About clauditorium / Claude  

Pictures I done took.

My manual camera is a Minolta X-370N, which I've had since circa 1990. It was a gift from my brother. The original lens went kerflooey, so I've been using a Vivitar 28-70mm since about 1995.

My main photographic loves are nature, and an aesthetic called wabi-sabi, which is about finding beauty in the imperfect, the impermanent, and the incomplete. Note that the Japanese word for rust is pronounced "sabi".
Oh, and I'm also kind of obsessed with taking pictures of men I find attractive.

I'm old-fashioned when it comes to photography. I call my manual camera "my REAL camera" and my digital is just for snapshots. One of the major drawbacks of digital photography is that its cheapness and flexibility make it too easy, encouraging conceptual laziness and self-indulgence more often than inspired experimentation (I paraphrased this last bit from a comment by critic Scott Tobias).

I don't believe in manipulating photographs. If a picture needs improvement after I've taken it, then it wasn't a very good picture. I don't crop shots taken for the purposes of art. I only alter the contrast if I want to restore a picture to its original appearance when it's lost something in the scanning procedure.

Yes, I know the watermark is disruptive, but I have to protect my work. By the way, if you see pictures on here that don't have a name, suggest one!