From film to digital
Using film cameras for nearly 35 years was great and easy. I took my camera( Hasselblad) out and all I needed to do was to take a light reading, make the necessary adjustments, take the shot and wait for my film to be developed by a professional photography laboratory into a contact sheet. But sometimes there was a big gap between the time of the shot and the processing. My son Ryan came to me one day and asked me to explain about photography. I thought about this and didn’ t want to worry him about the technical bits so I said that the most important thing about taking a photo is to understand what makes a good photo good. I then used the internet to show him several shots of my photography Gods-Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, Ernst Haas, Diane Arbus and more. I pointed out that I had seen many of these photos in galleries in New York and elsewhere and showed him why these Magnum Photographers are so great( e. g. depth of field, composition, etc.) We then briefly discussed some of the technical concepts regarding shutter speeds, aperture settings and film speed. I demonstrated these with my Hasselblad that allows you to see the relationship of each.
Ryan then went out and took quite a number of photos and learned by doing. He wouldn’ t use my Hasselblad but he borrowed my very basic digital camera 400D Canon that I had recently purchased to take family snapshots and he started shooting and digitally processing panoramas. He entered one into a photo competition run by one of the photography suppliers and won. He won a $ 4,000 digital camera. He then went on to take a great photo of his own feet on a moving skateboard and submitted this to a USA competition and won in one of the categories. This competition was judged by some very famous photographers so his achievement was incredible. After winning these competitions, he was invited to cocktail and other functions with well known Western Australian landscape photographers who gave him further mentoring. Ryan produced a website( http:// ryanepstein. com) and marketed his photos and he has sold many large, framed photos and continues to sell quite a few.
Well, he returned the favor to me and got me converted from film to digital. I sold my Hasselblad that I had since the beginning of time and bought a very nice Canon camera model 7D with a few lenses( wide angle, telephoto, etc). Although digital is more technical, the key feature that I liked is the instantaneous nature of reviewing the photo. You can experiment more to get that right exposure, composition and aperture setting. The only real issue is still the quality of the image compared to my medium size camera and I will have to live with this and not be able to enlarge the photos as big as I have in the past. Although I really want to buy a digital Hasselblad and they have come down in price from $ 65,000 last year to under $ 30,000 this year! That’ s nothing, as the camera Ryan wants- Phase 1- is around $ 100,000. But I am a solid convert to the low cost digital world!
BARRY STEVEN EPSTEIN- PhotoAutobiography DRAFT 106 of 156