I wear the pout of a disappointed child. My photographic partner in crime is retiring.

Who am I going to nerd around with from now on? Filters and light and exposures, Cecil B. DeMille-style grand plans for the next wedding set. It’s as if the conversation had barely started. I turn my back for a minute, and this is it. Uncle-All-Things-Pictures, the DIY master of all image-thinking, has run his course.

“I’ll miss it, that’s for sure,” he concludes with an impulsive chuckle. A sixty-plus years old boy who never stopped being amazed by what started as quite a mind-bending job; making images in a land of no more images.

Hold on. Rewind.

Why did the images stop?

We’re in Cambodia in its very long 1970s. A place and time of civil war, and behind the heat of the civil war lurks the greater specter of global cold wars.

Photos disappear because of what they contain: the past, the land, ancestors, loved ones, all things of longing and attachment. It is a place and time of no more cameras; those are a technology of the West, the empire, the colonial. It is a place and time of no representation, a thing of the bourgeoisie. It is a place and time claiming to start all over. Year zero is now, and it promises a future.

Barely emerging from that land is something claiming to be peace, shyly crossing the threshold. By the 1980’s, it’s not quite here yet, but we’ll take it, since that’s all one gets. Barely emerging with it, barely recovering from the toll of family losses and absences, enters Uncle-All-Things-Pictures: then and now a public school teacher, then and now a respected Muslim thinker, then and now an admirer of whatever it is that modernity carries with her. Then and now, against all odds, an imaginative maker of images.

“There was no money at the time. Actually, let me take that back: they had just started reprinting  money (currency had been suspended during the regime of the  Khmer Rouge). In the city, they were producing new bills. But it’s not like after all those years of nothing to barter, we were about to actually carry money in our pockets overnight! So, I guess it was a time of money-for-all, except that for all of us, there was none”.

No cash.

No gold.

No sequins.

And yet weddings were about to light up the countryside again. People began to get back together, to gather, to groom around and bride about. There was a hunger for images; there were too many weddings with no camera. In those times, what was missing was a photographer.

“I always loved photographs and cameras. Even when I was little. When we were kids, we used to make pinhole cameras out of mud. My father was so intrigued by the upside-down impressions that he kept staring at them. And even during the war(s), I managed to keep family photographs from the old days, before the soldiers got hold of them [in their quest to start a revolutionary society from year zero, Khmer Rouge soldiers went through households to discard any traces of the past, and keeping family photographs was often dangerous]. For a while, I still had this portrait of my dad working in the rubber plantations and a photograph of my uncle in his athletic days at an international javelin competition. But even when the war(s) began to end, things were still rough; my teacher’s salary wasn’t enough to support my family anyway. That’s when I noticed that those photographers were sort of better off. So I thought I would give it a try”.

But giving it a try in the early 1980s, with the broken roads and shattered land, required more than it might today. It required talent, savoir-faire, daring, brains, and maybe a bit of chance too.

“Well, obviously, I had no camera and certainly no money to get one. So things were about to get tricky”.

On his way to becoming sort-of-a-photographer, Uncle-All-Things-Pictures set out to become sort-of-an-ethnographer. Observation and research gave him his starting point.

“I already knew what photographs looked like. Now I needed to look closely at what they were actually made of, how professional photographers were doing it. I decided to follow them.”

Uncle-All-Things-Pictures tags along: itinerant adventurers on the go thrown on a moto with gear around the neck, red dust all over their faces, torn-up flip flops glued to the brakes. Photographers were not exactly common. They were coming from afar to spend a few days working on a wedding, fed and lodged by the host, leaving only to return weeks or months later with the long-awaited bounty; half-filled albums displaying the few precious glossy shots that could be afforded.

“I really got interested in the cameras they were using and started to pay attention to… you know… What do they call those boxes where they show images for kids? [Uncle seems to be referring to something similar to Iranian shahre-farang or Japanese kamishibai: itinerant storytellers with a viewing box using still-images as a visual support to the narrative. In the 1980s-1990s, some international humanitarian organizations were using the medium for various awareness campaigns in remote areas of Cambodia]. And then I began to imagine doing all that on my own”.

Just like that, Uncle-All-Things-Pictures was going to make a camera. Still no money. But ideas. Uncle-All-Things-Pictures had a lot of those.

“I got some wood and built a little box. Then I added some old spectacles’ lenses. I managed to get my hands on some leftover rolls of film and found someone who could process it. That’s how I got my first camera to work”.

Curious neighbors come to observe but don’t really get it. “Go buy yourself a cow, man!”

The idea being that you get the cow, feed it, sell it back, make the money, and buy the camera. Nice and simple. Almost too nice and too simple for Uncle-All-Things-Pictures. So he kept on going with his very own pinhole camera and in time, all the neighbors wanted images. Just a few. And then more. And finally, a lot.

“My cousin, he had an old Rolleiflex. He had buried it somewhere to protect it from the soldiers, and when the war(s) ended, he was finally able to retrieve it. All beaten down and broken up, of course. But I figured I could work on it and finally get myself a real camera.”

A tiny little piece of wooden stick here, a thin line of iron thread there, and probably quite a lot of patience and tenacity, and voila! The Rolleiflex is back from the grave, ready to wink its dove eye shutter. Except that, by then, the medium format film that the Rolleiflex uses has completely disappeared from the barely emerging market economy.

“Here is what I did: I took some black fabric and glue and made a mask for it. So that instead of the large opening that allows the whole surface of the 6×6 roll to be exposed, I could focus the light on a 35mm strip”. A conversion that will, decades later, become the core principle of Lomography’s refurbished Lubitel, and a DIY process that is now the quest of many YouTubers.

The refurbished-plus Rolleiflex makes its way through a series of images before 1986 arrives and, with it, finally a bit of income accumulated through the selling of all those portraits. “At last, this is when I bought my very first ‘real’ camera. A Soviet Zenit. You would have loved it!”

My eyes turn to the ethnographer’s shelf and the Arax-CM, a re-cared-for Kiev88, the socialist understudy of the ubiquitous Hasselblad. I pause the note-taking for a second, for I can’t resist and must ask. “What happened to that wooden one, the one you made yourself out of scratch? Or even the Rolleiflex you refurbished?”

“We recycled them. There was no reason to keep them once I had a replacement, so I sold them for parts.”

But as film photographers know all too well, the picture is only half-made once we have a camera and film. How do you create darkroom magic when you have no darkroom, chemicals, or enlarger (or, for that matter, electricity and running water)? Magic will have to do…

“I went to the small town nearby once. There was a famous photographer there. The guy had quite a reputation… He was a character. I followed him in his lab to become his apprentice, and he was flattered, but it’s not like he was going to hand me the tricks of the trade. I just had to figure it all out by myself. Except, it’s seriously dark in the darkroom. You really can’t see anything!”

Learning in the pitch-black lab turned classroom, hands venturing into can’t-be-taught experiments. Observation switched to something beyond sight, attention beyond mere vision.

“I figured the trick must be in the numbers. It was all it could be about: the timing, the minutes, as important as measuring the right chemicals. So I started to count and take notes in my head”.

Uncle-All-Things-Pictures finally gets ready to leave and go home when the master-photographer comes with a departure gift in hand: some leftover chemicals. Shining silvery particles as an omen to a bright future. And more of the good stuff awaited Uncle once he got back to teaching: a few grainy paper sheets—or rather shreds—were waiting at the nearby printing store where the exam sheets were Xeroxed. Uncle-All-Things-Pictures is now ready to go full DIY mode.

“So, here is how it went. I do the whole thing with the paper, the chemicals and all, in the dark, counting in my head, with a little torch handy right next to me. But here is what I had missed; the prints could only be exactly the same size as the negative. It was impossible to make them any bigger. That was a problem. I was stuck”.

Uncle-All-Things-Pictures waits. Probably counting by the minutes until a solution comes. And one does, oddly dressed as a soldier.

“Where he got it from? That I have no clue. Back then, people got their hands on all kinds of stuff that had been left behind.”

Back then, the war(s) displaced both people and objects. So maybe the camera stood there, somewhere, abandoned. Perhaps the soldier had his own ways and got it by other means. Perhaps the camera had belonged to someone who’d “forcibly disappeared” as  happened again and again back then. Uncle doesn’t know, and who knows if the soldier himself did.

“Anyhow, that guy, the soldier, he had this Polaroid camera that didn’t work so well and that he didn’t know what to do with, so I got it from him.” Another drafty yet crafty conversion: an inverted camera hanging from high above, suspended on a wall. The bare bones of the most basic enlarger. “Of course, I still had to adjust the size, so I would play around with a stool and a pile of books, getting the image closer or further to the lens.”

It couldn’t be that difficult, right? A little before that, Uncle had improvised his very own darkroom with a blanket and a stool. “I was doing it, right there with my hands under the stool and the blanket, while chatting with friends visiting. They had no idea what was going on down there. I would always amaze them with the images coming out like a magic trick!”

Passers-by with no affinity for photography were not the only ones amazed. One day it is the famous master-photographer who stops by to visit. (Uncle says it as if it’s no big deal. Like it hadn’t taken days of bumpy travels on roads still prone to landmines’ explosions and conflicts’ eruptions to get there.) Uncle gives him a tour of the impromptu tricks and treats.

“It’s like his face enlightened and darkened at the same time, his body shivered. He said, ‘I have spent a fortune to set up my whole lab and you, you spent nothing and got it all done just the same!’”

A small fortune—just a tiny bit of one—will finally come to Uncle-All-Things-Pictures, as the demand for his refined techniques and know-how increases. And yet, himself restless, he couldn’t stick to what was then the bread and butter of any photographer; weddings. He was an image hunter.

“I would go around, take so many pictures of my kids, relatives, friends, neighbors. Sometimes I asked them to take a pose; sometimes, I would just go around and snap a shot as they went about their daily lives. I was so happy to get the pictures printed that I would just go all over the place to distribute them, so I don’t have that many left. But back then, people had lost most of their photographs to the war(s). The photos I was making were the very first images they were getting again”.

Camera-man on the road, in the trails, by the river, and through the jungle-plantations-paddy-fields commute, paying close attention to others, caring for what they looked like, knowing what they could be.

“Sometimes I would add some colors to make it a little more special, just a touch, you know… I used those old Chinese color inked sheets to work on the print in the lab to dress them up a little. Or even during the shooting itself, I would set up a whole scene with a tableau. I would either rent the backdrop or buy a secondhand one. Sometimes even, I would make one by myself to try things out; you can change everything with a tableau.”

The word craft comes to mind. And care. An intimate knowledge that comes from the hands as much as from the heart.

Years later, and for quite a long time, I am lucky enough to learn from Uncle-All-Things-Pictures, his trade, his art, and his love for images. During those years, and at his side, I am encouraged and inspired not to leave analog photography despite the growing difficulty of acquiring and processing film within the country. Not because of the war(s) this time, but because of the collapse of the global analog industry as photography shifted to digital.

At his side, I was finally encouraged and inspired to conduct an ethnographic project as a wedding videographer working alongside rural teams of wedding designers, planners, arrangers, and photographers. And then just as the photographic, videographic, and ethnographic impostor syndrome was barely beginning to fade, just when I was about to start my year-long “internship” with Uncle (otherwise known to anthropologists as “the fieldwork”), he breaks the good news of his long-awaited retirement, the photographic business reduced to on-site operations (quick ID photographs, short textbook photocopies, international phone calls by the minute only).

“But who is going to teach me now if you stop?” I wail like a tiny little thing.

“I don’t know. I was pretty much one of a kind, that’s for sure!” A cheeky smile accompanies a dash of pride. “But actually, I was never taught. I never learned. I just tried things out. I always loved doing it and I still do. Just like you, right?”

Follow Casual Photophile on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]

The post An Oral History of Photography During and After the Cambodian Civil War appeared first on Casual Photophile.

The title says it all; I have decided to commit to shooting large format for one full year. My decision was made for many reasons, not least of which is a desire to challenge my photography skills, and my philosophy on the medium.

How Did I Make This Decision?

In my Nikon F article, where I wrote about returning to basics, I left one ominous question at the very end that seemed to only serve a purpose as a joke/homage to tv shows from the 1950s that would end on a cliffhanger. “Will James let us exclusively review large format gear?” Tune in next… article.

That joke question began a train of thought. Shortly after that article was released, I descended upon Polacon 2022 in Denton, TX to meet with instant photography experts and try my hand at using the Lomo Graflok with Instax wide on my Toyo Super Graphic. The process, even though it was all instant film based, created a stirring within me; a feeling of excitement mingled with discomfort, a desire to see my photography skills advance beyond any previous expectations.

After the instant film festivities had settled, I decided to buy the first boxes of sheet film that I’d bought in over a year. The film in question – a box of Kodak Plus-X that expired in 1983. This box was purchased from a local seller who’d kept the long-beloved film in the freezer since purchase. The excitement continued to build.

Since black & white is my primary choice, I quickly loaded four sheets of Plus-X into two holders, one sheet for each side of each holder. I packed my Toyo Super Graphic and lenses for a morning hike at Fort Worth Nature Preserve with my colleague Jason King. While at the nature preserve, my excited discomfort returned. Only this time, it was more concentrated and purposeful. I still did not know how to interpret it, all I knew is that I only had four exposures and that I needed to use them carefully.

After hiking and driving around for about three hours, I exposed three of my four sheets; that’s one exposure every hour. I was completely satisfied with this outcome and was overall feeling pretty confident in my ability. However, those of us who shoot film are no stranger to being humbled, especially those of us who shoot large format. Only one of the exposures I made that day was decent ; the other two were cases of what I call, “it looked pretty good on the ground glass.” I soon realized that my groove was something that I desperately needed to get back. Sadly, I was not able to contact Stella for advice.

Reuniting With Gear

For the journey of 365 days of sheet film, I knew I needed a more flexible camera. While my Toyo Super Graphic is a finely made piece of equipment, it possesses more bulk and less movement than some 4×5 bodies, and I knew that I would want more of the latter trait and less of the former. That is why I chose to reunite with a Tachihara field camera.

My very first large format system was a Tachihara and I absolutely loved everything about its movements, build quality, and overall looks; it was a natural choice for me, lighter on the weight, and more abundant in movements. I also cannot overstate just how much I admire the craftsmanship of a Tachihara. For those unfamiliar, Tachihara made all of their field cameras by hand from 400 year old cherry which was aged for a minimum of four years. This is what Tachihara put in their manuals with new cameras; their pride in craftsmanship and quality is greatly appreciated to this very day.

Next, I sold my 300mm f/8 Fujinon lens that I briefly mentioned in my Toyo Super Graphic piece, and purchased a Schneider 120mm f/8, a lens that was originally made to cover 5×7. The major benefit of this wider angle lens on 4×5 is the allowance of certain movements without suffering from vignetting like some other wide angle lenses.

With my kit rounded out, I also purchased a new f.64 backpack made for the large format photographer in mind, complete with two separate pouches strapped to the side that are able to carry five holders each.

Large Format Cameras for sale | eBay

Get the best deals for large format camera at eBay.com. We have a great online selection at the lowest prices with Fast & Free shipping on many items!

The Philosophy of Large Photography

That was a lot of gear-talk. Why is the gear important? Different tools for different jobs.  For example, point-and-shoot users want to keep up with the moment and enjoy the convenience of photographing with a compact piece of equipment. SLR users prefer to see what the lens is truly seeing as well as real-time depth of field before the exposure is made. TLR/waist level users want to be discreet and immerse themselves in the three dimensional world of their smaller ground glass. Leica users want the best in build, the unobtrusiveness, and simplicity of a quality rangefinder; which is why they undoubtedly turn to the Lenny Kravitz edition. (Just kidding Leica owners, someone needs to make the friendly ribbing around here.)

With all of these options in gear. there has to be some sort of method to the madness. If you’re like me, and truly desire to explore and grow and change in your photography, then sometimes madness seems to be the only method that makes sense.

From a purely practical standpoint, large format photography is madness. Composing an image can be a minutes-long process, as well as focusing, and if you’re waiting for the light to reach a certain angle, color, or for a scene to be void of any people, then you could possibly be waiting for hours and run the risk of not even making an exposure at all. Why would I or anyone bother with a method this slow?

I like to compare photography with drawing; both require countless hours of practice, both require the decision of color or black and white, both can be done with many media, and both require skills of composition as well as execution of the final image. In short, I equate large format photography to a painter bringing a large canvas to life with oil paints.

First Exposures with the Tachihara

Reuniting with the Tachihara field camera was like reuniting with an old friend. Everything was where it should be; the locks were in the right place, I could adjust the front standard movements while concealed by the dark cloth with minimal fumbling (still getting my groove back). That’s why I decided the best place to test a field camera was where I was for the intro of this article – Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, TX.

With Plus-X loaded into some holders and a vision somewhat planned in mind, I soon found myself in the Paluxy River bed composing my first sheet. The 90mm f/5.6 used to expose this sheet was on loan from a large-format colleague. This exposure, in hindsight, is mediocre at best. Although, it is a little more acceptable than the exposure of the tree, which I will include with this article, which features a sizable lens flare that I failed to notice while composing.

Finally, my favorite exposure of the day – the statue of Rex, one of the park’s signature dinosaur sculptures. Fifteen minutes would pass before I clicked the shutter on this exposure due to third and fourth guessing composition. I was quite satisfied with this shot, considering that I setup for compositions at least five to six times that day, but decided to break down the camera and move on when I couldn’t fully commit to exposing a sheet.

Finally, my desire to improve my composing eyes, patience and overall a deeper sense of purpose. Last year, I was in a cycle of making photographs for other people and not myself. I’m positive quite a few of us have experienced this not just in photography but any field where your input is needed in order to create a vision. The last six months have been liberating. Relearning large format has made me relearn why I was fascinated with photography almost a decade ago – tell a story, send an important message or document life all without saying anything.

Closing Thoughts

The biggest takeaway I have after six months seems to be kind of a rhetorical one; have patience and trust the process. This may confuse some and maybe even outright perplex others. However, what it really means is, trust your process. The only one who knows what they want from the exposure is the one operating the camera.

Ansel Adams referred to this as “the mind’s eye.” The key is to apply this Adams’ photographic philosophy to your own photography in order to create a process that only you understand and one that will ultimately help you create your vision and do so in a way where it eventually becomes second nature. I highly encourage everyone who has not exposed a sheet on large format yet to do so. Find a friend with a system that you can borrow, or rent one to test drive before buying.

How I Got Into Large Format Film Photography and How You Can Too

A friend of the site tells us how he got into large format film photography, and lays a path for you to take your first steps, too.

Large Format Cameras for sale | eBay

Get the best deals for large format camera at eBay.com. We have a great online selection at the lowest prices with Fast & Free shipping on many items!

Follow Casual Photophile on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]

The post A Year of Large Format Photography – Chapter 1: Rediscovering My Photographic Purpose appeared first on Casual Photophile.

Preemptive annoyance tinges my whispered words because I know this rabbit is going to run. There is no threat. I just want a photo or two. But rabbits don’t know a camera from a gun, nor a lumbering human with good intentions from a ravenous coyote, apparently.

“Stop being so twitchy and just relax, so that I can relax, and then we can both relax together, for Christ’s sake!”

But then the pea-sized brain in the animal’s skull screams the existential warning, “DANGER! DANGER!” It bounds away chaotically, and one of its half-dozen leaps brings it three feet into the air, its hind legs flailing pointlessly against the snatching predatory jaws that it has entirely imagined. It flees approximately twenty feet, stops when it realizes it’s not dead, and turns its head to look at me, a blade of half-eaten grass dangling stupidly from its lip.

“Wow. Very impressive. You escaped.”

I wearily push myself up and stalk toward the creature once more. I wonder about those enormous black eyes. Placed as they are on the side of its skull, does it see ahead of itself when fleeing? Or can it only see to its sides like a deer? When panicked, is it prone to career into a tree?

I’ve apparently approached in an acceptable way this time, since I’m allowed to get about ten feet closer than the time before. I stoop once more to sit in the grass alongside the rabbit.

“Alright.” I sigh. “Let’s try it again.”

Photography has been a good friend. A way to chill out. A salve for anxiety and worry. At times in my life I’ve used cameras and lenses and film and tripods to philosophically refocus. As I’ve written in previous articles, even the worst cameras end up pointing at what’s important. I could add to that observation that even if the camera points at nothing of particular importance, the act of pointing it at anything can itself be important.

This rabbit is important enough. A small living thing with the same hopes and dreams as all living things (though we humans tend to complicate what is so fundamental); to have food to eat and a place to live, for our kids to live lives that are happier, healthier, and longer than our own. That’s all most of us want. Sometimes we don’t get it. At those times, photography has been useful. As it is now.

I raise the camera and feel the weight. It’s not insignificant, because I’m using a Sony A7 mirror-less camera fitted with a ten-dollar Nikon F mount adapter and a sixty-dollar Soligor 90-230mm F/nothing-to-write-home-about telephoto zoom lens from, like, 1971. The lens weighs more than the camera, but it’s all-metal and glass and feels, surprisingly enough, wonderful. The focus throw is long and gentle and the aperture clicks into its detents beautifully.

In addition, because the lens was designed to operate uncoupled to the mechanisms within the camera (Nikons in the 1970s and Sonys in the 2020s alike), it features a second aperture ring which stops the lens down in a progressive way. The iris is circular and beautiful, and before I’ve ever mounted it to a camera I’m sure it will make interesting, if not creamy, bokeh.

The lens.

The rabbit.

So anyway, there I am sitting in the grass peering through a viewfinder and fiddling with an aperture ring and a focus ring, and zooming in and composing and framing, and remembering which button on the mirror-less Sony activates “close-magnification focus assistance” or whatever they call it, and the worries are sloughing off.

No, that’s not entirely accurate, if I’m honest. They’re not sloughing off. But maybe they’re out-gassing, dissolving at a molecular level, becoming ever so slightly lighter. I suspect that another two hours of shooting this rabbit might get me to a point where I feel like everything is going to be just fine. But this rabbit has got shit to do, and it hops away after about three minutes.

“Well, let’s see what we’ve got in Lightroom.”

The thing about photography, for me, is that I’m sort of adrift. I don’t exactly know what I’m doing anymore. My whole photographic life has been taking pictures of my children and trying out cameras that I think look neat. I still like my children, so that’s fine. I take pictures of them, same as always. But as far as the “cameras that look neat” thing is concerned, I’ve tried them all.

I love film cameras. Always have, always will. I’ve shot every film camera I care about, and hundreds about which I’ve cared very little. Plus, film is expensive and getting pricier every year. And then I have less time to do it, and more bills to pay, and personal situations to work through, and oh, boy, we are going down this hole again, Jimbo? Where’s that rabbit when I need him.

Let’s get back to cameras and photography.

My pictures of the rabbit are pretty good. They contain a rabbit, and some grass, and nice colors and sharpness most of the time, when I’ve focused right. The shots made at wide-open aperture have strong subject isolation and interesting bokeh, as I suspected they might. The shots made with a tighter aperture are sharp. Not as sharp as would be with a modern lens, naturally, but sharp in that old fashioned way which lacks of clinical perfection. A good thing.

In Lightroom I’m able to turn my decent RAW photos of a rabbit into whatever I want. I can make these pictures look like clean digital photos, or Ilford HP5 film or Kodak T-Max 100, Kodak Portra, Delta 3200, all by sliding a few sliders and knowing what I’m doing. I’ve even managed to create a pre-set which makes a shot look very much like images made with the long-ago discontinued Fujifilm Natura 1600 color film, which is my favorite film I’ve ever used. (And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a picture of a rabbit in that article, too!)

I love using old lenses on new cameras. I love it more than I love shooting film cameras or shooting the newest digital Leica, or instant film, or anything else. Old lenses adapted to new mirror-less cameras; nothing is better. We get the more interesting imaging characteristics of old cameras and film, without the hassle and cost of actually shooting film.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the rabbit.

Get your own cheap lens on eBay here

Buy one from our shop, F Stop Cameras

Vintage Camera Lenses for sale | eBay

Get the best deals for vintage camera lens at eBay.com. We have a great online selection at the lowest prices with Fast & Free shipping on many items!

Follow Casual Photophile on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]

The post A Cheap Lens and a Rabbit appeared first on Casual Photophile.

It was an honest mistake. I was practicing bass for an upcoming gig, whipped around, and knocked it off the table. It landed square on the HP prism, shattering the nameplate and destroying the penta-prism inside. The film door popped open too, ruining the film inside.

My chest tightened as I heard the crash. My heart sank as I picked the F3’s pieces off the ground. My eyes welled with tears in a strange reflex that I couldn’t quite understand as I surveyed the damage. The film door wouldn’t close, the prism was completely totaled, and the advance lever lost a vital piece that I simply couldn’t find, all problems beyond my own power to fix. I couldn’t stand to see my F3, my constant companion of the last eight years, like this. Maybe other cameras, yes, but not this one.

This one’s different.

Real Casual Photophile heads (probably only James, who am I kidding) might remember that this very Nikon F3 was the subject of the first article that I ever wrote. It wasn’t my first camera (that would be the Nikon FG), nor was it my dream camera (that would be the Leica M2), nor even my favorite camera (that would be the Olympus Pen FT, the subject of what I consider to be my favorite thing I’ve written here). But the Nikon F3 was the one that started it all, the first camera I fell in love with.

What did I love about it? My 2016 review tells me that I loved the way it felt, how luxurious yet workmanlike it was, how damn pretty it looked. “I mean look at it,” was a real sentence I wrote about it. And it’s still true. Look at an F3 if you have one lying around. It’s gorgeous.

Nikon F3 - Camera Review

My original Nikon F3 review, written a million years ago.

I also loved the story behind it. I love that Giugiaro was brought in when Nikon needed help keeping aesthetic pace with the other manufacturers, and ended up designing maybe the most beautiful SLR ever made, not to mention adding the red stripe that Nikon uses as a signature to this day. Its production lifespan of nearly twenty years is remarkable, and it still lives long in the memory of photographers all over the world.

But even more than all that, I loved how it shot. It was just so easy to make a great photo with it, provided I was being intentional about framing and metering. To this day, the combination of AE lock, 80/20 center-weighted meter, and aperture priority is the easiest way to tailor the exposure to my exact needs. The HP finder let my bespectacled eyes see a perfectly sized frame without issue, and the exposure information (while a bit dim) wasn’t intrusive. It is still the one of the only cameras that can disappear from my hands completely, and the one that lets me do whatever I wish within the frame.

It was my initial love for this elegant yet workmanlike machine which informed the way I’ve reviewed every camera for this site. The F3 changed the way I think about cameras themselves. Since that first article, I’ve seemingly looked for the F3 in every camera I’ve shot, or at least looked for other cameras that could offer the F3’s balance of utility and design.

For example, I loved the Pentax K1000 because it was, as a camera, so forgettable that it made me just take pictures. I also championed the Nikon EM simply because of how eminently usable it is by pretty much anybody looking to learn film photography on a budget. This F3 starting point also accounts for the cameras that I didn’t like – I was disappointed with the Leica M2 because so much of its appeal was tied to status rather than its raw technical ability, a criticism I’ve also leveled at cameras like the Yashica T4, the Olympus Mju-ii/Stylus Epic, etc. I also don’t really care for weird offbeat cameras unless they have something going for them – I didn’t care at all for the Diax IIa when I reviewed it but was smitten by its Schenider-Krueznach 45mm f/2.8, and the same arguably could be said about the Leica III.

But that’s not to say my love for the F3 is rooted in pure utilitarianism – if that was the case I wouldn’t be shooting it at all. We’ve published articles on how the numerous autofocus SLRs from the 1990s are far better than hyped older cameras, yet I still haven’t felt compelled to part with the forty or so dollars it would cost for the privilege of shooting a plastic blob, no matter how well-equipped. And let’s be real – if I was really utilitarian, I’d just shoot a Fuji XT-4 or some such digital workhorse and abandon film completely.

Loving the Nikon F3 showed me that there was something more interesting beyond the aestheticism vs utilitarianism debate. Generational designs like the F3 (and most, if not all, great tools of art) subsume their aesthetic into their utility and vice versa, becoming total, singular experiences in and of themselves. The really great ones express some set of values and ideas, and it’s the F3’s values and ideas I love most of all.

Every line, curve, dial, and knob has a beautiful, singular, clearly defined purpose, every bit as practical as it is elegant. It’s simple to shoot, helps when you need it to, but always leaves you in control. Its design makes taking photos not only easy, but pleasurable, and engages you enough to let you focus not only on your composition, but on the moment itself. More than any other camera, the F3 is representative of everything I love about the act of shooting vintage cameras.

But it’s not these things that made me tear up about losing my F3. If that were the case I’d have no problem replacing it with another, better one. I didn’t just lose any F3 – I lost my F3.

For eight years of my life, my F3 has been there for me. The countless nights I spent playing my first shows across the city. The first time I ever went on tour. The trips back to my family’s old neighborhood in the Philippines and my first trip to Japan. Those times I saw my heroes onstage or on the field, or all those nights I spent out with my friends and family. So much of the joy, the sadness, and the beauty of eight years passed through its lens and viewfinder. It helped me see it and process it, and in its way, the F3 became a part of the way I lived my life.

And that’s the thing about cameras, isn’t it? They’re witnesses to our lives the way nothing else is. No matter how well or badly designed, no matter how storied or overlooked or hyped or not hyped or whatever, they’re all capable of accompanying us through life, if we let them. My F3 just happened to be the one I let in.

One of the many beautiful things about film cameras is that when they break, the vast majority of them can be fixed. Part of the enduring power of film cameras in our times is that they, along with other examples of older physical media, represent an alternative to the mainstream contemporary tech philosophy of non-repairability, glorified pump-and-dump corporate investment schemes, and rapidly accelerating planned obsolescence. We only need to point to the F3’s twenty-year production lifespan and repair support to show us that this was not just a camera made for its time; it was a camera meant to last for the times to come. If there is any camera for me that is worth the trouble, it would easily be this one.

But even still, throughout the years I’ve heard repeatedly that a full repair of a camera is only worth it if the camera carries sentimental value. Looking at my F3, remembering its heritage and meaning to the film camera canon, what it means to me as a photographer and writer, what it means to still shoot film, and everything this camera means to me — it’s worth much more than that. It’s worth all that I can give back to it, for all it has given to me.

Shop for your own Nikon F3 on eBay here

Find one at our shop, F Stop Cameras

Nikon F3 listings on eBay

Find the best deals on auctions and Buy It Now listings and get your own Nikon F3 from eBay here!

Follow Casual Photophile on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]

The Ten Best Mechanical 35mm Film SLRs Ever Made

After seven years of shooting classic cameras, we've compiled our list of the ten best mechanical SLRs (plus three honorable mentions).

Read More

casualphotophile.com

The post Death of a Nikon F3 appeared first on Casual Photophile.

The apocryphally informed among us will say that the motto was coined by the mid-20th century New York City-based crime and tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig, more popularly known as Weegee, whose photography was scalding hot in black-and-white, flash-exposed on the rain-slick streets, and often dripping with blood.

In the earliest days of his career, Weegee would loiter around the Manhatten Police headquarters. Whenever a notice came over the police teletype (an early fast communication device that could send written messages over phone lines) Weegee would race the police to the scene of the catastrophe, and often find himself first on the scene. This offered him an opportunity to photograph the scene of the crime or disaster without interruption or interference. He would quickly develop the film and take the grizzly, uncensored pictures to the newspaper, which paid handsomely for blood and guts.

Weegee quickly made a living (and a name for himself) out of his violent and shocking photography.

The connection between Weegee and the mantra F/8 and be there goes like this.

One day, when Weegee had achieved a certain level of fame, he was asked by an interviewer how he had managed to become the most famous crime scene photographer in history. Weegee supposedly replied with the now famous and famously succinct witticism, “F/8 and be there.”

I can’t find this interview anywhere, nor a written first-hand account. Nor, it seems, can anyone else.

Did Weegee ever speak the words? I don’t know.

But there’s reason to believe he did not.

To start, Weegee is known to have made nearly all of his published photographs with a 4×5 Speed Graphic camera preset to f/16 and 1/200th of a second, with a flash bulb, and standing from a set distance of ten feet. If a photographer spent decades shooting at essentially the same settings, it makes little sense that the photographer would offer anything but these specific settings in his clever retort to a somewhat dim question.

So, forget Weegee. I’ve found published documents in which multiple people claim that National Geographic is the source of the phrase “F/8 and be there.” 

In an article in the July 1985 issue of Whole Earth Review titled Digital Retouching: The End of Photography as Evidence of Anything, writer Stewart Brand wrestles with the question of photographic ownership in an approaching era in which photographs could be created by a computer. Interestingly for our purposes, he mentions the “F/8” mantra and its connection with National Geographic.

“The advice to photographers from the [National] Geographic is: ‘F/8 and be there.’ If content in photos can be electronically and subliminally added and re-moved, why bother to be there?” – Stewart Brand; July 1985; Whole Earth Review; Digital Retouching: The End of Photography as Evidence of Anything

The NG connection to the phrase was mentioned again in a 1993 issue of Popular Photography. In this issue the photographer Kal Muller describes how he made a particular photo. He casually mentions, “The advice, ‘F/8 and be there’ from National Geographic years ago, has long been my motto.”

Frustratingly, I’ve not been able to find a single issue of National Geographic in which the motto appears. So, forget National Geographic. And let’s forget about hunting down the origin of the phrase, and move on to something more interesting.

F/8 and Be There, Elsewhere

In a 1983 issue of Direction: The Navy Public Affairs Quarterly, Master Gunnery Sergeant Ed Evans writes about covering the Marines in Lebanon in 1982. In this article, Evans contrarily writes that F/8 and be there was, for him, useless.

“[…] Marines landed. Cameras whirred and clicked. […] It was a battlefield circus. Masses of PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] supporters were firing weapons and armament of every sort, artillery airbursts promised to make Vietnam-era knees buckle instinctively, automatic weapons chattered, loudspeakers blared, the crowd surged and the situation seemed always on the brink of raging out of control. […] There was no time for the “F/8 and be there” philosophy, no time to be shooting 20 shots in the hopes one would be good[…]”

As for the mantra’s popularity over time, Google Ngram Viewer attributes the first mention of the phrase to have occurred around 1968. Incidentally that’s the year that Weegee died. The phrase appeared more and more frequently throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. It peaked in popularity around the year 2004, dipped considerably throughout the aughts, and climbed back to popularity throughout the latter half of the 2010s. According to Google Ngram Viewer, F/8 and be there is as popular today as it ever was.

How To F/8 and Be There, and Why?

With the lens aperture set to F/8, sufficient light enters the camera to create a proper exposure in most situations. If we set the lens to the lens’ hyper-focal distance (using zone focusing), F/8 also provides sufficient depth of field that everything up close and far away alike will be rendered sharply focused in the photo. That’s the “F/8” part of the phrase.

With the lens aperture set to F/8, the lens focus set to hyper-focal distance, and the shutter set to a general purpose speed, it’s possible for the photographer to completely ignore the camera. With the controls set in place, he or she can instead focus their attention entirely on what’s happening around them. That’s the “be there” part.

The result, supposedly, is that photographers attempting to capture a story, for a newspaper, let’s say, will have the best luck doing so by following the mantra. F/8 and be there and they’ll get the shot.

In the heyday of film photography, and to the many hobbyist photographers who idolized the reportage of the famous photojournalists who often said the phrase (apocryphally or not, who knows?), F/8 and be there came to stand for a certain photographic philosophy. It asserted that taking good photos was less about technical ability or innate talent and more about being in the thick of it, amongst the action with your eyes open and your senses tuned. To F/8 and be there was to be knee deep in the mud and up to your elbows in the drama. All you needed was guts and an eyeball.

F/8 and be there. That’s all it takes. Press the button and watch for falling Pulitzers.

What F/8 and Be There Means To Me

There are plenty of photographers who live by the mantra today. I’ve seen it written on countless blogs and heard plenty of YouTubers mention it. I’ve seen t-shirts branded with it (I’ve even considered making one myself). For many, I’m sure the motto still conjures images of the ideal photojournalist (whatever that means).

For me, F/8 and be there means something else.

I’ve long ago given up the idea that my photography will mean anything to anyone outside of my family. My photography isn’t anything special. I’m not a fashion photographer or a celebrity portrait artist. I don’t have a high concept in mind when I reach for my Nikon SP. I’m too old to be cool and too young to be interesting. As I have said on my YouTube channel and in other articles, I shoot photos so that someone I love might someday look at them and think I was pretty good.

But I can still wring some use out of the mantra F/8 and be there.

I focus on the last part. Being there. On vacation. At home with my girls. When I was in the hospital after my daughters’ births. At Disney World. I always have the camera. But I don’t really care about it. I don’t worry about it, or focus on it. Or pack it away delicately between shots, or bother with a lens cap, or bring too much gear, or obsess over getting the perfect photo.

I just shoot the thing and spend my time being there. There with my wife and kids. There with my thoughts. There for them. Just being there. For me, being there is the best part of photography.

[Below: times I was there, not necessarily at F/8.]

Support Casual Photophile and buy a vintage camera from our shop at F Stop Cameras

The post F/8 And Be There – the Unclear Origin of a Photographic Mantra and What It Really Means appeared first on Casual Photophile.

Mom laughed as we looked out at the procession of shaved heads and neatly pressed uniforms.

“LEFT! RIGHT! LEFT! RIGHT!” an angry man shouted.

Gave mom a side-eye. She laughed. She heard similar from Matt when he was my age. In early high school, all was going according to plan for him. He had bangs below his eyes and went everywhere with a skateboard and baggy jeans. And then one day, he came into the house and informed my parents that he was joining the Marines.

Mom and dad weren’t happy. Dad said he wouldn’t sign for him early and scared the recruiter away from the house. All my friends were scared of my dad, but I never imagined a military recruiter would be. Matt would have to wait until he turned 18 and graduated high school. Matt was stubborn. Matt signed up after he graduated.

We arrived in Parris Island, South Carolina, for Matt’s basic training graduation a few months later. I was in the fourth grade. Parris Island didn’t look like Paris. And it wasn’t exactly my vision of an island. All the signs said Semper Fi. There were tanks by the gas station and a whole bunch of brick buildings. Barracks, Matt the Marine called them.

I held my end of the bargain when I was in high school. I practically sprinted by the recruiters when they set up their tables in the high school hallway. Head down. Hands on my backpack straps. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Oh… wait.

Those big memories. We can remember those, with or without a photograph or a video. They get talked about around every holiday dinner table. The recruiter texts every once in a while, or we see funny memes of high schoolers’ replies to those texts on the internet.

I purchased an old, used Kodak digital camera after I read this Casual Photophile article about how all the cool kids were getting digicams again. And I needed an SD card to put in it. I found one in a junk drawer and put it in the camera.

“When we got to Parris Island, they kept you up for the first two days,” Matt says on the decade-old video. He is sitting in the brown chair in our living room, which has tan walls that appear brown on this 480p recording. Matt is in his camo uniform, his eyes nestled in shadow beneath his standard-issue buzz cut.

“What did they keep you up doing? Running you? Walking you?” The camera shakes as mom prods. She sat Matt down to give an entire audio-visual narrative of his boot-camp experiences. And sure, there are minute details in this 20-minute long recording. The times that Matt arrived at the camp, an explanation of how the crew had to stop in a convenience store to buy Matt a belt on the way.

But there is also my mom’s voice. Her not so gentle way of cutting in and asking follow-ups. My dad’s voice booming through the background to my grandmother saying that he is heading to Walmart. The dark spots on the felt chair changed shades of brown where Matt would allow his hands to rest in between sentences.

Mom and dad are ten years older now – their voices don’t sound the same. That chair was thrown into the ditch two years ago. And even more, hearing Matt’s experience reminded me of my own car trip to Parris Island as a spectator. Crammed in the third-row seat of my grandmother’s Ford Explorer, listening to One Republic and regretting the grilled chicken sandwich I had just eaten at Cookout. I was working on getting abs – I had a girl to impress back home.

“I thought we lost these,” mom said as the video began. And truthfully, we would have. A random SD card in a junk drawer. One cleaning day away from the landfill, just like the chair.

Or maybe the card would have ended up on eBay. Sold for a couple of bucks as a hot commodity for the upcoming digital camera boom. Mom wouldn’t know how to wipe it, so Matt’s video would be shipped off with it, just as Matt himself was shipped off that morning on a bus outside the recruiter’s office in Tupelo, Mississippi.

The Kodak C813 arrived at my New Haven, Connecticut, P.O. Box about one week after I ordered it on eBay for $21.26. A digicam + memory card combo. Eight megapixels. Flash. A record of an entire family.

Wait, what? That wasn’t in the listing. Nearly 1,000 photographs spanning several years of a family’s life. From births to weddings to camping trips to vacations to dog pictures, they were all here. Forgotten on an SD Card. Which was picked up by a vendor somehow who promptly sold it online. To me. A college kid in need of a silly camera to take spontaneous photographs of his friends.

I’ll never know the tiny memories and stories hidden behind these photographs. Maybe the hospital cafeteria food was bad before the birth. Maybe some family members got into an argument at that wedding in the West. They loved that dog, I can tell that much.

Typically, this is where I would end the story. I would write some nice, pretty metaphorical ending that would get some positive comments and net a text from mom saying “Very well written!”

But nope, not this time. This is a call to action. Because frankly, I’m sick to my stomach that I have all these photographs, unsure of whether this family has lost them forever. And I don’t want any future college kid or, worse, a reseller to end up with your old memories. So, reader, sit down with those old SD cards or negatives and the people whose memories are recorded on them. Enjoy the little memories, the feelings and emotions that can only flood back with the tide of an old recording.

And me? I’ll search for this family. They deserve their own Parris Island. Their own felt brown chair. Their own recollection of exactly how their voices sounded, how that dog looked, what that wedding cake tasted like.

“I wanted him to remember what it was all like,” mom told me as I copied the file onto one of my archival hard drives before shutting off the video of Matt. “We should get him to watch this. Did you send it to him?”

Our guest posts are submitted by amazing photographers and writers all over the world.

Today’s Guest Post was submitted by…

Lukas Flippo is a first-generation low-income student at Yale University from rural Mississippi. Lukas is a photojournalist, with work appearing in the New York Times, TIME, IndyStar, and the Sun Herald. Lukas’ work, including a series on found photos, can be seen at Lukas’ website. More of Lukas’ guest posts on this site can be found here.

For more stories and photography from the community check out the many series we’ve published over the years below!

Featured Photophile – we shine a spotlight on amateur photographers whose work we love.

Photographer Interviews – in-depth discussions with professional and established photogs doing great work.

Female Photographers to Follow – get inspired by a monthly series focused on the beautiful and unique perspectives of female photographers.

Five Favorite Photos – a hand-selected examination of the oeuvre of our favorite famous photographers.

Follow Casual Photophile on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

[Some of the links in this article will direct users to our affiliates at B&H Photo, Amazon, and eBay. By purchasing anything using these links, Casual Photophile may receive a small commission at no additional charge to you. This helps Casual Photophile produce the content we produce. Many thanks for your support.]

The post $21.26 – The Price of a Thousand Memories appeared first on Casual Photophile.