Panoptikal*: Winston (September, 1994)

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Winston (September, 1994)

Serendipity intervened in this image, which I captured very early in in my photographic "career" (I was 14) and which is still one of my favourites. It was taken outside the library on Spring Garden Road in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I'm not sure which elements of the photo are deliberately framed; I get the impression that I was lining up a photo in which it would appear that Churchill was emerging ominously from the shrubs. The accidental addition of a well-posed pedestrian was the lucky part.

I'm not sure which camera I was using at this time, but I think it was a borrowed one (side note: The camera I was given after this was a Vivitar, evidently not of any quality since it soon developed--hah!-- an issue with light leaks that led to the ruination of a number of rolls of film).

Winston, or rather the statue of Winston Churchill that was my target in this photo, was created by sculptor Oscar Nemon in 1980 as part of a series. I'm not sure if the statue was unique to Halifax; since then, I thought I had seen it (or duplicates of the same original) in a couple of other places, but these could have been different members of the same series--I assume they look somewhat similar.

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More about...

The pictures I post here were taken between 1994 and today. There are some breaks during that period, generally because I had no working camera, or because I processed many negatives and made few prints (generally this is the case for 1994 to 2000 or so). I also have many prints from that time that have not yet been digitised.

The reason I call this a "photojournal" is that I tend to document my life with images, where possible, rather than words. I find it much easier to remember moments, and then events, when I have some kind of picture with which I can associate them. This is probably why I've always taken pictures when I could--even when there was "nothing" to photograph--and why I have such a difficult time keeping up a written diary or journal of any sort.

Technicalities

I've used a number of cameras over the past 15 years or so. The bulk of these were SLR, manual or semi-automatic, and of course non-digital (35mm film) cameras (photos shot from 1994 to 2004, roughly), though for a period I used both (low-quality) digital and film (around 2002-2003).

I first used a fully manual camera when I was 14, which was borrowed; the first SLR that I owned was a Vivitar, which rapidly deteriorated. It was followed by a Pentax, and after that, the Minolta XD-11 that I have used for film ever since. I use it with a 35mm or a 28-70mm lens with telephoto and macro. In addition to these, I also used Mamiya 220 and 330 medium-format (120 film) cameras while at NSCAD in 1997-8, and very occasionally, I used an old Agfa range-finder (from roughly the 1940s) which produced 6x9cm negatives on 120 film.

The first digital camera I used would probably have been in 2002, and I used it periodically over about a year (it was borrowed). In 2004-05 I again used a digital camera (also borrowed; specs not available); I stopped shooting on film beyond 2004 because of the expense. Finally in October 2006 I bought a Sony CyberShot, 7.2 megapixels, a very small camera (not an SLR) that I used for almost 4 years before replacing it with a CyberShot DSC-TX5, in July 2010. This camera now travels with me almost everywhere and is the only camera I use regularly.