Photography and the Creative Process

My preferred cameras over the past year have been a Yashica Electro GSN with fixed 45mm f1.7 lens and a Nikon FE with 100mm f2.8 series E lens.  Occasionally, I pull out my little Olympus Stylus Epic, a point-and-shoot auto focus film camera with a a 35mm f2.8 lens.  And I recently picked up a mint, fully operational Canon Canonet QL GIII for about $20 and shot a few rolls.

This summer, I will have my medium format Agfa Isolette III with 75mm Solinar lens serviced so I can start using that more, and I plan on shooting with my Mamiya c330 twin lens reflex camera for which I have a number of fine lenses.   I also will experiment by shooting 6×9cm negatives in two box cameras, a Balda Frontbox and a Pho-Tak Time Traveler 120.

For 35mm, I may again try the Photrix B, a rangefinder camera sold in various incarnations by Sears and Montgomery Ward in the 1950s, which I picked up for a song at an antique store.  I also just pulled out my previous favorite shooter, a Zorki 4K with a wonderful Jupiter 3, f1.5 50mm lens, a 1970’s Soviet copy of the Leica of the same era.  Finally, after a few fits and starts a few years ago, I am finally ready to take my Kiev 4A with Helios 103 f1.8 50mm lens for a spin.  This latter camera, a Soviet copy of the 1930’s era Contax II, has a funky method of focusing that takes practice getting used to.

I plan on taking pictures with these and perhaps other cameras this summer.  I am fascinated by these old photographic machines.  And they fit in well with my old fashioned photographic aesthetic - one look at my photo gallery at www.wmgphoto.com will reveal that I like to create black and white pictures with a shallow depth of field, something that these old cameras do very nicely.

Of course, one can make nice photos with newer cameras too, although you might be hard pressed to create a shallow depth of field with a modern digital camera with its small-sized sensor, smaller even than a 35mm piece of film.  But then, the other reason I take pictures with these antique cameras is that I can do so without breaking the bank.

I endeavor to capture interesting interactions when I set out to do street photography.  This image, which I have called Mischief, shows a young boy blocking the flow of the water jet at the public fountain, much to the amusement of the passersby.

Mischief is featured in the Street Photography Gallery at www.wmgphoto.com

Walking the streets of D.C. more than 20 years ago, I chanced upon the street scene captured by this photograph, Tom’s Wholesale Toy.  It appears from the sign in the window that Tom sold large industrial machinary in his toy store, or at least one may jump to that conclusion when viewing this photograph. 

Tom’s Wholesale Toy is featured in the Street Photography Gallery at wmgphoto.com, my online photo gallery.

These pictures come from a series of self portraits I captured circa 1999.  I have added them to the Self Portaits gallery at www.wmgphoto.com.  Check out Tom’s Wholesale Toy, a new photo added to the Street Photography Gallery, while you are there.

For the past few months I have been printing my black and white photographs using carbon pigment ink from MIS associates.  This is a third party ink provider.  My Eboni black and white ink works in my Epson R800 photo printer.  There are three dilutions of the MIS Eboni carbon pigment ink that I can use to make pure carbon-black photographs, and I still can maintain the Epson color inks to use the printer for both black and white and color prints.  With printers other than the R800 or R1800, in order to use such carbon pigment, non-dye-based black and white inks, one must remove all the color inks and replace them with various shades of gray.

Read more