Just some random thoughts today.
My parents loved nature and passed that love on to their kids. I never feel the same sense of peace and belonging anywhere else as I feel when I’m outdoors in wild places.
I’m completely in love with the natural world and how sunlight plays on the earth and changes the scene from moment to moment. I love the variety and nuanced lighting of clouds so much that I shouldn’t be allowed to drive when there are cool clouds in the sky.
I didn’t make a big conscious decision to become a photographer, it’s just who I’ve been my whole life. I could no more stop making photographs than I could stop breathing.
For many years I used 4×5 field cameras, which make you really slow down and work deliberately. You’re standing out in the open with a dark cloth draped over your head, looking at the world upside down in the ground glass. It is a powerful tool for learning composition because everything is reduced to shapes, tones, and textures. Once you get used to the inherent weirdness of it all.
I really love working in the darkroom. Ha, “working.” For me, going into the darkroom was never work, it was play in the same way that finger painting is play. I loved the alchemy of the film, paper, and chemicals. The revelation of an image in the dim orange glow of the safelight as the developer worked its magic on the paper. The first look at a new print under real lights as it swirls in the rinse water bath, wondering if I’d got it right or needed to start again.
While the field camera was a wonderful course in the craft of photography, I’m completely sold on digital cameras now. Fellow photographer David Brookover summed it up really succinctly when I was trying to explain the difference to him. David said, “It’s like you’re wearing tennis shoes now, isn’t it?” That’s a really elegant way to describe the difference between large-format film and digital photography. Both have their strengths and weaknesses but all of the gear you need to carry with large format is like the days of camping and hiking when boots were clunky, heavy, leather contraptions and the gear was made of wood and canvas. Both work great, but the experience couldn’t be more different.
Like I said, some random thoughts.