Wallace Koopmans Artlog

Do most pictures matter beyond the life of the photographer? Seeing this pile of slides which were likely someones photographic life work caused me to reflect on what my photography means to me and what it might mean after I’m gone. I can’t categorize my photography into one single purpose. I use photography for several different reasons; I record my family life and my children growing up, I make images that I hope have some meaning beyond a simple glance and stand on their own as art, I create reference material for other art and I create images just for the fun of it. Of primary importance to me are those family images. I have a large collection of images that my father took of us growing up and I value them dearly, and now the images of my own family are just as important. By creating thousands of images am I creating a curatorial nightmare for anyone looking at my images later on? How are they to know my intent when I switch between purposes continually. Maybe it’s time that in addition to my regular back ups I do some selective backing up of the images that are most important to me, so later on if their fate is to wind up in a box at an antique shop maybe they will be organized.

I always find it strange and somewhat sad to find lost family photo’s, that at some point no one was left that cared enough to keep them and the peoples lives that they represent going. In the past, say 100 years ago, it wasn’t really that hard as there were few pictures of any one person taken in there life time. Now that there are thousands of images of many of us what is the future of these pictures? Who will determine what is important enough to keep and what will be lost. And will someone three generations from now really need or care what I looked like or thought was interesting enough to photograph. So I think the best I can do, if my intention is to have a photographic legacy, is to select some gems and make it easy to preserve them.

When I visited the Museum of Anthropology a few months ago I took my Zeiss Icon medium format camera with me.  The reason for the camera choice is that the distortion of the antique Zeiss lens adds to the vintage look, which is what I was after. 

Carver: Mungo Martin 1951

Carver: Bill Reid with Doug Cranmer

Carver: Bill Reid with Doug Cranmer

Inside the MOA great hall

 Wuikinuxv  house post from Rivers, Inlet B.C.

And finally here is a picture of my Mother from 1961 in Victoria.  I believe that the man in the hat in the background is Mungo Martin although I don’t know where the pole being carved ended up.

I took the Stylus Epic with me this summer on a family vacation and while I wasn’t taking a lot of pictures I did take a few snap shots with it.

No not that awkward day at school when you wore that unfortunate shirt and had that weird haircut.  This was just a fun morning of taking pictures shared with another photographer.  Here is the link to Duncan’s blog post for the same “Picture day”  Granny and Grumpa’s Antiques

We decided to meet at a place in Abbotsford that is renowned for it’s antiques and collectibles, Granny and Grumpas.  Neither of us had been there before and despite knowing that there would be a lot to see there was more than I expected.  As we were there to take pictures and not necessarily to buy anything we made a small donation before heading into the antique abyss.  There really is more than you can take in a short period of time.  The other thing to consider photographically is that most of the interiors are very dark.  I brought three lenses with this in mind the DA 35 Macro Ltd, DFA 100 f2.8 macro WR and the FA 50 f1.4  as well as a flash the Pentax AF540 FGZ.  While using prime lenses limited my framing options the close focusing of the macro lenses worked in the sometimes tight spaces.  I ended up with at least as many images on my phone for Instagram as I took with my DSLR but here are some of the latter.

If your wondering what an image of a pond covered in algae has to do with antiques, well that’s another story best asked of  Duncan “Wet foot”  Turner.

“Day 452: I haven’t seen another  living thing for days now and I’m down to 2 litres of water, but on the bright side I still have film!”

Hopefully this is enough “good” film to tide me over until social order is re-established, too bad all the digital cameras stopped working, who new.

As I shoot through my first pack of Fuji FP100c I hope to learn what works and what doesn’t with this film and camera (Polaroid 330)   My initial reaction is that it doesn’t lend itself to taking close-ups or landscapes.  The best shot so far has been a Portrait and maybe that is where the strength of this combination will be.

This lens was made in many different camera mounts but here I have it in Olympus OM. It is a true macro lens providing a 1:1 ratio. I loaded my OM-1 with Fuji 400 film in order to get a little more speed over the 200 ASA I typically use. That one stop can mean the difference between a sharp image and a blurred one. For example while typically you can hand hold a 55mm lens at 1/60 sec that isn’t necessarily true with macro. The reason is that small amounts of movement are magnified at close distances, while an angular shift of a degree has little effect at 100ft it means an entirely different view at 1 foot. Of course a tripod would be a good idea ordinarily but in this case I either hand held or used a mono-pod. As you would expect with a macro lens it is very sharp and has very little distortion.

My only wish is that it were in K-mount so I could use it with my DSLR, I really can’t find any reason to fault it, on the OM-1 it performs great and I was able to use it as a normal lens too.

Today Kodak announced they intend to sell off there film business as part of the plan to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.  What most people think of when they think Kodak, “film” is tucked away under Paper and output systems, which is going up for sale.  I wish I could say I’m optimistic about still image film continuing to be produced but any company that takes this on would have to make a profit and film has really become a niche market (excluding motion picture film) 

Momma don’t take my  Kodachrome Ektachrome  Ektar away.