So many of us started out like you Bryce — some small Kodak camera to explore with and moving on to hobbyist. Lots of people photograph trains around here especially at the Horseshoe Curve, Tunnel Hill and a host of other locations. I’ve never had the police interfere but I suspect if I were photographing bridges they might. The world is changing.

I still have a 4×5 Speed Graphic is near mint condition. Hardly even think about it. My first view camera was a small Century Graphic with a 120 roll back. Loved that camera. Could shoot 2-1/4 x 3-1/4 sheet film with it too. Kodak sold that size. Now I would probably have to cut down larger sheets.

I do worry about archiving digital images. I have seven external hard drives next to the computer with a really messy system of back up. Will take months to sort things out. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Who knows what will happen to my work when I’m gone.

Kodak was magic to me growing up. The big yellow box was everywhere and when I started to process my own stuff I entered a Kodak world of names and products that just made me feel special. Medalist and AZO papers, Dektol, D-76, DK-50, Kodalith, and on and on. And the films and contains — Kodak was on top of everything. What the heck happened…

I had hours and hours of 8mm movies transferred to video. I neglected to break out the record tabs. My daughter recorded Saturday morning cartoons over them…

I imagined the Mamiya 7 to be like my Leica M6 on steroids. Sadly that wasn’t the case and I never warmed to the camera.

Contact sheets are what I miss most about film photography. I LOVED looking through 35mm sheets. I know I can see everything in Lightroom, and larger and clearer, but there was a mystery that was special in print. And you could get the feeling for an entire roll in a glance. Doesn’t happen the same in Lightroom.

Thanks for the kind words Ry. Always nice to reminisce through old photos.

As far as what’s seen and not seen in photos, one thing I’ve learned is that they’re are far more complicated than they appear and both maker and viewer bring a lot of baggage to the the moment. The photo you describe is an example of the unique experience we bring to an image. I always feel good when I learn a photo makes someone move, squirm or react…

Think too of the physical devices for photography. like you once a field camera, and a latterly Speed Graphic . And too still have a field camera, a Toyo, acquired from an estate sale, in lovely condition. Thankfully the addition of different lens boards allows the use of both the Kodak and Wolensak convertible lenses. And the joy of knowing I have three film holders each with two sheets of film. These days it is processing that is difficult. Use a small private lab about twenty miles from here; he does the processing once a month, in batches. I receive a copy print and a negative in a sleeve, in return for $8.00 cash per negative. Cash eliminates the 13 percent sales tax.

Then I look at my metal slide boxes, 25 thousand plus colour slides, not all Kodak either. Perutz, Agfa, they all produced films for colour slides, once. Also have a certain amount of black and white slides, from glass plate negatives. All in the sorting process.
If I expire, want to see some of my historical images to go to the local Historical Society, rather than the dumpster. My living Will details all of the this….

Bottom line, iti s a hobby. Oh, and when we were both younger we thought nothing of carrying those heavy photographic devices everywhere. I used Hasselblads as my then employer used them, I initially used Pentax then Nikon and in between the aforementioned large format cameras, a number of Rolliflexes as well as myriad other brands. Exacta comes to mind.

Now the method of rendering the image has changed, and sadly said image exists only in zeros and ones; and until printed exists only on a computer disk that has not yet failed.

The images worth keeping are printed, labelled, andp laced in a dark place. BTW colour lasts maybe 200 years, black and white as there is no “colour” could last forever.
Neither one of us will be here forever so we won’t know if this is true, or not.

My Dad worked all his life for Kodak. We took family vacations to places like the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and Washington D.C. and his job gave us special access to amazing places behind the scenes like the film warehouse at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society. I remember towering shelving in a huge temperature-controlled vault with what seemed like thousands and thousands of yellow Kodak boxes.

My childhood was intensely documented in dozens and dozens of Kodachrome Carousel slide trays.

My sister took them and had the collection digitized. I haven’t gotten around to getting the DVDs from her. It’s something I need to do.

I still mostly shoot film…35mm is truly my “home” format, and until my mystical ship comes in allotting me with a pair of full-frame Leicas or the like, that’s how it’ll stay. However, I’ve also made my peace with digital over the last six years, with a decent compact camera of some sort or other, and now have inherited a dSLR from Sig. Other (Nikon D300, old but solid, and her mainstay until she moved to a D800 a few years back). The thing is, I got sick to the teeth with SLRs of all stripes nearly fifteen years back, and moved to a rangefinder setup (pair of Konica Hexar RFs and trio of lenses), and never looked back.

On the “stuff that isn’t seen” in pictures, I think about what I didn’t notice at the moment of exposure…or even the stuff I didn’t notice the first time I made a print. This is where things like contact sheets have become invaluable. (While I’ve continued to shoot on film, I pretty much gave up the “analog” darkroom back in 1997: bought a good film scanner, a good flatbed scanner to make digital contact sheets on, and Epson’s first 13-inch format photo printer…and, again, never looked back.) I never got into the edit-in-the-field mentality a lot of people seemed to develop when transitioning to digital cameras – there’s even more that you don’t see in that little image on the back screen. I never know about an image until it’s writ large, or large-ish…in a print, or at least on a 23-inch screen. And, even then, like Garry Winogrand, I might want to sit on that image a while, before I look at it again, which is usually a while before anyone else gets a look.

Sometimes this process can be a bit rough, as I think of photography in terms of heart-and-head, or heart-vs.-head, and the way I look at an image taken decades ago gets turned on its head.

(Sig. Other is beckoning me to grab a camera now…pink skies everywhere before dusk.)

I’m impressed by your remarks about what isn’t seen in photographs: Oh, the secrets photographer keeps–the illusionist the photographer is. Indeed, what’s behind or over the horizon or otherwise out of frame does not matter–an analogy for living in the moment, for being present?…

I think about a photo I took a few years back on a return trip across the barren desert from eastern Nevada. The subject is a desolate, dirt road stretching ahead apparently endlessly, and at the bottom of the frame are the instruments on my GS and the GS’s right mirror, reflecting my camera-obscured, helmeted face and, behind me, power lines in the sky.

Short of the motorcycle, those power lines are the only in-frame evidence of modernity, of civilization, evidence of the rural highway I’d just left. For that very reason, that photo both bothers me and intrigues me.

Thanks for the kind words about the post. Glad it helped launch your morning.

The majority of the images for the blog over the past couple years were made with a Canon G15. It’s a high end point and shoot camera. I almost always manually set shutter speed and exposure depending on what I’m trying to achieve. I have the camera set to produce RAW files which I process in Adobe Lightroom and export as JPEGs for upload.

I don’t do much processing — tweak the exposure, color balance, vibrance and sometimes crop a little. Sharpening of the image is automated by Lightroom on export. But not much more than that.

There are clues and reminders of the life we’re part of in those boxes. I always enjoy looking through them.

There are cameras that I miss and others there’s no connection at all. Sometimes it’s the process they enforced and others are memories of their use. Both of my Zone VI view cameras and my Leica M6 stand out in my mind. And sadly, all gone. Kim tells me not to worry though, I can always buy another…