I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. This is a beautiful place for a photographer. There are always photographic opportunities here to explore.
Photographs have always been important to me. I can still recall the first time I saw the Ansel Adams masterpiece, Moonrise Over Hernandez. I was only 11 or 12 at the time, sitting on my grandmother's couch. While she cooked up something simple for me -I think I ordered a chocolate souffle- I looked through the books in the living room. There was a book maybe 300 pages thick, published by Look magazine. It was a survey of America through black and white photos. Of all the photos in that book, Moonrise is the only one I recall today, forty years later. The photo was a puzzle. It seemed to be a night scene. The sky was jet black, and the moon was hanging over a graveyard. In the distance was a line of snowy peaks. But if this was a night photograph, why were the crosses and the tombstones in the graveyard glowing?
Decades later, I would learn a bit more about Moonrise. Ansel published a book in which he discussed the making of that epochal image. His use of a red filter helped give the impression the photo was shot at night, when he had actually caught the image late in the afternoon. Talk about working under time pressure, one shot is all he got. Before Ansel could take another photo of it, the sun had dipped enough to place the graveyard into a shadow.
I became serious about photography in the 1980s. I could feel the changes. My voice became deeper and slower. I then began the sort of apparent evolution that many serious photographers undertake. I bought myself some 35mm single lens reflex cameras. Then, I heard about the medium format. The film was in rolls, like 35mm cameras, but the rolls were larger. A single 35mm film frame might be the size of a quarter, but the medium format frame was two bucks in quarters. This meant that large photos would be sharper. Not long after that, I discovered the large format. I bought a view camera which used 4x5 film.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, large format refers to the size of the film and the camera. Contrary to the popular misconception, it does not refer to the size of the photographer. Many very small people have mastered large format photography, and many large people have failed at it. While the size of a 35mm frame is still a quarter, the film for the large format cameras is so big, it doesn't come in rolls. The 4x5 view camera uses sheets of film that are 4 inches by 5 inches. With film that large, you can blow the picture up to the size of a billboard, and it will look quite sharp.
Besides the sharpness of the image, one great benefit of using the view camera to take large format photos is the process itself. It's fun to compose the image using the view camera. The camera is the viewfinder itself. The image passes through the lens and hits the groundglass in the back. With the dark cloth over your head to keep out sunlight, you can see the image directly. It's upside down and horizontally backwards -the way light actually reaches our brain from the retina before our brains flip the image- so we do have to work in that optical world. It's easy. Using the controls of a view camera to manipulate the lens and the back of the camera, the photographer has enormous control over the final look of the image. It becomes possible to achieve a deep focus, where the near and the far both look sharp. You feel a bit like a painter working the canvas. The main difference is that, when you've got your shot, your clothing isn't splattered with paint.
There are two disadvantages to the large format. First, there's the cost. Each time you click the shutter on a sheet of film, four dollars. The film costs maybe a dollar, sometimes two, and the development can be about three dollars. Your mistakes cost a lot of money. Second, it takes time to set up the view camera on the tripod and compose the shot. A rush shot takes five minutes, and I've spent more than an hour composing a shot. That's why I've never seen a rainbow in a large format photograph. By the time you're ready to shoot the rainbow, the skies are blue again, and the birds are singing sweetly, "You missed it, you missed it, you didn't get the shot."
I wrote about going through an "apparent evolution" in cameras and formats. While I still have the view camera, almost all my photos these days are with 35mm cameras. To begin with, films are so good these days, they produce large prints quite well. Second, there's the element of skill. A 35mm photo shot by an expert will look better than a large format photo done by the novice. The genuine evolution of a photographer has to do with the development of technical skills and a personal style. Third, there's the issue of spontaneity.
My favorite photos in the last ten years have been shot with 35mm cameras because they let you be spontaneous. You aren't just photographing an image, you're capturing a moment. With a view camera, you wouldn't have a chance to get that shot. I was in Fairfax, California once when it was still raining. Somebody asked about the chance for getting a rainbow photo. I said they seemed quite good. I was hoping to get one on Broadway near the Fair Fix cafe. I reached the Fair Fix cafe and went inside. When I came outside, there was the rainbow where I expected it, and I got my photo. It wasn't a great rainbow photo, but like Babe Ruth pointing at the bleachers, I had called my shot.
Regarding digital cameras, I stayed away from them for years. I knew they could not match the silky tonality of black and white films, for instance, and they could not match the sharpness of the large format film. However, last month I finally bought my first digital camera, the Canon A570 IS. It's a beautiful machine, but it's not film quality. At 7 megapixels, it can produce a good 8x10 color photo, but I don't expect it to do much more, and that's fine. It will be used mostly for photos that I plan to post on the Internet. My next digital camera will probably be a single lens reflex, and I figure 12 megapixels should do it...for a while.
The view from Corte Madera across US 101.
Here's how polluted the sky is, the sun is still red well after
sunrise. It doesn't come through well because of camera limitations,
but the Sun looks like something from a Coleridge poem. That's an
Erector Set posing as a bridge.
The sun is placed behind a set of lamps, and it reveals the hazy orange quality of the sky.
1 of 3. I
was driving around dawn in metropolitan Larkspur. The radio was tuned
to KCBS in San Francisco, which reported the status of the Big Sur
fires as I drove past that black Prius. Big Sur is far south of the San
Francisco Bay Area along the coast, but it isn't considered part of Los
Angeles. I instantly pulled the car to the curb. Why?