Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“It has been said a thousand times that photography is a universal language. To accept this notion is to ignore the fact that its meanings cannot be translated in anything other than a woolly and imprecise manner.” – Pete Turner
I’ve always thought photography was the universal language and somewhere during these 150 years it evolved a language of its own. But every now and then it changes. The meaning of dodge and burn, for example, flipped their meaning during the last 50 years.
I’ve always been a fan of the photography of the late Pete Turner and his images were a major influence of my work during my film-shooting days in the 1970’s, And back in those original film days whenever people seemed more obsessed with their gear than the kind of photographs it made, they were called equipment freaks.
Nowadays, you’re maybe called a pixel peeper and some shooters are accused of having GAS, “gear acquisition syndrome,” a term I’m not all that comfortable with, much like the use of “capture” to describe making a photograph or how some people on social media type “desent” when they mean “decent.” But unless you’re living a Cartier-Bresson-like existence with one camera and a 50mm lens, chances are you own more than a few pieces of gear.
How I made this shot: This is photo was one of my earliest attempts at HDR photography. This image a combination of a series of five bracketed exposures made at San Diego’s Balboa Park one morning. It was made with a Canon EOS 5D Mark I with a EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens (at 41mm) and a nominal exposure of 1/25 sec at f/22 and ISO 200. After a few cropping tweaks, this is my first iteration of the Balboa Park image after processing in HDR Efex that turned the original image’s color upside down creating a warm sunset look that I found pleasing.
My workaday cameras include an assortment of Canon DSLRs and Olympus and Panasonic mirrorless cameras and if left to my own devices I’ll reach for the mirrorless cameras first. For a while I was test shooting the full-frame mirrorless Lumix S1R when reviewing some Sigma L-mount lenses, but the lens and camera belong to their respective companies and have since been returned. To tell the truth, I found the camera/lens combo to be on the heavy side, although image quality was superb. And then there’s my Contax and Canon A-series film cameras that deserve their own story, in addition to what I’ve already written. That’s coming in 2024, I think.
It may be worth repeating, that all the cameras and lenses used to make the photographs that appear on this blog and any magazine articles and books I’ve written were bought with my own money, although sometimes Mary has purchased gear for me, so I guess that’s her money. Any exceptions would be gear, like the Lumix S1R and It’s Sigma L-mount lenses, that were on loan from their manufacturers. You may be surprised to learn that after reviewing this gear I have to return it to the manufacturer. There are no freebies, at least not for me. Since I pay for all of my own gear you’ll probably notice that some of the cameras I use are “old” and occasionally I’ve received e-mail asking “why are you using that old thing?” I’m not an equipment freak for good reason: I can’t afford to be.
My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips and techniques for using the cameras and lenses in my gear closet to produce glamour and portrait photographs. New copies of the book are available from Amazon for $34.90, with used copies selling for more, as I write this. The Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.