Spent a pleasant morning with my friend Shawn exploring the back streets of Half Moon Bay. Since Shawn is never without a Leica M series camera, I decided to bring a camera too, just in case our brunch turned into a walk-and-shoot around the town, accompanied by a round table discussion for two, as it always does.
Shawn is a serious black and white film photographer, and our discussions have included previsualization of the latent black and white image, something that I never really thought about. Growing up, black and white photography was the economical medium of choice, since all of my extra money went into buying bulk-packed 35mm film loaded into reusable cassettes, and printing only those images that I really liked, and whose expense I could justify. Back then, a little bit of money had to go a long way.
For me, digital photography unleashed a creative urge that lay dormant since the early 1980s. I was in the process of launching a second career, and as such set aside my cameras for lack of anything I was required to photograph. The need would emerge when I took responsibility for producing my school's tri-annual catalog of classes. I started working with color transparency film, creating slides that would be sent to a lithographer for conversion to the cyan-magenta-yellow-black (CMYK) separations necessary to produce brochure covers in full color.
Eventually every aspect of the catalog was created digitally, and as the need for more detailed documentation increased, so did my inventory of digital cameras. Now, three years into my retirement, I welcome the chance to spend time with Shawn and discuss our shared artistic outlet from a purely recreational standpoint. Advances in digital camera technology have resulted in cameras that can effectively address the nuances of proper exposure, and post production software that help me to salvage images when I mess up. I shoot for myself now, free to indulge my fascination with color, something I could never afford to do when I worked with film.
