Today’s Post by Joe Farace
To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures. Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there is no guarantee that one will become an artist—Harry Callahan
Once upon a time, during a more affluent time, I owned a small car collection. Nothing ostentatious, you understand—no Ferraris or Lamborghinis, for example—but more than a “normal” number of cars that an average person really needs. One of the things that car enthusiasts know (from sad experience) is that cars need to be driven on a regular basis and the best way to make sure they are driven regularly is to maintain a Car Log, a written record—\of when each car is driven, so you can balance usage on each one. You do it with a computer or tablet if that floats your boat. That car collection is long gone and for the past three years I have personally not even owned a car.
In recent years, I have also sadly found out that I need to do something similar with my film and digital cameras as well as my lenses. Do I have a camera collection? Or am I just an equipment freak…who knows.
Back when there were such things as print photo magazines, some of them, like Shutterbug, had travel budgets allowing them to send Contributing Writers, like myself, to the big photokina trade show in Köln Germany. At one of the of the last film-based photokina shoes, I was sitting in the press room talking with the legendary Joe Meehan along with several other photo magazine editors and he asked each of us, “How many cameras do you own?”
A now former Shutterbug editor sitting next to me said that he owned somewhere around two hundred cameras. (By comparison, at a subsequent photokina show a later editor told one of my fellow writers that he owned no cameras. Do with that fact what you will). To answer Joe, I did a few mental calculations and came up with 25 cameras, although that number might have been a little low. For instance, I didn’t know if I counted my Hasselblad Flexbody because it didn’t have (and I couldn’t afford) a back or lens.
When digital imaging became more practical and popular, I pared down the number of film cameras I owned. Oh, was that ever a dumb idea. To this day, I regret selling my Contax rangefinder, SLRs and other film cameras. Over the past couple of years I have been selling some of my digital cameras, while buying and selling some film cameras, so I just did a head count of the number of cameras in my equipment closet.
The reason behind this inventory is that having gear languish is much like having your cars sit idle; things break down. In the not so distant past it was my Hasselblad XPan, which I ended up selling “as is” because the difficulty and cost of having it repaired. As I started this inventory, I noticed that my (second) Canon EF 135mm f/2.8 SF lens was oozing sticky stuff from the control ring that sets the level of soft focus. The ring was was stuck on zero and otherwise functioned fine. I contacted one of my tech friends at Canon and he told me how to clean it up but also told me that they would not be able to return it to full functionality. (Although I’m sure a talented repair person could fix it.) Right now, my plan is to clean it up and you know, see what happens. This depressing development—I loved that lens—got me even more serious about checking out each camera and lens that I own and creating a log and get serious about shooting each piece of gear on a regular basis.
Now that my wife is entering the second phase of her recovery from hip joint replacement surgery—she still has a long way to go—I can intensify my inventory and begin shooting on a more regular basis. I recently starting by diging our my Olympus Pen F, which hasn’t been used in years, and shooting it at a car show. This was the first day that Mary was out in public and walking, with the aid of a walker. UPDATE: She now using a cane and thinks she can toss it in a week or two but we will see what we will see.
So how many cameras do I have now? Before counting you should know that the newest camera I own is that selfsame Olympus Pen F, which was announced in January 2016 but I didn’t buy mine until a few years later when it was available for a short time as an affordable refurb. I owned two newer Micro Four-thirds cameras but recently sold them because I didn’t like the ergonomics of one and never used the other one.
OK, lets count: Four Olympus Micro Four-thirds cameras including my beloved Pen F. Three Panasonic Lumix cameras, including the Lumix GH4 that Mary gave me as a birthday gift and a very special Lumix 3D1 camera that shoot shoot standard and 3D images. There are also three Panasonic Lumix camera converted to infrared by Life Pixel. Do those later cameras make an equipment freak? I’m getting worried as I tabulate this.
On to film: six Canon A-series SLRs, one Contax SLR and Seagull TLR that suffered from neglect and had what could be described as a half-assed repair rendering it workable but not much fun to use. For the classics there’s a Leica M6 TTL and Zeiss Ikon SW. In the point-and-shoot world, there’s a Leica Z2x, and a Minolta Prod 20. I have three different kind of Holga’s but I’m not sure they count, so I’m not counting them, bringing the total, I think, to 23, which is less that when I started with so many years ago, so maybe I am overcoming my camera addiction. But enough so that I need to put the Camera Log in operation…and have.