Pondering

Adam has now joined the line of MacDonald photographers that started with his grandfather who once worked for Kodak. The images (just a few) below, he did last weekend. His playful fearlessness with a camera is worthy of a Mac.

This small set Adam shot with a Panasonic DMC-FZ30. He's a natural...not at all afraid to zoom right in and wait for the right moment. More importantly, he enjoys it!

I started at exactly his age...13. My father and I often sort of "missed" except when it came to photography and a love for basketball. Those were two major gifts he gave me and I enjoy them to this day.

Together, we went through a debacle with the Sears catalog guys...they kept delivering the wrong product. We just wanted an enlarger. Finally, after six months of having small darkroom kits, toolkits and a think a box of women's underwear delivered at the pickup spot at Sears (He wouldn't let me see the contents), we just went down to Wentlings and bought the enlarger I still have to this day, some 36 years later.

Probably the most productive purchase Dad ever made. I think it was $89, which was no small purchase for a hobby in 1970.

I went on to do magazine covers with it and other work up until the early 90's when I finally packed it away in favor of the growing digital conversion.

I am not always happy with this. I miss the magic of the darkroom where the image which has first been taken, then developed as a negative, then dried, examined, then loaded, test stripped and finally exposed to that special paper (that always seems in danger of being opened and is precious) starts to appear in the waters of the developer fluid.

There is a special art to it. In the early 90's Jim Seyman, a master photographer who had worked with George Lucas, and was somewhat of a Zen Master, taught me how to dodge and burn photos using only my hands and a variety of exposures (up to 10 different "sessions") for a single picture.

I liked the smell of fixer and seeing a pool of photos in the bathtub washing. I miss that.

Still, I shot a concert two nights ago in San Francisco and produced over 100 pictures digitally and ready for publication in just under two hours.

They are good shots (you can see them HERE ) but not great.

I've lost a step.

I think it is just that I am still a bit clueless around digital. I've had a Minolta dualscan negative and slide scanner (pricey at the time) since 2000. I rarely use it. It would be the equivalent of a darkroom, but lacks the magic.

I always shot without a lightmeter. I always went manual...like Luke in the original Star Wars...I just shut it all down and shot through the lens with my gut. After a long while I just "knew" what the exposure was. After a few lines I was rarely wrong. What I saw through the lens was what I got in the darkroom unless there were bad chemicals involved.

And I admit there was some excitment to that.

I spoke earlier of my father's love of photography and basketball. We would go to Warrior games in Oakland in the early 70s and I had a "Press Pass" from my high school (I was in fact the best photographer they had by the age of 16, thanks to my father giving me the bug). So I was able to sit down on the floor under the basket with photographers from The San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Oakland Tribune.

My camera was...well not as good as theirs. It was an inexpensive Vivitar, but it had a decent lens with a 2.8 aperture. That meant (I would not use flash or a strobe)...that if I got the right angle I had a chance to get a shot that was natural and yet not blurry or smeared.


Most of them were smeared. I mean I was shooting a 1/60th of a second with these behemoths traveling at at 1/800th of second.

But every once and awhile I would get a shot and I "KNEW" it was gonna be kickass.

And it was.

Later this week I will put up some of those shots...but I really want to get back to Adam and his shots.

Adam is in a digital only age. I doubt he will ever get to smell fixer on his hands...but he still has the MacDonald Eye. My father has it. I have it and Adam has it. The next few photos will show this. He did them in minutes and they are very simple. But I like his playful and fearless eye. That's what an artist needs. Hell, it's what we need in life.

I suppose the one real downside is that you do not have to be as careful with digital. When I shot things at 16 or 28 or 34, I had to savor every shot...it was expensive even though I rolled my own film from a bulk loader and got good deals on paper and chemicals.

Now, at the concert the other night, I shot the equivalent of three "rolls" of 36...each time I just downloaded the megapixel images into my nearby laptop and went out for another batch. I never came close to running out of "film" (battery power and memory)...in fact I shot a long movie sequence from the same camera. No red lights, no fixer...just processing images at 2:40 a.m. at an amazing rate.

Of course, without the years of darkroom I could not crop, adjust levels and use various filters as rapidly as I do. In fact, at times my 3.0 GHz Tower cannot keep up with me and I hiss "today!!".

I could use more humility.

It's a nice legacy. Most people cannot take a good picture to save their lives. My father can, so can I, and so can Adam.

P.S. When he took this picture he said "the exposure is off...it's way too white."