New thread for Bill's problems to keep Joe's thread on topic :)

[oftheherd]

i've had the misfortune to live in 2 different houses that had their basements flood, big time.

prints were destroyed, books of notes and writings and negs too.
some of the negs i saved but i was too depressed to do the work to save them all.

now i pack everything in rubbermaid totes and if flooded again, i think at worst they will float away.

i just started over.
big time cleansing/metamorphosis.

and less to carry forward.

Interesting. I had the experience of going through a house fire. I lost some camera gear, some photographs, and about 8000-10,000 slides and all negatives were badly damaged. Not to mention other personal property and family keepsakes. It takes a lot out of a person. Twice would be hard to take.

i guess the point is/was that sometimes it's good to shed the skin and start growing another.

losing that stuff was hard at first but almost liberating in the end.
i don't feel so attached to anything anymore.

How did you put it away so easily? I certainly have never felt the liberation. It is only recently that I have begun to try and salvage the negatives. Don't know if I will ever try the slides. My photography has been little more than famliy snapshots at home and on trips. I have acquired a lot of gear, more old cameras, some more recent, some folders and LF gear. Not using most of it. I never lost my ability to photograph, nor my desire. Just the will I guess. Of course there were some other factors; I retired from the military and began a several year search for a second career. Not too long afterward, my wife developed a dibilitating condition of constant pain, the kids went to college. Lots of changes.

Life still has a lot of good things, not the least of which is my grandson, a favorite photo subject. I carry a camera of one kind or another all the time. I am just not as likely to use it as before. Nor am I as likely to see something and spend a lot of time trying to get photos.

Hey Bill, let's start a club. 😕

 

[Kragmeister]

Hello Bill,

<snip> I'm social. I realize that there is no way to make photographs that everyone likes - assuming I don't do puppies with big eyes or something - but I think that for me, I need to know that someone out there appreciates what I have to say photographically - this would be what gives me pleasure, besides the pleasure I get from making images I like. Of course, I don't know yet what kind of photos I want to make, so I don't know who, if anyone, will appreciate them.

<major snip>

Yes, I can derive pleasure from the first part - making a photograph that pleases my soul (assuming that I figure out what that is). And I can take pleasure in creating a resulting print, whether through traditional wet-darkroom enlargement processes or by way of computer and subsequent commercial printing. But for my joy to be complete, I have a need that *someone* out there see my work and find it worthy, acceptable, or pleasing in some way. I have a need to make a complete photograph of the three. If this makes any sense.

I get where you are coming from now. I'm kinda anti-social comparatively speaking. Relating humor to art is a good metaphore. My sense of humor runs to the...well...strange, probably from watching Eraserhead and Blue Velvet too many times in my youth. So finding an audience for my brand of humor is difficult. As for finding an audience for art, I don't really try to find a like-minded audience. I am not sure what kind of photos I would like to take either, besides a desire for more people photos. I guess the audience I am trying to find is one that can critique the work and offer something constructive in the technical sense. With luck someone that may like the subject will find the work. However I see my stuff as a work in progress, I am learning all over again after a decade hiatus. Maybe I ought to take a Photo 1 class at a local college....

Like I said in my earlier note, I shoot for my own mental health so getting images of what I see onto "hard copies" is what I'm after, but I'd like to do it well. Like I said too, our life experiences are different so what I had to offer wouldn't necessarily be useful.

Later,
Greg

 

[back alley]

Interesting. I had the experience of going through a house fire. I lost some camera gear, some photographs, and about 8000-10,000 slides and all negatives were badly damaged. Not to mention other personal property and family keepsakes. It takes a lot out of a person. Twice would be hard to take.





How did you put it away so easily? I certainly have never felt the liberation. It is only recently that I have begun to try and salvage the negatives. Don't know if I will ever try the slides. My photography has been little more than famliy snapshots at home and on trips. I have acquired a lot of gear, more old cameras, some more recent, some folders and LF gear. Not using most of it. I never lost my ability to photograph, nor my desire. Just the will I guess. Of course there were some other factors; I retired from the military and began a several year search for a second career. Not too long afterward, my wife developed a dibilitating condition of constant pain, the kids went to college. Lots of changes.

Life still has a lot of good things, not the least of which is my grandson, a favorite photo subject. I carry a camera of one kind or another all the time. I am just not as likely to use it as before. Nor am I as likely to see something and spend a lot of time trying to get photos.

Hey Bill, let's start a club. 😕

i wont even begin to to pretend to know how i did it.
i do think it's part of my personality though. not to sound too glib but i have been losing things most of my life, in terms of people, my dad died when i was a baby, my mother died too young also. i have pain every day, either a headache (migraines started when i was 8), screwed up my back young and now arthritis.
part of is that i enjoy the process of photography as much as the outcome. i have bags of unprocessed film that i will get to eventually, maybe.

don't know...

 

[Pherdinand]

Thank you! Sadly, I am color-blind. I think that would be a poor choice for me. But it might be a lot of fun until they figured it out.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

There's a movie with Woody Allen where he plays a director, and at some moment he becomes blind, however he pretends that all is fine coz the movie has to be made anyway!
So they do it, and in the end, the crazy french just loved it, it's the most avantgarde production of the latest years they say😀 Something like this, approximately.
So there's hope for you.

 

[bmattock]

I'm getting a little bit closer to finding what I'm after. Not entirely there, but I decided to keep playing around with the digital IR to see where that goes for now.

Today is B&W film processing day - lots to do.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[clarence]

Bill, that is the most powerful IR shot I've ever seen, because it utilises the surreality of motion blur in a landscape already made surreal by the IR filtration.

It's quite mindblowing. The central composition also sucks me right into the picture, but the curve of the train makes it very dynamic.

You've made me very excited about that roll of Ilford SFX I have in the fridge.

Clarence

 

[bmattock]

Clarence,

Thank you, those are very kind words indeed. I hope that you get out and shoot your SFX and enjoy the heck out of it! I know I'm having fun.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks