend.
