Photography – my Friend for Life

I will readily acknowledge that my life would have been very different if I hadn’t discovered photography at an early age. I picked up my first camera around 75 years ago, a nameless box camera but one which sowed the seeds of a life long interest. I know that, aside from my family and my career plus playing a lot of badminton until my shoulder called time, it has filled almost all my free moments. Now I have been retired for some 20+ years, it keeps me awake and reasonably alert, never failing to fill my head with ideas and things to investigate, ancient and modern.

Early days

In the early days of course I was just your everyday snap-shooter, recording stuff I was interested in. (The “girls” aren’t what you think – I attended an all boys school – these were from cast shots for a school play). It was one of these interests I think that led me to a more serious interest in photography, namely train spotting.

I am still amazed that my parents allowed me to travel alone on the tram and the train from my home in a Bradford, UK suburb to spend the day on the platforms of various railway stations at the tender age of 11 or 12. Also I doubt that a group of us would nowadays be allowed to camp out on the end of a platform the whole day for the price of a platform ticket, logging the numbers of the engines we saw and ruling them off in our Ian Allen booklets.

Of course, I tried to emulate the railway photographers of the day with my box camera and later my father’s Autographic Brownie that he gave me when I showed such a keen interest. Needless to say, I failed miserably having no understanding of what was really involved, especially composition and focus as you can see. My feature image of the Church of the Good Shepherd, in Tekapo, NZ perhaps shows I did improve a little.

But, like every photographic tyro before and since, I put this down to not having the right gear of course and so began the search for the perfect equipment.

Starting to see the light

The camera clubs at school and then at University stimulated my early interest and introduced me to the the craft side of photography, the darkroom and things like filters. I also began to study the work of current and past masters, through books like Beaumont Newhall’s later, excellent and ground-breaking book “The History of Photography”, something I still dip into occasionally, and which is a mine of historic information. (SBN: 436 30641 7 – paperback/ – 9 hardback) published 1964. It was a major factor in establishing photography as a creditable art form, especially in the US. Bill Brandt, Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and many others influenced my development and inspired what I produced, teaching me a great deal in an informal, hands on way. The only formal training I had was when I took an evening class in GCE A-level photography in my ’40s.

I avoided camera clubs for some time after leaving University until, through a small group I belonged to, I discovered something called a postal portfolio, The Lincolnshire Photo Folio to be exact. The precursor of the present day online forum probably. It brought a group of like-minded people together remotely to share their interests and ideas, but on a cycle of a month in our case as the three boxes of prints and comment sheets followed each other arriving monthly around the membership. So different to the instant gratification of computer communications. I joined a folio run by the Photographic Society of New Zealand when I moved here but it only ran one set and so had a roughly 3 month cycle, far too extended to retain my interest I’m afraid. The crit. sheet shown is very like the LPF version I was used to.

I belonged to two clubs in the UK and one here in New Zealand, most of my activity here being with the PSNZ for a while but for the past 10 years or so I have only been involved on line.

Equipment summary

My first ’serious’ camera in the 1950s was a 35mm Iloca Rapid followed by a Voigtländer Vito IIa and then a Moskva 5 Super Ikonta copy. I may have briefly had a 127 of some sort to judge by some of my negatives but I can’t recall that one. Next came a Zeiss Werra mk1 followed by my introduction to my favourite type, the twin lens reflex in the shape of an MPP Microflex followed by my first SLR, a Praktica, then a Zorki 4k rangefinder. A Yashicamat followed and then the Mamiya C33 with 55mm and 105mm lenses. The Mamiya served me for many years alongside an Olympus XA that lived in my pocket. I had a spell with Minolta SLRs and then several Nikons with a Mamiya 645 Super briefly. Then digital came on the scene, an Olympus C2000Z, followed in New Zealand by a Fuji S2 Pro and finally my current Sony A3000 plus a whole string of film cameras more recently, too long to list.

We had moved to New Zealand in 2002, where our two daughters had settled and which coincided with the gradual drop in value of much analogue equipment. I was able to sample and enjoy many different cameras that had been beyond my reach in the days when I could only afford one at a time with the result that another couple of dozen cameras have now passed through my hands or sit on my shelf. I have also become increasingly intrigued with subminiature, 16mm and 110, which proved really involving and rewarding.

So what have we come to?

It is undeniable that photography has changed dramatically in my time involved with it and especially in this past 20 or so years. So much so that I have argued it should now only be called “imaging” or “digital imaging”, the original meaning of the word having been left behind almost completely much like the LP is now referred to as vinyl, the LP having replaced the simple “record”. It may be coming into more general usage over time.

The image is still formed by light energy falling on a light sensitive surface but that surface responds in a completely different way to film. And to carry out the process of creating an image requires an almost completely different skill set. The only things carried over are the lens and the person wielding the camera, who creates the result by their manipulation of the equipment.

But, then again, when Kodak exploded onto the scene in 1888 it opened up photography to the non-technical, which must have caused some possibly doom-laden comment amongst the black fingered fraternity. The cover image on Newhall’s book carries what appears to be a typical, circular, early Kodak photo but taken with a good lens. I have seen examples of this quality though so it is understandable that it caused such a stir.

But everyone survived so that even now we can still pursue our photography however we choose thank goodness. Long may we do so. The two final shots above, film and digital respectively, are of two Bendigos. The ruin of the miner’s cottage is on the site of the abandoned one in New Zealand while the memorial is in the prosperous namesake in Australia, a thriving regional centre and where the New Zealand miners came from during the mid-19th century gold rush days.

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