I was free to walk, to pause, to see, and whip out the small X10, twist the barrel to start it, and shoot. Most of all, I loved the fact that I was, quite literally, *unburdened*. They required the most minimal adjustments - some exposure tweaking, minor sharpening, not much else. I think I got reasonable results, both in colour and black and white. On a holiday in and around Geneva and then through Barcelona, Granada, Seville and Ubeda, I abandoned The Beast altogether. But it kept going, taking photographs, and while it didn’t have the present ACROS modes, its in-camera BW conversion was very good. It served me well over many years, and only gradually began to deteriorate - the sound went, beginning with the shutter sound, and then all sound, and no firmware upgrades could fix it. I needed something that I could put in a pocket, whip out, but had a reasonable tele-zoom, shot RAW and had viewfinder. I bought the Fuji X10 as a standby carry-around, mostly in situations where The Beast was too obtrusive, too intrusive, or just too darn heavy. By now, in my late 40s, the Nikon was just *The Beast*, an extraordinarly heavy thing to lug around. In June 2013, with an appointment to a different position, though still in law, I was forced to reduce the time for photography - less time for the actual photography, and a greatly tightened or stripped-down post-processing workflow.
Until 2013, I was in independent practice as a litigation lawyer, but managed to find time to follow my interest in photography. By then, I’d added several lenses, two or three zooms and some primes. Came the digital age, and I was in right away, with a Nikon DX90, then a DX100, a DX200 and finally a DX7000. I devoured books on photography, everything from self-teaching to books by masters.
ISO 400īut the fixation was beyond the taking-and-making of images. It was all black and white stuff, of course. In college, in my late teens, I started a small darkroom with a Durst enlarger, and loved the shimmer of prints in the trays, the red light in the room, the mixing and shaking. There was a strange Russian model that swept a vertical slit over the lens sideways to produce faux panos. There was, I think, an old Leica, but I don’t remember using it. There was other equipment around, and I soon began experimenting with that: a twin-lens Rolleiflex, a Pentax K1000 SLR, a large format Mamiya. Then there are some weird ones from the time I was 16 or so, and I think that’s when I picked up my first camera - an Agfa ‘Click 3’, as I recall. All the early ones are by my father, a civil engineer, now retired. They go back to the time of my birth and run through my late teens. There is now a folder of scans of old photographs, some of them very beautiful.