The reality of the image

This bear has recently been taking care of a backlog of unfinished tasks, and having caught up a bit on the past, is now able to plan for the future a bit at the same time.

This post is some rambling about the past and future as reflected in photography.  For a long time, NJ Kpopper was a manual photography purist, having inherited some gene for this trait somehow.  In film, I learned my apertures, shutter, focus, and ISO settings, and had bursts of activity where I tried to be more or less artistic with my images.  But I would end up with results like this.

Actually sometimes the results were more meaningful.  The discipline of watching and waiting for the shot, and the restriction, especially on a trip, of being able to take (and afford to develop and print) only 5 or 6 rolls of 36 images each led to a more careful selection of images.  And the resulting images from those years carry a lot of weight in my memory, since each image has a greater burden of representing what is not recorded.  There are some very significant friends for whom I have only 4 or 5 images recorded (or less), but my imagination can build off of that skeleton to create a rich structure.

Later, I bit the bullet and invested in a Nikon kit that included a fully manual camera and several prime lenses.  I started to shoot in black and white only and developed and printed everything myself.  This was several years after rational people stopped doing such things, but even thinking about it now sets off waves of pleasure because that period was entwined with some of the more significant moments of a bear's life.  It also took a lot of TIME, mostly locked up in a dark bathroom with chemicals.  That too was fun, but just couldn't be sustained for long after my life got more complicated.

So I began to go digital, first with a Nikon DSLR.  But the DSLR was slow and not as nimble as my little manual, and frankly I never got good at handling its complicated controls.  I took more pictures, but enjoyed the taking less, and gradually stopped using that camera.  Then I tried a little Nikon point and shoot that had some manual controls, hoping its portability would translate into spontaneity, but it too was very unsatisfying. If I relied on the camera to take the picture with automatic settings, I either found it too boring and pointless to bother with, or I confounded the focus and exposure due to my oddball framing habits developed with film.  I stopped using it and tucked it away in a drawer somewhere.  I became one of the legions who rely on their smartphone.  But that is no fun either, with a tiny distorting lens and weird distorting filters on the images, even if the image resolution is high.

The intervening years show an increasing accumulation of images on my hard drives, but I look back at them less and less.  The thoughtless ease of their capture has devalued them in my mind, and other reality-construction tools (notably words) have started to fill their place.  The image has to be carefully selected if it is going to become a permanent overlay on reality.

Getting to the point, what is the future part of this post?  That I am not giving up on images yet entirely.  With adventures ahead to record, I am going to make another attempt at digital photography with a slightly different approach.  This does involves the dramatic, even traumatic, step of abandoning Nikon, which I had never done before, except for a brief dalliance with a twin-lens Chinese Seagull medium format camera.  That was more for the experience of something different rather than dissatisfaction with Nikon though.  To avoid turning this into a product placement, I won't say who I am leaving Nikon for...

But I am still hoping to create the requisite imagery to build a beautiful mental landscape for this bear's future.