The beginning of a blog...

First things first: why a blog? It seems so 1990s. 

I wanted to have a single spot for both my photos and some commentary on those pictures. Right now, I post photos to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Flickr, and may include a description or story about the photo or a series of photos, if it’s on FB.  And some of those photographs are from interesting places: I’m very fortunate that my work has allowed me to travel extensively, and I usually bring some kind of camera with me, then post photos from near and far. Then, months later, I will want to locate a particular shot or a some detail, and I’ll have to dig back through my feeds on these different platforms. So, first objective, purely to simplify my life, is to have a single place to post photos and stories about the shots.  And while I may cross-post photos to other sites on the web, I’ll keep any detailed descriptions or additional commentary here.

 

In addition to start putting my photos in a single place, I also want to describe something of my photography journey. I’ve gone from film to digital, and recently, back again to film.  I made my first photograph in the 1960s, and have in the intervening years owned or used a pinhole camera, instamatics, pocket instamatics viewfinders, rangefinders, Voigtländer folding cameras, SLRs of a number of flavours, two Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) rigs, studio large format cameras in college, medium format SLRs, and a number of digital cameras, including Sony, Nikon, Olympus, and a GoPro, though like everyone else, most of the images I have recorded in the last decade have been on a smartphone, Blackberries and then iPhones.

One of my first experiences with a camera was with a pinhole camera, and it was on the site of the 1967 World Exhibition, Expo 67, in Montreal.  After Expo 67 ended, the site and most of the pavilions continued on as an exhibition called Man and His World (see cool video here https://www.britishpathe.com/video/man-and-his-world-exhibition ), open during the summer months from 1968 until 1984.

In the summer of 1968, as an eight-year-old, I participated in a photography workshop at one of the pavilions.  We were shown the very basics of photography, assembled pinhole cameras, took a photo with the cameras, and were shown the results.  I only wish I still had the contact print I was given at the end of the afternoon, but it was lost probably soon after.

At the bottom of this post is a photo from the last camera I’ve acquired, shot with a very cool film stock that I used for the first time. 

 

In November of last year, I got my hands on a Hasselblad, a camera I have coveted since my early days of film photography. The Hasselblad 500 C/M is an absolute classic, but not that far in shape from the square pinhole box camera I used in 1968. Paired with Zeiss Planar 80mm f/2.8 C, this camera shoots 120 format film, in a 6cm (2-1/4-inch) square framing, providing far higher resolution than 35mm (135) film format. 

The Hasselblad was the camera of choice of Ansel Adams, arguably the greatest landscape photographer of all time.  It was also the camera that NASA sent to the moon. NASA first sent a modified Hasselblad into space in 1962 as part of the Mercury program, and from Apollo 11 to 17, Hasselblads were taken to the moon … and, no joke, they were left there: to save weight, only the film backs were returned to earth.  A dozen Hasselblad camera bodies and lenses are still on the lunar surface. https://www.hasselblad.com/about/history/hasselblad-in-space/

 

 

So here's a photo, shot at the same time as the cover photo for this blog, taken with the last, most recent camera, the Hasselblad 500.  In subsequent posts, I will describe my photo journey and publish some of my favorite pictures along the way.  But for now, I’m starting not at the beginning of the journey, but from where I am today. 

Back when I started in film photography, a fast film was 400 ASA (or now, 400 ISO). The photo below and the cover shot for this blog, of my canine companion Sallie, was shot on Ilford Delta 3200, a film introduced to the market after I started my transition to digital in the late 1990s. I’m really impressed with how fine a print this film produces, and this is a great example of how well it performs in low light conditions.This picture was shot at night with only the available light from the ceiling LCDs.

The good news is how great the film is in low light, especially in 120 format with the much larger negative than 35mm.  I am looking forward to experimenting with the Delta 3200 in the months ahead. The bad news is that I bought a number of rolls when on a trip to Calgary and had them in checked luggage: the airport baggage X-ray system fried them.  That's what the lab is telling me.

That's all for now.

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