I have been a passive APUG reader for quite some time now, but the quality of the posts and the dedication of both staff and members finaly pushed me towards subscription. This site is too good not to be supported, and even if my knowledge is far behind that of many of you here, I feel proud to be a member of such a great community.
I am an amateur most of the time, with some part time jobs in photography for friends, our village or different communities like churches in our area. All of the "official" jobs are done digitaly, quantity of pictures and customer expectations require a computer-friendly workflow and digital output.
All of my own private work however is analog, or hybrid, since I don't own and don't have access to a traditional dark room (that detail will change some day, now that my eldest son is getting into real photography too, the pro-darkroom-minority in our family is growing fast!).
At the age of 6, my father bought me a Kodak plastic camera with 124 cartridges. That was in 1968 or 69, photopgraphy entered my life. At 12, I bought my first "real" camera with all the money I had, a Ricoh 500 GX rangefinder, and at 15 or 16 a Pentax MX with the 50mm f/1.4 lens. Later on I switched to Nikons F601, and when ebay made access to used gear easier, I worked with lots of different cameras: Canon 300, Canon 50e, Contax 159 MM, Leica R4 and R4s, Nikon F3, FG, FM2n, F80, F100. I started medium format with a modified version of the Seagull, the B.I.G. 4, and went on to Rolleicord Va and Vb, Mamiya RB67 and some folding cameras friends of mine did not know what to do with.
My first DSLR was a D70, and I was excited: no grain, no dust, different ISO from picture to picture, no waiting for film to come back from the lab, no scanning, no more deciding on b/w or colour, a few clicks in PS could get me both... a brave new world in photography unfolded before my eyes. I still had my analog gear, but I used it less and less. I optimized my digital workflow, bought fast computers, a good printer, and lots of external drives for backups of backups of thousands of pictures.
Until one day about two years ago I sat down and went through all of my old pictures, negatives and slides. And only then did I discover the beauty in what I had until then seen as faults: the grain, the wide range of light and shadows, the in-between-colours my DSLR's never showed, the personal touch even in the worst of my old pictures, the ones I had enlarged on an old Liesegang with a normal household light bulb years ago. I discovered the soul of analog photography, or so it seemed to me. Digital may be sharper, grain-free, flexible. But to me it simply is too perfect, like a perfectly computerized polycarbonat auto-everything-camera compared to my old Leica M2. The picture-computer will easily make the most of a given situation: perfect lighting, perfect sharpness, no grain, no noise. Perfect for documentation or information. But not perfect my personal view and expression. It's a bit like email compared to a hand-written letter: the email may be easier to read, to deliver, it's faster, can be forwarded and copied. But the handwriting will tell me more about the author, it's personal, and the fact that it can not be copied and spread that easily makes it unique.
I still work a lot with my DSLRs, they have there advantages, but most of my private photography is analog. I had the cameras that had been sitting in the locker for so long serviced and CLA'd, the Leica M2, Rolleiflex 3.5F and Mamiya RB67 Pro SD. On my business trips, either the M2 or the Rolleiflex are with me all of the time, and on weekends I take the RB67 out for portrait or landscape shots.
Looking for more information, for friends with similar interests, I ended up on this wonderful site. You now know my photographic history, I hope I will be able to contribute to this site too and am now looking forward to a wonderful analog time.
Thanks to all that keep this site running and analog photography alive,
Holger
I am an amateur most of the time, with some part time jobs in photography for friends, our village or different communities like churches in our area. All of the "official" jobs are done digitaly, quantity of pictures and customer expectations require a computer-friendly workflow and digital output.
All of my own private work however is analog, or hybrid, since I don't own and don't have access to a traditional dark room (that detail will change some day, now that my eldest son is getting into real photography too, the pro-darkroom-minority in our family is growing fast!).
At the age of 6, my father bought me a Kodak plastic camera with 124 cartridges. That was in 1968 or 69, photopgraphy entered my life. At 12, I bought my first "real" camera with all the money I had, a Ricoh 500 GX rangefinder, and at 15 or 16 a Pentax MX with the 50mm f/1.4 lens. Later on I switched to Nikons F601, and when ebay made access to used gear easier, I worked with lots of different cameras: Canon 300, Canon 50e, Contax 159 MM, Leica R4 and R4s, Nikon F3, FG, FM2n, F80, F100. I started medium format with a modified version of the Seagull, the B.I.G. 4, and went on to Rolleicord Va and Vb, Mamiya RB67 and some folding cameras friends of mine did not know what to do with.
My first DSLR was a D70, and I was excited: no grain, no dust, different ISO from picture to picture, no waiting for film to come back from the lab, no scanning, no more deciding on b/w or colour, a few clicks in PS could get me both... a brave new world in photography unfolded before my eyes. I still had my analog gear, but I used it less and less. I optimized my digital workflow, bought fast computers, a good printer, and lots of external drives for backups of backups of thousands of pictures.
Until one day about two years ago I sat down and went through all of my old pictures, negatives and slides. And only then did I discover the beauty in what I had until then seen as faults: the grain, the wide range of light and shadows, the in-between-colours my DSLR's never showed, the personal touch even in the worst of my old pictures, the ones I had enlarged on an old Liesegang with a normal household light bulb years ago. I discovered the soul of analog photography, or so it seemed to me. Digital may be sharper, grain-free, flexible. But to me it simply is too perfect, like a perfectly computerized polycarbonat auto-everything-camera compared to my old Leica M2. The picture-computer will easily make the most of a given situation: perfect lighting, perfect sharpness, no grain, no noise. Perfect for documentation or information. But not perfect my personal view and expression. It's a bit like email compared to a hand-written letter: the email may be easier to read, to deliver, it's faster, can be forwarded and copied. But the handwriting will tell me more about the author, it's personal, and the fact that it can not be copied and spread that easily makes it unique.
I still work a lot with my DSLRs, they have there advantages, but most of my private photography is analog. I had the cameras that had been sitting in the locker for so long serviced and CLA'd, the Leica M2, Rolleiflex 3.5F and Mamiya RB67 Pro SD. On my business trips, either the M2 or the Rolleiflex are with me all of the time, and on weekends I take the RB67 out for portrait or landscape shots.
Looking for more information, for friends with similar interests, I ended up on this wonderful site. You now know my photographic history, I hope I will be able to contribute to this site too and am now looking forward to a wonderful analog time.
Thanks to all that keep this site running and analog photography alive,
Holger
