I started taking pictures when I was in high school back when digital photography was unheard of. When I was young, my father did a little freelance photography on the side and I used to sit beside him as he developed and enlarged B&W work in a makeshift darkroom in our bathroom. When I was a sophomore in high school, I took a home economics type of class and the teacher asked students what we were planning on doing after graduation. I had no intention of going to college and no one really encouraged me to do so. My philosophy was that if I did not have to go to school I wouldn’t.
On the spot, I told the class and my teacher I was going to be a photographer, my reasoning was you did not need a college degree to be a photographer. This was not entirely accurate, but you could not have convinced me of that at the time. However, this announcement set the course for me to be a yearbook photographer and to take photography at the local Vo-Tech my junior and senior year. Even though I went on to work in a field unrelated to photography, I never gave up what had become a passion for me – photography, in fact, photography was something of a salvation.
A lot has changed in photography since I first started – particularly the advent of digital cameras. I am something of a dinosaur – I still shoot film. For my serious work, I still shoot positive film with my Mamiya 645 medium format camera. I have a Nikon D-200 digital camera, but I have never been satisfied with the quality over my medium format camera.
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These shots of Pennington Creek near Tishomingo in south-central Oklahoma are the first digital photographs captured by my Nikon D-200 that I was satisfied with the quality.
I will continue to shoot film until they stop making it and developing it, because nothing matches the fine grain and saturation of Fuji Velvia.
I guess I am a purist at heart. I hope there are enough of us out there that film photography never entirely goes away.
