Tree on the UC Berkeley College Campus
Taken July, 1973.
For the past six days, I have been participating in a 7 day black and white photo challenge, I have to say what fun it has been working "old school" as it were. I'm repeating myself, but many years ago I stopped by the camera bar at a big box store in Billings, Montana, where the (much older than I) clerk caught my name and asked if I were related to Clarence Spellman. When I said that he was my father, the clerk told me that my dad had done the first color photography in Yellowstone County (of which Billings is the seat). That would have been back when I was a very small child, i.e. 1950-54. The clerk said he knew this, because at the time, he was the man who processed all my dad's photography, primarily Ektachrome slides. My dad had a Kodak rangefinder 35 mm camera that he used extensively, especially to document all the fish and game he and his friends got while enjoying the wilds of south central Montana.
Brother Jonathan Cemetery
Crescent City, California
Taken July, 1973
I grew up with a camera in my hands, beginning with a Kodak Brownie Box Camera, then moving on to an Instamatic, and finally being found worthy of using my dad's rangefinder. While in grad school, I took a course in photography through one of the many "free university" opportunities in Berkeley, and while I started out with the rangefinder, I ended up buying my first Single Lens Reflex, a Zenit camera, made in the Soviet Union and imported by Sears, of all places. It cost $60 in 1973, I remember this well because that camera was stolen from my apartment in Berkeley, and when I told the police it was just a $60 camera, they replied, "Yes, but it WAS your $60 camera." (Sidenote, a Nikon F2 with a 50 mm lens had a list price of $660 in 1973.) The class involved not just learning how to take photos, i.e. finding subjects, framing them, learning what makes a good photo and what doesn't, but also doing all our own processing. Taking the film out of the camera, removing it (in a suitably dark space) from the canister, processing the raw film, then using an enlarger in a dark room to actually print our own images. I still have the portfolio I submitted for that class, and I still love many of those images. They were all in black and white. If you don't know how to process film, I can tell you that black and white film is, relatively speaking, easy to process. Color film is another matter entirely.
7 Foot Band Saw
Simpson Logging
Smith River, California
Taken July, 1973
Fast forward to the 21st Century where so much has been digitized. I do almost all of my own processing, but now, instead of taking a film canister apart, I remove a memory card from my camera and insert it into my desktop computer. I download those digital images using a program from Adobe called Lightroom. (No need for a darkroom these days.) While my camera allows me the option to take the photograph in black and white, I prefer to take everything in color and use the computer to change the image's nature. Specifically, I use an add-on module with Adobe's Photoshop, something that anyone can download free of charge called NIK. The NIK plugins were available from Google, but Google just sold them to DxO who promises that for now, the NIK collection will be free. (This is truly breaking news. It was just announced few hours ago.) What will happen as DxO works with the NIK collection is anyone's guess, but DxO makes it's own photographic software which is superb, in my opinion, but costly, especially after you pay Adobe their monthly fees. One of the NIK collection items is called Silver Efex Pro 2, and that is what I have been using in this challenge. I thank Betty Depee for turning me onto NIK.
View of Pat's Knob from our home deck
Plains, Montana
Taken October 26th, 2017
Shot as a RAW image and processed in Photoshop CC2015 using a NIK Silver Efex Pro 2 filter
No comments:
Post a Comment