Photography

So… if you know me, you know that I have spent an inordinate amount of my life involved in photography.

If you’d like to see some of what I think of as “the best”, you can go to:

Or http://photos.maddisonweb.com for simplicity…

I’ve had an interest in it since I was in my teens, using an “Instamatic” camera with cartridge film (in 126 cartridges, if you know what that is…), moving on to my first SLR (a Canon AE1, purchased in the early 1980’s.

That progressed through a Canon A1, and then – in the late 1980’s when all my gear was stolen (forcing me to start from scratch) a transition to Nikon. A transition made possible by a former co-worker, who left the company we worked at together and went to work for Nikon and was able to get me some very nice discounts (thank you John Kawasaki!)

At one point I owned a couple N8008 bodies, an FM2, a plethora of lenses for the same, and in addition to the 35MM SLR’s some medium format gear. During the 1990’s a Rolleiflex twin lens and a Mamiya 645 outfit were added to the gear bag, adding some nice 6 x 4.5 capability…

During this time – the “film era” – I shot mostly color transparency film, Fujichrome Velvia 50, again thanks to John’s influence.

Being relatively poor and liking to shoot massive numbers of frames (for then, at least), I also learned how to develop my own, and usually bought film in 100 foot reels, loaded it onto reusable 35mm cartridges, and then developed it myself at the end of the process.

Which brought my cost from perhaps $12-15/roll if I had purchased individual rolls and paid for development down to more like $2-3/roll.

Which meant I could shoot a whopping (again, at the time) 20 or 30 rolls on a vacation without breaking the bank.

Of course, as always, I was often lucky to get five or 10 usable frames from each roll, but then that’s just the way it went back then – particularly when you (like me) like to shoot in unusual lighting conditions that have no “cookbook”, and can’t see the results until weeks later when theyr’e developed…

And then came digital…

For several years I watched digital get “more affordable” (i.e not $10,000) and better quality (i.e. more than 640 x 480 resolution…)

In the early 2000’s I thought a sweet spot of price and quality had been reached, and sold every bit of my film equipment to finance the purchase of a Nikon D80 and several lenses to complement it.

The Nikon eventually (after 5 or 6 years) developed a problem – a growing “noise level” evident in low-light photos with long exposure times and high ISO’s. Given that is a lot of what I like to do, time to move on.

Which brings us to the current gear, a Nikon D7000 that I’ve now had for perhaps 5 years, which has operated mostly flawlessly since then (although the switch on the back that engages live view and video recording got sticky enough to refuse to move and require replacement at one point, and I’m a bit concerned right now about the power switch…)

Of course I occasionally use other cameras, including my daughter’s Nikon D60, and sometimes even my cell phone… (ack!)

Lately I’ve also been playing around with timelapse photography, for a set of those, you can go to:

http://timelapse.maddisonweb.com

Thanks!