Getting Old ~ the present state of things

Kirk Tuck writes about how difficult it is to keep "engaged" in blogging as the world around us changes.

I can see his point. If you're young and "connected" to the world through a mobile phone, you likely don't care nor even know about image quality, A to D bit depth, lenses and lens design, cameras, and all the things us old guys spent years trying to understand and master.  

 

 

No.  Likely all you need to do is point a phone at something, snap a comparatively low-rez photo, share it on social media (maybe passing it through a filter to make things "interesting"), and be on your way.  As I continue to age, perhaps the ranks of "cell phone photographers" will grow by a minuscule 1?  It's a little early to tell (though not by much).

It used to be that controlling the photographic process took years of learning, practice, and refinement.

I paid my way through the University of California (twice) by, in part, working as a photographer's assistant (weddings) and in B&W photo print labs (Irvine, and Hollyweird).  I picked up a lot of tribal knowledge, which included posing people, subject composition, processing chemistry, film of a wide variety, print papers from the world over, enlarging using all manner of enlargers and lenses, framing, and showing of finished works.  

Things could get extremely "tweeky" and esoteric.  Tri-X shot at ASA200 and souped in D76 (perhaps one of the greatest film/developer combinations ever, after the much more recent TMax100 souped also in D76), printed to extremely large sizes with even, in-focus grain edge to edge?  No problem.  Stand or semi-stand film development in Rodinal 200:1 to "fully process" the shadow areas for Palladium contact printing?  No problem.  Masking slide film to cut and paste, add or subtract images, and to control contrast or add colors?  No problem.

 

 

This is where I've gotten stuck.  I've narrowed things down a bit.  Now I enjoy older optics.  This is because I can't have a darkroom where I live and the old chemical film processes are beyond my reach.  But lenses?  If I pay close attention I can find brilliant things for attractively small prices.

I have several boxes filled with old lenses. I often use them.  They're very satisfying to me.  This mania stems from a time when I couldn't afford these jewels.  

It's kind of like never being able to afford a Selmer Mark VI alto saxophone and having to settle for a Conn or lesser Selmer model, or trying to scrape together enough money for a chopped Model A bodied flathead V8 hotrod, and later in life finding you have just enough resources to pull it off so you indulge yourself, in spite of the music and automotive worlds converting to electric.

Deeply and profoundly I know these skills and this knowledge are no longer useful nor very much appreciated.  Self awareness can be brutal.  Yet I continue to pamper myself in cheap old photographic glass. To make matters worse, I get bored and when that happens I tend to buy things, like lenses.  Particularly when there are fewer photo-opportunities. 

I've spent years writing about this stuff and sharing the little unimportant things that I've found.  That's it, actually, in a simple statement: These things are unimportant and increasingly so as time passes.

This is why, like many other old guys, I toy with the idea of just letting the blog sit in place, but to personally move on to other things.  What other things?  I have no idea.  Maybe I'll continue to post things until something different occurs to me.