Young folks, listen up!

[blockend]

I'm currently going through my old negatives, 10 fat folders of them with a view to putting them in printed books. Currently scanning, spotting and tweaking 1975 - 1980 monochrome. It's a real effort but my only regret is I didn't take more pictures!

The thing is at the time you think people and places will be around forever - they won't. Record them now. Some of the most fascinating shots are throwaway street corner photographs. The hair-dos, clothes, cars, shop fronts, advertisements have gone and sometimes entire areas have been flattened and rebuilt. Even the graffiti is heritage.

The lesson is take more photographs, you won't regret it.

 

[pdeeh]

gosh I was just thinking about destroying all my negatives, prints and scans ...

 

[lauffray]

Taking note

 

[Bob Carnie]

I'm currently going through my old negatives, 10 fat folders of them with a view to putting them in printed books. Currently scanning, spotting and tweaking 1975 - 1980 monochrome. It's a real effort but my only regret is I didn't take more pictures!

The thing is at the time you think people and places will be around forever - they won't. Record them now. Some of the most fascinating shots are throwaway street corner photographs. The hair-dos, clothes, cars, shop fronts, advertisements have gone and sometimes entire areas have been flattened and rebuilt. Even the graffiti is heritage.

The lesson is take more photographs, you won't regret it.

good post , listen to this as is good advice.

 

[Echoes]

Thanks a lot for the advice man, I'm only 18 but already have a big big folder of negs, the feeling of going through them and remembering is jsut awesome, can't imagine how it is with a larger body of work over the years.

 

[DWThomas]

Yes -- and it wouldn't hurt to organize them in some fashion and tie in dates, names, and places.

(Don't bother to ask why I say this!)

 

[Slixtiesix]

The thing is at the time you think people and places will be around forever - they won't. Record them now. Some of the most fascinating shots are throwaway street corner photographs. The hair-dos, clothes, cars, shop fronts, advertisements have gone and sometimes entire areas have been flattened and rebuilt. Even the graffiti is heritage.

With my 30th birthday drawing nearer, I absolutely know what you are talking about! I too regret the many shots not taken and I must say it is often the most trivial things that I wish I had taken pictures of. I often think of my old student´s flat now, which I moved out of about 3 years ago. The alley I walked every day when coming home, the supermarket I went to every evening, the parking lot where my car was parked. All these things seemed so common to me that I never even considered photographing them.
There is currently a lot of construction work going on in the city that I live in, and I have never seen it changing that much during my lifetime. There is an administration building from the 60s that will be demolished soon and it´s so ugly that most people, including myself, will be happy that it´s gone. However, I had been to this building so many times that I also have fond memories of it. Feels strange that the place of these memories will vanish forever. I think I should take a picture as long as it´s still possible.

 

[blockend]

With my 30th birthday drawing nearer, I absolutely know what you are talking about! I too regret the many shots not taken and I must say it is often the most trivial things that I wish I had taken pictures of. I often think of my old student´s flat now, which I moved out of about 3 years ago. The alley I walked every day when coming home, the supermarket I went to every evening, the parking lot where my car was parked. All these things seemed so common to me that I never even considered photographing them.

That's exactly the kind of thing not to miss. Familiarity breeds contempt, but the familiar doesn't last very long.

 

[Wallendo]

I had a discussion about these things with my 88 year old father a few weeks ago.

Pretty photographs of sunsets, sunrises, mountains and other scenery are of little personal interest - we all have them. Photos of places are of little importance unless the place has personal/family meaning. I have many years of photographs, but have a "dark zone" from the age of 18 through 31 when I was in school and training where I have few photographs because my priorities were elsewhere and I regret not having photographs of my apartments, friends and favorite haunts. What makes this worse was that I spent 9 years between two very photogenic cities - Charleston SC and New Orleans LA. I also didn't take enough photographs of my grandparents.

It is easy to focus in on art photography and the technical aspects of photography, but many of the images people treasure the most are simple snap-shots. Although to be honest, I wish I had taken a number of photos with better framing and better equipment - shooting Kodachrome in a fixed aperture, fixed focus and fixed shutter speed camera was a hit or miss proposition and I missed quite often.

 

[winger]

My parents are months away from moving out of the town where I grew up. Once they leave, I won't really have any reason to go back there - no one there to visit anyway. It's a town that my family lived in for several generations and had a huge hand in building. While it's smaller now than it was in the 1800s, there's still evidence of a lot of history in that town. I really wish I'd taken FAR more photos there. I plan to go up and do some shooting in August, but I'm sure I won't get a quarter of what I want to get and even that's just the tip of the iceberg of what I should shoot.
So don't do what I've done! Shoot, shoot, shoot, and shoot some more. Don't just capture the festivals and family parties; take pictures of your town on a quiet day. Take more pictures than you think is wise - film's cheaper than you think when compared to the value of the images to future generations.

 

[frank]

Profound advice from OP. Take heed!

 

[skorpiius]

Meh, in 100 years we can check out all of that in google streetview

Seriously though, you're right in that so much of old photos which are the most fascinating are just ones of normal everyday life which don't seem remotely worth taking photos of in the present.

 

[removed account4]

Meh, in 100 years we can check out all of that in google streetview

Seriously though, you're right in that so much of old photos which are the most fascinating are just ones of normal everyday life which don't seem remotely worth taking photos of in the present.

i've been taking photos of my local environemnt in the present for the last 30 years
some of the images are in local libraries some are in my files.
nothing wrong with now .. we live in interesting times

 

[frank]

i've been taking photos of my local environemnt in the present for the last 30 years
some of the images are in local libraries some are in my files.
nothing wrong with now .. we live in interesting times

We certainly do.

Back on topic: My parents have a shoebox with old B+W photos taken while they were children and before, mainly of family members. There's also a picture of the black forest mountain side farmhouse with barn on top that my grandmother grew up in. That connection with my family's past is priceless.

Photographers of today: Your pics will be part of someone's past.

 

[pbromaghin]

I have an album with pictures of a school play, starring my uncle Robert, taken 2 weeks before he died at 6 years old around 1918. There is one faded photo of my aunt Helen, standing in the back yard, who died at 8 years old near the same day as Robert. My father, also deathly ill, was the only one of the children who made it through that week. Yes, take those photos.

 

[scheimfluger_77]

...we live in interesting times

Hmmm... Are you saying we are cursed?

 

[Colin Corneau]

This advice rings true.

I've been photographing the downtown neighbourhood of my small, weird city for over 8 years now. I just kept seeing these odd moments and so when I started to get back into film again, I decided to document it on film.
So glad I did...even in this short time there's fleeting moments gone forever that are still preserved in silver. It's amazing to see them.

Do what this guy says -- it's just solid advice. It'll work for you, too.

 

[removed account4]

Hmmm... Are you saying we are cursed?

not at all, im saying
at the very least the architecture of our world
is kind of eclectic to say the least
very strange contrasts / juxtapositions
buildings are disposable for the most part, so
something that was built 10 years ago is probably gonna be torn down
in 3 years to build something new
from a historic preservation point of view photograph as much as possible
when the next boing-boing car drives by ( or google or ... ) things will be completely different
and your photographs will be the only visible record.
where i live all the free standing mailboxes ( on a pole ) have vanished.
we had one at the end of our street, and i have no idea when it vaporized ...

 

[blockend]

There's always something interesting going on.

 

[sirimiri]

Photography is as close to time travel as most of us will ever get Shoot as often as you can!

 

[LAG]

Excuse me

The complete lesson will be not only for the “young folks”, but olders. If I can express my way of thinking on this matter, I would say that the crux of your advice is this:

to putting them in printed

More photographs mean more negatives, the real and happy thing is the positive, “The Print” that’s the motivating idea to get more (...), not to say that there must be always a special dedication for any photo we take, whether personal or work either. I know many photographers that perform real technical deployments when they go to take a landscape picture and yet for a picture of their mothers or their children use a miserable mobile camera … (Well, that’s another question, sorry for this thought)

Back to the point, of course, more photographs mean more money as well, not always available in younger pockets … (When I was young I did not have money, now that I have (not much) it’s the film which is in danger of running low …) Don't let it happen young folks!

Thanks blockend for you help

 

[Brian Schmidt]

Honestly this is the reason I got into film photography. I know of at least a couple people whose phones have died and they lost all their images from the past few years and they are left with nothing. I even knew of a guy who had all his kid's baby pictures and first couple years on a cell phone that he just lost one day and has no pictures left of him.


On the other hand I just recently came across some of the belongings of my Great Grandpa’s cousin (Ernie E. Hance) that my Grandma saved. He was born in 1889 and died in the late 1960’s. He never had kids so nobody was too interested in his stuff, but my Grandma’s aunt saved a box of his old photographs and writings and things. He was a great woodworker and was quite into photography himself (I found a picture of him with a Hasselblad from the ‘50’s some time, though I don’t know what happened to the photos he took with that). Many of the photos date back to the teens and some are in such good shape they could have been taken yesterday. What I mean to say is that I could keep images on a phone that will crap out in a couple years or I could make silver-based photos (and still save a good deal of money not owning a phone!) that somebody could look at in 100 years just as I can now, even if they are kept in a porch closet with no climate control at some point as Ernie's were.


Finding all that of his really was quite an inspiration. I am sure he would be honored by my interest and it came to my mind that it might not take much more than a will to make such a time capsule for those of the future to find (or a series of them!). I got thinking about what I would have liked him to add to it. It mostly came down to his personal projects and he and his friends doing what they like. I know he built a little one-man motor boat about the size of a kayak done up fancily. He has plenty of pictures of him or him and his wife but I would like to see him doing what he does best. Portraits only go so far for describing a person.


Reaction wise, I have been trying to take a picture of every great project I take on in various stages of completion and a few nice final shots. Friends are hard to photograph as they tend to duck away but I get them when they aren’t looking, and luckily that is when they are busy doing something, exactly what I am looking for. I have one of my friend cutting logs up for firewood. As it has been asserted above my very favorite photographs are of my cousin’s two year old and a somewhat poorly taken photo of my friend and I out in the woods with the camera propped up on some drift wood. The shutter wasn’t correctly adjusted yet so it is a bit underexposed. It is one of my favorites anyway. I have photographs of my brother and I on our 50-ish year old motorcycles dodging around, the first good casting from my homemade foundry held by my brother and I, photos of our childhood playground right before and during its destruction, etc. I just wish I would have started with a good camera earlier! It was all box cameras and flea market specials, but I now have a Voigtlander Avus with a roll film back which is a fine camera. I may make some kind of flash attachment.


Sixtiesix seemed to put it well. I have always been attracted to the “neglected” points of life like the alleys, garages, back corners of parks, falling down structures, junkyards, etc. Those also tend to be the most likely to vanish and change while many merely bat an eyelash. They hold just as many stories as anything else. Chances are somebody devoted years of their life to what is now only a falling down frame and yet nobody even remembers their great effort.


Anyway, excuse my rambling and have a nice day!


Brian

 

[Gerald C Koch]

I'm currently going through my old negatives, 10 fat folders of them with a view to putting them in printed books. Currently scanning, spotting and tweaking 1975 - 1980 monochrome. It's a real effort but my only regret is I didn't take more pictures!

The thing is at the time you think people and places will be around forever - they won't. Record them now. Some of the most fascinating shots are throwaway street corner photographs. The hair-dos, clothes, cars, shop fronts, advertisements have gone and sometimes entire areas have been flattened and rebuilt. Even the graffiti is heritage.

The lesson is take more photographs, you won't regret it.

+1000

Glad to see someone else realize this concept. I try to make the same point whenever I can. But most people ignore the advice.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

Thanks a lot for the advice man, I'm only 18 but already have a big big folder of negs, the feeling of going through them and remembering is jsut awesome, can't imagine how it is with a larger body of work over the years.

I still have all my negs and those from my father,starting with my birther 1954.What a pile of junk we produced early on1

 

[NJH]

Blockend I agree 100%. I was 42 this year, my grandfather died when I was only a few years old so all I had of him was my sketchy memories and a few poor minilab prints from older family members. That is until my Mum found her box of Kodachromes from the 60s so I started scanning them, what a wonderful and frankly pretty emotional experience that has been. Seems my memories are pretty good but its just incredible to see my grandparents again and looking better than I remember of course as I wasn't born to several years later. Its really impressive how well those chromes have held up over the past 50 years kept in a plastic Patterson slide box.

Family members have noted other things from these scans we easily forget, like how few cars there were on the streets of London back then.