While I remember playing with an old Brownie box camera, the first camera I actually remember shooting with was a wonderful Leica 35mm with Zeiss lenses. I’m told it came back from Germany from the Berlin Airlift, slightly before my time. Completely manual, but those Zeiss lenses were really sweet. A Minolta SRT101 with an assortment of lenses carried me thru many many years – all of the scanned shots here came from that camera. Match needle technology, easier than the Leica, still sweet. I skipped the progressively more automatic film cameras, the SRT101 was too sweet. My first digital camera was an Olympus D-450 about 1999. Took a while to get used to it, but it fit in the bag along side the Minolta, which I continued to use until 2005. In 2004 I acquired a Canon EOS 300D, Digital Rebel, which I’m still using. Current equipment also includes an Olympus D-580. The Cannon and Olympus live in the same Targus camera bag the Minolta occupied for years, though pockets that used to carry fresh and exposed film now carry batteries, cards and the like
Enough of equipment. After all, you can get great shots with a pin hole camera made from an oat meal box and piece of film. Beyond that its a case of how finely does the available equipment allow you to control the recording of light impacting a sensor, be that film or whatever.
I’m a geek, a computer nerd (where I make my money), a physicist, an astronomer, a high performance driving instructor, a safety and operations official at car races, and sometimes I take pictures. Don’t be surprised at anything.
My photography crossed into computers in the field of computer graphics. I created the first model visualization tools at a major aerospace manufacturer when they thought aluminum plate scribes on 24-foot Gerber drafting machines were all they needed. In a Big Oil company I was part of a major rewrite of the LANDSAT satellite image processing tools, and developed image analysis and 3-D seismic analysis tools. With others at a major users group I led writing a white paper that became the initial specs of Corel Draw (wish I had royalties on that). Several years on ANSI X3H3 resulted in ISO standards for PHIGS, GKS, CGM and other foundations of today’s computer graphics. It was fun.
The world is an integrated whole, regardless how we try to parse it. Visualizing the world from images is the most powerful method of putting both thoughts and information into the human mind. Some of that input needs to be technical, some experiential, some emotive.
Welcome to my world, disconnected from time, space and mind, somewhere between the Big Bang and the Heat Death of this Universe. Step outside with me for a moment.
Feel free to leave comments on the blog or many of the gallery pages, or drop me an email using the form below
