robert the bear's photostream

Hi,
I'm Robert and usually I'm building tunnels (engineer). After spending much time underground, I enjoy photography as my most favorite past time pleasure.
What does photography mean for me? I think it is a constructive and creative way to document my own little life and the astonishing world around me. It is way to express myself and sometimes it is even like playing journalist, an easy and fast way to tell a story on a place or an event, - how I see and feel about my little part of the world.
Whether I document my occasional travels to fare flung countries or the place where I live at the moment, I can document whatever I do or whatever is going on. Whether I provoke with the picture of a beggar in front of a shopping mall, or show the beauty of a landscape or show anything that touches my mind and give it my own impression in how I compose the shot.
As an amateur I don’t have to go to war or put myself in dangers, but there is always some level of courage required to take pictures in public places or ask a stranger if I can take a picture of him. So my alter ego, my second life’s dream is being a photo journalist, working on the streets or in fare flung countries to document history and to show the world with all its unjustness and beauties. My heroes in photography are therefore quite naturally all the famous Magnum photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger, Elliott Erwitt and so on.
However being an amateur, I don’t need to have a clear mission statement. I can take pictures of anything I want and of any style I want. A bit of consistency makes the result better, a series on landscape or industrial decay. Or a small report on a festival or a market place - small little stories of life.
Technically I still enjoy using film and any kind of old manual cameras. Since most of my work is black and white at the moment, it makes more sense to use film since I can do the whole process from the exposure to the development of the final negative on my own and it gives me much more satisfaction to pull the freshly developed film from the reel than just downloading from a flashcard.
And as E.F.Schumacher (famous economist) says in Small Is Beautiful: “The type of work which modern technology is most successful in reducing or even eliminating is skilful, productive work of human hands, in touch with real materials of one kind or another. In an advanced industrial society, such work has become exceedingly rare, and to make a decent living by doing such work has become virtually impossible”. This would also be my answer to the digital vs. film debate and being an amateur I can afford the joyful luxury of using my brain, my hands and my film.
My favourite film, since Agfa Scala is no longer in production, is currently Ilford FP4 and HP5. My most treasured cameras are a Nikon F2 and a Nikkormat – usually with 28, 50 &135mm fix focal lenses and an old Rolleiflex TLR for the bigger (6x6) negatives. The 50mm normal lens is my most used lens and I try to keep my pictures more on the journalistic side. Image manipulations I keep to a minimum.