What got you started in photography?

[Bill Brown]

Several factors drove my beginning interest in photography and one of the main ones was my love of motorcycle touring. I wanted to document my personal adventures and since I was working at a professional photo lab a camera loaded with Kodachrome seemed to be the best way to accomplish this. This was the late 1970's and tour bikes had not yet become the expensive rides like present day. I paid $2200 for the basic Yamaha 750 2D shaft drive bike then began the process of outfitting it with everything I wanted. One of the saddlebags was devoted to holding all my camera kit which included a Canon FTb, a FD 50 mm lens and a Vivitar 28mm lens. Pretty basic. Then rolls of Kodachrome 64 to record it all with. My first tour was in 1978 from Dallas, Texas to Muncie, Indiana to visit family. I drove through North Carolina and got the attached image at sunrise with fog.



The main b&w photo was shot in Wyoming during my 1979 tour. The road appeared as if it was a silver ribbon winding it's way into the mountains. The original color image was nice but doing a b&w conversion better created what I saw in my mind as I drove that day. I titled it "Riding the silver ribbon". These tours and several others launched my now lifelong enjoyment of photography. What got you started?

 

[Gianluca Drago]

I never truly started, Bill, but also my first camera was a Canon FTb (actually it was my sister's camera, but I loved it anyway). Fantastic photos!

 

[Gary R. Smith]

I took a class in high school in 1971. Purchased my FTb (after borrowing a Voigtländer for 80% of the class). Bought an enlarger and darkroom gear. Got interested in other stuff. Took a job 15 years ago that ended up with me as the designated photographer (listed under: other duties as required) since the guy I replaced had also filled that roll. That started me on this current bout.

 

[Paul Taylor]

I grew up in a very rural, poor area of the country. Although my parents were well-off (especially for the area) - however if I wanted a camera I had to buy it myself. I shot mainly with disposables as they were cheap and had them developed at a store in a town that was ~30 miles away. I eventually saved enough money to buy a old Minolta X700 in the 90s.

I was extremely fortunate that a high school teacher was an advisor / chaperone for a technology / trade club - which was amazing as no one in the area cared about such things. This was a "sports-ball is all that matters" type place. As someone who was very interested in computers, electronics, and building things - I joined soon as I walked into my freshman year. I would do odd-jobs to save money so I could buy things on the trip, and steal the stuff I needed to build the projects from my father's workshop. This club allowed us something pretty rare for people in our area - travel. We would have two or three fundraisers a year selling candy. Miraculously all the kids who qualified for the trips sold enough stuff to go. Of course, that wasn't really the case - as I found out a couple years in that the teacher was paying the difference out of his own pocket to make sure we could all attend because the school definitely wasn't going to help. Because of this I got to travel to places like Chicago, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, NYC, Nashville, etc. After I graduated I repaid the kindness by helping the teacher with the club as a chaperone / judge / advisor and would help teach after school "extended learning" classes for students who wanted to learn more than what was allotted in the curriculum.

I was into photography then to document things I never though I would be able to see/do again. I would burn through multiple disposable cameras per trip.Unfortunately none of the pictures (as well as the souvenirs, awards, trophies, etc) exist today due to them all being tossed (turns out being told "we will store this stuff in the spare room" actually meant "dumpster." lol)

After I moved out at 16 or so I didn't have the money for photography again till the late 90s when I bought a digital point and shoot - and Olympus Camedia. I still have some of those pics. I didn't get really involved in Photography again till the early 2000s when I moved to Phoenix, AZ (where I still live.) In 2004 or so I took a job with a small, but high quality classic car restoration shop. I bought a Sony DSC-H2, and then a little later a DSC-H5 to document the stuff I was doing. As I learned the camera more - that lead to customers paying me for the photos of the work being done, and eventally photoshoots and car event photography. I even managed to shoot a couple features for car magazines during that time (slightly fibbing about my camera being a interchangable lens DSLR.) I did enough of that over a few years it allowed me to buy a Sony a900 full frame and a couple Ziess lenses for it - something I would have never dreamed about being able to afford a decade earlier. Since then the hobby has persisted and the camera collection has grown. I don't do any paid gigs anymore as I would rather enjoy photography for myself - but sometimes I make exceptions (Recently did some graduation pics in exchange for baked goods cause who could say no to that?) Luckily I am into photography as my wife is not - so I document our adventures.

 

[Bill Brown]

(turns out being told "we will store this stuff in the spare room" actually meant "dumpster." lol)

Man, I guess it's better to laugh than to cry. I just don't know if I could be that okay with it. Ephemera is so important to me. It's a definite factor in my continued support of film. I like having the tangible object of a negative or transparency to hold in my hand. Thanks for your story. Mentors have played a strong role in my life also. I always want to pay it forward as a way of honoring their selfless giving to help me and others. The baked goods sound quite nice as payment. Besides it will stay with you longer than the money.

 

[Rob MacKillop]

I started about 12 years ago, and joined this forum at the same time. First camera was a digital point and shoot, but soon discovered film cameras were cheap on eBay (how times have changed). Bought and sold a few cameras over those years, but was never really happy until I got a Mamiya 6 (not the folding one) for medium format, the Hexar for 35mm, and the Leica Q3 for digital. The latter was a retirement gift from one of my more wealthy guitar students - incredible! I’m sorted now, and have no plans to look further.

My goal has been to express myself through the lens, much as I do when playing guitar, rather than just point and shoot. I fail often, but not always, and it is those small personal victories that keep me going. Manipulating something that is purely mechanical to express inner feelings is a tough ask, but one worth the effort. Do it often enough, and your ‘voice’ becomes evident and recognisable. Well, that is what I would like to achieve, but it’s an ongoing effort.

 

[Bill Brown]

My goal has been to express myself through the lens, much as I do when playing guitar

Wow. A musician. What type of guitar do you teach? Classical, Jazz? I admire anyone who can play an instrument of any kind. I never achieved anything like that. I have a few Peter White CD's in my collection. I lean more towards the trumpet, piano and violin(classical) as favorite instruments. Wynton Marsalis and 1990's Harry Connick Jr. first and then numerous other Jazz and Classical musicians. I was always more of an avid listener and for a time could have been considered an audiophile of sorts.

I think photography, from capture to print, and the camera became my instrument. I have a 'voice' as a print finisher but I feel I'm still looking visually. Having been a retoucher for so long it has influenced my eye. I have a series of images that I call 'Real and Imagined'. One of those images was the boy with his radio controlled 4x4 that I posted in my introductory story. The problem I'm encountering now with that series is the influx of AI. Used to be you needed to be an artist to create these kind of scenes, now it's with a few words in an image generator. I am looking at moving back to my roots of doing original art works. This AI trend doesn't interest me at all. Much like shooting with a manual film camera I want to feel like a needed part of the process and AI strips that away. Enough of that topic though.

Do you have any particular photographers whose work you admire? For me personally the photographers I've produced work for over the decades have probably been my biggest influences except for the 'Real and Imagined ' series. Back in the 1980's I retouched all of the work for one of the pioneers in environmental portraiture, William S. McIntosh. He was an amazing person to work with. He actually gave me printed credit for the retouching. Only one other photographer has ever done that. I'm always the best kept secret.

What made you take the step into photography 12 years ago? Had you thought about photography for awhile up to that time or was it a spontaneous move? What made you look at film other than the lower cost of entry?

I'll thank you in advance for your response. I bet you didn't know you were going to be interviewed.

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Well, Bill, I had a career playing and teaching the lute, classical guitar, and some other plucked instruments. I’ve retired now, and am studying jazz guitar from a hospital bed! You can find me on three websites:

https://robmackillop.net/ - general overview

https://rmclassicalguitar.com/ - devoted to playing classical guitar

https://archtopguitar.net/ - archtop guitar with some jazz

And while I’m at it, here’s my photography site: https://imagesrm.uk/

I don’t have a photographer I most admire, but I have a good appreciation of all the usual suspects and a few of the lesser-discussed. I like Dutch art of the time leading up to and including Rembrandt, and the darker-toned Northern Renaissance than the Southern Italian brightness. Maybe some of that has seeped in, but I couldn’t say for sure.

What made me take that first step? It was just a family holiday in London, just before phones included a camera, so I bought a Canon G10 (I think) to record the trip. To be honest, I was suffering from anxiety at the time, especially with tall buildings and masses of people - so why we were in London has more to being outvoted than preference. I discovered that when I looked through the eye piece, the world became to a degree more controllable, more - excuse me - focussed. My anxiety would dip. Soon I had a camera with me all the time, and when I entered a new room, for example in a museum or gallery, I would first check it out through the camera, even when I had no interest in taking a shot. When back home I resumed my home teaching schedule. We lived in a small flat, so I was teaching in the living room, and watching TV in the evenings in the same room. This wasn’t healthy, so I made sure I would walk for an hour everyday. Pretty soon I started taking a camera with me. I started noticing things I had walked past without interest on previous occasions. Things like pattern, light and shade. I started viewing the world with a musician’s eye: melody, harmony and rhythm being the three principal constituents. I’ve very conscious of these things when lining up a shot - not all the time, but very often.

But enough about me. I want to learn more about your print finishing and retouching: skills I know nothing about.

 

[Bill Brown]

I started viewing the world with a musician’s eye: melody, harmony and rhythm being the three principal constituents.

I love that! It makes sense out of chaos. I'm attracted to repeating patterns and symmetry visually so maybe that's why I'm attracted to the spontaneity of Jazz musically. It allows me to step outside the box. I never thought about it this way before. Has anyone told you that you would make a great teacher?

I too am not a crowd person but a camera gives me permission to be assertive and step into any situation. My motorcycle touring was for the most part always by myself and I took my trips in late summer as school was about to start. That way fewer people would be around. I also drove on mostly deserted back roads.

I didn't grow up in a house where art played a role. My dad was a product of the Great Depression so life was all about being able to provide for family. Art wasn't a job it was for play. I have a photograph of my dad at the age of six behind a four horse team on the farm. Thankfully over the years my dad came to see that his youngest son could make a living as an artist. I know he was proud of what I accomplished. He passed away almost 30 years ago now. He never had the chance to see what I've been able to do digitally on the computer.

Print finishing for most people is akin to watching paint dry. Tedious and boring if you don't have a love of minutiae and working alone. It has been a perfect fit for me. You have to be a self motivator. I've been freelance since 1982, self motivation is not an issue. People hand you a job and they expect it to be finished correctly and by deadline. I worked 24 hours straight once to complete a rush job for Southland Corporation (7-Eleven). I finished the job and within a few minutes the doorbell rang. It was the person who had hired me and she was there to pick up the job. It's still the most I ever billed for a days work at 100% rush. She was very pleased with the result. This job was in the days before Photoshop. I retouched traditionally for thirty years before moving to the computer in 2006. I was given a large set of prints showing the interior of a 7-Eleven store. The store interiors were being re-designed and these photos were for a board of directors presentation. One set of prints, no undos, redos or mistakes. The presentation was for Monday morning and this was Sunday evening when she arrived to pick up my work.

This was complex image manipulation all done with an airbrush and gouache paint, Prismacolor pencils and Winsor & Newton Series 7 sable brushes. I had to complete the store interiors to show how they would appear updated. Their photographer had to use an existing store to photograph but I had to remove any outdated signage, update the checkout counter based on artist renderings and otherwise make it all look real and believable. You had to be an artist with an understanding of how to make things look real. Some of it required freehand lettering in scale and perspective. Here's an example of what I was doing as a kid with my Hot Wheels cars before I had high quality brushes, paints or a magnifying glass. One from a sizable collection.



Besides photo retouching my skills were also needed for mat cutting, print mounting, glass cutting and finally framing. I've also installed six figure original art works for Soloman Gallery of L.A. in Dallas for an art fair. Print finishing for me has covered a broad scope of things well beyond basic retouching. The one thread running through all of it is extreme attention to detail and NO mistakes.

This is getting long so I better stop for now. It's a lot of ground to cover. Rest well and get better. On a side note I worked as a second shooter and darkroom printer for a wedding photographer in my early days. Jim Law was from Scotland and I got good at understanding his brogue. He had a friend, Jimmy Murphy, from Belfast with whom he collaborated as cinematographer on several short films. I really enjoyed working with him.

 

[Bill Brown]

Rob, I've spent some time this morning looking at the sites you listed. I watched one video of you playing a classical piece. A beautiful, soft touch on the strings yet intentional in purpose. Beautiful and evocative b&w photography work. Your depth of skill across many varying disciplines and how they intertwine. Thanks for asking about my work but I am just a young upstart just beginning to find my way. Reading comments people posted on these sites lets me know how big of a heart you have to enable others to exceed their personal expectations. Thanks for your thoughts and words.

 

[Rob MacKillop]

Cheers, Bill. I’m impressed with your work and attitude, and you are a boon to this forum.

 

[Bill Watts]

I always had an interest in things mechanical and electrical from a very early age. I would have been labelled a "destructive" child, but for the fact that I could invariably reassemble whatever I took apart. Switches, lightbulbs and batteries fascinated me and I unknowingly constructed logic gates with them in my attempts to recreate the panels I had seen on Fireball XL5, Space Patrol, Stingray and all the other science fiction children's TV of the time.

We were not a wealthy family but Dad made sure we went on holiday every year, Plymouth was a favourite as he had been in the Royal Navy during WW II. Dad always had a camera as far as I can remember and took photos at every opportunity. At about 3 or 4 I became intrigued by the box that he looked through and later produced images of past events and would attempt to take it off him whenever he got it out.

On holiday in Plymouth when I was about 4 to 5 we were staying at the Armada Hotel, just off the Hoe, when he took me to Woolworths (where every thing was half a crown maximum price) and purchased a VP camera for me it came in 3 parts each half a crown and had a "bloomed" Bolco lens. It had to be assembled and just clipped together.

After that I would use it to take photos and send off the film from the local post office awaiting eagerly the return of film and contact prints from Kodak.

By the time I was 7 Dad trusted me with his own camera and I took it with me on school trips. From then on the camera was a shared object and dad changed them a few times along the way we had a Reid III which he part exchanged for a Leica IIIf red dial, should have held on to the Reid it is worth way more than the equivalent Leica today!

By the time I was about 10, Dad came home with a Durst Newporter enlarger and an Essex 35 daylight loading developing tank. It was a father son bonding thing originally but I got more involved and he would just leave me to it in the kitchen after dark.

Minoltas, Exaktas and all manner came and went until I was 18 when he asked what I would like for my birthday that year. He said it had to be something special and expensive - my choice. I thought about that for over a year and decided I wanted a camera of my own, in particular an Olympus OM-1. The Leica IIIf had developed a dodgy shutter so he said he would trade that and make up the difference in cash. In July 1975 I became the proud owner of an Olympus OM-1 with 50mm f1.8 Zuiko lens. I still have the camera and the receipt from I.P. Cross in Gloucester Road Bristol for £214.99.

I used mainly slide film as it was cheaper to buy and process than print film and dallied with Cibachrome for a while.

That camera travelled the world with me, recorded the birth and early years of my daughter and son and was finally displaced in 2000 by an Olympus E-10 Digital camera.

Since then I have collected a large number of Zuiko lenses, OM-1n, 2n, 2sp, 2 x 4Ti, OM-10 and OM-40, a number of XA and coloured XA-2s and a mju -1, but the OM-1 has pride of place for purely sentimental reasons.

 

[Laurence Griffiths]

When my grandmother gave me this as a 6th birthday present:

​

I think that she realised that she had awakened a monster. - She gave me a Kodak Instamatic 33 for my 13th birthday. I must have carried it everywhere. - So many photos of me during my high school and university days show me with that camera hanging from my neck. She died when I was 15 and I inherited a 1903 Kodak Box Brownie from her. Sadly that has gone astray during the course of my many moves.

 

[Bill Brown]

dallied with Cibachrome for a while.

The first photographer I worked for, Bank Langmore, had his darkroom technician print Cibachromes. Those prints couldn't be spotted so it required careful attention to a clean transparency. I've still never seen anything printed that had the depth in the surface emulsion that those images had. Stunningly beautiful with the right image.

Thanks for telling your story. I didn't tear things apart I modified them. I never had a toy new in the box except at the moment before I tore it open. My collection of hand painted Hot Wheels is probably the single most elegant outcome of that desire to modify.

 

[Bill Watts]

The first photographer I worked for, Bank Langmore, had his darkroom technician print Cibachromes. Those prints couldn't be spotted so it required careful attention to a clean transparency. I've still never seen anything printed that had the depth in the surface emulsion that those images had. Stunningly beautiful with the right image.

Thanks for telling your story. I didn't tear things apart I modified them. I never had a toy new in the box except at the moment before I tore it open. My collection of hand painted Hot Wheels is probably the single most elegant outcome of that desire to modify.

Have to confess, Cibachromes glazed on a float glass sheet had amazing depth - like looking through still water

 

[Bill Brown]

She gave me a Kodak Instamatic 33 for my 13th birthday.

I was about that age when I rescued a Brownie Starmite II from a trash bin. I was always trying to do close-up shots of the model airplanes and motorcycles I built. You can imagine my disappointment in the results. I didn't have anyone around to explain depth of field or focus range. I eventually just shot more typical landscape images and the results weren't all that bad. I even went to several big drag race events and photographed the real cars that matched my Hot Wheel hand painted efforts. I still have all those negs in my archive and there are several that aren't bad. I still have the camera too.

Seemingly simple gifts can have a profound impact on a kid's life. Thanks for your story.