Photography

Photography

      Through a hazy lens I remember how I started in photography: pulling a Radio Flyer wagon through suburban streets, looking for my prey: “little old ladies”. The advertisement in the back of the comic book said that if I sold enough “All Occasion Greeting Cards” I could win a kit which would allow me to develop the film from my Kodak Hawkeye and make prints at home. The wagon full of greeting card samples would come in handy when a “little old lady” answered the door, as they were more likely to give me an order than would men or younger women. It was a great bargain at $3. The fact that they were probably 20 years younger than I am now doesn't affect my memory of them or their designation. Surprisingly, I sold enough and got the kit, using it for several years. The beginning of a life-long enjoyment of photography. I still have the pictures.

      After getting married I wanted a “good” camera and a friend who was a professional photographer steered me to a want ad in the Washington Post. He checked out the camera with me and I bought it: a Pentax Spotmatic with an f/1.4 lens. After giving the seller a check for $100 I was urged to run for the car as the camera was a steal at that price! It was a fine camera giving me many good pictures. Until film died. Now the camera is a paper weight.

      Moving into the world of digital I joined a camera club and learned the rules of good photography: thirds, leading lines, curves, contrast, background and bokeh. Many people who know little about photography are able to casually quote those rules to me though I didn't know them before listening to lectures at the club.

      The last one, bokeh, is the rule that the background, and maybe the foreground, should be somewhat out of focus so that the subject in between would stand out sharply. All of the rules can be violated, of course, though bokeh only seems to be irrelevant when you show an expansive mountain range of dangerous peaks, or a city at night with multi-colored lights.

      And that's where I get into trouble. I try to create photos reflecting my garden's appearance to a viewer: some things seen close, some in the middle distance and some far away. No bokeh. I believe the plants should be viewed as part of a nice garden landscape, and that is the way all humans see it. Everything near and far is in focus to our eyes (due to the physics of a narrow pupil creating a high f-stop number).

      Photo contest judges want a single subject to look at, not a lot of items in the picture. No prize for me.

Me.  In the Garden.  I'm smiling.

      I take a lot of shots in April and May. While it is instructive to look back and see the year-to-year growth in the plants, the real reason for all the pictures is to view them in January and February. Suffering through the barren winter, it always seems impossible that the spring was so lush and colorful. It's almost as if it couldn't have happened!

      When you can't exactly remember how something, or someone, looked, the picture you took becomes the “truth”. Years later that picture is how your child looked, is how the garden looked and is how you looked (OMG!!)

      And maybe some people, including those “little old ladies”, will look at my pictures when posted on the net* by this man, once small and pulling a wagon but now 20 years older than those ladies were, and be happy that their $3 bought a lifetime of pleasure in photography.

- - - - - - - -

* Who knows what the future net will do to links, but you might be able to view my azalea garden as it appeared in 2015 by going to:

Azalea Garden 2015