my life in pictures

I am going to end this series of Sunday Slideshows with a few photos of my favorite subject, Margaret.

camposanto

The point & shoot Vivitar PN2011 is probably the commonest plastic camera to be found in thrift stores, and it is seldom priced higher than a couple bucks. The shutter speed is a fixed 1/125, the f-stop is about f/16. The 28mm, 2-element lens is very sharp. I've pointed the camera at quite a variety of subjects, and have seldom been disappointed by it. This Sunday Slideshow resulted from a visit to an old Las Cruces cemetery a few years ago.

cover shots

Voigtländer Bessamatic

I started this blog just a year before we moved to Albuquerque in January of 2008. I had my Photography & Vintage Cameras web site under way well before that, and the blog seemed a nice way to show some of my current work with the old cameras without all the coding that goes into web site maintenance. In order to link the two sites, I decided to feature a cover picture on the web site homepage that would point to the latest blog entry.

I see in looking back at my collection of cover shots stored in a Photobucket folder that I have recently posted the 300th cover. A few of the photos are digital, and there are a couple not mine which were the work of others featured in blog posts. The vast majority, though, are pictures from my collection of old film cameras. So today's Sunday Slideshow is a look back at the past four years of my photography and my life.

When viewing the slide show, some viewing options are available if you move your mouse pointer down to the bottom of the page. I found it more interesting to use the "reverse order" option to view the series from the beginning in January of 2007. It is also possible to control the speed of the presentation, or to select individual photos from the thumbnail list.

dieciséis de septiembre

Mexican Independence Day brings out the folklórico and flamenco dancers in the plaza of Mesilla, New Mexico.

Giving digital its due

I originally got seriously interested in photography in the mid-1960s. I then took a thirty year break. What brought me back was a desire to embellish my web design efforts with some photographs. I picked up a little Olympus D360-L with a whopping 1.3 megabyte sensor. That proved perfectly adequate to my purposes, but what I also discovered was that photography had been completely transformed since I was last involved with it. The process had become miraculously simple and quick. The little Olympus let me make super-close macros effortlessly, and everything was properly focused and exposed with almost no effort on my part. As I got more involved in photography for its own sake, I started using the digital camera to make small graphic studies of things around the house.



I gradually moved my photo efforts outdoors into the Chihuahuan Desert that surrounded our home in the country north of Las Cruces. I continued making graphic close-ups, but also extended my range a bit to include desert plants and animals, as well as a bit of scenic work.



In my wanderings around in the desert I often trained my camera on ancient rock art finds. Mostly for that subject, I decided I needed a wide-range zoom that could help me fill the frame with petroglyph panels that were sometimes difficult to access. I therefore acquired up a Nikon Coolpix 5700, a digital camera that was at the time pretty close to the state of the art with a 5 megapixel sensor. I think I paid about $900 for the camera, which seems incredible now.

Around the same time, I also picked up a couple cheap old film cameras from local thrift stores, and then a couple more off ebay. Gradually, my interest in the old film techniques and equipment overtook my devotion to the new digital technology. I now have a little pocketable Canon that gets used mostly for taking pictures of my old film cameras.

On the Border

Living in southern New Mexico there wasn't much opportunity for street photography. When I felt the need for some of that, I would drive to El Paso and wander around with one of my old cameras. Most of the pictures in this 2003 gallery were made with a Kodak Retina II. The camera's shutter had kind of a weak mainspring, but it worked ok at 1/500, which was fine for hip shots. The f2/50mm Xenon lens may be the best of any in my collection.

Combating Entropy

I have added a new feature to my web site home page to facilitate showing some of my old camera work. Down in the lower right corner will be found a link called "Sunday Slideshow". I have stored my photos over the years on several photo sharing sites, and all offer an easy way to generate slide shows from directories of images. For this inaugural Sunday, I have turned the big selector knob of my webmaster control panel to the mid-1960s to display one of my personal favorite photo-essays, Chinatown Hip Shots.
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Nikon S -- Wikipedia

The NYC Chinatown essay was shot on a Nikon S that I bought in the '60s.  I sold it soon after shooting those pictures, much to my regret ever since.