Photographs, Photographers and Photography

You think of yourself as a decent photographer. Your work gets better and you expose it regularly to peer groups for constructive criticism.
Now and then fortune smiles upon you and you find yourself with some spare cash. Money to blow. Like photographers through the ages, your thoughts turn to that new body, […]

How many times have I read exhortations by ‘teachers’ of photography that the aspiring photographer should take more pictures, use more film, carry more digital storage?
I always flash back to my mother telling how she once met George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). In 1938 she had been passing a few idle weeks at the Dorchester […]

This is a tough question.
When I was a kid my pictures were lousy.
The composition was poor.
The exposure was wrong.
The processing was worse.
And the subjects were uninspired.
Though I had a deep appreciation of the arts and many years of studying the masters of photography in my psyche, my pictures reflected little of this acquired knowledge.
I also […]

Some historical context is appropriate.
The Nazi hordes had swept Western Europe before them. Only Britain alone was holding out, having grimly fought back the air invasion during the Battle of Britain during the fall of 1940.
America remained staunchly isolationist, egged on by Nazi sympathizers Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, both sporting Iron Crosses awarded […]

You see them everywhere.
Execrable, blurred, out-of-focus pictures, often with the frame borders printed to make sure you know which film stock was used, generally with a scratch or two added for effect. Always in black and white. No, I don’t mean 99% of digital pictures. Those, at least, are generally in focus […]

So I arrive at my Top Secret Highway One location on California’s magnificent coastline with my ‘new’ Crown Graphic and its Schneider Xenar 135mm f/4.5 lens. My Linhof tripod, sturdy but weighty, in a Scottish Tartan bag over my shoulder, the tripod some two inches longer than the bag with the latter’s microscopic strap […]

Well, I screwed out my courag