Bill Poff's photostream  

Photography facinates me. It has for over fifty years. Ever since my Cub Scout pack toured the darkroom of Doug Lester, the town's photographer. The magic I experienced in that darkroom started me down a road that has given me a tremendous amount of pleasure and fulfillment through the years.

When I was seven, my camera of choice was the family Kodak Brownie. Later I moved up to my very own brand new Kodak Instamatic. Unfortunately the prints were smaller because I could only make contact prints using my Ansco contact print box and Kodak Tri-Chem-Pak chemicals.

In the late 60's I bought my first Nikon and a couple years after that my first Hasselblad. Somewhere in that time period, I also bought a surplus Virginia State Police 4x5 Crown Graphic. I don't think the trooper ever took it out of his trunk. When the guy behind the counter at Roanoke Photo hauled it out to show it to me I just "had" to have it. After all, real photographers, like Doug Lester, used big honking 4x5 press cameras. I had arrived!!!

For the next thirty or so years, I was involved in a lot of different aspects of photography. I shot everything... people, products, sports, architecture, travel, audio-visual... I even shot a wedding. After encountering the mother of the bride, I discovered what I didn't want to shoot.

Photography today is a world away from those years. I developed color film, 30 rolls at a time, in a big old stainless steel sink. The room was hot and dark and the job was boring. One assistant decided the task was a great opportunity to enjoy a joint... until I followed the happy scent and spoiled his fun. Today my darkroom is digital. It's been years since I've developed a roll of film. All of the darkroom is packed away in the studio's basement.

I embraced digital photography much earlier than most photographers. My "conversion" took place in 1985 when I purchased a digital imaging system from Management Graphics which output to a digital film recorder. About five years later, I saw a demo of a new software package that had just been introduced for the Mac, Adobe Photoshop v1.0. I immediately went out and bought three new Macs because the capabilities were much better than my "old clunker".

It took years for my conversion to be complete, more than 20 years until I finally packed away the darkroom and turned the space into a digital darkroom.

Today, the quality of the digital image blows me away. With a few clicks I can create images which would have taken a lot of skill, materials and time in the "darkroom days".