"The Liberator"

(photo by John Minnick)

This is the camera I have now--not mine, but John Minnick's own.  He is letting me use his while mine is being finished.  I walked about with it yesterday trying to become familiar with it.  It is heavy--almost ten pounds--but boy do people respond to it.  Walk around with a thing like this and people talk to you in the street.  But I am pretty certain that I will need a tripod to use this camera well.  I looked at some good ones yesterday and some good heads, too, and suddenly the cost of buying and using this camera doubled.  So for now, I will walk with the thing slung across my shoulder.

But suddenly I am making more and more digital images than ever.  That is the way of things.  I have recently sent around to friends a digital image that they like very much.  They want me to post it here, but I am not sure.  This is a happy weird place, and the image is darker than what I usually show.  I have lots of darker images that do not make their way into the cafe, so to speak.  This is a safe haven for those who have been to WeirdoWorld and who may have even taken a few of the rides but who do not, in the end, want to run away from home but who want to return to a place that is clean and well-lighted.  Perhaps they are like the proprietor who is not scared of the strange but who prefers the museum crowd nonetheless.

I lose my way.  What I began to say is that I have learned to muck up my digital photos enough to like them more, and others like them even more than that, but there is something about a difficult magnificent about a photographic method that you try hard to control but which provides images that are often rough in spite of it all.  Here is an example (link).  And here is the process (link).

The making of those simple photos is arduous, but the process lends itself to making precisely the sort of images I most like.  You cannot simply take a picture of the subject this way.  They are inherently a part of the creative process, conscious of what they must do to present themselves to the camera.  The making of the picture is a true collaboration.

It is simply not so with a digital camera unless you do something radical to change it.  Here, for example, is something I would be most interested in, a digital camera adapted to accept a 19th century lens.

I am already drooling over this one.  I'm not sure that what I stumbled upon here is even a working camera, but I will make inquiries.  I want one badly.

Meanwhile, I work to strip the digital image of its easy perfection, working almost as long with the image as I do with the Polaroids.

And I like them.  But they are not this.

Nor this.

But "The Liberator" is here, and I will learn to use it.  The proof will be in the putting (pudding?)  Perhaps I'll be frustrated and ready to sell it in a month or so.  Or maybe I'll make a bunch of mediocre pictures and tell myself they are O.K.  It is all to be seen.  Perhaps a trip to Madame Sosostris is in order?

O.K.  The sun is shining.  The sky is bright and blue and clear.  I have things to do.  And miles to go. . . etc.