i wayne t's photostream  

Please, no awards, or iconed group invitations.

Click here to see all my pictures on black in Flickriver

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The ribbon above is in memory of friends and the families of friends who have been affected by cancer. It is not representative an illness in me or my family. I hope that it serves to remind us all to live every day with courage, joy and respect for the gift of life.

My photographic auto-biography.
I grew up by Lake Michigan in the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 100 that I got for Christmas when I was 11 or 12. I learned to develop the B&W film in those cartridges. To print, I had to wait until night when my room was dark to screw in that Kodak Brownie safelight and set up some old dinner plates as print trays. I made my first contact prints (little ones) with a piece of plate glass and a 25 watt bulb. When I saw that first tiny positive image appearing in the Dektol developer, I felt a shiver at the back of my neck. After the stop bath and a minute in the fixer, the lights came on and there in the water bath, were these little stamp-sized black and white pictures of my dog Tama. I was hooked big time. I think I ended up with a shoebox full of those little prints. A couple of years later my dad, taking pity on me got me a Durst M300 enlarger and some real darkroom trays. I know I thanked him, but I’m sure I had no idea of how impactful that gift would be. I was now making 3x5 and 5x7 prints (big time!). A couple years later when I was in high school, my dad bought me, a Minolta SRT101 with an f/1.4 lens. This was a professional quality camera and I worked it. My camera oriented friends and I roamed the city (mostly Hyde Park) using so much film, that we bought it in bulk and reloaded our 35mm cassettes. We took lots of underexposed pictures and struggled to match those sweet contrasty images in Life magazine. I used that Minolta for years, but eventually it went to the big darkroom in the sky and I was camera-less for a while until replaced it with a Nikon FM that by then I was able to pay for myself. I continued to struggle to create prints that had sufficient contrast. I replaced the Durst with a Beseler 23C which, with its condenser head, really helped with the contrast issue. Still, for me, photography was too often a mysterious hit or miss exercise in frustration. I just couldn’t come up with a consistent method for good quality pictures. Most of the ‘how-to’ photography books in the 70s gave advice like “use more exposure for a backlit subject”, or, “use less for bright sunny days”. Their approach made good photography a matter of memorizing a never ending series of unrelated rules. I would use the FM2’s ‘match needle’ metering system as precisely as I could, and most of my photos were ok, but then seemingly at random, a number of shots were too dark or too light.

A Truth
On one of my numerous trips to at Kroch and Brentano’s downtown I stumbled on a little grey book called The Zone VI Workshop , by Fred Picker. This was something really different. Here was a step by step description of how use Ansel Adams’ Zone System. Did you know that camera meters try to make everything they see the same shade of grey? …..I didn’t. Suddenly I understood why that black dog picture came out too light, and why that picture with lots of sky came out too dark. That book explained how to calibrate your film, light meter, camera and developer in combination to determine your actual film speed was. What? The film speed is printed right on the box, isn’t it? Wrong. Following the instructions in Fred’s book, I spent days taking pictures of black blankets and crumpled white paper, and carefully developing numerous rolls of film only to discover that in my camera, ASA 400 Tri-X film was actually performing at only ASA 200 – one full stop slower. Suddenly, my contact prints had actual black in them instead of dark grey and finally had that elusive contrasty snap. I learned that instead of blindly following the camera’s meter, I needed to decide how much texture I needed in that black dog’s fur and how to make it look right in the print. There were also chapters on print making, and even more tests. I did calibrations, of print developer, silver rich photo paper, my enlarger and timer. It took a little over a month to create a small pile of negatives and prints mostly showing nondescript bands of grey, but when it was done I finally understood how to reliably create technically decent images and my prints finally looked like those photos in Life magazine, at least technically. I could evaluate a subject, make an exposure, develop the film, and make a print that closely matched what I was seeing when I released the shutter. Wow – that only took eight or nine years.

The other shoe.
Fred Picker said in his writings, that gaining a degree of technical control was the 5% of photography that was easy. The 95% that was difficult was learning to create images that meant something to you and others. He was right. I’m still working on that second part.

Time for the real world.
Then all of a sudden, I wasn’t a student any more. I was working full time with computers and then became programmer at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Clinics. There was a lot of photography going on. My boss was into photography, and one day we went down to Helix together and he bought himself a darkroom. I met my friend Ben who worked in the Emergency Room who, over time helped me to amass a couple of 4x5 view cameras and round out my 4x5 darkroom. I met Rich and discovered his passion for photography. Eventually Ben, Rich and I started a group to do a monthly photo assignment. There would be a subject and four weeks later a meeting to show and critique the photographs. Prints had to be final dry mounted versions and were not supposed to be accompanied by excuses or explanations. Our assignments were loose subjects like ‘Vegetables’ and ‘Coffee’. What a great experience that was. We had a lot of fun and I learned a lot by setting up the photographs, working up the prints and then from the critiques. You learn to have a bit of a thick skin, because your favorite photo in a set will definitely get trashed. You’ll also have to learn to be honest about your impressions when it would have been more social to be polite. It’s wasn’t for everyone. In this process I discovered just how talented my friend Rich was. He had worked for the Leo Burnett ad agency in the city and knew more about graphic arts, and had done more quality photography than anyone else I knew. I always felt that I got the most out of that group because I had the best partners. Unfortunately, the critique group only lasted for a few months. It was a lot of work to do the assignments, and we all fell behind, we postponed one week, and then the next, and then, never resumed the group. Not long thereafter, I got married, Ben got married, and we all ended up, moving apart geographically. In 1984 my wife Maggie was pregnant with our daughter Jennifer, and she and I and our 18 month old son Robert all moved to Tucson Arizona so that I could work with a growing commercial software company. Ben went to medical school and moved to Indianapolis where he is an ER physician, and Rich eventually moved to Oregon and wrote a materials management system for a manufacturing company.

Evolving priorities.
Within a year of hitting Tucson, I sold my entire darkroom and my large and medium format gear for a down payment on our house. I kept the FM2 as a family camera. We were so busy with two kids and work that I didn’t miss my black and white photography much. For the next 20 years we raised our kids, and I took lots of really nice family pictures. Instead of being in the darkroom for six hours, my film went to the local drugstore for processing and came back as glossy color prints in little yellow envelopes. I did almost all of the photography for the family and probably like a lot of people became a 'missing person' in our family's photo journal. In this environment, my FM2 saw less and less use and at some point was replaced by more convenient film based point and shoot cameras. I almost never took photos other than of the kids, or on vacation or for special occasions. During this period of time, Rich in Oregon had continued his photography. He collected several nice film cameras, before deciding to try out a Casio digital. Like me he gave up his darkroom, and relied on commercial processing until getting the Casio. When we talked he would tell me about how much he liked the Casio, and I liked the way he could email me pictures. Given my all time low photographic activity, I never seriously considered a digital camera. At least until in 2003, when my wife and daughter got me a Sony P72 for Christmas. My immediate reaction to the little screen on the back was “cool, that’s just like those little contact prints”. Now instead of days or weeks going by before seeing my photos, there was instant feedback in the form of the on-screen image. Getting that fast feedback improved my vision and my photographic ‘batting average’ significantly. I took a lot of pictures with that little Sony (see the Ecola Beach panorama). Then one fateful day, I emailed Rich a link of a review of the new Canon G9. I think he had looked at the camera before, but that review clicked with him (like putting out a fire with gasoline), and shortly thereafter he was the proud owner of a new G9 and was regaling me with the tales and images of his romance. Rich’s early G9 images were better than anything I had knowingly associated with digital photography (have a look at his ‘CoverShots’ photo stream). Then, predictably, it started…”when was I going to get a G9?”. Rich became like a glacier crushing its way down a mountain slope – an unstoppable force of nature decimating everything in its path. “Well have you looked at the G9?” Kids on a road trip were never more persistent. Are we there yet? How about now? I’m not saying I dreaded talking to him, but I did put the headset down once or twice This went on for something like a year, during which time I was looking more and more critically at my Canon A560 images and trying to convince myself that I didn’t really need another camera. I failed at that attempt, by the way, which brings us to the present day.... and here we go.