To the StudioKB blog. I’ve made a few changes in the appearance and content of the site for 2015 I hope you enjoy. Scroll around and explore. Be sure to check out my LATEST POST and leave a comment. Subscribe via the RSS feed or sign up for email alerts to stay updated with things here. If you’d like to write articles or posts to share with everyone, and I hope you do, let me know and I’ll give you a page. Of course, you can be active posting comments almost anywhere on this site. Articles may be rather sporadically spaced in time because of my schedule, so check back often. Or better yet, subscribe. Then you don’t have to check at all, you’ll be updated automatically.
Thanks for visiting,
KB
Commentary on the header photograph and other meanderings:
One weekend day many years ago, I decided to take a drive to find things to photograph.. not an uncommon pursuit of mine. Going South I got down near Allegan, and the weather and light weren’t looking very favorable. But, as I was driving beside the river, the sun broke through a very dark sky and this scene of the back side of main street appeared. The sky really did look like that, a rare sight, to be sure. This was worth stopping for!
As I recall, I also got some other good material on that trip. It ended up being one of those days where a photographer feels good on the way home and can’t wait to get the film developed and see the results (in a few days). (For all the younger readers who are growing up in the digital “in your face everything” era, we couldn’t chimp our exposures on a nice LCD screen on the back of our cameras back then. In fact, the only information we had on the back of our cameras was a little slot bracket that held the end flap of the cardboard box the film canister came in, to remind you what type and speed film you had in the camera.)
I was an early adopter of digital imaging, but not until about 1996. The first real digital still camera (the DCS) was offered by Kodak in 1991 as a “Pro” digital SLR aimed at photojournalists. (Yes, the worlds’ premier film manufacturer basically helped invent sensors, the new “digital film” , they still make them today). It was built using a gutted out top-of-the line Nikon F3 film body, which they shoehorned the sensor and supporting electronics into. It was about 1.3MP, and cost over $ 8k…. sorry, can’t do that. My first digital camera was a Casio QV-10 that took an image of 320 x 240 (a whopping .25 megapixels, yes that’s right, just a quarter of a megapixel), and it cost an even more whopping $840, with a sort of proprietary image format! (They were .jpg based, but called .CAM and you needed the Casio app on a computer to see the images). Later I bought a Nikon Coolpix 995, still less than 4 MP, but with the friendlier .jpg format (also .tiff), and it sat at the top of the consumer digital camera heap in its time. Eventually Nikon got into the digital SLR game themselves and came out with an “affordable” body of their own. That’s when I bought the 6MP – D100.
It is now widely recognized that about the time the APS-C size digital sensors hit the 6 MP level with photosites in the 5 micron range, we had surpassed what film could do. My D100 was stolen and replaced with a D300. After getting into digital and the “computer darkroom”, there’s no going back to film for me (unless I want to use my Dad’s now old Bronica ETRs in 645 format, because I can’t afford the $30k digital back for it, but those Zenzanon lenses are tack sharp). And I hope my old reliable Konica 35mm systems don’t read this blog. Those were my workhorses in most of my photo work for 20 plus years, but I just don’t think I will dabble in film again…sorry (not!).
The header image is cropped from a digital scan of a 35mm transparency. To see the full frame and read the rest of the story, and other commentary, hit the link to the Misc Images page under the PHOTO ROOM and find it there.
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