Steidl printed a new edition of Sander’s classic 7-volume People of the 20th Century a few years back at a quite bearable price and I was lucky enough to pick up a copy for something like $75 (Amazon currently lists 7 copies ranging in price from $325 to over $1000).
If I can’t photograph anything new, I guess I’m down to photographing books of photographs or books about photography…
When I was about 12 or 13, Time-Life Books started issuing a subscription series of books on photography. They were very cheap, but much more than my weekly allowance would cover. I persuaded my father to cover half the cost and every other month a new volume would arrive. I devoured them. Initially a series of 8, they subsequently extended the series but we had left the country by then so I only have the original set. Still a worthy source for the budding young photographer.
My first digital camera. Lovely, sleek design. Sometime in the late ’90s I decided digital had come of age and bought this 2MP beauty for something like $700 for family snapshots. That summer I had an epiphany with it on the beach at dawn, realizing how much better modern cameras with auto-focus were than my match-needle, fresnel-screen, manual-focus SLRs and soon I had switched to higher end digital cameras, sticking with Minolta (I had an srT101, an XE-7 and a couple of xD-11s) and getting the Dimage A1, a 5MP all-in-one that I loved, and then their first DSLR the 7D, now both long gone.
I don’t remember where I picked this up but I actually used to shoot with it. In fact, in 7th grade, when I was 11 or 12, I shot pictures of Greenwich Village with it for a group school report. Entirely manual and un-metered and, probably with some minor holes in the bellows I got some nice big foggy, low-contrast negatives on Kodak 120 film with it.
In my desperation to find subjects worthy of photographing around the house, I’m turning to my collection of old cameras.
Stack of coins from long ago travels, with a wooden clothespin on top. The brilliant Fuji 60mm macro has picked up schmutz and fine dust hairs that I can’t see with my weak, unaided eyes.
I used to be a calligrapher, Here, a collection of nibs in an old bicycle tire repair kit case with a few staples thrown in for good measure.
Back to hunting that rare item of interest lurking in the apartment’s undergrowth, with my trusty 60mm macro lens and Litra cube
There’s gonna be a lot of crocheting going on and I’ll remain crotchetty.
I’ve been taking most of these indoor shots, for photographers who want to know,with the excellent Fuji 60mm macro lens and a shoe-mounted Litra cube.
Neither in Florida, nor here in NY have we been able to find antiseptic wipes, masks (now mandatory for venturing outside) or gloves. Here, our dwindling supply of hand sanitizer.
In Florida we had no cooking facilities whatsoever. Sheltering in place now, Margaret has baked delicious bread.
I couldn’t find any placards to identify these, the top image is a set of glass globes from their students; the bottom one is a close-up of a metal sculpture in the gardens.
(These pictures were shot over a week ago – everything’s shut now and we’re complying with attempts to halt the spread of Covid-19 by not going out except for necessities).
Another interesting shot (to me, at least) with the Fuji 60mm macro lens, shooting at f/2.4. I happened to notice this forlorn blackberry on the kitchen counter – it must have rolled out of the container unnoticed and I grabbed my camera and switched to the macro lens for this shot, just playing around, really. Talk about narrow depth of field and bokeh!
