Experiencing the process of discovery is what motivates me most. If you pay calm attention, you can feel your hands adopt new movements, gradually appropriate them, until the steps become so natural that they require no thought. Your vision of the tools changes as well and you might notice exactly when it happens. That crescendo until it makes perfect sense and clicks...the conquest...the expansion of knowledge and senses....absolute pleasure.
Teaching allows me to witness this moment over and over again and take part in it vicariously.
Once a technique fully learned there is the meditative joy of repetitive creation but that is another chapter to be written about another time.
As the Mamiya sits at the Nippon Photo Clinic getting pampered, I have been using the Rolleiflex solely. Even though it is made of steel and has been around longer than me, I treat it like the most fragile and precious newborn. It must be amusing to see me handle it with complete awe, overly prudent and just oh-so enamored.
Until I learn more about lighting, I am guessing that all my shots will be horrendously over and under exposed. And I promised myself to love the outcome regardless.
(We shall see if I keep this promise, when they get developed next week).
To learn, until I get to take a class, I am reading this brilliant book: Photography A Handbook of History, Materials and Processes by Charles Swedlund (1974) which I ironically acquired 10 years ago, lugged around two cross country moves but never read.
The little online information on the author, reveals that he studied under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Chicago Institute of Design and taught Photography for 29 years at the Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
His work, some of which you see below, was featured in this mentionworthy exhibit in 2010.
In my next post I hope to show some scanned printsof my first adventures in TLR medium format and maybe even talk about the upcoming Viva las Vegas.
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