let's go digital
Cameras
THEY ARE A CHANGIN'
Although I make my living through photography,
I’m not the sort of person who purchases
the latest and supposedly greatest camera
bodies just to have the latest gear. Don’t get
me wrong, I love gear and totally obsess over
all the new features. Still, there have to be
some very compelling reasons to pry my wallet
out of my pocket to purchase a new camera.
In fact, before this last fall, I’d gone four
years, yes, four whole years, without adding a
new camera body to my collection.....
By Paul Burwell
Contributing Editor
To read the full column click here.
BIO
I took a circuitous route to professional photography.
As a six year old, I used my mother's box camera with 120 films. Two Christmas's
later, I received my own 110 point and shoot camera. At fifteen, I
purchased a Pentax K-1000 single lens reflex camera - a wonderful
manual camera with which I learned the concepts of exposure. Every
setting needed to be made by hand.
I borrowed photography books from the local
library, studied them intensely, and learned that it was possible to
develop film and pictures by myself using relatively simple equipment
and chemicals. My father had some unused darkroom equipment consisting
of an old black and white enlarger that was missing a lens as well as
some developing trays, film development canisters and a darkroom light.
I took it upon myself to set up a mini darkroom in the closet of my
bedroom. This was hardly an ideal place for this activity as the closet
only measured two and a half feet by six feet and took a lot of work to
make completely dark. Eventually I had a space I could work with. After
convincing my father to help me find a lens for the old enlarger, we
took a trip to McBain Cameras in downtown Edmonton and managed to get a
good deal on a used enlarger lens that someone had traded in. Together
with the required chemicals, I purchased the enlarger lens and spent
the last of my accumulated savings. At home, my father helped jury-rig
a mount for the lens to the enlarger.
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