K. Close III

The more I read about them, the more of them I want. And the more I think about that, the more I want a large format camera and my own lab. I almost miss the vinegary smell of the B&W lab at TCU… many happy hours spent there.

Oh, I used to want an acutal photo lab, but with digital photography coming of age, I’ve totally accepted it with open arms. I can make clean 14×20 prints with the $1000 camera I have by the time I need to go bigger, I’m sure cameras will have come down in price again.

Its just so hard to get back into it after so long and after so many changes. I actually completely jumped over the automatic cameras… when I was doing photography the first time, everything was manual. Now I not only have to learn everything about what automated cameras can do, but also what digital cameras can do. Its like I just jumped ahead two generations.

I used SLR with no automation. My photo prof would have killed me if I had a camera with anything automatic about it! I had old school professors who liked you to know how to do it all by hand and if you couldn’t show them all the f-stops and the shutter speeds for all the photos and talk about where you placed your gray card if you were doing something with touchy lighting… well… You would start with a B and go down from there. And if you used a special lens, they wanted to know why you picked that one. I can’t even imagine taking a photo course any other way. BTW, need a gray card or three? 😉

That was how they wanted us to work for B&W Photo I, and if you had an automatic camera, you had to know how to run it in manual mode.

I just did manual all through my undergrad. And I still have my grey cards.