A Shared Love of Photography

At a Plein Air photo workshop at

Philip Johnson's Glass House in CT

 

One of the things that connected Vince and I practically from the first moment we met was our love of photography. We both enjoyed going out to the countryside or the beach on the weekends with our Nikon F3's or walking around New York City day and night and just taking pictures. Old cemeteries were some of our favorite haunts! Pun intended.

We started going on photography outings together on the weekends and he even lent me his very expensive Nikon camera lenses when I went on my photo safari to Kenya and Tanzania in 1979. Man, that's trust!

Photographing the Gates in Central Park

From the rooftop at the NYAC

We both came by our love of photography naturally. Vince's father's first civilian job was as a photographer for the Boise (Idaho) Sun. He learned to take photographs in the US Marine Corps during World War II when he was a combat photographer in the Phillipines and the Pacific theater. Many of his photographs can still be found in World War II history books. Coincidentally, my Uncle Ray was a World War II aerial combat photographer too, but with the Army Air Corps in the Aleutian Islands.

Second Place, The "Gilded Cage", GC of Irvington-on-Hudson

Vince inherited his father's darkroom equipment once his dad stopped using it and for a time we had it set up in one of our guest room bathrooms making it an ad hoc dark room. We mostly developed black and white film. He also inherited his father's entire photographic equipment collection. That included a 4X5 Speed Graphic which we actually took with us on trips when we were first married. We have gorgeous photographs of historic buildings in Paris and London and other cities in Germany.

I remember once he set up the Speed Graphic on a tripod in front of the Acropolis in Athens in order to take a picture and a quasi-Communist government official made him take it down and put it away. He had no problem with our 35mm cameras. I am not sure what he was afraid of, but we didn't argue. He looked like a Greek Stalin to me.

judging photography at the Jupiter Island GC in Florida

I turned my photography hobby into a garden photography hobby when I served as a Garden Club of America Photography Judge for five years. Most of the pictures I took during that time were required to include plant material as part of the composition and the photos depicted different prescribed themes or inspirations like "A Sense of Place" or "The Sound of Trees." It was alot of pressure. I am much happier now just taking pictures again for fun!

The potager garden at the Royal Saltworks,

Arc-et-Senans, France

I resisted "going digital" for as long as I could, but the winds were blowing at gale force and I finally succumbed once I found out that one of the benefits of digital photography is that you can change the ISO after every picture! Sold.

But digital cameras are so complicated. The year we bought our Nikon D200, we went to France for two weeks and purposefully went through each and every single button and knob and setting that was annotated in the almost 200 page manual. We were experts for about a week and then ... if you don't use it, you lose it. Anyway, we always bring 'the big camera" - which is what we call our new Nikon digital 35mm camera - and all our lenses, filters, tripods and other paraphernalia when we travel and we spend alot of the time just walking around wherever we are and taking pictures.


Our recent trip was no different ...

 

There are thousands more! The problem with digital is that you snap away with abandon. As opposed to film developing, digital is free and only as limited as your memory card. But when you get home ... hours and hours in front of the monitor looking through your images. Pay now or pay later.