Trying again

A few years back I created a blog where I published images I had taken over the years. I had always had a yearning to be an artist but, when I got to college to major in commercial art, I found true artists with talent. No one had ever thought to inspire my creative side through photography and no one in my family had an artistic bent.

When I got married in 1968, I started taking photographs of my wife, pregnant with our first child, with little point&shoot cameras. If memory serves, I think my first camera was an Olympus point&shoot probably the Trip 35. Not having a lot of cash (I was in the US Navy at the time), I did not get to shoot as much as I would have liked. But I did shoot what I could though I never took the camera or film on any of my sub's deployments so did not have any photos from any of the ports we visited.

It was not until 1977 that I got my first "real" camera, an Olympus OM-10 with a 1,8/50mm Zuiko lens, that my wife bought me for my birthday that year. It was not long before I was bitten by the photography bug. I took a couple of photography courses at the local community college to learn how to develop b&w film and fell in love with Kodak Tri-X film. At the time, I would take images of anything. I fell in love with b&w due to the influence of Ansel Adams but it was the subject matter of photographers like Cartier-Bresson, Doisnea, Ronis, and other street shooters of the day that truly inspire me.

For the first image in this reiteration of my blog, I have chosen a candid portrait I took of my wife on a Mother's Day cruise we took in 1980. This was taken with the original OM-10 and 50mm lens my wife gave me.

I was fortunate, late in life at the age of 50, to be able to quit my engineering day job in 1998 and go full time into photography. I never really developed much of a commercial side but was lucky enough to secure an on-going relationship with a small weekly newspaper that lasted for 10 years. When the housing bust took hold in 2008, that relationship ended and I had to get a "real" job back with a military contractor.

But, all in all, I have enjoyed my over 5 decades of photography immensely. No one will every remember me for my photography but I am hoping my kids will keep my images that I have saved over the years. These days I do the occasional print using a converted Epson R2400 printer that uses Piezography inks along with the QuadTone RIP to print monochrome images. While I did do darkroom work back in my film days, I was never really a good wet printer so I, for one, have been thankful for the digital age.

In follow-on posts, I plan on publishing images that have some meaning or attraction for me. I may or may not note the gear used but plan on spending time talking about "WHY" I pushed the shutter button. To me, that is what photography is all about. It is important to get to know your gear well so it does not get in the way of your photographic eye. But chasing the "perfect camera" or "perfect lens" should not be the goal. The goal should be achieving an image that garners, on some level, an emotional attachment for whoever the viewer is.

 The title of this blog, "Life on the Banks", refers to a series of books by Will and Ariel Durant entitled The Story of Civilization. The Durants make note in the 11-volume series that, while history records the newsmakers of the day, the true story of civilization comes from the people living on the banks of the civilization river. Common, everyday folks that were born, grew up, married, had children, worked every day and were missed at their death only by family. Those are the people I have sought during my 5+ decades of photography.