My art, such as it is
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May 2004 - Saratoga, CA
Notes from the Photographer
I enjoy taking photographs of all kinds of things. It started early in life. My grandfather and uncle were avid photographers and I grew up always in the viewfinder. I remember having one of those old box cameras with the 127 roll film in Yosemite one winter. I was probably 8 years old, standing in a field of snow taking a picture of the falls. I remember all us kids getting Kodak Instamatic cameras one Christmas. The film was in a cartridge and the flash was GE Flashcubes. Boy, those really littered the environment for years. We were encouraged to take pictures all over the place. I still have a box of old square prints with the nice white border on them.
Sometime in high school my Dad gave me his old 35mm camera. I took tons of photos. I played a lot with black and white and did all my own developing and printing. I spent hours in the darkroom at Terra Nova high school. I didn't have enough money to print everything and I was taking a lot of photos. I made many proof sheets and I still have a pile of them. All the negatives were slipped into glassine envelopes and I have those too. Grandpa Kolm was always interested in what I saw through the lens. I can remember many, many times we'd look through a pile of my photos together. Grandpa would look at each one. On many he'd put his palm over one side of it and say, "I think it would be better if this part was gone." Or he'd say, "I would have moved to the left so these things lined up differently." He taught me to look at photos with a critical eye.
I think it was in my Freshman year at college that I got my first 35mm SLR. I remember Jerry Franke and Dick Tibbets in the Cal Poly Audio Visual department showing me how to engrave my California Driver's license number on it. I was so afraid of losing that camera. I took it everywhere. I carried it around campus. It went on every vacation. I loved it. At one point I was working in the school bookstore and that got me good deals on 8x10 prints. I started getting enlargements of all kinds of stuff.
I kept taking photos, getting them printed, and stuffing them into shoe boxes.
Vance, Steve, and I met at HP in the go-go days of the mainframe killers. Fat margins were there to be attacked. We had great times. We talked about photography and our different approaches. I like to consider a shot for a while and it's hard for me to shoot more than one 36 exposure roll in a day. Vance sees the potential in something and shoots off five or six frames. Steve is somewhere between us. I don't remember who came up with the idea, but between us the Photo Safari was born. We would spend a day together taking slides. We'd get them developed and then have a slide show over dinner the next to critique our efforts. To keep from boring ourselves, each of us picked a different topic to shoot. Once we put 10 different emotions on little slips of paper and we each drew just one. We kept it secret until the night of the slide show when our job was to guess what the other person's emotion was. It was interesting that we could each be at the same place in Golden Gate park and yet we would get three different photos because we were each looking for a different angle. At some point Edie saw some of our photos and made some critical comments. Edie is an interior designer and is not shy about expressing her own artistic thoughts. We recruited her and Carson to come to the dinners as our judges.
I got into digital photography when the cameras first came out. I still have my first 640x480 camera. Then I jumped up to 2 megapixels, a vast improvement. I jumped up to an Olympus 3 meg and that did me fine for a few years. Just this year (2004) I bought a 5 meg Olympus C-50 zoom. What a marvel! Other pages on this site demonstrate some of the power this camera has. I recently used oFoto to get an 8x10 and the resulting print was indistinguishable from my 35mm SLR. My old SLR is sitting in a cupboard gathering dust. I haven't used it much since I got my first digital camera.
So I hope you enjoy the show of my pictures (I still want to say "prints"). I will add more from time to time, most of the time I will add them to the front of the show so that returning visitors can see the new stuff without having to wade through the old.
Email with any critique, good or bad. I learn from the comments of others.
Jim