Camera Test

My father, the photographer, has been dead for nearly four years. Nonetheless, since Dad loved nothing more than taking a new camera out for spin, inviting him to “come with” to field-test my newest purchase seemed a natural thing to do.

The new camera is a Moore's Law upgrade of my previous 5 Mpixel Canon.  It's a Sony HX30V, a diminutive but feature-loaded, 18 Mpixel point and shoot descendant of the honking big Nikons and Pentaxes Dad strapped to his neck. At under $500, it’s low to mid-range as far as today’s cameras go. This makes it about $200 more expensive than my first real camera, a Nikkormat FTN.
 

The Sony has a high pixel count that approaches the resolution of film cameras, but entails a fair amount of sacrifices off professional systems costing six times as much.

 

Dad loved cameras as much as I do. Their hefty industrial beauty, the solid geometries of shiny metal and glass, precise, fluid mechanics, the logics and physics of lenses, irises, focal plains, shutter speeds, f-stops, ASA, the solid snick of a bayonet mount when you changed lenses, the smooth glide of the focus ring as you dialed it in.

Dad was no big fan of the automated features of cameras. He preferred to meter his own light, dodge and burn his prints and make his own adjustments. He’d explained the benefits of doing so many times. He taught me the virtues of bracketing (under/overexposing ½ -1 stop plus and minus), to shoot multiple images of the same subject. As I walked, mindful of his bracketing lessons , the Zone System, skylight, color temperature, saturation and shadow, I still let the camera do most of the work. Heck, I can fix it in post.

Dad was a working photographer, not the artsy fartsy type that his son is, but a self-taught man of practical science. His slides of wounds, scars and surgical procedures filled University of Pittsburgh medical libraries in the days before digital cataloging which he anticipated as the future of his craft. Prior to becoming a medical photographer, he’d been a police forensics photographer. Whatever he saw of human culvertage in his stint behind police lines must have prepared him for the clinical work of recording injury and disease. I once asked him how he could not be “grossed out” and he reminded me that there was a suffering person, often an ex-soldier in front of the lens. He took a humble but paternalistic pride in the knowledge that his work was being used to teach future healers. He saw himself as an important link in that chain of knowledge transfer.

 

Earliest Memories

Dad set up his first darkroom in his parents’ tiny apartment bathroom. I was no more than 6 when he set up his second darkroom in our family’s suburban basement. I still can see it in my mind’s eye. The red safety lights, Terry and the Pirates, L'il Abner, Beetle Bailey and other full-spread slightly off-register color comics from the Pittsburgh Press that plastered the basement windows and kept his darkroom light tight.



Other happy memories: The solid snap-click of the black square-rectangular Gralab 300 timers with sweep fluorescent hands. The teeth-grating buzz when they hit zero. Enough to wake the dead. The smaller mil-spec gray Time-o-lite timer which sat beside Dad’s enlarger as an exposure timer. It was a suitable stand-in for a movie-mockup IED. 


The ancient 50’s era Beseler enlarger and the light that poured from it in carefully measured seconds. These were the mystical objects of my childhood. Dad was self-taught, so for him photography was mostly an application of disciplined techniques. It was also an income that fed his family while nourishing his own quizzical nature on a home-grown diet of optics and chemistry to bring education and information to those who’d use it.



He also gave me my first serious book on photography, a large military-green telephone-sized monster called the Photographer’s Mate 3&2, which we’d shorthanded as the Naval Manual. I devoured it. It still sits in a place of honor on my bookshelf. A lot of Dad’s equipment seemed to be military surplus. I wish he was around to ask. Dad?



By his side, at home and later at his jobsite, I learned how to load, shoot and develop film-black and white and color. I learned how to mix developer, hypo and fixer chemicals into long, flat white trays in preparation for hours of darkroom work where he also taught me how to use an enlarger to print on photographic paper, which paper stocks to use, how long to develop, fix, wash and dry prints. From there I discovered how to flat-mount prints on posterboard with paraffin mounting seal, applied without bubbles using irons to carefully seal the edges before putting print and mounting in a press.

I also learned how to set plastic type to cardboard, shoot with diazo film and not inhale the nasal passage searing ammonia vapors that were needed to develop diazo strips—white text on blue or green background-colored slides—the analog ancestors of PowerPoint slides some 40-50 years ago.

 

When Dad got his first motordrive camera, he took it on his job interview in New Orleans, where a year later, he’d move the family to assume his first “Chief of Medical Media” post at the VA Hospital on Perdido Street.

Before his interview, with his big telephoto glass strapped across his neck, Dad must have seemed just another geeky shutterbug Sin City tourist to the streetwalker who approached him as he fired off a half a roll at four frames per second with his motorized Nikon F. Visibly disappointed that his interests lay elsewhere, she left the way she came. Only his camera and the remainder of the roll followed her progress. Looking at the series, realizing this was the closest he'd ever come to "art photography" I asked how he knew she was a prostitute. His eyes flashed as if considering another, wittier rejoinder than one should give a thirteen year old boy. He simply said, “She propositioned me.”
 

The Eye

Roughly 125 million photoreceptor cells are intermingled nonuniformly over the retina of the human eye. Rods (roughly, 12,700 per inch) perform the function of a high-speed, black and white film, while the 6 or 7 million cones (roughly 4,200 per inch) perform the function of a low-speed color film.  http://kcbx.net/~mhd/2photo/digital/pixel.htm

High speed b&w film will capture an image in a flash. Ideal for detecting motion along a plane whereas a low speed color film absorbs color, richness, resolution, depth. Black and white—fight or flight. Color elicits deeper emotions. Love. Remembrance. Envy. Regret.

 

I am not the photographer my father was. His was a strong technical eye. His lessons are deeply ingrained in me, but mostly what I take from them is a way of seeing, recording and expressing the memory of how light and objects fall in a place or on a face and how I feel about it and later comparing how my camera records it.



My eye is more emotional, more college-trained and formalistic than his was, but it certainly comes from him. As I pull my images up in Photoshop, I half expect to catch him in the corner of the frame, admonishing me to adjust the shutter speed, open up or close down, straighten the camera. I don't have the heart to tell him that it doesn't have to work that way anymore. That my "darkroom" has its own bag of tricks.

Another way I’m different from him is that Dad wore his cameras around his neck like a geek badge of honor. A really heavy badge. A 35mm motordrive camera with long lens ensemble starts about 5 pounds and goes up. Add a flash unit, another lens, a couple filters, two, three rolls each of Plus X, Tri X, Kodachrome, all in a bag and in no time, you are packing 25 lbs. of glass on your shoulder. And he wondered that he had persistent backpain?

So in my “I’m gonna differentiate myself” 20's, I told myself and anybody who’d listen that I didn’t want to be identified by my camera. That I wanted to “be in the moment,” not in the recording of it. To me, always having all that big honking camera gear between you and what you’re experiencing distorts and "mediates" the event, a’ la Heisenberg. While I still believe this to be true, lately, I want to have the camera more and more.

 

Where Dad’s cameras weighed pounds, mine weighs ounces. As a teenager, I got used to the heft of big glass, but even for a big guy like me, it’s tiring. I’m flashing back on a trip up the Torre del Mangia, a steep tower in Siena. My Tenba camera bag was chockablock with Nikon glass and weighed heavily on my back. Due due espressi were needed to relieve the battle fatigue from that climb.

Little cameras have different kinesthetic issues. Mine is almost too small. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to slip it in and out of my pocket, snap and go my merry way, but there’s an ergonomic tradeoff when devices get this small. It’s hard to get a good grip on. Hard to turn on and off. A sharp fingernail helps. Forget in-camera editing in HD movie mode. It’s so hard to steady such a wee thing that Sony builds in an image stabilizing algorithm that snaps multiple exposures when you press the shutter and interpolates the best shot. I find this kind of gimmicky, except when I’m zoomed full out and it looks through the viewfinder like the camera is on the back of a bumblebee. I do my breathe and squeeze, just like Dad taught me. This is why they call it shooting. 

The New Leica Manual , Morgan & Lester, 1951, states that the average eye, at a viewing distance of 10 inches, can distinguish individual lines when they are no less than about 1/100 inch apart. Thus, in the final print viewed from a distance of 10 inches, "any detail 1/100 inch in size or smaller will be acceptably sharp."
from http://kcbx.net/~mhd/2photo/digital/pixel.htm

 

Dad nags that you need the big film cameras and big glass to capture things in the big detail and even after all these years of digital photography, he’s still right. You can diddle with optics and fiddle with physics, but for a little while yet, bigger is better and silver halide still rules. And the bigger the image format, the richer and more detailed the image.

Cornering the “size is everything” market was the Polaroid Big Shot a 20”x24” monster from the same instant print camera maker who brought the world the “Pocket Instamatic.”



As to the Big Shots, there are only 4 of them in existence. Artists as diverse as Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg and, David Hockney have experimented with these behemoth cameras.

 


Pro photographers, even those who embrace digital technology, bemoan the rapid-plunge technological dumbing down, the “good enough” mentality of the digital imaging. They argue that the ease at acquiring images “untrains” our eye for resolution, all courtesy of the small screen online facebookpintrflikrverse and I’m just cantankerous enough to see their point. Camera images are no longer precious and unique. They are everywhere.

I’m of a generation that remembers when photography was smelly, difficult and not everybody had the patience, equipment or skills to even venture into the craft, let alone do it well. It was a commitment. One trained in photography as an assistant. Slowly apprenticeship yielded experience, skills and with them a certain selectivity in image-making, i.e., “The Eye.” You weren’t born with it. You trained. You earned. Cameras were expensive. Film was expensive. Developing was a bitch to do and expensive. Photo paper. Custom printing. Framing. Etc.
 
 

In Photoshop, I zoom in on my shots and even before I get to 100%, the pixilation jumps right out at me. I am none too thrilled; funny how I always liked seeing grain, but pixels annoy me. I'm not sure why. I can’t really grumble too much though, because I spent around $500, not a $3000 on a pro system. The pro systems are approaching or at the 20 megapixel-35mm film equivalence that some say rivals silver halide. I don’t know.

Digital pundits say the eye is fooled, that resolution isn’t king anymore. I say if it isn’t, what is? Think analog audio tubes versus digital circuits and records versus CD’s. I have a camera bag full of 35mm Nikon, Olympus and Pentax cameras, a couple strobe units and various primes and zoom lenses. It must weigh 40 pounds. It saddens me that all this beautiful, eminently workable gear collect dust, but that's the tradeoff inherent in my style of shooting.

I was so proud when Bennett attended an “old-school” photography class at Moore College and temporarily trotted the old glass out of retirement. I am middle-aged and have been taking pictures for almost half a century. Both of my sons have caught the "shutter-bug." I encourage both of them to learn with the old-school gear. I liken it to a painter grinding his own colors. It may seem antiquated and retro to them, but I see it as a pathway to greater appreciation and respect for the power they wield so lightly.

Despite protestations to the contrary, I am pretty serious about image-making. I do not pretend to know all there is to know and more often than not, I am disappointed by my work. Yet there are enough times when the images I capture (one in ten, one in twenty) hold me in awe.  I ask myself "Did I take this?" Did I see what was happening in the frame when I snapped it?  Dad was a photographer. I am the shutterbug. Yet I am obsessed with the power of photography to fix the transitory and hold it suspended. Time, caught, frozen, sliced and ambered.   

  

In this, Dad and I are very much alike. So I whisper that I enjoyed having him along on my camera test. I promise him that I'll continue to work to fill his shoes and pass on what I've learned to his grandsons. 

I go the same places. I see the same things. But they never look the same. They never feel the same. You’d think it would get old after a while, but it really doesn't. It’s a joy. Maybe I'm the one getting old; seeking mundane comforts in uniformity and familiarity. Or maybe age is good for "the eye" as it adds the deeper experience and motivation to detect nuances and variations that younger eyes miss? I’ve found ways to stop my world and detect and truly appreciate the infinite variations on the routine themes of life. That, for me, is the definition of joy.

*****

Third Generation

My oldest son is a film major at UARTS. He has the camera right now. Almost from the very first moment that he picked up a camera, he got it. We used to spend a lot of time walking around talking photography when he was little. We discussed light, lenses, focal planes and framing, but for the most part, his is a natural-gifted eye, with a strong, innate sense of composition.



Where I had to be trained and instructed, it comes rather easily and intuitively to him. His work is bold and vivid, subtle and strong. Free from the frustrating technical constraints and long apprenticeship of old-school photography, he barrels out wide-eyed to explore the world, then he comes back and learns what he needs to craft images to his desired effect. Whereas I grew up with the increasingly antiquated notion of “photographic realism,” my son realizes that photographs are as plastic and manipulable as all other media are today.



When he’s not out snapping pictures, he fills his sketch books with designs for bike-mounted dollies and steadi-tripod hybrids. I let him borrow the “Naval Manual” and I gave him a book on making your own rigs. He’s looking to cannibalize some of grandpa’s old tripods, a skateboard and some other stuff we have lying around in the basement. Dad would be mighty proud. I sure am.


All pictures in this “Third Generation” section, 2012© courtesy of Bennett R. Weiss

Photographic Memory

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been walking around snapping with the 5 MP camera built into my Windows 8 Phone.  It has the same resolution as my old Canon. There’s an old photographers saw that the best camera for the job is the one you have on hand.  I think the camera you have with you also defines “the job” you do.  I know I’m not the first curmudgeon to initially regard cameras on phones as creepy and intrusive. I’ve since changed my mind. Call it capitulating to the inevitable or being captivated by the freedom and perfectly reasonable resolution and mobility that have inspired a sort of “feets on the streets” guerrilla photojournalism. Last year, Cisco reported that there are more mobile devices than people on this planet.  Nearly every one of these phones has a camera.



The camera completes what the brain starts to do. It captures and stores evocative images that can be recalled at will and shared as part of a life’s story. Words alone, however much I try, aren’t enough. Images, without commentary aren’t enough either.

Within the predictable cadences of my life, there are moments of pure chance, striking beauty and serendipity that my brain decides in a instant are worth keeping. I want to live in and cling to these events, but I also want to fashion them into narratives to pass along--not just to my kids, but my kids' kids' kids.  Otherwise, they might as well have not happened. In stopping and clicking, I bear witness that such moments did and do exist. That I exist.

Preservation. To me, that’s what photography has always been about.