Several years ago Linda and I made a summer trip to Buffalo to visit a clarinet mouthpiece maker, and then to Chicago where I could choose the optimum bassoon bocal from a dealer renowned for having a probably unequalled selection. A side trip to a major instrument dealer in South Bend, Indiana, led to the discovery of the bassoon I now play, and to the discovery of the Indiana Dunes at the southern end of Lake Michigan, where we spent part of the afternoon exploring. Haze from the lake moisture, sand piled up like snowdrifts, rows of trees - of course I had to try a few pictures. Since we were traveling, I had brought the most compact camera I had available at the time, a Nikon Nikkormat with the classic 50mm f2 lens. Light was hard to judge, (meters can be fooled by hazy/bright situations), and I had to handhold and so couldn’t stop down as much as I might have liked, and it was dusty enough that some found its way to the film. And there was an element of this scene that I felt needed to be removed if I were to make a print. So the negative sat in storage until I began to work on a show for Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and remembered it. I was able to cope with all of those various difficulties by working with a scan of the negative in Adobe’s “Photoshop Elements", the principal program I use to work with and print my photographs.

The modern cameras, going back to the introduction of electronically-regulated shutters and polycarbon bodies, work wonderfully and are very flexible and capable, more so, it seems, with every new model. Remember, though, I have admitted on the home page to a fascination with cameras as well as with pictures. The Nikkormat is beautiful to look at. The Leicas are masterpieces of engineering, the Hasselblad has a distinctive beauty but even more distinctive functionality. The Crown and Century and Speed Graphic cameras were ingeniously and also artistically designed and built - take a close look at the workmanship of the levers and sliding beds. One of the Sinar monorail view cameras has been included in the Museum of Modern Art. I have traded my way through a good sampling of camera history. The solid feel of the metal bodies, the whisper of the Leica’s cloth focal-plane shutter, the faint whirring of gears in iris-shutter lenses and cameras, all have a mystique that I have difficulty associating with the new electronic, digital wonders - but what the new breed of cameras can do quickly, easily, and repeatably, to make pictures, and the range of creative techniques of which they are capable, is astounding. At a certain point some years ago I stopped trying to keep up, and in fact went backwards, at one point refusing to use any camera that needed a battery to function (although I still used battery-powered light meters). I changed direction when the resolution of digital cameras developed past needing apologies and I saw what I could do both in making exposures and in making prints.