30 years later and I still remember an exchange I had with a student in a professional workshop at the Rochester Institute of Technology focused on digital photography. The student worked at a national trade magazine and I remember telling her that she needed to play with the tools to learn. Those were the days of Adobe Photoshop Version 1 and we were all experimenting and pushing all the tools to their limits. The student shot me a look and responded, “I’m not here to play, I’m here to learn.” I was trying to convince her that by playing, she would feel comfortable with the tools and understand their capabilities.
Around that time, I was involved with the E.S.P.R.I.T. project where I was editor in chief of a magazine that encouraged artists to push the limits of technology. We were playing, learning, and expanding the limits of a new technology that would go on to change the imaging world. It’s fun to reminisce and remember how difficult the creative process was before Photoshop; darkroom work, dodging and burning images, physically masking film, controlling contrast through filters and chemistry. We could do things with the new tools that were once the domain highly accomplished photographers such as Jerry Uelsmann (whose work is still unmatched today), and the professionals that worked on high end electronic prepress systems.
I still remember taking out the $20,000, 1.3 megapixel, Kodak DCS 100 system onto the moving ice shelf on Lake Ontario to photograph a friend wearing a wetsuit and a pith hat. Then, there was the 20-megabyte file I created while building an image by combining over 10 separate images – yes, that was a huge file back then and it took many hours to make the image. That’s just what we did … we played and loved every minute of it!
Fast forward to the era of smart phones and apps and I have carried forward that love of play. Many of my friends are well aware of my iphone photography experiments. A recent example is my attempt to create panoramic images while riding on Amtrak along the northeast corridor. My classically trained photography mind tells me I need a large format film camera, or one designed specifically for panoramas, or carefully stitching multiple images from a stabilized high-end digital camera. That’s all well and good, but all of that is totally impractical traveling at high speeds … especially when the only camera I have is an iPhone. So, I decided to break the rules and see what a multiple stitched panoramic image might look if shot on a moving train. Answer? It breaks and breaks really bad … but … I LOVE IT!
In that regard, the pictures in The Train gallery are all iPhone experiments with a variety of tools. I learn more about photography and seeing, by experimenting and breaking the rules then I ever would by following a formula. Besides, it is so much more fun. Right?
