Anyone who knows me will tell you that, when it comes to photography, I can be borderline obsessive. (Actually, anyone who knows me will tell you there’s no “borderline” about it.)
Take my obsession/paranoia about “Distractions,” for example. While much of the photographic world (and many of my photographer friends) have gone all gaga in recent years over digital imagery, I’ve been a semi-lone dissenter, a film camera holdout. “Distraction!” I shout when my friends talk digital. I twitch. I get facial ticks. I act seriously disturbed. I launch into a crazed-artist tirade about how digital cameras are the tools of the Devil, a wrong-turn off the path we need to travel if we hope to find Clear-Headed Photographic Vision. “Peril will come to he who picks up Satan’s cameras!” I warn, my voice trembling with emotion.
(Well, that’s not exactly how I behave, but I’m not exaggerating much.)
I have been taking photographs for over 30 years, so you might assume that, by now, I should know my craft. Yet every day I pick up my camera--which these days is a digital camera, so don’t rush to pigeonhole me as a complete anti-technology wacko--I’m still trying to stretch, to grow, to see in new ways. My evolution as a photographer is never-ending.
In the Digital Age, the photographer’s evolution as a technician is never-ending.
About two months ago, a friend who works in the photographic industry asked if he could use one of my landscape pictures on the home page of his business web site. He came over to my office and he and I went through hundreds of pages of film transparencies that I’ve shot over the years on hiking, climbing and photographic trips into the Cascade and Olympic mountains. My friend pulled out about a half-dozen images that fit his needs.
I turned on my film scanner so that I could digitize the slides and then burn them onto a CD for my friend. The film scanner wouldn’t work. I had recently updated the operating system on my computer, and my guess was that now the film scanner needed a new driver. I got on the Web and downloaded a bunch of drivers, but the scanner still wouldn’t operate. Though I do shoot quite a bit of digital now, all my old work is film, so I use a scanner fairly often. I went out and bought a new scanner. I spent yesterday setting up the new machine. It works beautifully.
The above problem-solving process with my film scanner (which I managed to drag out into a two-month ordeal, and cost $600 to resolve) had little or nothing to do with image-making. At best, I am becoming a better technician.
