Under the crinoline tutus, bright costumes and silk shoes, ballet is grueling. It is years of practicing. Around age four is a good time to start.  Ballet is high energy. Ballet is passionate. It is dedicating your life for that two hours of rapture performing on stage. Hundreds of hours of rehearsal go into creating that artistic vision of gravity defying grace and beauty. Performers push themselves beyond human endurance practicing over and over for months so, when the colored lights come up on stage, they pour out their energy and passion, hoping to take the audience with them to new heights of emotion. Getting to that point is exhausting, aggravating and emotionally devastating. There is also a euphoria that comes from striving so hard and reaching so high. A feeling of family amongst those who take that journey together, and a lot of laughter and fun to counteract the stress and frustration.

When I first considered how to present the process of all the work and dedication that went into producing a professional ballet production through pictures, I thought of what photography style and medium would best capture that power with an intimacy that brought the viewer in to the story. I poured over the work of famous photographers throughout history to try to learn how to capture that kind of energy.

After fruitless searches through different pretty and polished dance photographs, I found the style I was looking for in, of all places, old Rolling Stone magazines. Particularly the high energy rock and roll photography of the sixties and seventies. From The Beatles to Woodstock, Led Zeppelin and the Who. The most engaging photographs to me were not the polished publicity photographs, but photographs of rock icons slumped over smoking a cigarette after a long night in the studio or goofing off during sound check, hanging out backstage, or even bored waiting for their flight at the airport while on world tour.

The one thing all the best rock and roll photographs had in common was that they were from this era when rock and roll began to take shape, and they were all on film. There was blur from the era before autofocus, there was big grain in the photographs, and there was a gritty raw feel that made me feel like I was there.

It is that vigor that I have tried to capture in this visual documentary. It is all shot on 135 film with manual focus cameras that are decades older than the dancers they are being used to photograph.

I was aggravated one night later in the process of photographing this project when the ‘real’ photographers showed up with their expensive digital cameras and yard-long zoom lenses and basically shoved me out of the way to get their production stills. I texted my wife venting my frustration.

She texted back saying, “Relax. Get the shot from a more interesting angle. Remember, you’re shooting little rock stars.”

That is what this book is about.

Another thing Renningers hosts is enormous civil war Festivals. More than just a re-enactment of a battle, the participants seem to literally re-live the Civil War.  The authenticity is truly stunning.

As I approached the encampment of  tents, the first thing that struck me was even these people’s children are dressed in period costume.

As I walked down aisles flanked by these authentic looking white tents that serve as makeshift homes to the 800+ re-enactors I could not get over the attention to detail.

No plastic, vinyl or any other modern-day materials to break the illusion. Bags were real leather with brass clasps. Hand made wooden furniture surounded burning camp fires with cast-iron cooking utensils simmering what seemed to be authentic period food.

Groups of soldiers stood in neat rows about the campsite receiving last minute battle plans from their commanding officers.

In the background could be heard the 97th Regimental String Band playing a wide variety of music from the Civil War era. In between sets they explained with humorous antidotes and reverential tales the history behind the songs they were playing.

Of course, part of the allure of a festival where people are this enthusiastic is that you are surrounded by 800 knowledgeable historians regarding this period in history. Soldiers had thorough knowledge of the operation and capabilities of their black-powder weapons as well as tales of the people they were portraying. Their wives, who sat in stitching circles around the campfire also discussed the roles that they would play in that period in history. Of course there were friendly vendors selling historically accurate mementos from clothing to novels. They are enthusiastic and eager to share this knowledge with visitors to the festival. My Wife overheard a telegraph operator explain to a group of children, “this was the internet of the 1800s”.

Finally, gear was stowed, weapons were checked, and it was off to battle.

The reenactment was of The battle of Townsend’s Plantation. It started off slow with the cavalry using hit and run tactics to pester the front lines of the enemy.

An announcer narrated the entire battle. It started off with a few random pop’s but as the lines advanced the air was filled with smoke and explosions from the massive amount of gunfire. With 800 soldiers firing black powder weapons on the battlefield, it was impressive.

The announcer explained that these were volunteers and not Hollywood actors so there would be no flying from horseback from being hit by a bullet or other elaborate stunts. He also explained the opposing forces would not fight this close to each other in real life.  Still, the cast was in to it and, with the gunfire and authenticity of the props, it took no imagination to visualize how this battle looked.

The announcer also explained that these volunteers did not travel hundreds of miles to die as the first shots were fired. Finally, though, the dead littered the battlefield.

Finally, the South one that day.

At the end, the entire company of performers stood in one long line as the buglers played Taps and fired off a salute to those who gave their lives in the Civil War. It was moving…and loud. Hundreds of rifles and all those cannons going off at once.

I think it’s too bad more schools do not do field trips to events like this. It brings home that these people were our forefathers and people just like us in one of the most trying times in our history that has defined this country.

I had a brutal cold bug and only stopped by this festival for a short time this year. Next time, I will be going for a full two days and burning  many rolls of film to give this festival the treatment and space on my web site in a gallery as it deserves.

As I have mentioned before, I am too stupid to own a dslr so The Nutcracker will be shot in its entirety in 135 film.  Actually there are other reasons I am using film. The main one being aesthetic. I wanted this to have a classic look that I have not yet seen digital photography and photo-editing software effectively duplicate. Especially when working in black and white. A very close second reason is exposure latitude.  It’s a lot harder to screw up a shot with film than with digital and I want to focus on composition and content, not worry constantly about fine-tuning settings.

I am using Pentax 35mm manual-focus  bodies from the seventies to early eighties.  I might put a ‘fancier’ film body in the mix later but, for now, I’m using these cameras because photography to me  is ISO, Aperture, Shutter Speed, and Focus. No other buttons or sub-menu functions need apply. I don’t desire the assistance of a computer chip and a battery of sensors deciding what a good picture looks like. I’ll meter my own shots and ,the film, for better or worse, will record faithfully what I decided on without running it through a computer program first.

Finally, I am using all prime lenses. There are plenty of heated arguments between photographers on internet forums and in magazine articles as to whether digital or film is better. There is no argument that prime lenses are better than zoom lenses for image quality. Harder to use, more restrictive, less versatile, but much better final results nonetheless. Plus, I’m photographing in dance studios that, to the camera’s perception, have the lighting conditions of a cave so the extra speed of a prime does not hurt.

Pentax 50mm 1.4 prime on Kodak BW400CN Film

Now to compare the equipment to the subjects and the conditions I am photographing them in to confirm your suspicions that I am absolutely crazy. I am documenting the mounting of a production of  Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker performed by the Central Florida Ballet. The first half (or so) of the book I am making will be the rehearsal process. This is primarily photographing in three separate studios of various size, with fluorescent lighting of varying brightness, rehearsals and candids of ballet dancers, directors/choreographers,  and supporting stage craftspeople, as they prepare for the big opening night. I wanted a slightly informal gritty look for this part of the book to create a feeling of authenticity and peering behind the scenes  so I chose to do it in all black and white film to be followed by color photographs for the production itself. Sort of a Wizard of Oz effect.

To be as unobtrusive as possible, there can be no flash, no reflectors, and I’m working without a tripod or monopod because it would impede my movement.  I crouch down as low as possible and then stand to my full 6′-3″ height to get different angles on dancers who, conveniently, are typically 1/4 to 3/4 as tall as I am giving me a wide variety of low and high angle shots. Not to mention I need to move freely to get out of the dancer’s way as I seek out different angles and rove about the perimeter of the studio. Plus, I’ll often be wearing two camera bodies with two different focal length primes and switching these out on a supporting device would be too slow.

Worse, the first rehearsal I photographed I used 13 rolls of film. I typically photograph rehearsals once a week. This is putting me at between $150-$200 a week in film and developing costs. I will be photographing at this pace for approximately three months. Despite the initial sticker shock of a top of the line DSLR, it’s looking like a bargain now.

Sounds like a job for a top of the line DSLR with a really nice, versatile, zoom, and the greatest advancement in photography at the turn of the century; shake reduction, doesn’t it? Yeah, it really does. I have no adequate explanation for serious technophiles as to why I am approaching this project the way I am. No charts, no stats, no pixel counts versus digital noise versus film grain as to why I would decide to shoot this project on thirty year-old cameras and lenses with film.

Ballet Feet

All I have is art history. In the age of amazing CGI, the greatest monster film of all time is still King Kong. When George Lucas had nothing but a dream and a whimpy ten million dollar budget with a cynical studio that thought the film would not last a week, he gave us Star Wars. When he had virtually infinite resources and the incredible power of CGI, he gave us Jar Jar Binks. William Shakespeare, argued as the best English Language writer of all time, wrote his masterpieces in the strict confines of iambic pentameter and his great poems in the strict syllable count of sonnets. Rick Allen, world-famous drummer for the rock group Def Leppard, stated in an interview that he became a better drummer after the tragic automobile accident that robbed him of his left arm.

Finally, for guidance, I turn to Alan Dean Foster and his classic SpellSinger series of fantasy fiction novels. In one book (don’t ask me which one) he describes how this musician must pull-off a phenomenal performance to survive. The Hero of the story has a flashback to asking his favorite bass player, backstage after a concert, if he has any advice for a newbie in the music industry.

The bass player did not reply with advice regarding the latest amps. He did not point out his favorite equipment or some specific technique. Instead, he said something along the lines of, “Go for the sound, man. You’ve got to have a sound.”

The equipment  I am using is my ‘sound’. This book will be what it is because of the equipment used to make it. Not despite it.

For high speed and indoor light, forget ugly digital camera noise. This is the beautiful grain of Ilford Delta 3200 B&W film.

Now to get down to brass tacks:

Film and Processing: For rehearsals, I am using primarily high-speed films such as Ilford Delta 3200 and Fuji NeoPan 1600. I love the “film noir” look in a lot of the photographs I am taking with these films due to the high contrast and large grain. Still, I want to have some nice, clear, shots in the mix so I go down to Kodak BW400CN Professional and Kodak TX400.

Target was originally a godsend for giving me nice high-res scans for web production with the CN41 process but, during the making of this book, they suddenly cut off doing in-house processing. Now it all pretty much costs the same for black and white or color film  so I’m processing almost exclusively through Dwayne’s Photo Lab. There’s a 2-3 week delay but the results are exceptional for the cost and good enough to post on the web. At the turn of the year I will get a film scanner of my own to process the final files that will go in the book.

I can not help but wish they made a ‘middle of the road’ 800 ISO black and white film but I am hoping the Fuji 1600 will be my “silver bullet” between grain and light sensitivity. More on this as the proofs come in.

Camera Bodies: As I have mentioned I am using Pentax film bodies. They are all the same in that they have center-weighted metering and manual focus.

The third body I was using was a Pentax ME. This body would typically hold the telephoto lens with the longest range since this range needed the least adjustment for the bodies’ metering capabilities. Sadly, it died at the last rehearsal. RIP Pentax ME. You served me well.

The second body, the Pentax ME Super has a great meter for dictating what the shot should be. Still, it only goes up to 1600 ISO. This does not help when I am shooting Ilford 3200 Delta film where I am trying to squeeze the last drop of ISO sensitivity from it. Still, I love the big and bright Pentaprism viewfinder of this camera and it remains a favorite in my bag.

Finally, the queen-mother of all camera bodies, to me, the Pentax K2 “limited edition” all-black body. The K2 was the professional version of the iconic Pentax K 1000.  A real dinosaur of a camera, this heavy monster features a pentaprism that makes you feel like your looking at the scene with both eyes open instead of through a viewfinder. Only the Pentax Spotmatic boasts a pentaprism as wonderful to focus through.  I like the two needles to the right in the viewfinder. The black one indicating where your exposure “should” be according to the center-weighted meter, the blue indicating where you have actually set it.

In a world of  hybrid cars, fuel-efficient cars and cars that can do more with less engine, we have 12, 14, 24 megapixel cameras with dozens of points of spot metering. The K2 is a 1967 Chevy Impala. You can get many cameras that technically handle much better but for sheer durability, power, and dependability, none are a greater pleasure to drive.

I hope any fans of the television series Supernatural appreciate the analogy.

A camera body is not much to consider, though. It’s really just a box that holds and exposes the film. What really matters is what is attached to the camera that the image has to go through to get to the film.

Vasile Demonstrates

Lenses: The lenses I am currently using for this project are all “softer” Pentax primes. For the difference between a ‘prime’ and a ‘zoom’ lens, go to someone else’s blog. This one is running way too long already.

The least-used, but hardly least-important, lens in my lineup is Asahi Optical Companies’  Takumar (bayonet) 1:2.5 135mm lens. When looking for reviews on this lens, I found that people either loved it or thought that it could serve no other  purpose than as a paperweight.  All I could deduce is that it had soft focus but its’ image quality was excellent. This has proven to be true and I love this lens for creating flattering photographs of human faces and bodies. Heck, my pets look awesome through it too.  Any candid shots of anything/one living, and this lens is a shoe-in.

Takumar 135mm 1:2.5 Sharp? No. Beautiful? Yes!

After the first day of shooting in cramped studios with lots and lots of dancers I realized I needed a wider focal length than 50mm. I went with the Takumar Bayonet 1:2.8 28mm prime lens. Wide enough to give me a good field of view, but long enough to have no barrel distortion, this is a nice work-horse of a lens.

Finally, my all time favorite lens, favor in Leica, Carl Zeiss, and if you have Canon or Nikon written on your barrel, don’t even bother showing up.  It’s hard to dispute that Pentax 50mm lenses are the best ever made. My personal weapon of choice is the Pentax FA 1:1.2 50mm lens. Slightly softer than it’s sister-lens, the 1.7, this lens produces the best image quality I am able to create with a camera. It’s made for auto-focus but the rubber focusing ring works well enough for me. The image quality reminds me of my old-time  favorite photographer’s use of Twin Lens Reflex cameras. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Conclusion: For those of you still reading this blog entry, are you crazy? Are you not bored yet?

Seriously, thank you for your interest. There are no statements of fact in this post, only an insight into how I approached photography for this project. I hope it encourages you to use your own judgement on what you want from your own photography exploits instead of solely trusting stats and the latest-greatest items touted on photography magazine covers to dictate what you can accomplish.

~Morgan

The next Real Florida Photo book will be based on the Central Florida Ballet’s Making of The Nutcracker which opens to the public December 19th, 2009.

The book will be divided into two parts. The first half will be black and white photography featuring an in-depth depiction of the rehearsal process. The second half will be in color depicting photographs of the on-stage production itself.

Old Spanish Sugar Mill

First of all, though this blog post is focused on the A Day in Florida History at DeLeon Springs State Park festival, I need to say that DeLeon Springs State Park is worth visiting any day of the year.

A highlight of the park is the Old Spanish Sugar Mill Grill and Griddle House or, as my wife, the MountDoran likes to call it, “The Make Your Own Damn Pancakes Restaurant”.

The reason she calls it that is because you enter this beautiful Spanish Sugar Mill constructed before Florida was part of the United States of America  (Hint: get there early. It fills up fast.) to be seated at an old wooden table with a griddle in the center of it. You are served an assortment of batters in ceramic pitchers with the pancake toppings of your choice. These range from fresh blueberries to walnuts to bananas.  Remember buckwheat pancakes? This restaurant’s recipe competes with my late grandfather’s and that’s saying something.

The beautiful springs made us wish we had bought our bathing suits. The seventy two-degree water looked very inviting on a Florida Summer day.

There is a small museum that features a dugout canoe from the spring’s original inhabitants that’s dated approximately 6,000 BC. That’s when agriculture first began by the Nile River, before the Egyptian Pyramids or anything we think of as ancient civilization.

The festival itself featured an assortment of areas scattered about the park’s grounds that each was hosted by reenactors/historians in period costumes featuring different periods in Florida’s storied  history.

Early Florida Settlers

Many cultures were represented from the Spaniards to the British Colonialists and Seminole Indians along with the early Florida Settlers pictured above. There was also a first aid station where kids could be dressed with a blood-soaked bandage by a woman depicting an Early American battle nurse.

The featured event of the day was a reenactment of  a Seminole Indian War skirmish.

During the presentation beforehand, we were informed that the United States had never won a military conflict against the Seminole Indians which is why they are a sovereign nation to this day.

One reason for this I found fascinating is that, when a slave escaped a plantation, (s)he had two choices: Head North to where slavery was illegal, or south to Florida where runaway African slaves were welcomed with open arms into the Seminole tribe and helped to start a new life.

Of course this made these escaped slaves fiercely loyal to their new culture and when war with the United States came, they knew that capture would mean being enslaved again. They fought fiercely and they fought to the death helping to make the Seminole Nation a force the U.S. Military could not defeat.

As a Floridian, I found the event fascinating and learned as much about Florida history as I did on our last visit to St. Augustine. I enjoy events that bring history to life and this was a good one.

An Escaped African American Slave Becomes a Fierce Seminole Indian Warrior

Still, for anything you want to present visually, nothing beats hard copy. I wanted a portfolio without the formality of a portfolio. Something that looks professional and allows me to put my best foot forward.  photographs in a leather-bound folio is not something people feel comfortable having you drop off with them. It’s too formal. It implies you are having a formal meeting right away. It turns showing someone your stuff because you love what you do and you want to share it into an interview situation.

A brochure or pamphlet didn’t quite cut it. It basically has a couple of well laid out teasers in the hopes of leading people to my web site any way.

Obviously, I enjoy photography. When I discover a photographer’s work I like and I’m interested in, whether it be Bill Brandt, Ernst Haas, or the work of many photographers like the portraits found in National Geographic over the past 100 years the medium I enjoy viewing a body of work in most is books. Nice high quality photography books with heavy paper and brilliant prints. It allows you to enjoy and mull over a favorite photograph or leaf through and soak in an entire body of work.

Books are how I have discovered and enjoyed my favorite photographers my entire life from my first Namu (the Killer Whale) National Geographic book when I was three years old until now. I realized that to present myself as I wanted to be seen, I would need to make a book.

At the time, my web site host SmugMug had associated themselves with a self-publishing company called Blurb. I trust SmugMug. They have excellent service on their web site and ezprints, the printer they use for online orders, produces some of the finest quality prints I have ever seen. When they said the Blurb books were ‘gorgeous’, I felt it was worth the risk to download the software and drop $50 on a copy of my very own self published book.

The software was easy to use. So easy, one could view it as somewhat limiting. It was full of attractive templates where you simply plug in your photographs in the picture part and type your text in the text boxes. Though I say ‘limiting’, all the classic looks for a photography book are there and you do have a nice selection of layouts, text, and colors.

I uploaded my completed book, got the highest quality paper possible (which limits the number of pages I can have in the book) and ordered my first copy. Then I waited…and waited. Shipping was slow. A little over two weeks.

When my book finally arrived, my wife texted me at work. She said I would not be disappointed and it was indeed beautiful. She was right. I have about five National Geographic books featuring their photographs and the print quality in my book matches it. It is expensive, but if you want to show off your work looking its best in a book, then blurb is definitely worth it.

Click on the picture below if you would like to see how they promote my book on their web site.

Of course, me being stubborn and slow on the take, it took several years after I graduated for those important lessons to sink in and for me to to realize how phenomenally smart my Professors are.

The lesson of the day begins with: Trees. Well, and an e mail from Mom.

First the trees in question.

Entering Lake Harris

When my site first went live on the internet, I, of course, had friends and family looking at it. My Mother e mailed me telling me she enjoyed the site and that some photographs she liked while others did nothing for her. She also was nice enough to inform me that I had cut off part of one of the trees in my Entering Lake Harris photograph.

Like any aspiring artist looking for helpful constructive criticism with a sincere desire to improve, I grew defensive and angry and tuned her out.

Why angry and defensive? Because, it was her idea I cut off that bit of tree. Well, not directly, but she wanted me to finish college sooo badly because it was sooo important to have that BFA (along with the huge GSL that went with it) and that is where I learned to do it.

Let’s go back to my sophomore year and a younger Morgan.

Our Color and Design class had been given the assignment of going to the library to look up several famous artists and observe their efforts. I believe they were all paintings.

At the tender age of 20, I knew everything. I knew those colorful basic shapes and squiggles  painted by artists whose work sells for millions in fine art galleries was the demented scheme of a bunch of hacks. It was all modern art. It looked to my knowledgeable young mind like a kindergartener’s finger painting that belonged hanging by a magnet on some proud mother’s refrigerator. Not something worthy of praise hanging in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I halfheartedly leafed through the rest of the assignment and left the library for more important pursuits like drinking beer, chasing girls, and bemoaning the fact that I was a genius under pressure with very important feelings and that nobody understood me.

Next day in class, the art teacher asked me something along the lines of, “Did you understand why I had you look at those paintings?”

I said, “Not really.” She asked me to explain so I gave an example. My apologies if I do not recreate this scene exactly. It was many years ago and I may be messing up some details.

Anyway, I explained that I did not think the art she had us study was any good.

“For example,” I said opening my notebook and illustrating with a pencil, “one artist just painted a couple of circles on the canvas like this.”

Let me just interrupt my own story by saying, at this point, I felt like I was done. I had illustrated that I had done the homework assignment and actually given it some thought. She really ought to have moved on to the next student and let me sip my coffee and nurse my hangover in peace.

Instead, she said, “I believe I know the painting you’re referring to. It is very famous and actually looks more like this.

I shrugged. Hadn’t she gotten bored with pestering me yet?

“See?” She said. “The way you just drew it is ugly space. There’s dead empty space all around the circles that does not tie in to the objects at all. The way the artist did it is beautiful space. By cropping the circles  the artist has drawn you in to the visual dialogue between the two focal points and there is no static dead space surrounding the circles in the frame.”

Uh, yeah, sure.

“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.” She said shaking her head and leaving my table.

She was right. I did not.

Years later, I do understand. I’ve seen it a million times. It is the photograph the co-worker shows you taken on a cell phone of what (s)he saw last weekend. It is all over Flickr. It is the boring static photographs a friend shows you of their ocean cruise with subjects ‘bullseye’d’  in the center of the frame. It is not art. It is not photography. It is a snapshot.

Oh yeah. Want the most important lesson I learned about art with my hoity toity BFA from my elite school? Here it is:

Whether visual art is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder and a matter of opinion. Whether or not an effort is art at all is defined by indisputable laws of composition.

That being said, I did not need to shoot the photograph the way I did. I could have shot just one tree centered and alone on the rippling waters of Lake Harris creating a feeling of isolation. I could have pulled back my focus and, yes, included all the branches of all three trees without including the shore on the right at all creating a more serene look.

I remembered my laws of composition. Cropped the image on the left and included the shore on the right ‘flowing’ off the frame to create a rhythym with the repetition of pattern created by the three trees to suck the viewer in and make their eye move from left to right to, hopefully, want to study the photograph more closely.

The bird perched on the third tree to the right symbolizes the eternal struggle between good and evil. Kidding!

Anyway, Mom did not like it. Maybe you love it. Maybe you hate it. Maybe you couldn’t care less and this is way to long a blog entry on a black and white photograph of three trees.

This leads me to something I learned from many years of attempting to create art in one form or another:

Making art “right” can be learned. Making “good” art?

That’s something else.

Some are from the archives and, though I liked them and thought they were good, they were just not quite good enough to make the final cut. Many are new pictures I have taken recently.

Click HERE to visit this gallery and come back often because it completely changes every week!

Usually these helpful advisors take the form of small children that either

1) Think your time, effort, and film are much better spent photographing them and perhaps their friends acting goofy or

2) “I want to try it.” because, though your hundreds of dollars of photography equipment looks extremely cool, it is very boring watching you use it when they could be looking cool peering through the viewfinder and pressing the  button to hear the satisfying click of the shutter snapping.

There are plenty of adult artistic directors too.  On a recent shoot in Lake Eola Park in Orlando, Florida, I had  half a dozen homeless people, that previously were simply hanging out in the park for the day,  acting as consultants excitedly telling me where all the swan’s nests were and where the cutest newborn critters could be found. 

When I first made the switch from digital photography back to film, one of the major items on my ‘to do’ list was (and still is) to get the definitive image of an Alligator. Since I was able to understand the English language and the inevitable “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question, I would proudly respond, ” A paleontologist!” As many young children who give that answer to that question, I did not really want to learn the extensive knowledge of Latin or spend my days under the brutal desert sun unearthing, one speck of sand at a time, a dinosaur skeleton with a delicate brush which are several of the real required geological disciplines for that profession. I wanted to be amidst the gnashing teeth and blasting volcanoes of our planet’s violent past.

Therefore, I was very excited to end up in Floirda where the backdrop of exotic foliage looked, to me, like the scene from a favorite Smithsonian Institution poster of when Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and there were enormous reptiles still roaming the landscape.

Alligators are tough, though. They’re common in the deep south. There’s tons of photographs of them. Still, the siren to an aspiring photographer, is that there are not so many good photographs of them. To photograph an alligator is not enough. I’m trying to get the definitive photograph of one of these beasts. Something with visual interest in the foreground, and maybe the background, that makes you want to say, now there is an alligator.

I’m still working on getting this shot.

One evening at sunset, on the shores of Lake Dora, I was close. it was a beauty lounging on the shores; nearly twelve foot long. 

(S)he was in my sights. There were cattails and tall Florida swamp grass in the foregroung, the gently lapping waves in the background. In the viewfinder of my Pentax ME Super was the perfect composition painstakingly taking shape. 

While crouching behind my tripod peering through the viewfiner, I heard the exclamation, “Amigo!” yelled with a thick spanish accent.

“Amigo!”

“Hey Amigo!”

“Amigo!!!“

Finally this increasingly urgent exclamation from the man behind me annoyed the beautiful specimen of an Alligator sending it to swim to another shore.

I slowly turned to glare at whoever was yelling, to see a hispanic man pointing excitedly now that I was finally paying attention to him.

“Alligator!” he exclaimed grinning from ear to ear and gesturing at the retreating beast.

I turned back to the reptile and clicked off a shot of this huge specimen swimming  across Lake Dora with the sun setting in the background.

It is one of the better pictures I have taken.

To all the armchair artistic directors who have pointed me in the right direction on what I should photograph:

Thanks Amigo.

The customer asks, “Is it really that bad”?

“I’m afraid so.” Replies the computer tech.

“Well, all right then, I suppose. What should I tell them?”

“Tell them you’re too stupid to own a computer.”

If you have never read this, you can find  a version of it in its entireity here.

I thought about this story a lot about a year ago.

I loved my digital single lens reflex camera (DSLR camera) so much, I suspect my wife was becoming  jealous of it. As those of you who own one already know, one of the biggest annoyances and greatest causes of neurosis on a DSLR is dust on the sensor.  The sensor is what used to be a frame of film but is now an insanely delicate small panel that captures the light/image that comes through the lens and records the information as a photograph.

The tiniest speck of dust, nearly invisible to the human eye, can show up as unsightly blackish-gray blobs on the final image. This was not a problem for one happy year of constant use of my camera. I only had two zoom lenses: one for wide shots, one to get closer to the action. I changed them rarely. It wasn’t until I began using prime (which are fixed focal length) lenses that this problem emerged again and again. The only thing worse than dust on your slr sensor is wet dust and, Florida being one of the more humid places in the world, their is nothing dry about anything as soon as you set foot out of your air-conditioned abode.

Every time you change a lens, a big benefit of owning an slr instead of a fixed-lens camera like a point and shoot, you expose it to this potential dust. In a state that is made up of sand floating on an aquifer, dust is inevitable.

The dust became so bad, I finally sent it back to the camera company (no longer under warranty) and they were kind enough to return my camera with a new sensor for the modest cost of $265.  Really, why tell your customers they’re stupid when you can charge them $265?

My camera came back so clean and new looking, I first suspected they replaced the entire thing. I enjoyed the use of my like-new camera for…one day. I was at a festival. I was by a lake. It was windy. After photographing people at the event with the zoom I had on the camera’s body, I looked at cat tails and tall grass by the lake and really wanted to take some fine art photograph’s of it with my 50mm/1.4 prime. I wanted to so badly I, you guessed it, switched my lens under the worst possible conditions.

Having twenty years experience as a shop craftsman for my day job, I’ve made pieces like a specialty cabinet or podium, so fine in their detail, so elegant in their design,  that they cost major corporations  tens of thousands of dollars. I’ve worked on sets and other projects for the themed entertainment and convention industries that have delighted, by now, millions of people. I make my living from working materials to perfection and eliminating the slightest flaws.  Certainly I was smart enough to clean my own camera’s sensor.

Wrong.

I tried blowers. I tried wands. Some showed little improvement. Some made the problem even worse. That dust became, to me, that infernal pink ring in Dr. Seuss’  The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.

Finally, in desperation, I looked across the room to see the computer owner’s weapon of choice: a can of condensed air. Oh yeah. That would definitely blast that pesky dust off of that sensor. I know you DSLR owners out there are cringing. I know you see that red circle with a slash through it neatly framing my Office Depot can of Cleaning Duster air. Hey, don’t worry. Look back up on my credentials as a craftsman. Just one quick blast and I’ll have the surface of that sensor cleaned good. There’s only one pesky speck of dust left. One quick blast and this terrible problem is gone for good.

Yeah.

What happened was I managed to blast a hair between the sensor cover and the sensor itself.

Yep, that’s right. Second sensor ruined.

That’s when I thought of the computer tech. I could just hear him saying, “You’re too stupid to own a DSLR”.

Ahh, the memory of the look on my wife’s face when I explained that I got one day’s use out of my $265 sensor but that it’s ruined again.

I thought of my first camera and how it was over thirty years old and worked great. I thought about film and how, though it does not have a lot of the conveniences of a modern DSLR, how the look of a film print blows digital out of the water.

I hit EBay and bought three camera bodies and four of the better prime lenses ever made for less than I would have paid for another sensor.

Now I’m making friends with film. It’s a lot harder to use, but it’s worth it. There’s a depth to the photography that digital, much as I loved it, can not capture. My photographs will be better than they ever could have been with digital for a myriad of reasons. Maybe that’s not so stupid after all.

The New Gear

Complete with knitted “lens condoms” courtesy of my wife, Jennifer